It was about five AM EST by her clock, and she had work to do. She slipped on her boots and began to work on fitting her exterior work suit on. Cary stood up, fit the helmet over her head and onto the slips on her suit, and turned the lock. She turned the air controls on her tablet and watched as air cycled through her suit. The tablet read a perfect seal and she turned to walk towards the hatch. She turned and gave her lovers one last look. They would be able to sleep for a few more hours. Cary could have as well, but she really wanted to get a head start on the repairs for the day.
The past two days had actually seen quite a bit of progress as everyone worked fourteen hours or more each day on the repairs. They had managed to get three fully sustained domes, cycling all of the air through the green dome and one set of CO2 scrubbers under the central dome. A breathable atmosphere was not an issue any more, and there was plenty of it just under their feet. It just had to be thawed and broken down from the water.
Susan had even managed to get the levels set to where the CO2 was at the safest highest parts. It was her intent to use as much CO2 as possible to boost the plant growth in the green dome. It was impossible to tell just how much that worked in the two days since, but she was confident that they would get their food sooner than later because of it. Of course, if anything went wrong with the plants, or the scrubbers, they’d best hope it wasn’t while everyone was sleeping or they wouldn’t wake up. What made matters worse was that because of all the shifting in the ice, electrical conduits had been torn up all over the base, so nearly all of the sensors and alarms had to be rigged up again. The domes were turning into a spider web of wires, and even then, they didn’t work all the time.
Susan had gone over the numbers with her and Gary a few times over the past couple of days. Susan was an airhead, aloof and giggly, but she knew plants. She knew the chemistry and the math of plants, down to the molecules. She was supremely confident that they would have spinach, peas, beans and tomatoes, along with several varieties of soy and kale, in edible form, within thirty days. Cary had seen some of the plants, and they were barely sprouts. But Susan had the lights running nearly round the clock, and thanks to the repairs, nearly all of the electricity went to running the LED lights.
Of course, her request for a moon outhouse in the green dome had been a bit bizarre. She had insisted that no amount of biological matter be wasted, and that whenever possible, they had to use the bathroom there. All the material would be broken down by some of Susan’s super bacteria and fed right back into the plants. Cary understood the basics behind it, but found it gross nonetheles, using the bathroom over a hole in the ice. It reminded her too much of her childhood just outside of Tuscaloosa. She had grown up poor and an outhouse was a regular part of her life. It was something her hard work and brains had gotten her far from. It got her through college, engineering posts with the government and into a space mission that was the pinnacle of human history. And here she was, having to shit in a hole again. It made her laugh.
There were three buttons on the exit panel and Cary tapped the first one. Air equalized in the passage chamber and then the inner door opened up. As she stepped in, she heard a chirp over the helmet speakers and she glanced down at her tablet. It was Thomas.
“You ready for this?” she asked. She proceeded into the passage chamber and tapped the second button. The inner door sealed shut with a hiss.
“I guess there won’t be any sleeping in and brunch today,” Thomas replied over the comm.
The second light turned green and Cary tapped the third button. The air was then pumped out of the passage chamber and even in her thermal suit, built especially for a human being to survive the absolute cold harshness of the surface of Europa for several hours easily, Cary felt the cold seeping in already. The suit would keep you alive, just not comfortably.
“What? No omelets and steaks for us today?” Cary asked. The final light turned green and the outer door moved away from the dome’s hull and rolled away to the side. The bleak, gray towers of ice were scattered with shadows, provided graciously by the gas giant behind them. She stepped out and looked around for the rover.
“Eggs? Speaking of which, is Susan going through with the egg thawing today? Is that really going to work?” Thomas asked. Cary could almost hear him salivating over the comm.
“She found the crates with the experiment last night and is going to crack em open today. She has to find all the database entries and parameters for the experiment,” Cary explained. “It’s kinda creepy, really. They had to somehow put these eggs on some kind of prolonged incubation, stasis something or other. Once she gets everything hooked up, she has to, um, revive them. Yeah, zombie chickens. Can’t wait.”
“Oh, I’d eat fried zombie chicken right about now. Or zombie chicken scrambled eggs,” Thomas said in utter seriousness.
The rover had its wheels turned where Thomas had left them the night before in a hurry. He probably had been just as exhausted as everyone else and just wanted to get into bed as soon as possible, especially since the hours for actual sleep were limited. Cary lifted herself up and over the railing and into the driver’s seat with ease, thanks to the low gravity. With the exercise equipment gone in the ice quake, the past few days in the low gravity had left her feeling a bit week, and it had only been five days. She needed to remember to bring that up that night at the meeting, or they’d suffer from the effects after a while.
She turned the power on to the rover, and saw that it had about forty percent in the batteries still. In Thomas’ haste to leave, he hadn’t plugged it in anywhere. It didn’t matter much though, as she didn’t have far to go. Just a mile ahead, where Thomas already was, were the hydrogen tanks. The seven tanks and the pumps had been running nonstop to keep the reactor running as much as possible, but the lack in power was becoming a hindrance on repairs. Connie had suggested using the pressure tanks from the supply ships. About ten miles away was the field of debris from the supply ships. Large containers, cylindrical in shape, scattered over a three mile radius. This is where Connie would bring them down from the lunar orbit and rovers would take the supplies into base. The supply ships each had a DVMR booster and fuel, and the fuel was stored in pressure tanks. So on her initiative, they had started to cut them out and install them into the existing pipeline for the hydrogen reactor. Eight of these tanks had already been cut out and transported and now it was Cary and Thomas’ job to dig out a spot in the ice and weld them into the lines.
Welding around hydrogen. Always a dangerous proposition.
Thomas had already been out there for a while, using the plasma drill to carve small shafts in the ice where they’d put the tanks. Cary had the welding training, so she would be down in the shafts, with the ice on all sides, likely with just a few inches to spare, and the potential for an explosion. Thankfully, she knew what she was doing.
As she sped off at the lunar’s max speed of thirty miles per hour, Cary sat back into the seat of the rover and felt the push of the acceleration. It actually felt good against her muscles and joints. It was momentary, of course, as once she got up to the same speed as the rover, her body no longer felt the pressure.
The path from the base to the hydrogen reactor was a clear shot. When the base was first created, Thomas and Geoff had actually iced out a road, nice, flat and straight. They had also lined the edge of it with ice spikes that easily reflected light. To top it off, they had frozen LED lights into the ice spikes to light up the lunar highway. There were no lights on at the moment, as the power was needed for far more critical things, but the thought, nonetheless, made Cary smile for a moment. She stared at each ice spike on her left as they sped by. She had taken this path many times in the past two years as she had worked on the hydrogen reactor on many occasions. Every dip and turn of the ice cliffs to her left came into view, and she remembered every one. Oddly enough, they had not been touched by the ice quake. To her right, the expanse of ice went off into the unseen darkness of space. Jupiter, as always, wa
s an enormous glowering giant behind her.
Then something caught her eye to her left. She glanced back over and saw what looked like a perfectly square ice carving. At first, she thought it to be the result of the ice quake. The tidal rift had ripped up ice everywhere and just thrown it about like jello. But this ice box was too perfect. As she approached it, she slowed down a bit.
“Hey, Thomas?” Cary asked into the comm.
“Yeah? You almost here?”
“When you came out,” Cary continued to slow down as she got closer to the ice box, “did you see this square ice formation out near the seven hundred mark?”
“Say again, Cary?”
Cary described the box in detail as she came to a stop. The formation was about one hundred feet off of the ice road.
“I don’t remember seeing anything,” Thomas said. “Why?”
“Give me a minute, it’s a little off putting. I’m gonna check it out.”
“Ok, I’ll just twiddle my thumbs here, waiting for you to finish your sightseeing tour.”
Cary began bouncing over towards the ice block. The closer she got, the better she could see the sharp and defined edges of the square. That set her off. If it was a natural formation of some sort, the odds were that the edges would be more rounded. Instead, they were sharp and very straight. It was almost a perfect cube. She reached it and instinctively reached out to touch it.
Smooth.
“What the hell is this?” she said.
“Is the camera in your helmet working?” Thomas asked.
Cary reached down and touched her tablet. The dull light lit up into the ice a few inches, reflecting white. There was no link to her camera.
“Nah, not working,” she said, looking back up at the ice. The light from the tablet sank into the ice and Cary turned her head just a bit in her helmet. There was something there.
“Damn it,” she cursed. The flashlight was back at the rover, so she bounced her way back, reached into her toolkit and took out the helmet light, and bounced back over to the ice cube.
“You coming yet?” Thomas’ voice squawked over the comm.
“Hold on.”
With her hand placed on the ice, she pressed the light up against the ice and turned it on. It was a powerful light, and it shone deep into the ice. Cary jumped and nearly dropped the light, but held it fast. Inside of the cube of ice were some of the drone soldiers. They were lined up straight, and set up into a pyramid, with four lying to form the base, and for more angled up to form the top. Four more soldiers, all stripped of their mech suits except for their boots and some of the attached gear on their chests, and all laid out at an angle downwards from each corner of the pyramid.
“Jesus, Thomas. Shit.”
“What is it?” Thomas asked.
“Get in your rover and come here now,” Cary said, stepping back away from the edge of the ice. The light dimmed away, but the image of the frozen men remained in her head. “Come now!”
- Ben –
“What am I looking at here?”
The mission commander was already dealing with the extreme pressures of the life and death situation he and his crew were stuck in. He knew his stress levels were far beyond anything that was healthy. Still, as he sat there in the darkened room, with Cary and Thomas leaning over his shoulder, pointing out the gruesome display on the screen, Ben knew then he hadn’t reached the ceiling on his stress tolerance.
Thomas had arrived a few minutes after Cary had called for him and had begun taking as many videos as he could. He had been frantic about not letting anyone else on base know about what they had found, to the point that he would make sure no one else would be scheduled to drive out to the reactor, only the two engineers.
A groan arose from between the hand on his face and his mouth, as the mission commander sat looking intensely at the images on the screen. They flickered a lot, and the camera work was unsteady. The sound was off and Thomas described to him what they had seen. Cary remained silent.
“Are we sure it’s the drone soldiers from the entrance shaft?” Ben asked, looking back at Thomas.
Thomas returned a look of disbelief. “Not many other humans here on Europa.”
Ben rubbed his eyes and he could feel the blood pumping through his temple, echoing in pain with every beat.
“So, what does this mean?”
Thomas began first. He was certain there was something else going on with the Alien vessel. They hadn’t seen a single body or remains of one, alien or not. It was entirely possibly, given that the alien vessel had already rejected human technology and the drone soldiers, that they had attacked and were sending everyone on base a signal. Ben shook his head.
“So, beings that can manipulate time and aren’t happy with us are, instead of just wiping us all out, giving us a warning?”
Thomas stood up in the darkness and said nothing.
“What else could it be?” he finally said.
“One of us, Thomas. Think clearly,” Ben replied, sitting forward and looking at the images again. The drone pyramid was indeed haunting.
“Gary said that Glorin was still acting weird from, I think he said, interfacing, with the alien vessel,” Cary brought up.
Ben shook his head, annoyed. Ever since the crew had returned from the alien vessel, his little ‘talk’ with the ship had made him just as annoying as ever. Everyone thought he was acting weird because of it. Ben knew better, that was how he always acted, he just had a bigger head now.
“What’s the doctor’s diagnosis?” Ben asked, willing to hear her out.
“Just that both he and Emir needed to be tested for AEC.”
Artificial Enhancement Control, a relic from an addiction of decades ago.
“We need to bring Charles in on this,” Ben added, “this is one of the reasons he is here.”
“NO!” Thomas jumped in quickly. “We can’t let anyone who was on the ship know we found it. We can’t trust any of them.”
“Seriously, Thomas?” Cary asked.
Ben nodded. “I’m a fan of conspiracies too, Thomas, but that is just a bit too much. Besides, that means Connie could be one of ‘them’ as well.” Ben was sure to add quotation marks with his hands around the word ‘them’.
That was enough for Thomas and he stormed out of the room.
“That man is under a lot of stress,” Ben said quietly.
“We all are,” Cary said with a moment of hesitation.
Ben pointed at the frozen image of the ice block on the screen. “How would you even do something like this?”
“Jenna or Thomas, maybe even Emir, might know how to,” Cary added.
“Yeah,” Ben considered his options. “Go after Thomas and see if the two of you can get out to where the shaft used to be for any clues. See if the angry man can come up with how someone could do that with whatever gear we have.”
Cary got up and walked slowly towards the door, but stopped short of it.
“What do you think we will find?” she asked, still looking right at the door.
“If we’re lucky,” Ben said in the middle of a deep breath, “that it was a freak random act of nature. I’m not sure I like our other two options.”
Day 19 AE
- Horace –
He was going to have that scar for the rest of his life. He could still feel it, raw and sensitive, as he moved his fingers across it. He half expected to take his hand away and see blood, but there was none.
“How did you get that?” a deep voice echoed across the room.
Horace was finally feeling like himself, except for the occasional headaches that still haunted him. He has glad, though, to be thinking clearly again. He had been quite surprised, though, to see the awakened drone soldier, Paul, sitting in a bed across from his. So surprised in fact, that he had at first attributed it to a hallucination. The fact that he thought it was a hallucination was a good sign for his mental capacities though, and that’s when he realized the soldier was in fact real.<
br />
This was the first time he had spoken though.
“This mess?” Horace said, pointing all around the cracks in the ice wall. “When the walls came crashing down I got caught up in it.
Paul grimaced a bit.
Gary talked with Horace just that morning, while the drone slept. The doctor had told him everything, the alien vessel, the aftermath, the damage, and of course, the drone soldier. Horace listened intently and frankly, quite curiously. During the training for the mission, he had undergone basic training on the drone soldiers, mostly as a backup for Bobby. Sadly, he had learned that he was now missing as well. The training didn’t involve any form of post awakening psychological assistance. He knew there were detailed journals and procedures for dealing with the possible side issues that came from waking from a twenty year slumber, but he hadn’t been privy to them. In fact, nearly all the materials that would have been useful now were still on Earth, in his office in Columbia, South Carolina.
Under nearly any other circumstance, all he would have had to do was request the digital copies. But yet again, in another incredibly depressing revelation, he now knew that Earth was no longer in contact, and for all they knew, barely a livable planet anymore. He had been knocked out by the ice having just lost a few friends, and he woke up to having lost his home. It was a tough pill to swallow.
Europa (Deadverse Book 1) Page 13