The Curse of Europa

by Brian Kayser

  “Understood,” Hicks responds slowly. He knows she is right and she is being very brave, but it isn’t helping the pit forming in his stomach, making him want to vomit.

  “Where is Patric{sssst}? Is he okay {sst}” Evans finally asks, worried about the answer because he hasn’t been on the com and no one has mentioned anything.

  Hicks responds, “He’s here, on Eagle-2, however he is unconscious right now. His glove came off as you probably know; he suffered hyperthermia in his hand and forearm. We have him sedated because of the pain, but we are trying to revive him.”

  “Jeez, No {sssst} don’t do that, let him res{sssst},” Evans requests, but is hoping they don’t honor it.

  “Since I’m obviously not coming home {sssst} you guys, I’d like to record a few messages while we still have {st} good com-link. I’d like to record a message for my boy Sean {ssst} and daughter Mary; {ssst} and also my parents!”

  “Absolutely Doctor Evans, anytime you’re ready; all of this is being recorded,” Hicks responds with a clearing of his throat.

  “Hey Sean… honey, I love you so muc{ssst}. Remember our talk when I wa{sssst} leaving? I told you this was a {ssst}reat opportunity for me, but it could be{sssst} dangerous. Well baby,” Evans voice pitches up an octave and she sniffles; a hot tear burns down her cheek. “I’m afraid there was an accide{ssssst} and I… I... {sssst} I’m afraid mommy won’t be coming hom{sssst}! I love you so… so very much! {sssst} NEVER forget that. You hear me! Jeez… you are a great kid, so {ssst}mart. You be brave for mommy, I love you! {ssst ssst}” Her final few words tapering off into a sob.

  Everyone on Eagle-2 and White-Bull-2 are whimpering and wiping tears from their eyes while listening to Evans say her painful goodbyes. She next leaves a heart wrenching message for her 13 year old daughter, then to her parents and some close friends. Then lastly to Tom, her ex-husband, apologizing for some things and pleading that he takes good care of their two children.

  Turk has made his way to the somber command deck, a little woozy but getting more alert from whatever Fedoseev shot him with. A local anesthetic was applied to his arm and hand, so he feels no pain and it just hangs in a sling as dead weight. At first he thought he was dreaming when Fedoseev told him that they were talking with Juliana. “What? What are you talking about? She’s dead! I dropped her!!” he had snapped back at Fedoseev when he was first waking up.

  He gets strapped into his chair with the help of Hicks. Turk leans over the console and says, “Juliana, can you hear me?” in a shaky voice, his heart pounding out of his chest; trying to blink away tears that are trying to form in his weary eyes.

  “{sssst}atrick? Is that you? {ssst}” Juliana blurts out quickly.

  “Yes!” he cries then stammers “oh – God… Juliana I’m so sorry! I dropped you, I let you fall!”

  “Patrick! You lis{sst}n to me! This is not your fault {sssst}, Jeez, I’m the stupid one that slipped down the hole! You {ssst}ried to save me! You almost died yourself trying to save me{sssst}”

  “Oh Juliana -” Turk can’t speak; he bits his hand, trying not to sob like a baby.

  “Oh Jeez! Oh – my - God!” Evans blurts out slowly as her teary eyes widen. She increases the oxygen flow for a few quick seconds to help defrost her visor. “I think I sa{sst} something move down there! It wasn’t just floating, it was moving, {sst} swimming!” She was frantically waving around the beam of light, trying to locate it, but it was gone.

  “I don’t see it now,” she says then starts speaking quickly as she knows her time is running short, “Listen – Patrick, I love {sst}, I loved our time together. It may have been short but {sst} was wonderful… perfect really. {sst} I wasn’t looking for love again, and I don’t think you were either, but we{sst} found it; and it was great! Don’t blame yourself for this; it IS NOT your fau{sst}. Our time was short – jeez, we didn’t even have time for any fights, who knows {sst}, we may have been great together, but… {sst} we may not have been. Don’t dwell on this… please! I want you {sst} always remember me, but please don’t mourn. Please just cherish our time. Cherish our memories together. Plea{sst}, always be happy when thinking about our time together and don’t let {sst} make you sad. Jeez, you’ve made me very happy these last few mon{sst}, you are a wonderful man. I love you! We’ll always have Europa!” She lets out a pitiful chuckle and sniffles a little bit, but stays strong to help Turk stay strong.

  “I love you too Juliana! And I will! I will always cherish our memories… forever. You… you… you snuck up on me. Yes, our time was short, but I don’t think I’ve ever loved anyone like I’ve loved you – like I LOVE you! And…” he squeaks out a painful chuckle, “Yes, We’ll always have Europa!”

  “Yes, we will!” She responds. She has said her goodbyes, she has cried her tears. She looks down at the white flakes still billowing upward and knows her time is running short. She sniffles one last time and it is as if a calm has washed over her. Enough with the doom and gloom, yes she knows this is the end, she has accepted it; but she was not going to cry away her last 75 minutes. She is aching to find out what’s down there now. If she finds an underwater dinosaur, like Turk once joked, so be it – what’s it going to matter if she gets eaten? Either way she is going to die.

  In a firm and assertive tone she continues, “My time is running short, my oxygen indicator esti{sst}tes about 75 minutes. What’s done is done for me and my fate is sealed, {sst}{sst} I’m not going to cry about it anymore. What I want to do is find out what the hell {sst} down there. As I investigate, my helmet camera can record everything {sssst} store it locally. When I have about five minutes of air left, I will reconnect my ant{sst}{sst}. Will you guys then be able {sst} upload all of the data?”

  Turk wipes his eyes and tries to perk up. Hearing Juliana being so strong helps and he doesn’t want her to hear him be weak. “That may be possible, I’m not sure since your transmissions are still breaking up some.”

  Glover chimes in, “I think that is possible but we should minimize the amount of data we’ll need to upload. Instead of recording in the default Super-HD panoramic-3D format, I can change it to just record in basic old HD…. Hold on… There… There you go; I just made that change for you. But you better reconnect with 10 minutes left, just to make sure we have enough time.”

  “Okay, {sst} that only leaves me about an hour then so I’m going to get going. Pat{sst} – I love you! Everyone… I love you all. If all goes well we will talk {sst} about 65 minutes and I’ll hopefully have a wonderful story to t{sst}{sst}!”

  “God Speed Doctor Evans,” Hicks proclaims.

  “Juliana, I love you too. Go find your aliens. We WILL talk soon!” Turk says with uneasy confidence; wondering if this moment is the last time he will ever speak with Juliana Evans. He knows the next 65 minutes of silence is going to be miserable.

  “Commander, we can’t just leave her down there to die, to suffocate! There has to be something we can do!” Turk pipes up, the dizzying effects of the sedative starting to subside.

  “Turk…” Hicks responds, solemnly shaking his head, “believe me, I’d be the first one planning a rescue mission if it were feasible – but it’s not. We don’t have the fuel for one thing.”

  “Bullshit, we can transfer fuel from the command module; it has plenty of extra thruster fuel.” Turk retorts. “and look here,” he sends a topological map of Europa to Hicks’ display screen with a little red ‘X’ on it. “I was able to triangulate her exact position using the radio signals from us and from White-Bull-2. She’s right… right there!!”

  “Turk… Patrick… It’s not possible. We won’t even rendezvous with White-Bull-2 for over three hours. Even if it was right here, right now, we wouldn’t have time to transfer the fuel and then land. The heat shield may not function for another landing either and we have no way to get her out of the ice. She barely has an hour of oxygen remaining.” Hicks places his hand on Turks arm.

  Turk yanks away his arm and screams “Dammit, I know, I know
!! Dammit! It was my fault anyway! I should have saved her when I had the chance, I’m such a wimp… why couldn’t I pull her up? There’s only 15 percent friggen gravity on the surface. She probably only weighed 18 pounds down there! Jesus! Europa! I hate Europa! The friggen place is cursed, no doubt about that!!” He pushes his display screen away from him and it spins around on its mounting arm a few times.

  “Don’t blame yourself buddy, I’m believing that curse is real too - right about now. Have you asked Fedoseev about his mis-adventures down there?” Hicks responds, knowing that Turk was ‘checked out’ during the other ‘fun’ they experienced down on the surface.

  “Just let me know when we get her com-link signal back,” He responds coldly. Then he unbuckles himself and floats back down to his bunk and curls up into a ball; wishing he was down there with her.

  Chapter 21: Hydrothermal Vents

  Doctor Evans lets go of the antenna, letting it fall out of the plug and dangle by the wire. She carefully slips the backpack back on, making sure she doesn’t yank the cables or air hoses. The clouds of white sodium sulfide flakes had already gotten much denser while she was talking with Eagle-2, as she had been gradually descending. Once she gets the backpack securely fastened, she aims her body downward and starts swimming, as best as she can in the bio-suit, with the beam of light searching for anything, searching for everything.

  She talks into her com unit to narrate what she is seeing, while her bio-suit’s computer records all the video and audio. “This is Doctor Juliana Evans, I’m starting my descent to try to find what I believe is a hydrothermal vent that is producing these white flakes of sodium sulfide. As I descend, the concentration of the clouds is getting thicker. I hope I am getting close, as I can feel the water pressure starting to bear down on me.”

  Surprisingly, after only about 60 seconds of swimming down, her light catches something. “I see what appears to be the peak of an underwater mountain, and am swimming towards that. I can’t believe I was this close to it. I can’t see it very clear yet. It looks like the vent I was looking for is venting from the side of this mountain; oh wow, it looks like there are multiple vents, spewing out black water that looks like smoke. We call these Black Smokers on Earth. I see multiple chimneys now, which are formed from the hot minerals. I’m going to steer clear of the opening, as the water coming out is probably superheated and could be three to four hundred degrees Celsius. Just looking at it I can tell it is very hot, as it distorts my light just like you may see in a desert.”

  She approaches the side of one of the black smokers extruding from the mountain and gets a huge smile on her face, and she almost begins to cry.

  “Oh my God! This is amazing; jeez, I think those are tube worms. I can’t believe it; they look almost exactly like tube worms found in Earth’s oceans. Wow… oh my God!”

  She is whimpering as she gets close enough to examine them. They look like giant lipstick tubes attached to the side of the black smoker chimney. A few of them have red heads poking out that quickly retract into the tube, as she gently touches them. She is so caught up in the discovery that she is not even thinking about her own life ticking away.

  “They are alive, most definitely. Wow! Oh jeez, would you look at that! It looks like a mushroom. But it’s not; it’s another form of coral. Oh jeez, and over there, that looks like the coral that I found floating above, there’s tons of it, all sorts of colors… Whoa!”

  She whips back her head as she is startled from something swimming freely. “Jeez… look – at – that! What is that? Maybe that’s what I saw earlier. It looks like a little eel of some kind. It is a light bluish color, about 15 centimeters long. I sure hope you can see all of this. Oh… hey… it went into that rock, into a little hole. Hey there buddy… hey there… don’t be shy…”

  Evans knocks lightly on the rock with her glove, but it doesn’t come back out. The large rock has a lot of holes, making it look like a big rock-hard sponge. She waits a few moments longer, but the eel doesn’t reappear, so she starts to look around elsewhere for other specimens.

  As she is kicking her feet to move around in the water, she kicks the side of the rock quite hard. Almost instantly, about fifty eels launch out of various holes in the side of the mountain, most of them much larger than the baby one she spotted, some blue, some yellow, and some more greenish in color. About ten of them are larger than she is, three meters, possibly longer.

  “What… oh jeez, Jesus!!” Evans screams to herself as she jerks back and tries to move away.

  The eels swarm all around her with lightning-quick movements, while she flails her arms and legs, as if being swarmed by bees. Her heart is pounding right out of her chest it seems. She sees them opening their mouths, revealing rows of dagger-like teeth. They have bloated cold black eyes that don’t seem to move. Their jaws are wide and muscular; in fact their entire body seems to be one big bulging muscle as they swarm around her.

  She feels a few of them bump into her as she tries to swat them away. It wouldn’t take much for one of the larger eels to cut through her suit and into her skin with those teeth. In fact, one of the larger eels could easily bite off her hand or even her entire arm. She thinks that maybe she should try to curl up into a ball, or something; but then notices they are gone.

  Just as quickly as the attack started, most of the eels retreat back into their holes, while others simply swim away. She floats down to the side of the mountain, breathing erratically, and almost hyperventilating in her helmet. It takes her a few minutes to calm herself down and to start breathing normal again.

  “Whoa… crap, that was scary,” she says in the com still breathing a little fast, “I must have startled them when I kicked the rock… they sure startled me. It’s lucky for me, I guess, that I apparently didn’t appeal to their sense of taste. I’ll try not to do that again!”

  “Jeez… look, over there…” She spots something else and swims towards it, very happy to get away from the holey rock full of eels; they are interesting creatures, but she’d prefer not to ever see them again. If it wasn’t for the fact that she is continually recording video and audio, she would probably have taken longer to recover from this scare; but she wants to appear brave.

  “Wow, the surface here is covered by some sort of little clams. And look at all those little red things poking out, they look like little palm trees waving in the wind. Maybe another type of tube worm. Oh jeez… it’s really hot here. I’m just going to grab one of these little things to check out. Yikes!” She jerks her hand back. As she pulls on the red palm-tree-looking-thing she finds out it is a tail of a creature and quickly releases it.

  “Oh… sorry little feller… Will you look at that! Those are all tails, for some sort of crab type animal. Look at it crawling around… now it is burying its body back into all those clams. Did you see those pinchers? I hope there isn’t a huge version of that! Wow, I’ve got to move on though… it’s way too hot for me here.”

  She notices she has 60 minutes of oxygen remaining and she needs to reestablish her radio link in 50 minutes to upload all of her findings. She starts to swim up again, up the side of the mountain, to see what is on the other side. There isn’t much on the side of the peak, just the crusty surface and some large rocks. As she glides over the peak her eyes widen and her mouth falls open. Her light catches dozens of hydrothermal vents with chimneys, sprouting many stories high from the top of the peak. She thought the surface of the peak would go sharply down again, but the summit of this mountain flattens out and extends well beyond where her light can reach. She can see dozens of chimneys within 30 meters, and there are probably dozens more beyond that. Maybe even hundreds more.

  “Oh jeez… I should have started here to begin with!” She exclaims, “Look at all those vents. I think we only saw the tip of the iceberg back there. That was the outskirts of town. I think I just found New York City here! Oh my God… look at that,” she swims fervently ahead. “Look at all of those at the bottom of this chimney vent
; those are shrimp… weird looking for sure… but some kind of crustaceans. Oh jeez… there must be thousands right there, hunting for food. It reminds me of maggots on rancid meat. Look at their bodies; they are probably three times as long as I’ve ever seen with our shrimp species.”

  Evans slowly trolls the bottom of the sea floor near the bases of all the vents and continues her narration. “There are some more of those red palm tree tailed crabs over there. What was that!” she exclaims, looking over her left shoulder quickly. “I just saw a flash of light or something.” She shines her flashlight over in that direction but doesn’t see anything out of the ordinary; although technically everything down here is out of the ordinary! But as she looks again, she does spot something.

  “I don’t see anything… wait, what’s that though?” she swims over to another vent. “Jeez, look at these tube worms, they are longer than I am. Their flume is dark blue, instead of red like those other ones, amazing!” Then she sees another flash of light, to her right, and quickly turns her head and whips her light in that direction.

  “I don’t know what that light is; maybe it is just reflections on my visor.” She moves on, examining the sea floor; paying close attention to her peripheral vision.

  “Look at these; they look like colorful plants and flowers. But I’m sure these are some form of sea anemones. The sea floor here is actually kind of sandy, large gritty granules though.” She scoops up some of the brown sand and lets it slip through her fingers.

  “Oh jeez… look at that thing. Is that another type of crab? It’s all fuzzy, kind of like a Yeti crab but this thing is fuzzy all over. There’s another one… OH MY GOD!” She jerks back quickly. A rather large fish instantly emerges out of the sand and attacks one of the crabs.

  “Wow, I hope you saw that. Jeez… look at that thing! It’s some sort of deep sea fish; it looks kind of like an Anglerfish, but surprisingly, this thing is even uglier. Oh jeez… poor crab, it’s fighting back… but look at the teeth on that fish. Oh yuck, it just ripped off one of the crab’s legs… now he’s trying to get away, but the fish is giving chase. Oh, poor crab!” Evans says. The fish opens it huge mouth wide and swallows the rest of the crab whole, then slowly swims away.