by Jack Castle
“Tae, you back there?” Leo whispered into the intercom while holding perfectly still, as if his mere one-hundred-and-eighty-pound frame might keep the enormous transport ship from slipping the rest of the way over the ledge.
“Yeah, but why are you whispering?” Tae’s voice came back over the cockpit speakers. Leo could hear the commandos in the payload area speaking amongst themselves near the engineer, congratulating themselves on being alive.
“Tae, listen to me. I need you to get the anti-gravity generators back on line. Do you hear me? I need everything you can give me in as little amount of time as possible.”
“Why? What’s going on?” Tae asked. The revelry in his voice turned to concern.
“Just do it, Tae,” Leo said harshly. The nosecone teetered once more toward the ocean.
“Are we moving? Maybe we should abandon ship.”
“Trust me; there’s no time.” Leo shook his head, biting his lip. With as much calm as he could muster, he said, “Tae, listen to me. If you don’t get those A.G. generators back on line, we … are going … to die.”
“Okay, okay, just give me about ten seconds.”
But they didn’t have ten seconds. With Leo shouting, “no, no, no,” the shuttle teetered on the edge, and then, gaining momentum, slipped from the rock face and plunged into the gaping void.
Chapter 2
The Bort Report
48 HOURS PRIOR
EXPLORER II, UNITED COALITION OF PLANETS SPACECRAFT
PRESENTLY IN ORBIT OF EUROPA MOON
MISSION DATE: AUG. 15, 2168
#
I don’t know; it still looks like a dirty cue ball to me, Commander ‘Mac’ O’Bryant thought. She glanced at Jupiter’s smallest moon, which spun lazily outside the cockpit windows, and focused on the brownish-orange blot that marked the moon’s relatively crater-free covering of solid ice.
Mac slipped her slender frame behind the navigation console and began her morning ritual. As she sipped a cup of ‘mud’ — coffee so thick that it held the little wooden stirring stick upright — she looked over the various readouts that monitored every integral component of the ship. At present, she examined navigational readouts that confirmed what she already knew: the deep space cargo transport Explorer II was in a perfect geo-synchronized orbit of Jupiter’s moon Europa.
Mac knew that Jupiter’s smallest moon, which was only slightly smaller than Earth’s moon, was one of four satellites discovered by Galileo in 1610. First, scientists had thought vast oceans covered Europa; next, they had thought it was covered by ice. In reality, the small moon turned out to be a little of both: an ice planet with pockets of water. Gravitational tides from the other three Galilean satellites heated Europa’s interior, enabling it to support an ocean. The ocean’s thermal vents, in turn, supported life — not mere microbes or tiny fish, but orca-sized creatures. The discovery of life thriving in Europa’s dark ocean had resulted in everything from plushy toys to speculations of human-level intelligence just waiting to make contact and people, especially members of the press, couldn’t get enough.
The lucrative toy market wasn’t the only reason for the space program’s keen interest in Jupiter’s littlest moon — no, not by a long shot. According to Mac’s sources in the field of xeno-archeology, the space program hadn’t really kicked into overdrive on Europa until orbiting satellites had captured thermal images of what appeared to be a five-sided pyramid resting on the moon’s ocean floor. After this discovery, it had taken the space agency less than five decades to get a base set up on the icy surface, drill through the 10 kilometers of ice, and build an undersea base conveniently near the pyramid. Of course, the government had never told the public about the pyramid, and this information remained highly classified.
The surface base had become a budding colony that rivaled those on the moons of Mars and Saturn. Naturally, construction workers and scientists had been the first to arrive, but it wasn’t long before their families followed. The last time Mac had visited the Jupiter moon, it had boasted a population of nearly one thousand.
Thanks to the invention of the Powell fusion drive, her current voyage to Jupiter’s Europa moon base had taken only six months, as opposed to six years.
Commander O’Bryant blew a practiced cooling breath on her cup of ‘mud’ before taking a tentative sip. She relished every caffeine-stimulated neuron, particularly as she had recently cut back from six cups a day to one. It had been tough at first, but she had kept that resolution ever since space dock. It was just part of her makeup; when she decided to do something, she did it, and that was that.
Nearby, loud music in the form of an epic battle soundtrack, emanated from the muffled earphones of a virtual-reality helmet worn by a young officer sitting to her right in the pilot’s station. Lieutenant Leo Dalton was playing his full-immersion video games again. Normally, the VR helmets were reserved for training-module simulations, but the young pilot had rigged it to play video games instead.
Boys will be boys, Mac thought as she watched his head bob and weave to the music. And this is the guy who wants to marry my daughter.
The thought of her only offspring back on Earth made Mac’s heart ache. Emma O’Bryant had followed in her mom’s footsteps after college and had recently made firstclass-man at the U.S. Space Academy. Just like Mom, Emma was top of her class.
Emma had met Leo when he was training under Mac’s supervision for the Europa missions. A year-and-a-half later, he had proposed. According to both sides, it had been love at first sight. Initially, Mac had disapproved of the cocky young man, who was five years older than her daughter and whose reputation as a ‘player’ had preceded him. Not only that, Mac hadn’t wanted Emma to go through the heartbreak of having a doomed long-distance relationship with a deep-space shuttle pilot — the kind of relationship Emma’s father and Mac had had. But over time, Leo’s charms had whittled away at Mac’s trepidation. More importantly, the young man treated her daughter like a queen, which was far more than her spunky, stubborn, thickheaded (yet brilliant) offspring deserved. She was a regular chip off the old block.
Of course, their engagement had to be kept secret. The reasons were twofold: first, it was forbidden for anyone in the space program to date an underclassman, and second, she didn’t want Leo to lose his spot in the Europa transport rotation.
But Leo hadn’t received the highly coveted pilot position just because he was dating her daughter. He was a gifted pilot, just short of brilliant. Most importantly, Mac knew that he wouldn’t drive her crazy, even if they were cooped up together in a tin-can-like shuttle transport for six months. Nonetheless, he got no special treatment from her. If anything, she was even harder on him than on the others.
“Leo,” Mac said, trying to gain his attention. Officially, she disapproved of him playing his games while on duty, but she knew that he had rigged all of the ship’s sensors to alert him the moment anything was even the slightest bit out of sync. Realistically, she knew that there was little for either of them to do on such a long journey, and she’d rather have him alert and occupied than asleep at the wheel. By their own admission, the two international space agency pilots considered themselves little more than glorified truck drivers.
“Leo,” she said, louder this time. Still no response. Judging by the way his head was bobbing up and down and side-to-side, he was deeply involved in some sort of deadly virtual combat.
“Leo!” She gave him a swift kick with the ball of her deck shoe. Although it was her third deep space mission to Europa, it was only Leo’s first. Even so, they had long ago dropped official pleasantries between them, at least when they weren’t in front of any ground crew. If they were, then it was back to the commander-and-lieutenant relationship.
“Damn it!” Leo reached up, pressed the pause button, and quickly removed his helmet and gloves. Pushing a hand through his spiked, dirty blond hair, he said, “A
h, good morning, Commander.” He attempted to hide his frustration with his patented shark-eating smile. “You do realize that you just cost me the Mars Colony all-time high score on Gateway Chronicles?”
Simply put, Leo was a twelve-year-old boy in a good-looking twenty-six-year-old’s body with a genius I.Q., especially where computers were concerned.
She could see why her daughter had been won by the young buck from Canada, but Mac considered herself an old romantic and preferred a man’s man — the kind of guy who could build the frickin’ Swiss Family Robinson tree house, with a two-car garage and Jacuzzi out back, after being dropped in the woods with only a pocketknife.
“Time to pack it in and let the skipper take a turn at the wheel.”
“Aw, Mom,” he said and again flashed the charismatic grin that had won her daughter’s heart.
“Call me ‘Mom’ one more time, and you’ll find yourself floating the rest of the way to Europa,” she warned. In truth, at 38, she only had him by thirteen years.
“Well, yeah, but …” Leo trailed off as he suddenly got lost in the hypnotic visage of Jupiter’s moon, which spun slowly below them. “It’s beautiful.”
“You mean the dirty cue ball?” Mac asked. When he didn’t laugh at the appropriate time, she explained, “It looks like a giant mud-splattered cue ball to me.”
“Yeah,” Leo breathed, his eyes still glued to the window, “I can’t believe you got to see this three times.”
“Yep. I must be the luckiest girl alive,” she retorted, purposely thickening her South Carolina drawl. Although she did not find it difficult to beat down Leo’s enthusiasm, she could hardly blame him. This was Leo’s first run, and he still had the ‘pixie dust’ sprinkled all over him. It was Mac’s third, and to her, it was just another milk run that brought her one step closer to a space station command, a command that would enable Mac and her daughter to live together on base. The best of both worlds. Mac hoped they would be able to get back some of the time they had lost during her career with the space agency. That was her goal, and she was focused on it. Everything else was just minor details.
Her tone grew serious. “Got anything to pass on to the day shift, Lieutenant?”
Leo got the hint and concentrated on the official business at hand. “Not really. The right stabilizer for the internal dampener went 0.005% out of phase variance for about six minutes last night, but by the time I went to wake up Tae, he was already there. I swear that guy is wired right into the internal sensors.”
Mac smiled at the thought of the third and final member of their intrepid crew, Tae Yung, a Korean tech-head, who, it seemed, would rather spend time with the Explorer II’s fusion engines and his scientific journals than with the ship’s crew. He mostly kept to himself; so much so, it often seemed as if he’d found some way off the ship. When Mac did happen to stumble across Tae (and, in one case, Mac had nearly broken her neck doing so), he was usually buried in some technical schematic of just about everything and anything: the Explorer II’s fusion drive; the orbiting space stations around Europa, Saturn, or Mars; or the findings of the latest deep-space probes.
Originally, they had started off with thirteen additional passengers who were rotating out to the icy moon, but just before launch, the passengers were pulled off to make room in the payload area for two soil-movers that were needed on Europa.
“Other than that, you got a package,” Leo said.
“Who’s it from?” Her eyebrows perked up and betrayed her excitement. She wasn’t expecting any mail. Only her daughter wrote her anymore, and she had just received a letter from her two days ago.
“Dunno. It was marked for your eyes only.”
Mac cocked an eyebrow at her future son-in-law as if to say, “Who are you trying to kid?” They had been together long enough for her to know that he had already hacked into her mail.
“No, really,” Leo replied. He tried to look hurt, failed miserably, and accepted defeat. “It’s encoded and a damn hard one to crack at that.”
Mac knew Leo prided himself on his hacking skills. His pride wasn’t exactly unfounded, either. In addition to being one of NASA’s best pilots, he was one of the best computer engineers NASA had to offer.
Leo sighed and then admitted, “I did manage to break all the barriers but one, and you’ll need your password for that. A ‘Dr. Bort’ wrote that you would know what it is.”
Intrigued, Mac glanced down at the blinking file with her name on it.
Leo got up and stood over her, waiting impatiently for her to open the file. She realized that the unbreakable encoding must have been a real bur under his saddle, bugging him all night long.
“Do you mind?” she chided.
Ignoring her, Leo asked, “Well, aren’t you going to read it?”
“Not just yet,” she replied, reveling in his annoyance. It was a little game they often played. She was usually the winner. No, she was always the winner. After all, rank had its privileges.
“Fine,” he said as he grabbed his jacket off the back of the co-pilot’s seat. “I’m gonna go grab a shower before final descent.”
He exited the cockpit with feigned annoyance but returned seconds later to retrieve his game gear from the helm console. Mac suspected that this was merely a second ploy to gain access to the encoded document. After seeing that she still hadn’t opened the file, he shot her another pouty look, grabbed his gear, and disappeared in a huff.
Mac did a quick mental tally of the score: Mac 671, Leo 0.
Normally, she would never tend to personal matters while on duty. However, her friend’s communiqué was marked ‘urgent’, and this ship, her ship, had already cost her a marriage and nearly eighteen years with her daughter. After three two-year tours as a pilot, she had finally made mission commander. She had earned the right to indulge herself and take the time to read a letter from an old friend. Damn, she really needed another cup of ‘mud’. She started reading the communiqué instead.
She typed in the correct user name and then her password, ‘Emma-1’. A letter, complete with enclosed photos, flashed onto the screen.
Mac soon realized that the history of humanity was about to be changed forever.
#
***** TRANSMISSION SECURED *****
Dr. Joan Bort
Alpha Base Headquarters
Europa Moon
c/o Jupiter Station
Commander MacKenzie O’Bryant
Europa Moon Convoy
Band 24-1706
Earth Date: August 15, 2168
SUBJECT: Europa Moon Underwater Pyramid Site
…
Mac,
I can’t contain my excitement any longer. If only you could have been here for the opening of Europa’s underwater pyramid!
At the time of your last visit to Europa Moon Base Alpha on the moon’s surface, engineers had nearly finished constructing Europa Moon Base Beta on the ocean floor near the five-sided pyramid.
After the completion of the underwater base and the subsequent tunnel leading to the pyramid, and after months of trying to find a way into the structure, my survey team and I finally entered the pyramid. When my hands broke through the outer wall, I felt like my childhood idol, Howard Carter, on that eventful day in 1922 when he first broke though the inner chamber of Pharaoh Tutankhamen’s tomb in the Valley of the Kings. In fact, as you will see, there are striking similarities between various Egyptian ruins and the Europa pyramid.
However, upon entering the pyramid, I was more amazed at the similarities between it and the ruins on Mars. The physical structures, which are composed of rough-hewn blocks, and the sandy, white flooring are identical. In addition, the same peculiar golden symbols appear at both sites. Mac, they’re the same symbols as the ones on the Mars engraving, the ones that were compared to the symbol found on the Dead Sea Scrolls!
Th
ere was always sufficient proof to support the hypothesis that there was intelligent life on Mars, although it remained to be determined whether indigenous life forms or visitors from another solar system inhabited the planet. And now this… I think we have solid evidence here.
But I’m getting sidetracked… The similarities weren’t the most surprising discovery at the site… I can’t even begin to describe our astonishment when we found a corpse, wearing what appeared to be World War II garb, lying beside a deep circular pit in the center of the pyramid’s inner room (see attached photos).
#
Mac stopped reading to examine the series of digital pictures. Her head buzzed with excitement. She and Joan had been sharing news of archeological finds and debating origin theories back and forth like a game of chess since Mac had stumbled into her strange fascination with Martian relics.
Immediately, she was spellbound by a photo depicting the inner chamber of the pyramid, noting the resemblance between the chamber and the Egyptian pyramids on Earth. She looked closely at the pit, which was encircled by several high-powered light stanchions placed by the dozen extraterrestrial archeologists wearing environmental suits.
Her eyes opened wide in astonishment when she saw the next image, a close-up of the human remains lying on the outer rim of the pit’s edge. The corpse wore a bomber-style flight jacket adorned with a captain’s insignia, and it was surrounded by various military artifacts. Mac used her zoom key and focused on an antiquated army belt and holster that looked like they belonged in a World War II museum. If this is fake, someone certainly went to a lot of trouble to stage this scene, she thought.
Mac returned to Dr. Bort’s report.
#
I looked up the name Reed, which was stencilled on the jacket and dog tags worn by the corpse, and after searching our database and crosschecking it with the library computer on Earth, I learned that a Captain Harry Reed piloted a PBY that disappeared in the Bermuda Triangle during a 1945 rescue mission. Reed’s plane simply vanished; as did the planes he and his crew had been sent to rescue.