She was familiar with the experiments. Plants had been grown on space stations and in several other space missions. They knew it worked, just that it didn’t work this well. All those experiments had been conducted over a small time period. The longest one was two months. On Europa, she had the best results from an ongoing experiment for growing plants off Earth that anyone had ever had. And they grew well. Beans, tomatoes, squashes, different kinds of corn, rice and a whole myriad of herbs. The mushrooms did especially well, growing to sizes she didn’t even know was possible. So successful was her dome, and by her own mathematics, she was sure that she could feed the entire crew of the mission from now on, and maybe even expand.
Of course, that would mean a vegetarian diet. Most on the base would not be OK with that. They still liked their imported meats and assorted other animal products.
Of course, she was about to take a step in that direction. Two dozen eggs, shipped somehow in some kind of preservation chamber, were due to arrive in the next pod. She was going to incubate them, if they survived the trip, and start raising chickens in her green dome. The real experiment of course was to see how Earth animals would do in a low gravity environment for more than two months. She had hoped to have them mature enough to lay eggs before they left the moon, but odds were they wouldn’t be ready on time.
Susan took a deep breath. It was the only place on the base where the humidity reached upwards of 80%. It was really the only place that still smelled of home. She walked the small path between the two largest sections of the garden. The soil underneath her was perfectly prepared by her, the amounts of nitrogen, calcium, magnesium and potassium carefully measured and recorded. Her destination was the far side of the dome, where several hundred-foot-long rows of spinach grew. She had planted them here for this very purpose. The deep green plants were ready the week before, so her timing was nearly perfect.
“Are those it?” Bobby’s voiced echoed on her wrist band. He was following her on camera.
“Beauties, huh?”
“Looks good. Wish I could have some.”
“There will be plenty left over.”
She reached over to the wall and brought down a small machine. It was about two feet high and had high tracked wheels on either side. She sat it down on the ground with the first row of spinach directly underneath it, with its tracks on either side of the row. She tapped a few buttons and the little robot hummed to life and began moving forward slowly. Susan reached back quickly and attached a small wagon to the end of the robot. It also sat high above the row. As the robot moved forward, it reached down into the soil, pulled the plant out and handed it to one of its tiny mechanical arms. That arm in turn moved the plant backwards underneath the robot and up into the wagon.
“How long will it take?” Bobby asked.
“Till it’s all harvested? Probably two hours. Once the harvesters get it all, they will dump it in the washers and the plants will get processed. You should have your finished product in five hours.”
Susan listened and heard only a pause. After a few moments, Bobby replied that would be OK.
Of course it was OK. She had sat with the Brazilian two nights ago, after he had completed waking the drone soldiers. They had the food necessary to process into the feeding paste that was intravenously fed to the drone soldiers, but Susan had brought up the idea to use their plants instead. She calculated the calories and necessary nutrients the soldiers would need and came up with her own concoction. In a few months, they would leave the base to head back home and all the plants here would be left to die off, so at least they would be put to good use.
Ben had agreed.
She had processed the corn and tomatoes the day before, and the beans weeks ago, and now they were all ready. She had opted for the corn instead of the potatoes, but she could use the tubers if needed. For all she knew, the soldiers were only going to be used for a week or so, and then put back into stasis and back on their slow drip of nutrients that kept their bodies alive.
She watched as the big wagon began to slowly fill up with the harvested spinach. She had designed both the harvester and the wagon. She was, as nearly everyone else on the base was, an expert at the top of her field. She was also officially single, like every other person on base was, with the exception of Captain Hoarry and Ben Kelly.
It had been one of the prerequisites for the mission. No attachments. For the longest time, the mission was seen as a one way trip. That it had succeeded thus far, without nearly a hitch, was an extraordinary achievement. Of course, very few of them had remained ‘single’ on the trip, and her situation was by far, the most complicated. Returning to Earth wasn’t exactly something she looked forward to. Still, that day was not too far off.
- Glorin -
“Commander, I don’t know how many times I have to reiterate this, but there is no need for the soldiers. They are just consuming resources we may need ourselves.”
Glorin Ignacius the Third sat directly across from Captain Hoarry and Commander Kelly. The two appointed leaders of the mission did not like the billionaire, and had made it very clear from the start. They had also voiced their vociferous opposition to the fact that the man would be leading the expedition into the artifact itself. They felt a money manager had no business delving deep into the possibly dangerous secrets from beyond the solar system. He barely had any business coming on the mission. But there he sat. His influence on the mission was undeniable, and Glorin knew it well.
“There is no chance that you are going alone,” Charles pointed out, matter-of-factly.
“I don’t need to go alone. I could take a small group, the botanist, surely the IT department would be useful, or the communications officer. At the very least, one of the engineers that had helped dig it out.”
Charles and Ben looked at each other, trying hard not to roll their eyes. The man had been trying his hardest to sleep with nearly every woman on the base. Despite his wealth, and his offers, no one had taken him up on his multiple offers. He had actually started to become a bit of a recluse as other mission crew members began pairing up. Ben found him repugnant and Charles just considered him an idiot. Despite that, they knew they were all here because of him. And mission control had already made it clear he could go into the artifact. Thankfully, they also ordered the use of the drone soldiers.
“We are sticking to the plan. You and me and the soldiers.” Charles wasn’t going to beat around the bush. “When we’re in, we’ll take a quick look, drop some flying drones, take some pictures, and get out. Once we have more information, we can make new plans.”
Glorin glared at the two men then slammed his hand down on the wooden desk. He had brought the giant desk with him on the initial flight, a luxury item. He tried to stare the two men down, as if in a gunfight, but the two leaders weren’t about to back down. And he knew it.
“Fine. But I’m telling you now, we won’t need to go back. We will have all our answers on day one.”
With a wave of his hand, he dismissed the men as if they were meager servants, and then spun his chair around. Charles smiled slightly, then got up. He could tell Ben was fuming, but he put his hand on Ben’s shoulder. He waited for the Commander to leave the room, and as he was about to leave himself, he stopped.
“And Mr. Ignacius, leave Susan alone. I think she’s said no more than enough times.”
With that he stepped out and slammed the door shut.
Glorin spun around, hoping to see the Captain’s back, but the door was already shut.
“Big man thinks he owns everyone on this moon. He knows nothing.”
Glorin opened his desk drawer and pulled out a journal, setting it down with a heavy thud on his desk. He opened it and began scanning the pages. There were hundreds of pages filled from edge to edge with his writing, as well as maps and diagrams he had drawn as well.
“I am the only one that knows. Years and years of research, a lifetime of discoveries. They have come back to humanity in its time of need, and
all they can think of is taking soldiers inside the temple.”
He turned a few more pages. There were maps of Egypt, the Yucatan peninsula, Rome, Calcutta, and the Bermuda Triangle. The self-professed xeno specialist had traveled the whole world for clues about extra-terrestrial visitors from the long forgotten past. He was certain he had found them. There were clues all over the world of benevolent beings that had come to Earth and helped fledgling civilizations. He had posted the information all over the internet and newsnets, but few believed.
They all believed in his money though. They called him a kook when it came to aliens, but a genius when it came to money.
“You can’t have it both ways. In two days’ time, we will be on board the vessel and I will be there to greet our helpers. Mankind will be saved.”
He talked out loud a lot.
- Ben -
“Please tell me you’re not going to let him out of your sight when you go in,” Ben said softly as the two men walked down the dimly lit hallway under the moon’s surface. The few lights that turned on when people walked the hallways reflected eerily into the bluish-green ice that made up the walls.
“You know it,” Charles guaranteed.
“It’s finally down to this. Two days from now, friend…” Ben trailed off.
“We got this,” Charles reassured. “Two days from now, we will be making history.”
“Or becoming a part of it.” Ben began walking again.
He caught up to Charles and asked, “So really, what do you think we will find?”
Everyone had been asking that, especially now that they were only two days away.
“I don’t get paid to wonder about it.”
“You don’t get paid much at all for anything,” Ben joked.
Both men laughed. It was the running joke on the base. As a Navy Officer, Charles was the only one who wasn’t being paid a very handsome hazard bonus. Instead, he was just receiving normal military pay plus a deployment bonus.
“Seriously though, what do you think?”
Charles walked a little further down the hallway, stopped, and looked up. They had reached one of the residential domes. He reached up and pulled down the ladder.
“I honestly don’t care what’s inside. What bothers me more is why it crashed on Europa instead of getting to Earth. We watched it coming towards our planet and we all watched as something happened to it and it lost control into the frozen moon, somehow landing completely intact under a mile of ice.”
He locked the ladder down in the ice and looked back at Ben.
“That’s what bothers me.”
Day 3 AE
- Gary -
“I don’t know how many times I have to tell you,” the doctor huffed, “the vitals are OK. Everything is good.”
Doctor Gary Fletcher was leaning into the control panel in his little office. It was the seventh time that day that both Bobby and Charles had messaged him, asking to go over the drone soldier vitals. He was confident with the results of the first reading and nothing had changed since, except for his attitude. He had dealt with drone soldiers in the past and fully understood their biological demands. There were no tricks, no special circumstances, and no gimmicks. They were human bodies stuck inside a machine.
Their vitals were good.
“Doc, we’d still like you to come down and check on them personally,” Bobby replied.
The doctor sighed in frustration.
“I’ve seen the video. I’ve seen the vitals and all of the readings. You have my go ahead. That’s all you need.”
He knew why he was here on the mission. There would certainly be a need for a doctor on any kind of mission, especially a surgeon. The whole mission had an initial success rate of only fifty percent. There was almost a sure guarantee that people would be hurt. His expertise would be invaluable. It had also looked really good on the mission specs that he was African American. It drove him nuts that racial issues still abounded in the United States.
But here, he was bored.
The trip to Europa had gone off without a hitch. The worst that had happened on the nine month flight from lunar orbit to the moon of Jupiter was a tooth ache. Barely a challenge for him despite it not being anywhere near his specialty. No one got sick, no one got hurt. Every man and woman on the mission understood that getting sick or hurt would be a terrible occurrence. Everyone ate well, everyone exercised as they needed to, and everyone stayed busy.
He was left to find something else to do.
At first, he tried helping out with the NASA-sanctioned experiments. They had come with several dozen and more came with every supply pod. But none caught his interest. Then, on a whim, he decided to help out in the green dome, and there he got to know Susan. It wasn’t long before he relieved his boredom in her bed. Not long after that, Cary Hughes, the lead research analyst on the mission came to him with some gynecological issues. Before he knew it, he had slept with her as well. What a terrible idea it had been because nothing was left unknown on the tiny base. There was no privacy. Soon the two women were at each other’s throats and he was at the center of an unwanted scandal.
But there he was. All these millions of miles away from Earth, the strange had gotten stranger. The two women had come to an understanding. Much to the chagrin of everyone else on the base, they both decided to remain ‘his’. He wasn’t quite sure what to make of it. There were already less women than men on the mission, and now he had two of them. The truth was, they owned him. And they never stopped letting him know.
So he had remained bored. For two years, on the frozen moon of Jupiter, the supremely skilled surgeon took urine and stool samples of the crew and did the quarterly physicals, and spent his down time trying to find something to do.
He should have been happy with the extra work now that the drone soldiers were awake. It was just that he didn’t like them. Very few people did, which, deep down, he knew was unfortunate. The whole drone soldier program was highly politicized and controversial. Government ran everything back on Earth though. These poor men were stuck in those suits for the duration.
Probably better that way.
He knew why they were here on the mission. He knew what he had to do next, and for the next day, at least, he would be busy. One day, out of hundreds. Better than nothing. At least Cary would be by soon to help. He liked her best, or so he told himself.
He already had one section of his dome mapped out. The idea was that he’d have a bed for each and every one of the soldiers, should it come to that. He just didn’t know what to believe. Cary told him she thought it was a waste of time. She was here on Europa for the experiments. The crazy fool Ignacius agreed with her, as did most everyone on the base. Susan, though, liked the thought of going in with the soldiers first. She was a little out there, the blonde botanist. She was sure the artifact was some kind of doomsday device.
She was out there in bed, too.
Gary sat down for a moment and put his hands on his head, squeezing his temples.
“What the hell am I doing here?”
- Crysta -
“See, here it is again,” Joyce pointed at the data stream on her display. “And here, and here. All on the laser bursts from Earth.”
Crysta MacKnight watched intensely. She was an aberration after being the only woman out of thousands of men to qualify for the final round of interviews for the mission, and even more so, to be chosen. It was unusual in the IT realm. She, along with Joyce, ran all of the hardware and software on board the base, but while Joyce’s specialty was communications, hers was entirely different. She was among the top AI minds on the planet. A savant, per se, on artificial constructs. She called them analogous minds, copies of human thought. Her AIs ran most of NASA and when she got back from this mission, would probably run most of American government installations. She would be filthy rich.
She didn’t care.
An accident when she was a child had left her barren, unable to have children of her own. That scar,
both visible and psychological, remained with her her entire life. She could never hold a relationship with anyone else, man or woman, adult or child, but found her desire to create life burned brightly inside of her. She found life in programming, and then found artificial life in AI sciences. She poured her whole life into it, developing true AI, true android forms, and the most lifelike android companions. She had created life.
Yet, on this frozen ball of ice orbiting Jupiter, she had made her first friend in Joyce. The similar interests helped, but for the first time, Crysta found someone who didn’t care if she preferred machines over men. Joyce didn’t seem to care about anything. It wasn’t in a dark brooding kind of way, but in a careless, free for all attitude.
“They come from three different locations. This one from Dallas, this one from DC, and this one from somewhere out in the Atlantic.”
Crysta studied the data bursts and their hidden data.
“I don’t like this Crysta. We get nothing from Indy in weeks now, but Captain Camo Pants keeps getting data sent to him? I don’t like it.”
Crysta knew what was coming so she waited.
“I can crack it, but it would probably take a week. I was hoping you could have Hammy take a crack at it.”
There it was. Her friend wanted the station’s AI to crack the encryption of the data being sent to Captain Hoarry. She turned to her friend and smiled.
“He already did.”
The shocked and surprised look on her face made her happy. It wasn’t often she could get that reaction out of Joyce.
“He decodes everything, whether asked to or not. It’s a matter of security for the AI.”
“Wait, wouldn’t you get in trouble for that?” Joyce asked, truly concerned.
“Probably, but we never did build a jail cell did we?”
Joyce laughed. It was actually a topic of conversation that had come up with the Jenna shower video scandal. The designs of the base had never taken into consideration that someone on the mission might actually need to be locked up for some reason. Mission Control had assumed that since everyone was a strict professional, that no one would ever be naughty. They didn’t take into consideration human nature and men’s desire to see women naked.
Europa (Deadverse Book 1) Page 3