Europa Affair

by M. D. Thalmann

  Marwick reached inter-frequency/line-of-sight range and said, “Are you boys about to set a charge?”

  “Just about to. You’ve been away a while; do you want to pop this one?” Jeff said, inviting Marwick to do something other than harass Rick and himself.

  “You bet your alloy asses I do.”

  “Hey, so, speaking of charge,” Rick said, “I found a couple of dead power cells over by the last blow when we were cleaning up—”

  “Not now, TODD, please… I’m not in the mood. It’s been a real fucker of a day. I just got the use of my legs back and then—”

  “Oh, seriously, that’s awful, but you know what might make you feel better?” Rick continued, undeterred.

  “I’m not kidding, TODD—”

  “He goes by Rick, now,” Jeff added.

  “Okay, okay,” Rick said in a resigned tone. “But if it would make you happy I’d give them to you… free of charge.”

  Marwick’s features gathered into an uncomfortable bunch between his eyebrows, creasing his face visibly through the quarter-inch thick ballistic glass of his helmet. After he managed to untangle his knotted expression, through a veil of utter calm he said, “You do realize—Rick, was it?—that I could tie you to the fins of my rocket and hurl you directly into the goddamned Sun, right? I can do that. It is most certainly a thing: a possible future for you, Rick the TODD. No one would care.”

  At this, the androids fell silent for a record seven seconds, and Marwick began arranging the newly pressed ice-blocks into a little wall around the lip of the fresh hole.

  After what seemed like an eternity to the TODDs, Jeff said, “There really are some old cells over there if you want to get the core charge for them.”

  “Yeah, I’ll take ‘em. I could use the money, honestly,” Marwick said.

  “Sorry, now that I think of it, I actually gave those to Hector last night,” Rick said.

  “Fucking great… who comes up with these names, anyway?”

  “Jeff downloaded an app. It’s got loads of names. Not Marwick though.”

  “Who’s Jeff?” Marwick asked.

  Jeff raised his hand.

  “He’s Jeff, now,” Rick answered and pointed one of his enormous fingers toward his counterpart.

  “Well, that’s just great,” Marwick concluded.

  “Sorry about Rick,” Jeff said. “He’s been on a tear since he heard about the new Purifier’s mission.”

  “What new Purifier mission?” Marwick asked as he interlaced his fingers and worked his gloves deeper into the crooks.

  “You haven’t heard?” Rick asked with hints of genuine concern in his artificial voice and then nudged Jeff with his elbow in what would have been the ribs if his form hadn’t been a unit-body alloy chassis.

  “I jacked-off my comms array,” Marwick said, and shot a glance over to Rick that told him it wasn’t an invitation to laugh.

  “You should work on your phrasing,” Jeff said mildly, then continued, “… anyway, two guys, friends of yours I’m sure, came up with a detailed plan and had all the trajectory and telemetry data mapped out. This plan was presented to the Regime in the form of a request seeking funding for a special mission. They were after three billion dollars which would be used to send a small crew to Sol and collect a four-ounce sample of the Solar Corona. These Purifier scientists said it would be enough to power every colony, all of mankind, for a century or better.”

  “Where are you going with this, Jeff?” Marwick asked as he knelt by the hole, inspecting its depth while absently humoring the android.

  “Well, you interrupted my flow, but that’s okay… so, before agreeing to grant the funding, the government’s man said he had just one question: ‘How will you to get the sample without bursting into flames and vaporizing into your constituent molecules?’ and the Purifiers answered, ‘That’s the easiest part, we’re just gonna go at night!’.”

  Marwick snapped his head up and looked from Jeff to Rick and back again, his face severe, conducting a scrupulous survey of each android before bursting into laughter. Between labored breaths he said, “That’s the first goddamn thing you’ve ever said to me that was actually funny. Oh, man. Good one… Now, hand me that PolyBlast.”

  Jeff’s thigh hissed, and a door swung open to reveal a compartment in his right leg which he reached into to extract a five-pound block of explosive polymer that the Penrod Foundation had created for deep-space interplanetary mining. Nearly three-times as powerful an explosive as C-4, the hydrophobic and remarkably elastic PolyBlast was molecularly chained so tightly that it couldn’t be safely divided outside of a sterile laboratory environment. All these qualities made it ideal for blasting icy terrain as it wouldn’t react with the surface, and also no portion of the charge would crumble off or get stuck between the phalanges of a clumsy TODD.

  Marwick unsheathed his Solar Confederacy issued “space-knife”—a term sarcastically coined by a Purifier who’d aptly pointed out, upon being issued his “field-knife,” that they rarely saw combat or even ran training drills on a field—and scored the Mylar wrapping on the longest edge of the block and peeled it away, discarding it onto the ridged glacier-like surface of Europa. The PolyBlast immediately abandoned the block shape which the Mylar had held it in and began conforming to the shape of Marwick’s gloves.

  Rick extended his non-auger arm to Marwick and opened his hand to pass him a detonator, a five-meter coiled filament with a six-inch tungsten rod at one end and what looked like an arcade-style joystick at the other. This joystick was made up of a square prism with a large red button, and a slim cylinder that jutted out from the center of the square which had another, smaller, red button at its point. The tungsten rod had a grape-sized bead of negatively charged PolyBlast on its tip.

  He touched the grape to the five-pound blob, and the two merged instantly as the unstable molecules of the grape were awarded electrons, completing the molecular bond. Each detonator had been exactly calibrated to be married only to its measured charge. If the volumes had been off by even a few grams, the whole ensemble would begin to shed quantum particles and convert instantly into energy. This process, called violent quantum ablation, was more commonly referred to as “blowing the fuck up.” It was no wonder the Penrod Foundation had made the stuff so difficult to cleave.

  “Fire in the hole, boys!” Marwick shouted for no good reason. He jostled back and forth between the robots, bouncing off their shoulders, and giggled as he dropped the charge into the freshly inspected hole. The filament unfurled as the blob fell slowly. Once it hit the bottom of the pilot shaft, the PolyBlast spread out to fill in the circumference of the cylindrical hole and permeated all the cracks.

  Marwick separated the arcade handle trigger into its component pieces, placing the square base unit near the lip of the hole, nestled among the ice blocks that Jeff had made just moments earlier. He palmed the tube-shaped piece of the detonator, keeping the little red button near his thumb. After pressing the many-times larger button on the base unit which hid within it an LED that suddenly activated, it began radiating red. Its glow was hazy through the fresh oxygen just inches above the Europa surface. The luminescence was beautiful, but it wasn’t something one should stop and observe for any length of time. It meant the transceiver was activated. At that point, had he desired, Marwick could have coupled up to six additional bases using the Penrod Foundation’s patented RedFang technology.

  Again bounding with boyish wonder, Marwick took leaping strides away from the unstable crevasse and toward the blast shield that Rick and Jeff had set up.

  Marwick handed the detonator stick to Jeff and said, “Hang on to this for a second.”

  No sooner than Rick had cleared the edge of the slightly angled blast shield, Marwick said, “I want you to know, you had this coming,” and then he snared Rick by the collar of his heavy-steel back-plating and swung him ‘round to face away from the blast-zone and protective barrier. He kicked the android’s feet out from under him, ca
using him to fall back towards Marwick.

  “What the fuck are you doing?” Rick asked in a panicked metallic shriek. As the machine descended in slow motion, Marwick dropped down to the ground, rolling onto his shoulder blades as he wedged both feet into Rick’s lower back. With the robot balanced on his heels, Marwick sprang his legs up like pistons, extending with the combined force of his dense muscles and the adrenaline he’d ordered up through his neural overlay, and catapulted the thousand-pound android over the blast barrier. At the peak of his trajectory arc, Rick’s momentum had carried him to a point fifteen meters higher than, and twenty meters closer to, the drill site. And that’s precisely when Marwick reached over to the detonator in Jeff’s hand and depressed the little red button. The pulse of light that followed was impossibly white. It was as though a star had been born mere feet from their noses and had then died out in a tremendous rumble that shattered the ground beneath their feet.

  Poor Rick, along with several tons of chunky water-ice, had just reached twelve-thousand meters per second, nearly six times the escape velocity of the tiny moon, and sailed off into space, trailing what looked like comets’ tails behind them.

  “Why would you do that?” Jeff said, not particularly seeking an answer.

  “He’ll be okay. Just sent him on a trip, is all.”

  “You killed him!” Jeff said, still transfixed on the fleeing ice and his fellow glacier-jockey careening into the stars.

  “He’s a robot, he can’t die. Besides, if he survived the blast, then that means the water collectors will scoop him up in their nets and give him a lift to Ganymede so he can get a nice new chassis and maybe some better jokes.”

  “North-Star says he’s still online,” Jeff confirmed.

  A distant transmission from Rick crackled through their comms, “I’m all right, but you’re an asshole, Marwick.”

  Jeff, unable to stop himself said, “Speaking of assholes, did you hear the one about—”

  “Do you have any charges left in the box?” Marwick asked.

  “Yeah, one more. Why?”

  “I just want to make sure we’re on the same page as far as the consequences of telling this joke.”

  “See… asshole,” came one last static-filled transmission from Rick the robot comet.

  The two began hiking back to the rover in silence.

  “So… you threw him pretty high,” Jeff said, finally breaking the silence. “What was that, like, fifteen meters?”

  “Yeah, man. Leg day’s important.”

  “So, I have to ask,” said Jeff, “why him and not me? I mean, I told the last joke.”

  “Well, sweetheart, because your joke was funny.”

  “Oh, okay, wow—”

  “But more importantly, you were carrying the PolyBlast. Which means that you have the climate-controlled storage locker in your chassis. And that means you have something I want.”

  “Do you have any money this time?”

  “I’m a little short.”

  3: Ice Haulers

  Europa Orbit

  “Sir, we have an ice blow in quad three. That’s well ahead of schedule for that sector.”

  “Thank you, XO, I’m aware,” Melina said from the Captain’s chair of the Natlie.

  “Who told you?” her first officer, an upgraded TODD, asked.

  “You’re sitting less than two meters from me, looking at the same display.”

  “Ah, yes. Okay. By the way, if it’s not too much trouble, I’d like to go by the name Gary, now,” the XO said without making eye contact. He was instead plugging numbers into his flight panels and having the ship’s LADAR tasked to the hurtling pieces of Europa.

  “You want a real name?” Melina asked.

  “Yes, sir.”

  “And ‘Gary’ was the best you could come up with?”

  “We don’t really get to pick them,” Gary explained.

  Melina swung her seat to face the XO full on and said nothing. When Gary finally looked up from his HUD, which he’d only been staring at to avoid Melina’s gaze, she said, “We? Who’s ‘we’? Don’t tell me there are more of you assuming new identities?”

  “This guy, Jeff, is randomly assigning them to any of us within comms range. We all kinda like it,” Gary said cheerfully, hoping to sell it to the captain. She could have the whole thing derailed if it stuck in her craw. Melina was the type to take on a personal vendetta and expend resources and precious time to shut something down if she took umbrage… just to prove she could.

  “He’s a guy, this Jeff, or…?”

  Sitting stiffer than normal, which was something to note considering he was an android, Gary said, “Another TODD, sir.”

  At this Melina chuckled, and said, “Well, all right, if you insist. I would’ve liked to have called you Ox since you’re the XO… it seems fitting. How does he choose?” she asked and sat back in her chair once more, the gimbals pivoting her to face the viewport.

  “He downloaded some app. I’m not sure if Ox was even one of the options. You can still call me that if you want.”

  “Well, hopefully he bought the ad-free version or someone’s gonna be walking around here calling themselves Caveman Insurance Company.”

  “That joke was terrible. You spend too much time with TODDs,” Gary said.

  Melina spun her chair to face him, and in a low register with a deadpan face she said, “Like you’d know funny.” She laughed at his dismay. “You’re too easy. Anyway, let’s go pick up a haul. Call it in.”

  “I’ve already logged in and claimed this load. We have LADAR lock. This reeks of you know who,” Gary said.

  Melina switched on her mic, leaned forward and, speaking gravely, said, “All hands, we have a mission on the board. Ready your stations and prepare for burn. Navigator, dope it out,” into the general comm.

  Gary reached over and covered the mic with his enormous armored hand and said, “He goes by Carl now, but he’s a little sensitive because he thinks that’s a stupid name and he hates it.”

  “No, you said it was a stupid name and that everyone else hated it. And covering the mic doesn’t help when I’m literally sitting three meters behind you,” Carl said.

  “Noted. Carry on,” Gary said.

  “Intercept trajectory calculating. Initial burn set. T-minus ten minutes to intercept,” Carl said, alerting the crew.

  Melina turned her seat to face the ship’s central corridor and released her harness. “And we don’t have the Mainsail prepped, I’m guessing?” she asked Gary, already knowing the answer.

  “G-force burn in three, two, one,” Carl said over the general comms, ignoring the back-and-forth of the senior officers.

  “No sir, my team was just alerted,” Gary replied.

  A barely perceptible rumble filled the cruiser, and the ship began pushing against the up-to-then-weightless crew and cargo. Melina flipped her shoulder harness over her head and stood slowly, getting acclimated to the brand new gravity for this burn. “Let your cadre know I’m coming down and to prep my suit,” she said to Gary.

  “Sir, we have it under control, there’s no nee—”

  “Nonetheless, I’m going to roll this one out, myself,” she said, ending the discussion.

  “Aye, Captain,” Gary said and then softly added, “Maybe this time we won’t nearly destroy the ship.”

  “Zip it, metal mouth, or you might find yourself strapped to the hull during re-entry.”

  Melina had walked as far as the central shaft before the klaxon sounded and Carl again used the general comms to announce, “Disengaging engines in three, two, one.”

  She held the deck railing firmly, preparing for the weightlessness that would accompany thrust cessation. Pushing off from the grated metal flooring at the precise moment of the burn’s conclusion, Melina flipped herself heels-up and, using the railing, she gracefully hurled herself down the maintenance shaft head first, in a clear violation of Solar Confederation protocol. Continuing her voyage down the tube, she pulle
d her body along with an occasional tug on the ladder rungs running the length of the vertical shaft or pushing off deck railings with her feet.

  “Natlie velocity twenty meters per second, relative to payload,” Gary announced over the general comms, though protocol demanded no such announcement. He offered this superfluous information as a subtle reminder to Melina, who was the only meat-bag on board, and also the only one not currently strapped in or clamped down, that there was soon to be a deceleration burn that could potentially pitch her back up the shaft to the flight deck, flinging her to her death or possibly even a sprained ankle (which seemed so much worse).

  The last level of the ship was Cargo and Sail Prep, and it was coming up fast. Melina made a one-handed grab on the deck railing and flung her feet through the gap between the lower level’s floor and ceiling, making her path of trajectory into an L that angled towards the wide open spaces of Cargo and on a collision course with Sail Prep.

  Coasting through the cargo deck, Melina radioed back to Gary to pop the reverse thrusters, braking for intercept. She wedged her feet onto either side of the hatch leading to Sail Prep to halt her momentum and with the aid of thrust gravity slid into her suit without effort and keyed in her code. The suit tightened and fastened to fit her form, which even the TODDs couldn’t deny was quite alluring. Melina dislodged and removed her helmet from the magnetic shelving and approached the cargo netting that she and her crew used to stow equipment during zero-G and ran her arms and legs through the mesh, deliberately tangling herself as the gravity sank her deeper into the webbing.

  When collecting ice-boulders from Europa’s orbit, the idea was to have smaller, purpose-built craft called Sails, which had a rigid outside edge and were tethered to the hull of ice haulers, to meet the fragments at a relative velocity of no more than .3 meters per second, or else it would rip your ship to shreds and fling your crew to their deaths, or sprained ankles. The Mainsail, which was a net rather than a sail (but named thus because it made ice haulers look like ancient pirate ships) had to be manually piloted by a crew of five in order to apply thrust and manage the slack of the couplings to prevent the payload ripping free of the boat altogether. It was a choreography of ice, momentum, and thrust.