Sand and Shadow

by Laurisa White Reyes

  Fess took several deep breaths in succession before answering. “The mixers,” he said in measured syllables, “the tanks that give us air—”

  “We know what mixers are.” Adán cut him off impatiently. “What about them?”

  Fess’s eyes widened with growing panic.

  “They’re gone.”

  THE NEW YORK TIMES

  NASA-NGIS PREPARES FOR LAUNCH OF FIRST PLANETARY COLONY

  Written by Yemeni Bastien

  8:39pm

  The President announced Thursday that NASA & Northrop Grumman’s Planetary Colonization Division has moved up its inaugural launch date by more than five years.

  Plans are underway to send twelve international super shuttles to establish exploratory facilities and a provisional colony on Europa, Jupiter’s fourth largest moon. The shuttles will carry all materials necessary to construct and maintain a fully operational laboratory and engineering station. The colonists will be placed into temporary cryo-hibernation for the three-year journey.

  The proposed launch date for the U.S. shuttles Carpathia, Beacon, and Ensign is September 2nd. In addition, China and Russia are each providing three shuttles and teams to the mission, while Iran, Great Britain, and the United Nations of Korea will each contribute one. Launch dates for the other countries’ shuttles are yet to be determined.

  Senator Polk of Wisconsin issued a statement questioning NASA’s decision, accusing the President of using the project to improve his chances for next year’s re-election and claiming the hasty move may lead to possible disaster. However, others in Washington are wondering if the decision was influenced by the recent reports of increased solar radiation levels detected in Earth’s atmosphere, but when questioned following the announcement, the President abruptly dismissed the idea as absurd.

  Adán followed Tink out of the common room into the cockpit, where the main controls of the shuttle were housed. A pale overhead light blinked on at their entrance.

  “Connection’s weak,” noted Tink. They also noted the condition of the shuttle’s forward windshield, a rectangular glass window fitted in the front of the cockpit to be used for visual confirmation during surface landings and take offs. Through it Adán had expected to see the planet, but instead he saw nothing at all. Like the cryo shields, it was completely caked in dust.

  Tink settled himself into one of the two cockpit chairs and studied the control panel. The commander and the pilot had sat here during lift off, overseeing the initial stage of Carpathia’s mission. Once the shuttle was safely on course and maximum speed had been achieved, they had joined the rest of the crew in cryo. The pilot hadn’t survived, and the Commander lay unconscious in Adán’s cryo unit.

  Above Tink, a clear acrylic screen jutted out from the ceiling. He typed a series of codes onto the panel keyboard, and the screen flickered to life.

  “I don’t understand it. No mixers. How could they forget to stock the shuttle with mixers?”

  Tink’s question was the same one Adán had been asking himself for the past half hour while he and the others had scoured every nook and cranny of the shuttle, hoping the devices meant to provide oxygen to the crew while outside had simply been misplaced. Yet unless NASA had stored them in the exterior cargo bays, which was a possibility, there wasn’t a single mixer on board. And if they were in the cargo bays, how could they get to them?

  “Not just the mixers,” Tink pointed out. “You saw the suits? Those aren’t anything like the EMU’s we trained in.”

  “Yeah, I noticed. They’re thinner, lighter weight. And the helmets—the visors aren’t mirrored.”

  “Computer, access diagnostics,” Tink said, followed by his personal code. Then to Adán he added, “This’ll give us some idea of which systems are functioning and at what capacity.”

  He scrolled through several screens full of numbers and mathematic equations. “For the most part, it seems that the shuttle is in good shape,” he said after a while. “Whatever caused that breach, though, did some serious damage to the electrical system, which may be why so many of the cryo units failed. Fortunately, the damage is isolated to that sector of the ship. Temperature regulation, data storage and collection, fuel systems, water development. Everything else seems fine.”

  Storage compartments ran along one wall near the ceiling. Adán opened three before he located the stash of E-Tabs, 9-inch rectangular touch screen devices. He pulled out six of them and tucked them under his arm. “Wish we could get a glimpse of what’s outside. Can you access the planet’s atmospheric readings?”

  Tink nodded. “Yeah, but I’m not sure if I can interpret them correctly. That’s the GEO squad’s job.”

  “Well, pull it up anyway. Let’s see what we’ve got.”

  Tink swiped his finger across the screen again. “Okay, here it is. Surface temp is negative twelve degrees Celsius. Humidity seven percent.”

  “Pretty damn cold out there.”

  “Yeah. And we’re supposed to go out there and drill a well—without mixers, I might add.”

  “There’s a layer of ice covering much of Europa’s surface, anywhere between two to eighteen miles thick. Endless source of water with a drill and steamer. That’s why they sent us here. Right?” Adán recalled the directives that had been drummed into them. “That’s our mission. Well, one of ‘em anyway. I’m going to pull up the comm link, okay?”

  Tink fell silent for a moment, as if suddenly lost in thought.

  “What is it?” asked Adán.

  The skin between Tink’s eyebrows pinched. “Negative twelve degrees. That’s ten degrees Fahrenheit.”

  “Yeah?”

  “That can’t be right. Remember what Jonah said? At best, Europa is negative 160, negative 260 Fahrenheit.”

  “The monitor’s gotta be wrong.” Adán snapped a fingernail against the screen. “Maybe the collision did more damage than we realized.”

  “Yeah,” said Tink, thoughtfully. “That has to be it. I’ll run the diagnostics. Gotta know what needs to be fixed, right?”

  “Right.”

  The comm stats turned up nothing. Adán had hoped there had been some attempt at contact from the fleet—a message or signal, something. With eleven other shuttles out there, it was hard to believe the Carpathia was the only one that had reached Europa so far. Earlier, Dema suggested they’d traveled far longer than three years, and Jonah had joked that they’d missed their mark. Now with the temperature glitch, a troubling thought wormed its way into Adán’s brain: What if they weren’t where they were supposed to be?

  “You got anything?” asked Tink.

  “Nope,” said Adán. “You?”

  “I’ll have to work on this sector here if we don’t want any more short outs.” Tink pointed to the corner of the screen. “If Fess could repair the external damage at Panel Nine—if he had air, of course—I could get the circuits up and running again. It shouldn’t be too difficult.”

  “Maybe he can do the repairs from inside. Can you manage your part alone? I mean, the simulations were all done in pairs.”

  “I can manage.”

  Adán switched off the comm link. He thought of the mixers and the hull breach. He thought too of what he’d seen through it. What he smelled through it.

  “Hey Tink?”

  “Yeah?”

  “There’s something else I need you to check. Could you pull up the atmospheric readings again?”

  “Sure. Why?”

  “Europa’s atmosphere is composed solely of oxygen, isn’t it? And it’s thin, too thin to breathe without mix tanks. I still don’t get how our air didn’t leak out.”

  Tink scratched at his temple with his index finger. “Well, you said it was all jammed up with dust, right? The shuttle constantly produces our air. Maybe it has been leaking but the breach is too small to make much of a difference.”

  “You got those numbers up yet?”

  Tink pointed at a series of digits on the bottom left of the screen. Adán leaned closer, narro
wing his eyes at the list of elements: oxygen, nitrogen, carbon dioxide.

  Tink looked at Adán, his eyebrows raised curiously. “I may be reading this wrong,” he said. “I’m no meteorologist, but I’d say there’s more than just oxygen out there.”

  Adán nodded. “That answers my question about the breach, but since when does any planet in our solar system, other than Earth, have a breathable atmosphere?”

  “Are you sure this is accurate?” Dema slid a finger over her E-Tab screen, refreshing the calculations. “I mean, there has to be some glitch in the system, right?”

  She was referring to the data Tink and Adán had just shared with the rest of Carpathia’s crew. Adán was reviewing them now, as was everyone else.

  “It doesn’t make sense,” said Lainie. “We can’t breathe Europa’s atmosphere, not without a mixer.”

  “Well, that explains that,” snorted Jonah.

  “What?” asked Adán.

  Jonah set his E-Tab down on the table. “The missing mix tanks weren’t an oversight. We’ve landed on a planet where we can breathe, and NASA sent us here on purpose.”

  “Those goddamn sons of bitches!” said Fess. “They knew we wouldn’t need them! They knew it from the start.”

  “We don’t know that for sure,” Lainie replied cautiously.

  “So, we don’t need mixers,” said Dema. “That still doesn’t answer the big question. If we’re not on Europa, then where are we?”

  Adán looked from one set of questioning eyes to another. They all seemed to be waiting for him to say something, as if he had an explanation, or could tell them what to do. But why him? He wasn’t the commander.

  “What about the damage to the Quarters’ hull?” asked Lainie. “Is it possible that whatever hit us threw us off course, and we landed on some other planet by mistake?”

  Jonah gave an indifferent shrug. “So, some meteor hits us, we veer off course, and just happen to land on some random planet. One that just happens to have a breathable atmosphere. We’d have better odds of hitting a golf ball into a tin can from ten miles off. Get real.”

  Adán didn’t like the way Jonah had spoken to Lainie just now, but this wasn’t the time to confront anyone about their bad manners. They were all under a lot of stress.

  “Whatever hit us,” he suggested, “it must have happened during descent, once we’d already entered the planet’s atmosphere, or even after we landed. If that breach had occurred in open space, it would have created a vacuum, instantly crushing this thing from the inside out.”

  “So, what did hit us?” The question Dema posed was one Adán couldn’t answer.

  “I don’t know.” It was all he could offer at the moment. “But listen, we’ve got plenty of food and water on board. Tink’s going to work on getting the electrical back online. With air out there, Fess can work on patching up the breach.”

  “Has anyone tried to contact the others?” It was Fess again. “Have we heard from any of the other shuttles yet?”

  Tink shook his head. “The comm link was set to off, but it’s functioning now. I sent out a hail transmission, but so far, no response. Either they haven’t landed yet or—”

  “Or what?” asked Jonah.

  “Or they’re not going to land.”

  Adán didn’t like the silence that followed. The unspoken questions and fears unnerved him. Had the other shuttles been hit by something, too? If they had, maybe they hadn’t been as lucky as the Carpathia, which had sustained only a negligible breach.

  He turned to face the wall of metal cabinets. He and Tink would have to search for answers to their exact location later. For now, the best way to keep everyone’s minds occupied was to get to work.

  “We’ve all gotten our fill of what some people might call food,” Adán said. “Now we need to see to the next thing on our agenda. Shelter.”

  “Can’t we just sleep in the shuttle?” asked Lainie. “At least it’s warm.”

  “If you want to go back to your cryo unit and all that dust,” replied Jonah, “you go right ahead.”

  “No way,” Fess said. “I’m not spending a single night with all those coffins in there.”

  Adán opened the top cabinet on his right. “We could stay in the common room,” he suggested, “but it’d be pretty cramped with all these tables. There’s plenty of room in the shelters, and we won’t even have to connect them to the shuttle’s oxygen tanks.” He pulled out a canvas tool bag and dropped it on the floor beside him with a loud clank. Next, he removed a large bundle of metallic lightweight tarp. “The braces for the tent frame are in outer storage bay one, along with the heating units, cots, and other hardware. We’ll only need one shelter now instead of all three, so that shouldn’t take too long to put up.”

  The crew sat sullenly, hesitant to move. Adán couldn’t blame them. They’d lost their friends, they didn’t know where they were, nothing was going as planned. All the more reason to stick to protocol, keep busy and focused.

  Tink, always the optimist, was the first to head for the locker room. “The good news is we won’t have mix tanks, which will lighten our load a bit.”

  Still the others lagged.

  “C’mon,” added Tink, reaching for Lainie’s hand. “Let’s get suited up and head outside. Time to face our own brave new world.”

  Until they opened the hatch on the port side of the shuttle and stepped outside, Adán and the crew of the Carpathia weren’t really sure what to expect. Due to the condition of the cockpit windows, it was the first look any of them had had of the planet’s surface. According to Tink’s diagnostic readings, there were mountain ranges forty-two kilometers to the west, longer and taller than those on earth. There also appeared to be a massive cleft in the planet’s crust twice the width of the Grand Canyon located a little less than a mile away. More importantly, the presence of oxygen, nitrogen, and carbon in the planet’s atmosphere suggested the possibility of life. The question was would it be microscopic forms of life or something bigger?

  Adán clicked his bio-optic scanner into place on his visor and scanned the horizon. As he stepped onto the planet surface, he felt gravity’s pull to be a little stronger than on Earth, though that had already been confirmed by the data that appeared at the edge of his visual field. His lightweight space suit felt heftier, his steps a bit more sluggish. He searched for anything that might suggest the presence of life: plant life, patterned formations, running water. But despite the mountains being visible in the distance, all around them, for miles in every direction, orange dunes lay as motionless as the painted landscapes he’d seen hanging in museums back home. Adán’s father had taken him to one shortly before his call from NASA. He had felt drawn to a particular painting there. It was actually a painting of the sea, with a wide golden strip of sand and foamy white waves. In the air, gulls dipped down toward the water, presumably to catch fish. Adán had stared at that painting for several minutes. Though he knew it was nothing but acrylic and canvas, he was afraid that if he blinked, he might miss that wave breaking on the shore, or the gull snagging its dinner and swooping back up into the sky.

  Adán felt that way now as he took in the 360-degree view all around him. He half expected the hills of dust to suddenly rear up and gallop toward him, but they didn’t.

  Carpathia’s exterior was long and sleek, resembling the design of the shuttles used in the 1980s and 90s, only much larger. Standing below its nose and looking down the length of it, Adán felt dwarfed by the immense spacecraft. Though it left Earth the old-fashioned way, vertically, it was designed to land horizontally like an airplane and could take off that way from the planet surface. From what he could tell, the Carpathia had landed successfully but sustained more damage than could be determined from the inside. Adán located the source of the long bulge inside the cryo compartment, what could only be described as a fifteen-foot-long gash along the ship’s side that ended where the rear hull had been breached. Larger than it looked from the inside, the gash itself was deep e
nough that Adán could easily spot where some wires and metal hardware had been severed. It would take days, if not weeks, to repair it, if they could repair it at all.

  Adán stooped a little to walk beneath the belly of the ship in order to inspect the landing gear. While everything appeared to be in order, there was one thing that bothered him. He found tracks in the soil trailing behind each of the three massive wheels, as he had expected, but they were located at a distance to the right of the shuttle. Between these tracks and the wheels were three unmistakable swaths in the earth, as if something had shoved the Carpathia sideways four or five yards.

  Adán stepped away from the shuttle, keeping its damaged flank in view. He walked backward until he could see it all at once—the shuttle, the gash in its side, the scars left in the dirt. Several thoughts hit him at once. First, the damage had indeed happened on the ground, not in flight. Second, whatever hit them was big enough and strong enough to move a shuttle the size of a jumbo jet. A meteor? Yet there were no rocks near the shuttle, big or small. And third, unless they could get the shuttle working again, they were stranded.

  “Hey Adán, you out here?” Fess’s voice in Adán’s comm was a lifeline, a connection to what felt familiar and safe, but he did not reply. He knew the crew, at least what was left of it. What point would there be in worrying them about something he couldn’t explain? He brushed his foot across the swath near the first wheel, back and forth along its length until it had vanished. He quickly did the same with the other two. The strange evidences—of what?—were gone.

  “Found you!” Fess came around the end of the shuttle just as Adán was having second thoughts about what he’d done. When Fess caught sight of the wound in Carpathia’s side, he whistled. “You see that?” he asked, casting nervous glances to his sides, like he expected to spot something sneaking up on them. “What the hell did that?”