“From my first reports, we, people that is, were still flying around bombing targets. But after a few months, all I get are automated reports of the machines, continually flying, bombing, and flying home to refuel and rearm. I have not had a single report from a living person from that point forward. And as of two weeks ago, this war, whatever it is now, is still raging. Just automated machines bombing and attacking each other across the globe.”
Charles sat back down and silence engulfed the room. He thought he heard someone cry, but it was gone as soon as he heard it. He caught Joyce and Crysta exchanging glances and waited. Crysta asked first.
“Is…” she started before taking a big breath. “Is there anyone left?”
He could only look down at the ice floor at his feet. There was a long crack that had long been filled in by more water and refrozen.
“I don’t know,” Charles said, then rethought his answer. “Probably. Right now, I don’t think we have any way of knowing.”
Silence returned. Everyone appeared lost in their thoughts.
“We need to get back,” Gary uttered in his typical low voice.
Charles swallowed hard and everyone looked up. He knew his face had given it away.
“What?” someone asked.
“The very last actual message I received from the Pentagon was concerning this mission,” the Captain stated, “They hadn’t been able to ship any supplies since the war broke out.”
Connie stood up quickly and ran forward towards one of the consoles and began typing in furiously. Everyone else reacted differently, from looking around afraid to standing up and walking slowly over to see what Connie was doing. Charles remained seated at the table with his head down. He had made the calculations himself and knew what she was about to come up with.
“Does that mean no more supplies?” Susan asked.
“The last one we got, a few weeks back, yeah, that was it.”
Charles shuddered at the gasp in the cold room.
“Ok, that…” Ben stopped and looked around, looking for something, “That changes a lot. We really need to get a ration file ready and get busy scrimping on things. Susan?”
The botanist nodded. “When do we head back?”
“That’s a lot to calculate right now, especially with missing people and missing supplies,” Ben added, “we need to start an inventory.”
Charles shook his head.
“What?” Ben asked.
Silence took over the room again as Connie had stopped typing. All anyone could hear was the brilliant engineer breathing through her nose loudly.
“When was…” Connie started and stopped, as if something was caught in her throat. “The, um, the return ship. That was, um…” she trailed off.
“Yeah,” Charles replied.
Everyone was looking around confused. “WHAT?” Ben shouted.
“I don’t know if they were able to launch the supply ship that had the return vessel.”
If the silence had been deep before, it was deafening now. It took a moment for the crew to realize the severity of the Captain’s words.
“Oh, fuck me!” Thomas blurted, then crashed down on a chair. “Oh, fuck.”
“Ok,” Ben started, looking around, “but we don’t know for sure that it WASN’T launched, right?”
Charles nodded.
“Ok, OK. So there is that. Maybe they got it off.” Ben looked over at Connie for confirmation. “When will we know for sure?”
“I don’t know if the scope even works anymore. I haven’t checked it out since returning.” Emir pointed out.
Ben told him to get on that right away, and Emir got up and left the room.
“What if they didn’t make the launch?” Cary asked.
“Let’s deal with that when that problem arises. We already have enough, the way it is,” Ben said, “Connie? When will we know?”
“If the scope is working, we can look today. If not, we will know in three weeks. That’s when it was due. I better go check to see if the Tin Can will even make it up into the sky…” Connie trailed off, got up and left the room.
“Susan, you know what we need to do. Gary and Cary, might as well go help her. Thomas, you just got promoted to chief engineer security. We need to figure out what can be fixed, what should be fixed, and what we can salvage,” Ben ordered.
Just as Thomas stood up and waved over for Jenna to help, the lights went out in the room. Charles’ eyes were greeted with pure darkness, with that odd feeling that your eyes simply stopped working. A light flashed deep within his eyes, a natural reaction to the darkness, and then everyone’s tablets lit up. A low glow filled the room.
“Now what?” someone asked.
“Let’s get that fixed, too.”
Day 14 AE
- Thomas –
“Ok, do you see that split right there? That one is far too gone to fix. Just like all the rest.”
Thomas was getting aggravated. It wasn’t enough that they were being faced with a potential slow death on a frozen moon, but now their power supply was being severely hampered. The base ran on a hydrogen reactor to provide all of its power uses. On a moon covered in water, hydrogen was everywhere. There were twenty two tanks that held the electrolyzed hydrogen and then fed the reactor. The tanks were spread out over several miles under the ice in case of the potential explosion that hydrogen was so famous for. In case one went, there were still many others. They just had never counted on one quake taking out so many.
The main hydrogen reactor was under the main dome. It was the most modern version they were able to bring with them. It was completely AI run with the highest safety ratings possible. It was also completely crushed under a thousand tons of ice. Perhaps the fact that it was incredibly safe determined why it didn’t just explode and leave a mile wide crate instead. Lucky them.
They had a secondary reactor. It was an older model that had been sent up a few weeks after they had landed. It was installed a few miles from the base, and was mostly a project to see if the cheaper model could be used for such extra-planetary missions as this one. The biggest pain was piping in the system to this reactor so far away from base.
Thomas and Jenna, with occasional help from others on base, had taken the past twelve hours to go through the tanks. They had found many of them ruptured. Only two of them had any chance of being repaired. That had left them only seven intact pressure barrels, enough still to run the reactor, but not at a steady twenty four hour stream. The electrolysis machine simply couldn’t feed seven of the pressure bins fast enough. So, now it was time to ration.
Thomas had already radioed in to Ben. Thomas still wanted to see three of the last remaining bins to be sure, but they were already getting too much radiation outside of the protection of the ice. Of course, cancer was the last thing on his mind now.
“What about all the pipelines back to the reactor?” Jenna asked over the comm.
Thomas watched her bouncing over towards the rover. His best friend had, as she always had, managed to remain upbeat in the face of all of the disasters facing the group. Thomas grumbled. It was almost disgustingly upbeat.
“I’ve got two of the EUAs dropped into this side of the reactor. While it’s down and the seven tanks are filling up, they’re gonna run through the pipes and scan them. We should know better by tomorrow.”
“And if there are ruptures? You think the ice can hold them together?” Jenna asked. The pipes were only about a foot in diameter, and under tons of ice.
“My math says yes,” Thomas answered, “my heart says whatever.”
“Not that it matters,” Jenna continued, “it would take us a month of hard work just to get down into the ice to fix them, and that’s with fully charged tools.”
“It’s a fuck me, fuck you situation,” Thomas barked.
Jenna waited in hesitation. “Yeah, kinda. Let’s just wait to see what tomorrow brings.”
“Good call, Ms. Gable,” Ben replied. Thomas had left the comm open and
the mission leader had been listening. Thomas ground his teeth in anger some more.
“Any ideas on power, then?” Ben asked.
“With what we have? Almost none,” Thomas said. “We don’t even have any kind of turbine other than the hydrogen reactor to spin up for power. Solar means very little out here and I don’t have a kite string long enough to fly into Jupiter’s storm for lightning.”
“Ignore sour-pants here,” Jenna laughed, much to Thomas’ disdain. “He cusses like a baby when he needs his diaper changed. What we need to be focusing on now is bringing all our rechargeable batteries into multiple chains throughout our working domes.”
Thomas and Jenna got into the rover and the machine slowly sped off back towards the base. The green dome was visible nearly a mile away. Jupiter, as always, hung ever so powerfully in the night sky.
“We ration power carefully, and just keep recharging the batteries when we can to keep essentials running while the tanks are refilling. Figure out our necessities and have Emir calculate our power requirements. He’s good at that.”
“What about converting any of the rover engines over to hydrogen? Any feasibility in that?”
Thomas knew the answer.
“Always possible, given enough time and the right tools. Hell, I could make a turbine if I had a welding torch and a couple of months. I’m guessing we don’t have a couple of months.”
“We may have more than that. Susan is very optimistic about what she is planting. She claims she can keep us fed for months on end,” Ben’s static voice echoed into his helmet. “We will still have to ration, but she is confident. She’s even going to try to get the chicken project going.”
Thomas heard Jenna laugh.
“Chickens, on Europa!”
“Yeah, we’ll all be cooked for sure,” Thomas threw in.
- Crysta –
“Here, run this parameter now. I think I have the kernel ready,” Crysta said, turning her chair towards Joyce. She felt the chair lift off the ground momentarily as the magnetic strips under the floor failed again. She was going to petition they just turned them off as it was easier to just deal with less gravity than try to guess when they were going to crash their heads into the ceiling.
“Ok, running it now,” Joyce answered, smiling at Crysta’s slight mishap on the chair.
Joyce’s screen had a black screen with a white prompt blinking after she ran the batch command. It kept blinking for a few moments, then a percentage counter appeared. The two of them watched with anticipation as the numbers grew slowly from 1%. They watched it pass thirty two percent.
“That’s where it bombed out last time,” Crysta said.
The counter rose all the way up to one hundred percent, blinked for a moment, then the screen went black again. Seconds later, the system rebooted, and the familiar operation system logo appeared on the screen. Crysta smiled and Joyce clapped her hands. They then shook hands in an exaggerated ceremony, ending it with a laugh.
All over the room, other screens began to come to life.
“He’s alive.”
The base AI. They were going to need it to run all the basic day-to-day calculations and operations. At least all of those they had left. Already, they had to manually cycle the life support systems, and that thankless job involved turning valves and wheels, and then waiting for the systems to read the appropriate numbers. It was the only way they wouldn’t die from carbon dioxide poisoning.
The main screen in front of Joyce finished booting up.
“Now what?” Joyce asked.
“Now we find out what we have, and just how much of the database we have access to,” Crysta said, moving her chair slowly back onto her console. She brought up her login and went directly into the AI code and began typing command routines to check the viability of the AI. The programming would all still be there, but there was always the chance all the learned behavior was gone.
“So,” Joyce asked. “Do you believe him?”
Crysta continued to type. “I kind of want to, you know.”
“I know,” Joyce sat there, watching her friend type. “I mean, what was he supposed to do, really, let us all freak out for months on end? The mission kept us going.”
“Or,” Crysta interjected, “he could’ve let us know right away and we would have had a ten month head start in trying to figure out how we’re gonna live.”
“Yeah, maybe.”
Joyce heard a beep from her console and she turned around.
“Ah, still have that app.”
Crysta turned to look at Joyce’s screen while she continued to type. “Which app?”
“It’s my deep space scanner. It’s part of some research bundle we got a year ago. You know, pick up cosmic signals and what not.”
Crysta stopped for a moment. “Um, OK?”
Joyce clicked on the app and went into the configurations. She clicked a few more times.
“What are you doing?” Crysta asked, intrigued.
“Well, along with the software were an array of dishes. Jenna set them up in the ice fields somewhere out there.”
Joyce ran the diagnostic test, checking for a link to the dishes. It came back positive.
“Is that good?” Crysta asked. “You trying to run experiments now?”
“Nope. Now that I know these work, I’m going to see if someone can go out to the fields and point those dishes into the solar system, instead of out of them.”
Crysta realized what her friend was doing.
“Wow,” she said, scooting her chair over again. This time, she forgot about the lapse in the magnetism and nearly toppled over. Joyce reached out and grabbed her hand in time, pulling her up easily. They both looked at each other and laughed again.
“Think you will hear anything?” Crysta asked, shaking herself off.
“I have no idea,” Joyce said, smiling, “but I’m going to try.”
- Emir –
It was at least forty-two degrees in the room, but Emir woke up covered in sweat. He was breathing rapidly, seeing specs of black and white swimming in his vision. There was a dim light on in his room, coming from his tablet. It was linked to him, and had awoken him. Looking at it, Emir saw the sleep patterns all over the chart for the past hour.
It had only been an hour.
Sweat continued to pour cold down his forehead and onto the covers. He watched every single one drop in slow motion. He tossed the covers aside and set a wet foot down on the ice floor. He put the second foot down and stood up quickly, but was held fast to the floor by the frozen sweat on his feet. He tore his foot painfully off of the floor and began walking to the bathroom, leaving behind frozen footsteps on the floor.
The light in the bathrooms used to turn on automatically, but everything had been turned off to save energy, so he fumbled a bit in the dark before going back for the tablet and using its glow to find the switch. The dim blue LED lights came to life suddenly, making him blink and rub his eyes. He reached into the shower and turned it on. Within a few seconds, steam began to fill the bathroom. Even with no power, there was always hot water, piped from the reactor coolants right into the base.
A shower on Europa was a rare luxury. Not that taking one was rare, because hot water was always there. No, a shower on a low gravity object was unlike anything experienced on Earth. The shower stall was sealed tight, and the water shot out of the shower head and actually bounced around the stall as it slowly worked its way towards the drain at the bottom. There, the drain actually had to suck the water down into it, or the stall would fill up. Steam and water hit you from all angles and sides. It was truly relaxing. Emir needed to relax now.
Fog filled the mirror and Emir wiped it away, catching a glimpse of his red eyes.
“What is wrong?”
He had seen the images, wires, conduits, paths of energy, data. He knew what they were, and at the same time, understood none of it. The alien ship had done something to him, and he was beginning to panic. He hadn’t slept in two
nights now. Every time he closed his eyes, the images flooded his brain. It was driving him insane, and he didn’t know what to do. He could ask Gary for sleeping pills, but then he’d be scheduled for a talk with Horace.
Of course, the shrink was still out of commission.
Still, the good doctor would probably try to talk him up instead. The doctor and his harem. There were barely enough women for the men on the cold moon and he got two of them. Not that it mattered.
He only wanted one woman.
He rubbed his eyes again and noticed blood on his fingers in the reflection in the mirror. Surprised, he looked down at his own hands. His fingernails were cracked and chipped, and dried blood was crusted into the nails. He looked them over again, wondering how he had done that. Clenching his fists, he took another deep breath and closed his eyes. Instantly, the image of the pyramid with the lines coming out of it appeared. He coughed and opened his eyes quickly.
Fog had covered the mirror again, but instead of wiping it clean, Emir began tracing the image from his mind onto it. He stood back and watched as the image faded away slowly.
“What is it?”
He took off his clothes and stepped into the shower. Hot water washed away the chilled sweat and he felt instant relief and his mind cleared. The alien images were replaced by the image of the short redhead with the large breasts. It was his image of relief, but in another moment, that vision vanished in the steam. There, among the vapor, another image took shape. It was of a small orb, floating in darkness. Behind it, a thousand copies of the orb seemed to trail off into infinity. For that brief moment, the image of the orb was even more relaxing.
Outside of the bathroom, in the dimness of his tablet’s light, strange diagrams were carved out into the ice wall, with traces of red frozen in.
Day 17 AE
- Cary –
As she slipped the last thermal sock over her feet, Cary looked over at the sleeping forms of Susan and Gary. They had taken to sleeping in the green dome, tucked away in a corner, hidden behind a veritable wall of green tomatoes that towered nearly eight feet high. They had never really shared a bed all three of them in the past, but since the quake and their reunion, and, of course, their impending deaths, they had all three agreed to forgo that rule. Nothing had happened any of the nights, as by the time they got to bed, they were all exhausted, but just the feeling of the three of them, together in bed, was very comforting. No one else on base had ever really understood what was happening with them, and for the most part, she didn’t either, but no one said a thing.
Europa (Deadverse Book 1) Page 12