And that’s why he was paid the big bucks. Of course, truth was, he was doing it all for free. It was cheaper that way, since he was running. Running from a failing marriage. He didn’t want to face her anymore, so when NASA approached him as one of the candidates to lead the mission to Europa, he had offered his services for free, in hopes it would entice them.
It had.
Of course, 365 million miles makes the heart long for those you love. After thousands of messages back and forth, he reconciled with his wife. Sometimes, not being able to scream and yell at each other was the trick. Now he just wanted to get back home.
He had hoped to get back with a clean conscience. None of it had been his fault, he knew it, but it didn’t take the reality away that he had lost six people under his watch.
“I think it’s time you get to bed, Ben,” a voice echoed over the speakers at Ben’s console.
Startled, Ben looked over at the audio stream and tapped the button. Geoff’s face popped up on the screen.
“How?” Ben asked, rubbing his eyes.
“You must have left the microphone on,” Geoff explained. He had listened to the mission commander working in central for the past hour.
“I recognize those breaths. They are breaths of exhaustion, like mine.”
Ben scanned the video. “You done down there?”
“I am. Everything ready for tomorrow. Any luck with the communications?”
“Nothing. Joyce has some ideas she is going to work on over the next couple of days. She’s good at it and will figure something out,” Ben added. “By the way, have you noticed anything off about her?”
There was a pause and Ben saw Geoff on the monitor turn around and look away from the camera. For a moment, he looked up as if looking at the sky. Then he turned back to the camera.
“Weird,” he said.
“What?”
“Nothing. I thought I heard something, rattling. Anyways, what did you…,” Geoff began, but was interrupted by the sound of a loud crash. Geoff spun around.
“What the hell…”
Suddenly, the world started to move.
Directly in front of Ben was a large red button. It was a joke to the rest of the crew. The panic button. Ben had used it just three times before, and on all three occasions, it was just to make sure it still worked. In the video stream on his console, Ben could see Geoff running off, stumbling as crates came crashing down all over. Ben began to feel it too, as the floor under him began to crack. The sound of splitting ice cracked through the room, piercing his ears. The last image he saw on the video before it went out, nearly made his heart stop. On the far side of the dome, the wall vanished. The white was replaced by the utter blackness of space. The dome had cracked.
Ben reached out and slammed the button and the base came to life with the scream of the alarm.
“Earthquake?”
- Horace –
They all thought he didn’t have any problems sleeping. He was the cool, calm and collected one on the base. They all had to talk to him, and he had to help them. That was his job. And he had to do it with a smile on his face. He couldn’t let them on to the fact that he had lost friends, too. Sure, the captain didn’t like him, but he and Gary enjoyed spending time together, and Jenna was always cheerful. He relied on her cheer to get through many days.
Now, all of this had happened, and she wasn’t there. Instead, he had to shoulder the weight of everyone’s grief. It wasn’t easy sleeping at night. Sometimes, he needed to use sleeping pills or alcohol. Tonight had been one of those nights. He had taken the pills just ten minutes ago, so they weren’t supposed to take effect yet, but there, for a brief moment, something was wrong.
He was floating.
Horace wasn’t sure how long he was floating. It was a great sensation, not unlike when sleeping pills first started to take effect. Problem here was that he was very aware.
“What the…” he started to mutter out loud before the ceiling came crashing onto him.
The shock was immediate and the room was an utter mess. The base alarm sounded off, but the alarm right outside his door wasn’t working. All he heard were the alarms down the hallway. There was a strong hissing sound coming from somewhere too. His room was compromised. Horace stood up quickly, nearly falling over in a dizzy spell, and felt the blood gushing down his head. His mind was cloudy, but he remembered one thing from training: if anything goes wrong, get in the suit.
Each room had a suit. Each hallway had a suit. Each dome had several suits. They were all there for a moment like this. On the far side of the room, the container holding the pressure suit had cracked, spilling the bright white material out onto the floor in front of him. He dashed over, nearly tripping over his chair. He got into the suit quickly enough, and put the helmet on, turning the seal. On his wrist, he tapped a screen and air began pumping into the suit. He felt the blood rushing down his face and instinctively went to brush it away with his hand, but slammed his gloves into the helmet visor, startling him.
“I wonder how bad it is,” he spat out loud, drops of blood flying off his mouth and onto the inside of the visor.
He took two steps towards the door and immediately felt the unevenness of the ice floor. It had shifted at an angle. The gravity was all wrong, as the magnetic strips that lined the floor under the ice were all wrong and his boots weren’t working right. With a small hop, he reached the door, and saw the frame bent. The door didn’t budge when he tried to open it, so he stepped back and with one kick, sent the door flying into the hallway and himself spinning backwards into the room. He had forgotten about the gravity.
There was a crackle of static in his helmet and Horace remembered about the com links inside them. He tapped his wrist tablet and brought up the app.
“Anyone there? Anyone know what is going on?”
There was a hiss on the other end, some static and some broken up words. Then it got clear.
“Mr. Tarner?” Ben’s voice chimed in, clear, “Are you alright?”
The psychologist found himself nodding before he spoke.
“I think I’m OK. Hit my head pretty hard. What happened? Earthquake?”
“Icequake. The plates shifted.” There was a pause. “At least that’s my guess. I haven’t reached anyone yet.”
“I thought this spot was supposed to be free of quakes?”
There was no response. Horace walked out into the hallway and vertigo instantly hit him. It was a twisted and warped maze and for a moment, he thought he might be trapped. When he looked in the other direction, he saw the ladder that lead up to the living dome, still intact. He hopped over to it, using the twisted sides of the hallway walls to help him along. There was a light coming down through the hatch above the ladder, and with a strong tug, he tested its strength.
“Here goes,” he said, licking blood off of his lips. It was still flowing, and he needed to get it checked out as soon as he could. He hoped he didn’t need Gary for it.
“Are there any safe places?” Horace chimed into the helmet com link.
Static filled his ears. “Horace, I don’t even know who is alive. You are the only one I can reach.”
As he pulled himself into the living dome, he looked around. It appeared intact. He hopped over to one of the two emergency consoles and checked it. The first one had no power. The other console was on the far side of the dome. Looking back, he saw the mess of fallen over furniture, cracked ice chairs and couches, splintered all over the floor. As he began hopping his way over, he stumbled as his magnetic boots picked up on working floor gravity. The sudden movement brought him to his hands and knees. As he looked up, he gasped as he saw a pair of boots sticking out from under a mountain of ice.
“I found someone,” he shouted into the helmet.
Horace stood up quickly, and felt dizzy. It was the loss of blood. He had to move fast. He moved over to the pair of boots and began shoving the ice aside. The ice crashed without a sound. They were in a vacuum. He stood bac
k for a moment as stars began to swim in his vision. That’s when he noticed the other bodies. He couldn’t quite make them out, but they hadn’t made it into their suits. Their blood was frozen into the shards of ice splintered across the dome. He started counting, two, three, and then seven bodies.
Something was wrong.
Stumbling over the ice, Horace continued to dig out the ice from over the first body he had found. The pieces of ice floated off before falling away slowly. It reminded him of when he was first on board the craft that brought them to the ice moon. The fantasy of floating pens and globules of water. It had all been so foreign to him, and yet now, all too familiar. What would it be like for them to go back home? To Earth? How would they all handle it? How would he?
He uncovered the last chunk of ice from over the body and the sight stunned him. It was Captain Charles Hoarry. There, in the flesh, or what was left of him. Horace stood up quickly and fell over backwards, in slow Europa gravity. He laid there for a moment as the stars continued to swim in his vision. For a brief moment, the realization that he was bleeding to death hit him. Panic erupted in his mind, if just for a second or two. Then, warm peace came over him, and he felt himself slipping away.
The dome roof tore away at the last moment, and the gas giant, the father-god of the Romans, Jupiter, stood there before him. Millions of miles of raging storms taunted him, made fun of him. He was weak, alone, and on the frozen moon, 365 million miles from Earth; he was dying.
Day 12 AE
- Susan –
When the ice shook and began to splinter, she had two thoughts in her mind, and neither were for hers or anyone else’s safety. First, she had to turn off the water flow, and then seal the individual rows of plants. Those actions ensured the survival of most of the growing plants in the green dome. In her desperation to save her plants, she had neglected to get into a suit and hadn’t even worried for a second if anyone else needed help. A day later, the realization of her actions had hit her hard.
Ben had already chewed her out. He didn’t need to. She knew she had messed up and it had been pure luck that she wasn’t dead. Of all the domes on the base, the green dome was the only one that hadn’t ruptured. In fact, at the moment, the plants in the dome were being used as a filter and air provider for the two other repaired domes. The ice cover over the green dome was also serving as a radiation barrier for the survivors while new covers were being melted and poured onto the surface of the other domes.
Already five people had been lost to the alien ship, including her Gary. Cary had found the body of Geoff nearly a mile from the dome he had been in when it ripped open. She had brought him back and he was still on ice while they fixed the base. They sure could have used him. Horace had suffered a really bad hit to the head, and had lost a lot of blood, but was still alive, and currently stable. Bobby was still missing and since the network was still down, they had no way of finding out where he was at the moment of the quake.
The icequake.
The spot that had been selected for the base had been studied for years by many drones. Europa was an ice moon that orbited a gas giant, and was routinely torn apart by tidal forces between the giant and the dwarf. The initial plan had been to establish a base deep under the ice in the free flowing water where the tidal forces wouldn’t have done anything to the base. The logistics of creating a base that far under ice was daunting. They would have spent two years just building the base before they would even have been able to start working on the artifact and to top it off, they’d still need a base on the surface while they built the underwater one.
But the probes had returned a few locations that had seemingly little-to-no tidal effects. The ice was smooth, and free of the countless cracks that crisscrossed the surface of Europa. While the rest of the moon ebbed and waned and cracked under the godlike pressure of Jupiter’s gravity, a few spots remained untouched.
The icing on the cake was that that artifact had crash landed just under one of those spots. Many on Earth didn’t think that was a coincidence.
And yet, the icequake had happened.
Susan sat next to some of her tomato plants. They were still sealed in their own mini domes, just in case. She had her helmet off, but right next to her. They were pretty much confined to their suits for the foreseeable future. She wasn’t about to complain.
Everyone had been working around the clock to patch up enough domes to live in. With the missing and dead, that left just her and Cary, Crysta, Joyce, Thomas and of course, the ever-driven Ben. The mission commander had chewed her out real good, but hadn’t said a word since, not to her nor anyone else. They knew what they needed to do. But midway through the day, everyone needed a break. They ate from her vegetables and then most of them fell asleep. She would do the same, but only for a few hours. She and Thomas were going to head down to the artifact site to see how it had been affected and to see if they could bring any of the drone soldiers back. They would be helpful in the repairs.
One quick bite and the juicy tomato slid down her throat. She sat down on the frozen ground next to Cary and the two snuggled up to each other. There would be no warmth shared between them that time, but with all the losses, the idea that she was next to someone she loved was warming enough.
She took one more look over at Ben, who was stooped over one of the only working consoles. He was sitting on a bucket and scrolling through images and video.
“Boss, you gotta take a break, too,” she said.
He turned around, and she was stunned by the ragged look in his eyes. She was afraid if she looked in a mirror, she might see the same. He nodded, then looked over at the sleeping Joyce, further down the tomato row. Her head was slumped back onto the row, her brown hair spilling out into the dirt. Her mouth was wide open and she was breathing heavily. Ben wanted to say something, but held it in, then turned back to Susan.
“Have you received any emails from Earth?”
It was an odd question. Susan thought about it for a moment. She had been so immersed in work for weeks now, she hadn’t realized nothing had come through for her in a while. She routinely sent through data from her work, and often, back on Earth, her research group responded.
“It’s been…” Susan kept thinking, “It’s been a while. A few weeks? Maybe more.”
Ben had already turned back to the console. The images of the disaster were replaced by his own log.
“No one has. We’ve been so busy we didn’t notice that Earth has gone quiet.”
“Huh?” Susan asked. She didn’t talk too much to Joyce, or Crysta for that matter.
“NASA, Earth, mission control. Nobody has sent us any kind of message in weeks. We’re so used to being alone up here, we failed to realize that maybe,” Ben stopped and looked up at the dome roof, looking beyond it, “Maybe, we are alone up here.”
For the first time since they had uncovered the artifact, and they had lost six people to it, and the icequake and the losses suffered from it, Susan caught a glimpse of fear in Ben’s eyes. They all relied on him. He was a driven boss, and not a very social guy, but not quite anti-social either; he just wasn’t anyone’s friend. But they liked that about him. He trusted everyone completely and respected everyone equally. For two years, these humans had been working and living further away than any human being in the Earth’s history, and all the potential disasters that came with such an endeavor. Never, during that whole time, did anyone ever feel afraid, and that was because of Ben. The look that Ben gave Susan, right before he turned back to his console, left her shocked.
- Thomas –
Ten seconds and he would have died. He was just getting ready to go to sleep that night and was on the toilet. He was about to sit on the vacuum potty when an alarm from his console went off. It was for his medicines, so he stepped back out of the bathroom closet and into his room to get the console and turn the alarm off. Nature was calling strongly, so he headed back towards the bathroom when the icequake hit. The half of his room where the bathroom
was vanished under tons of ice. With the little air that he had left, he made it into his suit.
He was not ashamed to say he did shit himself, though.
Nearly twenty four hours had passed, and the effects were quite devastating. They had lost two men, and nearly a third more than half of the base was completely destroyed and under ice while the other half was wrecked pretty well. They had lost a good amount of their breathable air. In a stroke of pure luck, they still had the green dome, and that had been their salvation, not just for air, but from radiation.
Now he had to go outside. Their regular outdoor suits, the ones suited to block a large amount of radiation, had vanished under tons of ice. They were lucky that one of the rovers had been parked over by the green dome and not in its usual place in the engineering dome. The inside emergency suits had next to no radiation protection, so walking to the artifact site would have been a death sentence. But here they were, himself and Susan, riding across the ice that had changed its view quite dramatically. Instead of the once smooth ice plains he had ridden on nearly every day for two years, giant spears of ice pierced through the surface, creating a whole new environment. The ice shafts were forty-to-fifty feet high, jagged and sharp. Thomas couldn’t even begin to imagine the sorts of pressures needed to make them burst through like that. One day, if he lived through it all, he would sit down and do the math. He was an expert on ice, after all.
He wasn’t an expert on trauma, though.
Susan was clearly shook up. Everyone was, but she was especially disturbed. Everyone had seen and heard the verbal punishment Ben had laid onto her. It had been unfair of him, as if the icequake had been her fault. Still, Thomas had tried to talk to her about it, and she hadn’t said a thing. For as much as people didn’t like Horace, he was certainly being missed now, because in some way, somehow, he always managed to say the right thing to just make you pause and think. Reflection, he had called it. The best healer of oneself, was yourself. He used to say gummy shit like that all the time, made you laugh. One always thought he was talking to you like a kid.
Europa (Deadverse Book 1) Page 8