Europa (Deadverse Book 1)

by Flunker, Richard

  “Huh,” Paul uttered, “I thought that would be harder.”

  He sat back down on the bed and began flexing his arms, feeling the muscles beneath the skin. For a brief moment, Joyce admired the man. Clearly, everyone had expected a weakling to come out from within the mech. It was assumed the reason for their great strength was the machine. She expected a thin shadow of a man, and the pale skin had certainly helped that thought. Instead, the bare chested man in front of her was about as fit as he could be.

  Even Paul was surprised.

  He swung his feet back up onto the bed and covered himself with a blanket. It was all they had for him. This section of the underground had been totally repaired by now, at least to the point of holding in the atmosphere. There was little risk of a vent, unless another icequake happened. But if that came to be, there would be little point being in a suit.

  A door hissed open and Cary walked in, followed closely by Ben. They had some fresh clothes for him, but Joyce was unsure where they had found them from. Ben took the pile of clothes from Cary and handed them over to Paul.

  “You’re a lucky guy,” he said, checking him out, “I’ve been told that there really should have been no way you survived your, extraction, I guess you can call it.”

  Cary nodded. “The files we read tell us the whole waking up procedure takes twenty hours under a strictly controlled scenario.”

  “Lucky me,” Paul whispered, taking the clothes and unfolding a shirt.

  “Do you remember anything at all?” Ben asked.

  “Nothing. One moment I’m in Fort Bragg, getting ready to go under, and next thing I’m waking up in the darkness of my suit.” They weren’t supposed to remember anything from their time in the mech, and so far, that theory seemed to be holding.

  “Well, I’m going to have Ms. Hughes here catch you up to speed on our predicament, as well as why we are on Europa, why you are here, and, well, I guess to answer any questions you might have,” Ben said, nodding his head at Cary.

  Joyce watched as the soldier lowered his eyes, in thought, or in exhaustion. It sure was a terrible way to wake up.

  “Ms. Hunter, with me please,” Ben ordered, as he walked out of the room.

  Joyce got up quickly, smiled at Paul, then at Cary, and left the room. She ran up to catch up to Ben at the end of the hallway. The commander was already getting into his emergency suit, so Joyce followed suit. She climbed into the suit with a speed gained from the hectic practice and experience of the past few days. In a matter of seconds, she was sealed within its constrained protection and was following Ben up the shaft that led up into the command dome, still not fully repaired. It was, perhaps, a long way from being prepared.

  As they entered out of the shaft hatch into the main dome, darkness greeted them from below the partial dome roof, but Jupiter’s glow created shadows on the icy floor. It was akin to an ancient temple, now in ruins. Joyce caught herself staring at the vision, when she noticed Ben had already gone. She turned to follow him, bounding along the floor that was devoid of any magnetic force to keep her glued to the floor.

  Ben was heading towards the Command Center.

  “What’s going on, boss?” she asked.

  “I have something I need you to look at. Something curious, but up your alley.”

  The Command Center was actually clean, Joyce noted. It made sense, though, as this was Ben’s place. The man was notorious for his cleanliness and neatness. Everything had its place and he preferred when everything was in its place. No sooner had the ice stopped falling than he had started cleaning up the center. Still, it wasn’t the same place they had all grown used to. Most of the equipment had been damaged. It was just a stroke of pure luck that Ben himself had not suffered any injuries.

  Then again, it was lucky she hadn’t either. She had left the communications room mere minutes before the icequake, and it was currently buried under tons of ice, smashed utterly under the frozen water. The backup coms had been moved into the command center, along with other equipment Joyce had moved and managed to cobble together. As soon as they entered the center, Ben started walking over to her gear. He was right, it would be up her alley.

  Ben pulled a crate over, her makeshift chair, and motioned her to sit down. She did, a quizzical look on her face. He brought up the screen, bringing the monitor out of its sleep status, displaying her screen saver of a picture of Nikola Tesla. She brushed her hand on the touch pad and the display brought up the main desktop, where Ben had already turned on some of her communication apps. On the upper right hand corner was Joyce’s always running IWI, the Indiscriminate Wave Identifier. It was a project application, a research project from Earth, designed to listen for random communication waves, radio, cosmic, alien, or anything else. It was a part of the greater SETI program that had become incredibly famous after the discovery of the alien artifact, despite the fact they had absolutely nothing to do with that discovery.

  Joyce sat down on the crate and slid it over to the desk, scraping ice flakes off the floor. Ben pointed at the app and she maximized it on the screen. It was a plethora of wave signals, most she knew to be natural in origin.

  “Ok?” she asked, wondering what he was about.

  “Is that normal?” he said, pointing at one of the signals about halfway in the mix of other signals.

  Joyce turned and looked. It didn’t look like any signal she was familiar with and was going to dismiss it when she saw the small red check mark at the bottom of the signal.

  “What the hell. That signal is digital.” Her voice betrayed her shock.

  The communications expert quickly isolated the signal and began reading through the data. The signal itself seemed dead, barely a blip, but the digital connection was one hundred percent established and linked. She ran the linking coding and saw that it was also encrypted. She brought the link up into the station’s com software to see if any of her encryptions would work. The moment she did, though, the station recognized the encryption and opened the data link immediately.

  Ben and Joyce looked at each other, stunned. The screen had identified the signal as that of Captain Charles Hoarry. Joyce quickly lurched forward, opened the com and nearly shouted.

  “Captain. Captain Hoarry. Can you hear me?”

  They both waited a moment, but there was no reply. Joyce continued to monitor the signal itself. The connection was there, but again, it was almost a dead signal. The wave pattern was almost non-existent. As she explained that to Ben, he asked if maybe the com was open and he was just non-responsive. She said, while that was possible, the signal wasn’t showing that. If all they were hearing was dead noise, it would still be noise.

  “See this signal here? Its cosmic radiation, look how the waves are all over the place,” she explained.

  “But that’s space stuff, not actually sound.”

  “Ok,” Joyce continued, “let me do this. I’ll open a com here to Thomas.”

  She did and brought Thomas on the other line. As soon as he answered, she asked him to leave the com open and just be quiet for a moment. The confused engineer obliged. Joyce showed Ben the waves of sound that were registering even though no sound was heard. She compared them to the waves on the open comm from the captain, which was a nearly straight line.

  “So, is that comm just completely dead?” Ben asked.

  “No, the link is established and here, if I magnify the wave to a factor of twenty, you can see these occasional blips, tiny waves. Something is there, I just don’t know what is going on.”

  “But you are sure this is the captain’s link?” Ben asked.

  “Unless someone is faking the encryption, which is unlikely here on this icy coffin of a moon, then yeah, it’s him. Or his comm, at least.”

  “Can you at least find out where it’s coming from?” Ben asked. Joyce already knew the answer.

  “No, not with this gear. If it was a regular analog signal, then yeah, but not digital.”

  “So what now?” Ben had been hopin
g for more concrete answers.

  “There is something to this signal. It’s unlike anything I have ever seen, and yet, still oddly familiar. I’m just not sure why,” Joyce was bringing up samples of other signal data, to compare side by side.

  “You’ll work on it, right?” Ben had turned to walk away.

  “Of course, boss,” she answered, deep into her data.

  “You don’t have to call me that, you know,” Ben answered, not really annoyed.

  “I prefer to. Makes me feel like I’m doing work, which I need to be.”

  Ben smiled in satisfaction and walked towards the edge of the room. He had the best person possible on the job. Joyce stared at the data when it hit her.

  “It’s compressed.” She turned and Ben had walked out of the room, out into the whole of the dome. She quickly dashed through the list of apps on her monitor to find the general comms and opened a link to him.

  “Get back here quick, boss! It’s compressed.” She took a breath and realized she had been shouting.

  She was looking at nearly two hours of data streaming when Ben returned to her console.

  “Say again?” he said, now without a helmet on. It was certainly important if he was disregarding his own safety rules. That made Joyce smile a bit.

  “I knew I recognized this pattern. It’s compressed.”

  “Like, data compression?”

  “That’s what I thought at first,” she said. “Mostly because I was seeing it visually, the waves, that is. But it’s not data compression. The whole sound, the entire sound, is compressed.”

  Ben was excited for the first time in a while.

  “So all we have to do is decompress it?”

  “The opposite,” Joyce said as she typed and touched the screen furiously. “The signal isn’t compressed on this end, but on the other end. It’s somehow been compressed and we are getting it, slowly, REAL slow like. It’s just a trickle on our end.”

  “How is that possible?” Ben asked, half wondering out loud.

  Joyce shrugged her shoulders, but offered no response. She drew the screen back and collected the entirety of the wave from when the app first identified it. Nearly forty two hours of sound. She took the stream, making a copy of the segment from the beginning to that very moment, and separated it. Then, she used her sound manipulation app to compress the sound. The flat line began to get shorter until it suddenly jumped into the familiar waves of a sound.

  “That,” Joyce nearly gasped, “I recognize.”

  She copied the wave relay into an audio app and pressed play. Something played back, clearly recognizable, but at a very high pitch. She slowed down the signal a few factors and played it again. This time, the voice was instantly recognizable.

  “Command, we’re headed out now.”

  Joyce turned and met Ben’s look. She laughed, deducing that the look he had on his face was the one she had as well.

  “A four second wave,” Joyce said excitedly, “that came to us stretched out over forty two hours.”

  Ben lurched forward and typed in Thomas’ comm signal. His link opened up.

  “Again?” Thomas’ slightly annoyed voice chimed in from the other side. “What are you guys doing up there?”

  “Uhm, Mr. Astor. Do you mind firing up the rover again? I think we need you out at the artifact.”

  - Thomas –

  He was tired. He stunk like a week old sock and he was getting hungry. With everything that had happened in the past few days, what he most wanted to do was take his helmet off and let the air whip through his hair. Best he could do was imagine. The thought of Connie alive and well was more than enough of a boost of energy for now.

  The rover was going as fast as it could along the ice covered surface. Behind him, tiny chunks of ice flew off into the sky, leaving behind a trail of ice dust akin to a horse galloping in an old western movie. Thomas felt like a heroic cowboy, dashing off to a rescue. He had to concentrate, because despite the boost of hopeful energy, the exhaustion was entirely too real. Back and forth he went through the ice spear field until, at that final turn, he cleared it. Jupiter’s might and glow greeted him on the other side.

  The alien artifact grew in size as he approached. He sped by the shaft he and Jenna had so painstakingly carved out for nearly a year, the now worthless elevator crane standing out as a monument to history. The rover skipped a bit and floated through the air, and Thomas let off the accelerator, coming to a stop on the ice. He had been going too fast and the spikes on the rover’s tires were not gripping the icy surface.

  “Just get there,” Thomas thought.

  The alien vessel seemed deformed, even more so than the last time he had been out here. The shape had melted forward onto the ice, flattening out a bit. Still, it was an imposing mountain of green hue that only kept growing and growing. He wasn’t entirely sure where he was going to, as the entrance point they had plotted out for nearly a year was covered once again under ice. Instead, he just aimed in the general direction Susan had run off to. The last thing he hoped to find was her body, somewhere out here on the ice plains under Jupiter.

  When the alien vessel grew so large in his view that he could barely see Jupiter behind it, he knew he was near. Still, the enormity of the ship created an illusion where the hull of ship blended in with the ice.

  “You there yet?” Ben’s voice cracked in over the comm.

  Thomas let go of the accelerator and peered off in the distance. He couldn’t just how far he was from the ship’s hull.

  “Yeah, I think so.”

  He got out of the rover and began walking straight forwards. It was only when he tried to look down the length of the ship did he realize how close he was. When he turned down to his left, he spotted them. He couldn’t believe it. There they were, a group of people in the official mission lunar suits, walking towards him. Some were waving. He looked down at his comms, but saw no connection status with them.

  “Screw it.”

  He began bouncing over to them as quickly as the moon’s little bit of gravity would allow him to. His heart began pounding in the anticipation that Connie was there. He recognized her suit as he got closer, as it was the only one she would wear outside. The gas giant was casting a pretty ominous shadow across the icy landscape as it shone behind the exposed alien craft, so Thomas couldn’t see into the face shields. For a brief moment, he came down from a bounce and stopped, wondering if what he was doing was wise. That wall came crashing down as some select memories of his time with Connie burst into his thoughts.

  “Yeah, screw it.”

  Within a few moments, he was in front of them, smiling. It was them. His sheer relief was so great that he could barely speak. Instead, he found Connie and held her hands. He was so focused on her that he failed to feel Charles tapping him on the shoulder, and pointing down at his own tablet. Thomas looked down and saw the frequency and tuned his radio into his.

  “Oh, man, Captain. You have no idea how glad we are to find you.”

  “I think we are too,” the Captain chipped in, “Lot of weird stuff has happened. How long have we been gone?”

  Thomas turned and looked at the Captain, confused.

  “It’s been eight days,” he said, then adding in “sir” at the end. He wasn’t sure why he had done that.

  Charles looked back at Jenna and gave a thumbs up.

  “Looks like our girl did her math right then. Thomas, is the rover nearby? We need to get back to base right now. A lot has changed and we have much to discuss. Also, why is the alien artifact half way out of the ice?”

  Thomas started to chuckle, then held it back.

  “Yeah, we can get back to base, or what’s left of it.”

  Day 13 AE

  - Gary –

  Horace would be fine. No internal bleeding, just a good concussion and some stitches on his head and on his leg. His life threatening wound had been the gash on his leg nearly everyone had missed. It had been really just a matter of luck that the ve
ssels had managed to clot enough for him not to bleed out. That, or divine intervention. No one cared right now; they’d take help from the aliens if they could.

  Horace was conscious, though, if a bit woozy. The shrink was actually surprised he was still alive. The guy who was supposed to keep everyone’s spirits up had very little of his own apparently.

  Clearly, the events of the past couple of days, or hours, as was Gary’s case, were mind blowing. Shortly after returning to the base and seeing the destruction and the patchwork repairs, Gary had gone straight to where Horace was, and been fully surprised to see the drone soldier, Paul, there.

  Back on Earth, in what seemed like several decades ago, Gary had gone through some extensive training in dealing with soldier drones. He had learned the cybernetic symbiosis between the mech, the AI and the human body and knew exactly how to deal with the biological injuries the soldiers could have suffered, up to and including the need for extreme surgery and how it integrated into the mech. In that training course, they had gone into the whole awakening sequence, really only for information purposes. Even a severely wounded drone soldier was not supposed to wake up. Only the AI system, tied into the main automated controls at several military bases could actually wake a soldier up. He knew of exactly zero cases where a soldier had woken up without going through the twenty seven day waking sequence.

  It wasn’t far to say he was quite shocked to see Paul sitting up on his bed.

  He ran a small battery of tests on him with whatever equipment he could find. Mostly, he just ran blood samples, pressure, and physical tests, and the soldier checked out fine in all of them. What Gary really wanted to know was what his mental state was like, and unfortunately, the best person to diagnose him was currently in a fuzzy state of mind himself. That being the case, Gary had taken the time to dig through some old manuals and ran a simple code test on Paul.

  Artificial intelligence was quite common place in America, but there were several very extreme limitations. For one, AI did not stand for artificial intelligence, but automated intelligence. It was not the AI that was portrayed in fictional literature and media. There were no conscious machines on Earth, at least as far as Gary knew. Instead, nearly every household, business and company had some sort of learned automated system that, with training, could run every day operations. Everything that could possibly be automated was run by an AI of some sort. It was one of the modern discoveries that had once again propelled America years, if not decades ahead of other nations. When wars had broken out all over the planet, America held on tightly to their technology, although it was quite clear that other nations were developing their own automated intelligence systems.