Europa (Deadverse Book 1)

by Flunker, Richard

  Of course, traveling at light speed was just one form of interstellar travel, Thomas had argued. An argument they had enjoyed many times over. Jenna pointed out that unless you somehow managed faster than light travel, going at the speed of light was really slow in universal highways. She much preferred wormholes or space bending.

  It was a theoretical argument. Just the technology used to deliver the humans onto Europa had been brought upon by amazing developments. The urge to discover the alien craft was a huge incentive, especially for the United States military. Funding to develop the propulsion that brought them to the frozen moon had come primarily from them.

  And that crazy little man they were going after.

  Jenna didn’t like him. Very few people did. He had no scientific or engineering background and routinely just made up the bullshit that he called his xeno expertise. He ranted and raved about all the research he had done back on Earth and it was always a joke. He could never show any proof of his discoveries, always quoting some kind of corporation policy he had and the ‘eyes of spies are everywhere’ crap he continually spewed. Even with creeps like Emir on the mission, she disliked the short man with the bushy black eyebrows the most. Somewhere, deep down, she wouldn’t mind if they found him dead.

  That was a horrible thought.

  Jenna snapped back out from her daydreams. There was something up ahead of them, down below. It looked like an egg, but, as she drifted closer, it was clearly something much larger. She saw Gary look back up to her. He signaled ‘can you see that?’ She replied that she could. Emir was doing something too, but she couldn’t make it out through all the goo. There was still a constant light around her. Nothing bright, just, there, like a dull green light deep in a basement somewhere. A quick check behind her showed that Connie and Charles were still there in the same spot as before, as least relative to her. Charles gave her a thumbs up, and she replied.

  Whatever it was they were in wasn’t killing them.

  For now.

  There was no sense of distance or size within the vessel. She could still feel the motion of her body through the liquid, and that was the only way she knew she wasn’t frozen in place. Now though, the egg shaped thing ahead of them kept growing bigger and bigger and Jenna had to train her mind to think that it wasn’t growing bigger, they were just getting closer. Several more minutes passed by as the egg grew larger and larger. It was dark in color, almost black, yet not quite. Before long, it was clear the egg was far larger than they were, in fact, it was larger than one of the domes they lived in on the surface of the moon. It was only then that she could see what could only be described as a long thread coming out of the pointed end of the ‘egg’. It disappeared deep into the vessel.

  Whatever this thing was, they were being pulled to it. She had no way of knowing just how deep they were, or how far they had travelled. She had a small analog watch inside of her helmet that ticked away nearly silently and according to it, they had been descending for nearly ten minutes. She was starting to panic as the egg got so large, that was all she could see. She knew that she had volunteered for the mission and that going into the complete unknown like that was, at best, potential suicide. She had been gung-ho about it. She wanted to be the one. Now, it looked like she was about to collide with whatever it was deep inside and her heart began to race. She tried twisting around, but found that it was worse than being in zero gravity. She could turn her head and torso a bit, but her body just kept moving down.

  She could see the edge of the egg and for a moment, she thought she could see through it. Her panic subsided for that brief moment until she realized she was going through it. Her heart exploded as the slow motion of the water was replaced by the scream inducing sensation of free falling.

  It didn’t last long when she crashed with a thud onto the ground, the floor, or whatever it was.

  Then she heard two more thuds.

  Standing up, she looked around and saw that they were in a large cavern of sorts. Not surprising, it was shaped like an egg on the inside. The strange ambient light was strongest here, which again distorted the sense of size, but Jenna guessed it at a couple hundred feet long. She turned and saw her four companions standing up, and that’s when she realized she had heard them fall as well.

  “Did you all hear me?” she shouted inside of her helmet.

  Emir was the first to turn and look, but the others, after looking around quickly, turned their helmets towards her.

  “I did. I DID!” Emir shouted. It was muffled, but clear enough.

  “There must be some kind of atmosphere in here,” Connie said, barely audible through the helmet.

  “Let’s not go cracking our helmets off just yet, folks,” Charles shouted.

  “The captain is right,” Connie said, louder this time, “We have no way of reading what kind of air is in here. Let’s just be thankful we don’t have to walk around signing.”

  Jenna began walking off towards the pointed end of the room when a hand reached out to grab her.

  “Hold on there,” it was Charles. “Let’s figure out where we are at first, OK?”

  The engineer spun around. “We are inside of the alien vessel. We did nothing to get here and now we’re inside of the egg. We need to get moving to find the professor.”

  She noticed Charles smile inside of his helmet. That was what he called Glorin, much to his chagrin.

  “Fine, just check your air first, and check for leaks I'm your suits. Let’s not mess this up,” Charles ordered.

  As Jenna checked her air supply and then start checking her suit, she did notice the captain pull out a hand gun and check it as well.

  “You brought a gun?” she shouted.

  Everyone turned, although Jenna was the only one seemingly surprised.

  “That is my job. Not a chance I’m going in here without one.”

  The captain straightened himself and then began walking away from them while everyone quickly fell in line behind him.

  “Any ideas where we are? Or what this is?” Charles shouted out behind him.

  “You don’t think this is really an egg, like Jenna said? Maybe the aliens were bringing an egg to Earth?” Emir speculated, his voice quivering just slightly.

  “Seriously?” Charles said, stopping and glaring at Emir. He shook his head and looked at Connie. “What do you think?”

  She was on her knees, and was sticking her fingers through the floor. Jenna stomped and felt solid ground, not the soft goo of the hull.

  “We are walking on a grated floor that’s been fitted onto the substance we were pulled through. From what little we saw, I’d say the substance actually coats the vessel and we are now inside. This is all clearly artificial in here. And by artificial, I mean, built, crafted.”

  “I don’t see anything else in here though,” Charles continued, “Right? I don’t see wires, bolts, nothing like that.”

  “And we don’t see a dead little man lying about,” Gary added.

  Connie nodded. “Nothing that I can see. We were deposited here, and as you can see, there’s nowhere to go but ahead of us.”

  “So, we are at the entrance,” Jenna threw in her thoughts.

  “Maybe. There is no way I could say. I’m barely an expert here,” Connie replied.

  Gary laughed. “It’s too bad Glorin isn’t here.”

  “All right, let’s stay focused,” Charles immediately quipped before everyone could start laughing. The billionaire had been extremely frustrating from the first day Charles had met him, and this was no different. This was not what he had expected to do when millions of miles from his family.

  “Let’s move forward and everyone, just be careful and aware.”

  Jenna dropped in behind everyone as they began walking towards the pointed end of the large room. As they walked, they could see the shape of the room by the odd glare their chemical lights gave off against the walls. The room was now visibly hundreds of feet long, if not more. They also weren’t bouncing around
like on the surface of the moon.

  “Normal gravity,” Jenna said.

  “I was thinking the same thing,” Connie added. “Beyond me to think that a civilization that could cross millions of light years couldn’t manipulate gravity.”

  “Yeah, but this feels like Earth gravity,” Jenna pointed out.

  “That freaks me out,” Emir added as they continued to walk.

  “Why?” Gary asked, turning around just slightly to look back on Emir.

  “Why would it be the perfect gravity for us? It’s too much coincidence that whatever planet this thing is from has the exact same gravity as our planet,” Emir explained.

  Gary continued walking, thinking about what he had just heard.

  “For that matter, why aren’t we falling over? We have been used to Europa gravity for almost two years now. Even with all the physical training we do with the weights, we should be feeling some intense fatigue right about now. We are actually going to be nearly bed ridden for a month once we get back to Earth while we get our strength back. No way our bodies should be walking around like it’s nothing,” Gary explained, then pointed up ahead to Charles, a good ways ahead of them. “Yet there goes Captain America like he’s running a marathon.”

  Charles had indeed been walking at a far greater pace than them. The rest of them were so used to walking slowly, even when magnets held them to the base floor. But Charles’ instincts had kicked in. The moment he felt normal gravity, he had fallen into a heavy pace.

  “What I want to know is, why we could come in here, hell, why we were brought here, when the mechs can’t?” Emir asked.

  “Maybe they don’t like robots,” Connie said, picking up her pace as well.

  “Maybe they can read our minds?” Emir continued to ponder. He stopped for a moment and looked up.

  “Then they wouldn’t need videos to watch me shower,” Jenna said, walking past him. No one said a thing, although Jenna thought she heard Gary laughing.

  A few more minutes passed as they continued walking in silence. They had to pick up their pace to catch up to Charles, but when they did, they nearly ran him over. He had come to a stop just before the floor began to descend. The pointed end of the egg room had suddenly become much smaller. It dipped down into a much smaller room where a large green globe sat suspended in the air, spinning ever so slightly. All five of them stood there watching it in awe, as it would expand a bit then deflate. The deep green light appeared to emanate from within it, but how it reached out through the vessel was a complete mystery.

  Beyond the large sphere were three columns of dark green matter, flowing upwards from three separate holes in the grated floor and up into the ceiling. It appeared to be the same material that the hull itself was made out of. And there, right next to the column of flowing liquid furthest on the left was the form of a man, sticking his hand into the flowing column. As he looked back, they all could see the face of the man they all hated, smiling back at them like someone who had found their long lost toy.

  “I’ll be damned,” Charles muttered.

  “Hey captain, I thought you followed along with me,” he said, wiping away the liquid off of his arms and walking up towards Charles. “But how did they get in here so quickly? For that matter, why are they here? Where are the drones?”

  “Professor?” Charles asked. “We came to rescue you.”

  “Huh?” Glorin gave the captain an equally confused look. “Rescue? I just got here.”

  Now it was everyone’s turn to be completely confused.

  “Mr. Ignacius,” Gary said, trying to be as polite as he could be, “You’ve been missing for ten hours or so already.”

  Glorin stopped short of the small ramp to where the five mission members stood. He looked around and then back up at them.

  “That’s impossible,” he said, “I just walked into this room maybe five minutes ago. I’m not sure since none of my gear works. But yeah, it really hasn’t been that long.”

  Charles looked around at everyone, then back at Glorin. He began walking down the ramp into the small room. “Are you sure? Is it possible you just got distracted and have been looking at this stuff for hours?”

  “Oh, I’d love to do that,” Glorin said, the huge kid smile popping on his face again, “Just look at all this.”

  “Concentrate, please,” Charles barked.

  Glorin spun around, his lips squeezed shut, clearly annoyed. “No, CAPTAIN,” he spat, “I just got here. Then you came with me, just now.” He turned around and walked back towards the columns.

  Gary walked up to Charles and pointed at their breathable air gauges. “Captain, his digital air feed is off. He probably only has a good hour of air before his CO2 levels in his suit get toxic. If he’d been in here that long, he’d be dead. We completely forgot he was on the digital air feed. If we had remembered that, we probably wouldn’t have even come in after him.”

  Charles turned clumsily in his suit and looked right at Connie.

  “What?” she asked.

  “Tell me you know what’s going on?” Charles asked.

  “Captain, you need an astrophysicist, or something like that. We sent a bunch of engineers and lab monkeys because we just wanted to dig this thing out. No one thought we might need an expert on temporal distortions when digging out a ship from ice.”

  “Can someone tell me that what I think is happening, is actually possible?” Charles asked out loud.

  Jenna chimed in. “Do you even see where you are? What kind of a question is that?”

  The captain spun about and walked down the rest of the ramp up to Glorin.

  “So, can we even say what might be happening out there?” Charles asked.

  “It doesn’t matter. We need to get the professor out of here as soon as we can or he’s gonna run out of air, here, there, or anywhere,” Gary pointed out.

  “And how do we get out?” Connie asked the obvious.

  Loud laughter erupted from Glorin’s helmet. He turned around, sporting that kid smile again.

  “That’s clear,” he said, stepping towards the large sphere. He stopped just under it and suddenly shoved his arm into it. “We ask it.”

  Day 11 AE

  - Ben –

  It had been a rough couple of days. They only had enough air for two days really, more or less depending on how everything went. The entire crew had watched as the five volunteers had vanished under the hull of the alien vessel, disappearing beneath it like sailors lost in a storm at sea. It had been disheartening to see them go like that. Still, he had maintained hope. Charles was a capable man.

  But that day was the last they had heard from them. Seven days had passed. There was very little hope left.

  The crew took it as they could. Thomas was the most visibly shook up, while Cary and Susan grieved in their own manner. Otherwise, the mission was essentially over. Two days after the crew had vanished into the ship, the next phase of the plan was put into motion. The main mission had been to try to extract anything of worth or value from the alien vessel, but if that were impossible, then the crew would setup the vast quantity of probes and drones that would remain behind on the moon to continue studying the vessel, remotely, from Earth. A large communications array was setup along with the hydrogen reactor that would power all the devices left on the moon. Little drones would sweep through the ice extracting the fuel for the reactor and power it for twenty to thirty years. NASA expected to be back with an even larger mission in the future if this one ever failed, as it appeared it was destined to.

  Setting everything up had kept everyone busy, which was better than thinking about the loss of friends. But while the crew worked, Ben had been waylaid by even worse problems. Communications with Earth had come to a standstill. Joyce let Ben know that Captain Charles had still been receiving data up to a few days ago, but that all NASA laser links were completely dead. Ms. Hunter had been sending regular radio messages back to Earth on various channels, but there had been no responses. Ben hadn
’t even been able to let Earth know about the losses.

  He had spent an entire day with Joyce going over all of their equipment to make sure it wasn’t something wrong on their end. It was during this work that he detected hints of nervousness in Joyce, which was unusual for the overly confident woman. Something else was going on, but at the moment, there were other pressing matters.

  With a sigh of exhaustion, Ben sat at his lonely console. Everyone had reported in already and most everyone was already sleeping. By his monitor, only Geoff and Susan were still awake. Geoff was finishing off some drone maintenance for tomorrow’s work in the engineering dome. The last couple of drones needed to be driven out to the secondary hydrogen reactor and configured. Once that was done, it would be a matter of waiting.

  Just a few more months on the frozen moon. The supply ships would arrive, Geoff would get the return vehicle assembled and they would leave. It was going to be a long two months, and one they would have to tread carefully without their doctor. Missing two engineers was going to make building the ship much harder and it take longer as well, but missing Connie was just a pain. She was responsible for the SEV and supply drops, so now Ben would have to get someone to train very quickly before the next drop was available. Geoff had volunteered, but Ben had already tagged Bobby on it. He was a smart kid and could get it done.

  Ben looked at all the files in front of him on the console. Susan had already resubmitted her data for the food and water needed for the flight home. The issue was that there were less people heading home. Less people meant less food and water, and also meant less weight. He would need a new flight path to counter the change in the vessel’s weight. NASA would have to provide it, but he couldn’t talk to them. If it came down to them, it was going to take some time. He could do it, he just didn’t want to.