“There is something about that vessel that is blocking, I don’t know, technology,” Charles attempted to explain.
“Well, it can’t just…” Crysta started to expound.
“Yeah, yeah, it’s not that simple, I know,” Charles interrupted. “You have all seen the footage I’m sure. The drones worked and worked on that hatch and nothing. My arm goes through, and I nearly get swallowed up.”
“Maybe that is just how the entering mechanism works. You were all saying the hull was soft?” Thomas asked.
“I thought that too, until I stuck my hand in again,” Charles continued.
“I saw you doing that. What were you doing?” Ben asked.
Charles pointed at the tablet. “Every time I pushed my hand through, the tablet died. It went blank.” The captain looked around to make sure everyone was listening. “But the moment I pulled it back out, it was back on. Not like, turning back on, rebooting, nothing like that. It was on, just like nothing had happened. But inside the hull, or goo, nothing.”
Crysta and Joyce both reached out to grab the tablet, but Joyce came up short, and gave her friend a quick wink. The IT specialist instantly turned the tablet it on and began running diagnostic subroutines. She watched the data intently while Charles continued to talk.
“I was watching everything down there. The professor and I walked on the weird hull and it reacted to the two us us like that, all soft and oozely. But each step the drones took was on one hundred percent solid ground. Why is that?”
All he got were confused looks.
“So, the drones can’t get in.”
Silence took over the room for a few moments, until the captain’s tablet started beeping.
“This is…” Crysta started, still looking at the tablet. “Well. There were no overrides. No internal attacks. All the hardware checks out, no damage. Here is the weird thing. There is one minor data correction, but it’s done here,” she said, pointing at the tablet despite the fact no one could see, “where the tablet syncs back with the station time. There is no lost time, but suddenly it has to sync ahead six seconds. It lost six seconds, but it hadn’t turned off.”
“So WE,” Thomas started, looking around the room, waving his arm slightly around, “we have to go into that thing.”
“YAY!”
Everyone spun around towards the door, where Jenna stood with a giant grin on her face. Thomas laughed. Then all eyes were focused on Charles.
“I guess we go in, then,” Ben added, an air of defeat in his voice.
“There’s one more thing,” Charles said with a raised finger. “Anyone know how our 02 in the suits is regulated?”
Everyone looked around at each other, trying to figure out the answer, then they all looked at Geoff.
“What?” he shrugged his shoulders. “They’re just regulation 02 flows, run by the….” He stopped. Everyone realized it too, and heads turned towards Crysta, then down at the tablet she was holding.
“None of our gear is going to work in there. It’s all digital. Our air, our communications, we won’t have video, hell, we may not even have any light.”
If the air hadn’t gone out of the room before, it certainly did now.
“Time go pack up and go home?” Gary tried to joke.
Ben stood up and looked around. “Please, don’t look so helpless people. You are all the finest in their field on Earth. You’re telling me we can’t figure this out? We have seventeen hours, ladies and gentlemen. We need solutions. We need old school solutions.”
He turned around to start walking out of the meeting room before stopping short of the doors and turning to face the group again.
“NOW!”
Day 5 AE
- Connie -
“We have gone over these a hundred times. They work perfectly. We won’t be flying the Tin Can anytime soon, but we have another week or so till we need it and even then, I’m sure I have plenty of spares around somewhere. In the meantime, you can breathe old school.”
Connie went over the airflow design they had engineered for the suits. They had dismantled the internal air supply system for the orbital delivery vehicle, per her suggestion, and had implemented the regulators and pressure valves into the suit, along with copious amounts of glue and tape. They would have to rely on analogue displays of current oxygen time, each tailor made for the five lucky men and women who were going into the vessel after their lost crewmate.
Communication was an entirely different problem. There was simply no way to maintain contact with the base from within the vessel. Whatever form the brilliant engineers tried to rig up always ended up using some form of electricity. Even the simplest device, a telegraph, relied on pulses of electricity. Inside of the artifact though, they were going to rely on hand signals and writing on tablets, in the most literal of ways. The five had already been practicing their hand signals for the past eight hours.
Light had been an easy fix. The right combination of chemicals mixed together produced a rather bright glow for hours. Bottle that together along with some lenses, and the brave explorers had themselves flash lights. They were not nearly as bright as electric generated lights, but it was far better than stumbling around in the dark. The prospect of going into the alien vessel was daunting enough the way it was.
But the biggest thing all five of the volunteers had in common was the saving grace of their predicament. Each and every one of them knew sign language. It was really their only hope when communication was not expected in any other way.
They had rations for two days, if needed, but they really only had enough air for ten hours, maybe twelve.
Jenna attached the canister of oxygen they had brought along to the intake valve on the rover. She motioned the drone soldier over and it immediately tapped into it, refilling its own air. Jenna smiled through her helmet. It was like taking care of a pet. She then began dragging the rest of the canisters over to the shaft elevator. The rest of the drone soldiers would need a refill as well. She didn’t understand how their biological filters worked, but she knew they did, and well. They used far less ‘food and air’ than anyone else, and that was mostly because of the way the mech suit filtered and recycled. The mech AI also regulated their bodies; it was a way to get them to use far less energy when they didn’t need to.
Charles led the way to the elevator. They would drop the lift down and do their own jump into the shaft, just like the first time. Connie would go along as she had some of the best hands on engineering experience on the base. She had laughed at that though, as they were about to go into a foreign and completely alien space ship.
The doctor, Gary, came along as well, for obvious reasons. They still had no idea in what condition they would find Glorin in, if they found him. It was a heavy risk allowing him to go. Should something happen to him inside, the rest of the crew would be left with only first aid training. Gary had insisted, though. He wasn’t about to miss out on the tiniest bit of action this mission would provide him.
Emir had been forcefully volunteered. It was clearly delayed punishment for the video incident. He knew it well and had accepted the role quietly. He had only asked that he not wear any red clothing. It was a joke few had understood.
Of course, Jenna had volunteered and no one was about to deny her the opportunity she had desired from the very beginning. She was also the last to jump into the shaft and into the frozen darkness.
- Ben -
“Ok, we have clear video from the EUAs, Charles.”
Ben looked at the screens they had mounted in central command. Most of the crew was there to watch, except for Susan and Joyce. The botanist was busy with regularly scheduled work in the green dome, and Joyce had excused herself. She said she was tired and wanted to get away from the stress for a bit. Once the crew down below went into the vessel, they would have no more contact with them, and the lab would have to go back to its normal routine, at least for a while. Joyce just wanted to get started earlier.
Two more mo
nitors sprang to life as Ben clicked on two separate video streams: one from a EUA and another from drone 7. He poked and prodded at other camera feeds, occasionally putting his fingers in his mouth to bite off bits of his nails. It was his sole nervous tic. Cary sat next to him, seemingly much calmer than the base commander. Her heart was beating through her chest, though. She had something strange, for sure, going on with Gary, but that didn’t mean she didn’t like him. A lot even. She also knew Susan was probably rushing through her garden chores to be back here with her.
Their little experiment had started as a joke, something to fight the boredom on the frozen moon. Instead, it had turned into something real, something concrete, and at the same time, something currently quite taboo back on Earth. The end of the mission had led Cary and Susan to talk about what would happen once they were back. It wasn’t something they looked forward to. It was too bad they couldn’t get a straight answer from Gary, either.
Thomas sat on the far side of the room. He could barely make out the images on the screen, but he knew precisely what was going on. Down under a mile of ice were his former lover and his current lover. He didn’t like that prospect very much. They were supposed to dig the ice and then relax for the rest of the mission. This was not relaxing, he thought.
Multiple images showed the five crew members assembled around the spot where they best guessed Glorin had vanished down into. They had gone over the video over and over again, and all they could make out was the form of the professor slowly sinking into the hull. Now, they stood over that spot, waiting.
“Ok, we are here, Ben,” Charles’ voice crackled over the speakers.
Ben nodded at Cary, who typed in a command. A second video came on, side by side with the live feed down below the ice. It was the original feed; they were matching the video to pinpoint that entrance. The images flowed on top of each other and froze still.
“Two or three feet to your left, Charles,” Ben said into the mic.
Back on the screen, the captain took two small steps to his left, putting his feet right over the spot on the old video where the body was.
“Ok, right there,” Ben confirmed.
Charles turned and gave a thumbs up to the video camera on the EUA. Ben covered his face for a moment, squeezing his temples. When he looked back at the screen again, Charles had already turned around and was on his hands and knees, looking around the hull.
“Can you have the drones try again?” he asked over the comm.
“Already on it,” Charles replied. Ben saw as one of the drones walked over and stood next to the captain. Dropping down on its knees, the mech began exploring the surface of the hull with its hands. Ben switched the video feed to that particular drone and images of its metal hands filled the screen. It was digging away at the surface of the hull. The way the fingers rattled off the hull showed it was hard. Then Charles put his hand next to the drone’s hand and his sunk in immediately a few inches in.
“See?”
“I had to try,” Ben added.
The screen flickered momentarily, then the full view provided by the EUA came back on.
“It’s time,” Charles indicated.
The entire room held its breath as they watched the screen. Charles stood up and took one step forward. When his foot struck the hull, it began sinking immediately. But instead of just his one foot sinking, his entire body started going under, despite the fact his other foot had been standing on ‘solid’ ground.
“Ain’t that something,” Charles was able to utter right before his head slipped under the hull. The comm clicked and static came over it for a moment, then it was silent.
The image on the EUA spanned wider and all four remaining crew were seen on the screen, slowly beginning to sink where they stood. They weren’t standing anywhere near the supposed entrance, but were now vanishing into hull of the ship. Cary gasped when she realized what was happening and leaned forward quickly, turning the long spindly mic over to her.
“Gary, be careful,” she quickly uttered. When she looked again, the doctor’s head was already vanishing under the hull.
“Just be careful,” she whispered, sitting back in her chair.
In moments, their shadows were all but gone, having slipped away into the alien ship they had traveled millions of miles to explore.
“Now,” Ben said, standing up slowly and turning to face the rest of the crew, “we wait.”
Horace stood up and looked around the room. “I have to go write some reports.” He continued to look around. “Where is Crysta? I have to ask her what is going on with the emails to Earth. Nothing is going through.”
Ben had turned his focus back to the screens and waved aimlessly towards the exit. The psychologist shrugged his shoulders and walked towards the doors. He would look for her in her workspace first.
- Crysta -
“Ok, I’m here,” Crysta said, sitting down on the seat next to Joyce. Crysta held out her small comm link. The IT chief had setup up some confidential data links that she gave out to her few real friends on board the base, notably Joyce and Connie. Twenty minutes ago, while everyone was in the central command watching the five getting ready to descend into the alien ship, she had gotten a beep on her comm, on the secure data link she had setup. It had one message.
- You gotta come see what I found. –
“Whatcha got?”
Joyce turned and Crysta was immediately shocked. Her friend’s eyes were red, the kind of red eyes a person gets while staring at a screen for hours on end. Joyce put her hand on her screen and swiped, sending the information on her screen over to an adjacent monitor in front of Crysta. Joyce began scanning through the data, mostly documents with some images and maps. She took only a slight glance before turning back to her friend.
“Ok, you tell me what I’m looking at, seeing as you’ve been going at this for quite,” Crysta began, stopping for a moment before taking a closer look at her friend, “some time.”
“I took all that data, the encrypted stuff sent to the captain. Gigs of data. Some of it was double encrypted, meant only for the algorithms on his console. Might need your friend to try to hack those. Anyways, I start going through this stuff, first, just glancing, looking, reading like it’s off the internet. It looks like boring reports, battle stuff, troop stuff, missions and what not. But, after a few hours, I start getting this feeling. The reports, they are building up. There are a LOT of requests for intel, forwarding information from overseas…”
Joyce was frazzled. She started shuffling through a stack of papers she had in front of her.
“Did you actually print this stuff? On our limited paper?” Crysta asked.
“Ok, look here, and…” she threw some papers off the stack, grabbing another, “and here. Ok. Now, this is where it starts getting odd. Its damn military talk, but I know this word. Look.”
Joyce handed her friend the sheet of paper, where she had circled and underlined a word.
“Detonation,” Crysta said out loud. “Detonation confirmed.”
She took the sheets that Joyce kept giving to her, all reading the same thing. Detonation confirmed. London. Paris. Mumbai, Tehran, Jerusalem, Berlin. She kept reading the sheets Joyce was giving her. New York City, Toronto, Chicago.
“Are these…Is this…” Crysta could hear her heart beating loudly. “Is this what I think it is?”
“I didn’t know for sure at first. It never flat out says it,” Joyce said, a hint of desperation in her voice. “But here, look at this one.”
Crysta took the sheet.
“President underground. Washington lost,” she pronounced the words, barely uttering them.
“What happened? What IS happening?” Crysta began digging through the papers herself.
“I don’t know. The details are rather lacking. I think the real meat and potatoes are in those encrypted files. Can Hammy crack them?” Joyce asked.
“I’ll see what he can do,” Crysta stopped for a moment, looking up at the scr
een in front of her. “Who else have you told about this?”
“Are you kidding? I’m not even supposed know about this. I hacked this, we….YOU hacked this. Who am I supposed to tell?”
Crysta reached out and put her hand on her friend’s shoulder.
“Alright, relax. I’ll get the AI to work on it. Let’s see what we can find out. Either way, if the captain makes it back from his little mission, then we’re going to get it out of him.” Crysta sat back in the chair, a thousand thoughts running through her head. “So, we agree, right? What this is?”
The look on Joyce’s face revealed her terror.
“Nuclear war.” The words nearly left her out of breath.
- Jenna –
Just keep your head above water.
A natural reflex. That is all it was. She didn’t even notice it until it seemed too late. Before she knew it, she was gasping for air and struggling to get back to the surface. Panic set it, if only for a brief moment. Then she realized, she didn’t have to gasp. She was breathing just fine. Still, she was being swept away by whatever it was she was in.
Jenna had gone under without even noticing it. One moment, she was standing on top of the oddly feeling hull of the alien vessel, and the next, she was flowing into it on some kind of current. She hadn’t even felt herself descend into it.
There was some kind of light all around her. As she twisted herself in the liquid, she could see Charles up and to her right, and Connie just above him. Looking down she could make out two more forms, likely Emir and Gary. She watched all four of her companions for a minute, turning her gaze from down to up and then back down a few times. All four kept the same angle and distance from her. If it wasn’t for the sensation of flowing with a current underwater, she would have thought themselves frozen inside the tub of gelatin that was the alien vessel.
Over the past two days, Thomas and she had discussed the nature of the alien vessel a few times. Clearly, it was something completely beyond their understanding. It was quite possibly biological, and therefore alive. It freaked her out a bit to think she was a microbe inside of a huge being. The other possibility was that for a ship to travel at the speeds necessary for interstellar travel, the material needed would be something humanity simply couldn’t comprehend. She compared it to the use of compressed gel atmospheres in extreme deep sea subs. It was amazing technology that allowed a human to go that deep, and for machines to go even deeper. Perhaps the liquid they were trapped in served the same function at light speeds.
Europa (Deadverse Book 1) Page 6