Europa (Deadverse Book 1)

by Flunker, Richard

  “Honestly, I thought I was dead,” Horace said, going over his wound again with his fingers. “But here we are, right?”

  “Have you been out of this room?” Horace asked.

  “Not since they cut me out of the mech and brought me down here,” Paul looked around, “I’m not sure they know what to do with me…”

  Horace stood up. “Let’s go show you around. At least what’s left of the base.”

  Paul stood up quickly. “You sure that’s OK? I don’t want to anger anyone.”

  “I have a certain level of authority here,” Horace said, smiling. “It’ll be OK.”

  The new medical center was just under the central dome one of three fully repaired domes, and so they went without the suits. Horace knew that if Ben saw them, he’d throw a fit, but he was willing to deal with the old ornery commander, if it came to that. As they came up through the central stair case still riddled with cracks and missing chunks of ice and into the main dome, Horace felt a sense of relief. It wasn’t the wide open skies of Earth, but the larger room gave the human psyche a greater sense of freedom. He could tell that Paul instantly felt better, as well.

  Within moments of coming out into the dome, Horace felt a tap on the shoulders. He spun around, nearly losing his footing on the magnetic floor but was greeted by the cheerful smile of Connie.

  “My goodness, doc,” she said, reaching in for a hug, “it sure is good to see you up and about. Looks like you got yourself a nasty one there, huh?”

  Horace reached instinctively for the wound on his head again, but stopped short of touching it.

  “It’s good to be alive,” he said, looking around. “At least for now.”

  “Ben’s gonna have your ass with you two walking around without a suit on,” she said, holding back laughter.

  Horace nodded. Connie was only in part of a suit, and a helmet was nowhere nearby. He pointed at the folded over flaps of the lower part of the suit, and Connie just shrugged.

  “What can I say?” she laughed, hugging him again.

  “And this is the soldier?” Connie asked, extending her hand to Paul.

  He shook it. “Paul. I don’t know if I qualify as a soldier right now.”

  “We don’t qualify for much at all right now, all of us. Mostly just janitors.”

  “We are up to walk around, stretch our legs,” Horace pointed out. “Where is it safe to go?”

  “You need to get over to the green dome,” Connie pointed to the far side of the dome they were currently in. “We dug out a whole new corridor down to it, so be careful. It doesn’t have magnetic floors; just pull yourself along with the handles we put on the side of the hallway.”

  Connie turned to head out towards the opposite side.

  “Where are you off to?” Horace asked.

  “I’m taking the Tin Can up for the last supply crate we know for sure is coming,” she said.

  “Any word on if we can see the return ship?”

  “Nope. We can’t see it at all on our scopes. We will have to wait another two weeks to see if it shows up in the skies above us.”

  Horace nodded. It was a difficult place to be where you had to wait to see if survival was feasible or a dead end road.

  The two men watched as Connie walked briskly down and behind a large ice wall at the far edge of the dome. Directly ahead of them was the small spire where central command was. They walked past the small tower which had survived the quake intact. They hit a few patches where the magnetic floor didn’t work, but they reached the corridor to the green dome fine.

  Connie had not been joking. They had carved a new hallway in the ice, melting their way through to the green dome. They had installed no lights so the only light that reflected into the hallway were the ones on either side of the shaft. It had been crudely cut out as well, likely in haste. The walls were uneven and rough, as was the floor and ceiling. They pulled themselves along with small metal handles that had been frozen into the walls. There was no room to bounce around in the low gravity. So they made their way slowly through the rough corridor until they came out the other side.

  “Is the whole base like this?” Paul asked.

  “I honestly don’t know. This is the first time I’ve seen the damage and repairs,” Horace answered, pointing towards the hatch to the green dome above them.

  Paul reached up and brought down the step ladder. It stopped halfway down as the mechanism was still bent a bit from the quake, but one good pull from Paul brought it down all the way. Horace reached up and pulled himself up through the steps, jumping a few steps at a time, right up through onto the main floor of the green dome. Paul followed up through the staircase and found himself in a small room, cylindrical in shape. Ice walls held two doors on opposite sides of each other. The room itself had no ceiling except for the clear dome a hundred feet above them.

  Horace opened the first door and was instantly greeted by a blast of warm humid air that turned into a fog nearly immediately. Both he and Paul stepped through into the whole new environment, breathing heavy, but with a slight degree of familiar comfort.

  “What is this place?” Paul asked, walking through the fog alongside Horace.

  “It’s our own personal jungle,” Horace said, as they stepped through the initial fog and were greeted by a green mass of plants. Around a small table sat several of Horace’s crew members and as soon as they saw him, they stood up and began clapping and cheering. Jenna came running over and hugged him.

  “It’s good to see you back, doc,” she said with her ever present smile.

  “Didn’t know you all liked me so much,” he said, coming over to the rest of the group. One by one, he shook their hands and acknowledged them.

  “You woke up at the best time,” Joyce added, pointing at the plates, filled steaming vegetables and the goop that has been their only course until recently. Several plates covered the table, as well as more pots with more steamed vegetables.

  “Don’t mind if I do,” Horace said, grabbing a plate and handing it over to Paul. “Sure beats the paste I’ve been eating the past couple of days.”

  Ben came up and put his hands on his shoulder. “Did Doctor Fletcher release you?”

  Horace turned and raised an eyebrow. Of all the people on the base, Horace had the authority to override Ben. He knew it was a matter of safety, and not power, but he did joke about it with Ben from time to time.

  “He did.”

  “That’s good,” Ben said, stepping away. “You really should get a suit on, though. And find one for the soldier.”

  “His name is Paul,” Horace said, introducing him. The young man sheepishly waved.

  Joyce sat down next to the soldier and began dishing out food onto his plate. In turn, his eyes grew large, likely larger than his stomach. Horace had read at some point that awakened drones had incredibly elevated senses due to the drugs the mech AI used, and taste and smell would be some of those senses he was enjoying at that very moment. Horace took that moment to step aside and talk to Ben.

  “He, Paul, needs some integration. The man is in great physical shape and mentally appears to be just fine,” Horace whispered. “He needs something to do.”

  “You sure?” Ben asked.

  “I am. Besides, it looks like you could use all the help you can,” Horace said. “That includes me. My head might still be a bit wobbly, but I can be told what to do.”

  “No. Not you. You were barely alive days ago. You need more rest.”

  “I can rest at night. Besides, the more I’m out here, among them, the better I can do my actual job,” Horace pointed out.

  Ben remained quiet.

  “You know I’m right,” Horace added.

  “You usually are, you smug bastard. Fine, but for God’s sake, don’t overdo it. We might really be needing you in two weeks if that return ship doesn’t show up.”

  “If that ship doesn’t show up, there will be nothing I can say or do that will change anything. Each one of us will deal
with it as we see fit.”

  “I hate the way you talk,” Ben said, walking away. Horace could only smile.

  Looking back down at the small group eating, he saw smiles, laughter, and the weary sound of exhaustion. For now, these men and women were acting true to their expertise, experience and professions. They were working through the problems instead of panicking. Each and every one of these men and women had gone through a rigorous psychological evaluation, of which Horace had played a big part in. The biggest reason they had been selected was for their ability to not lose their cool. Those were his words. Besides, traveling three hundred and sixty five million miles from Earth had a certain element of suicide in it. Not coming home was a possibility every single one of these men and women knew intimately.

  Some already were not coming home.

  So he joined them and ate, because now, more than ever, he really needed to not ‘lose his cool’.

  - Gary –

  The doctor had a strong sense of dread building up as he looked over the horrific human pyramid. Ben had called Gary in to help with the removal of the drone soldiers to see if he could determine anything that could help them understand just what they were dealing with. Thomas and Cary had dragged the large block of ice with the rover far back from the ice highway so that no one else would be able to see it, and with a plasma drill, had melted away the water to get to the men inside. All the work had to be done there, outside, in order not to risk anyone else seeing anything.

  Gary understood, too, that Ben had been very wary in bringing him in. He had been inside of the alien vessel. He hadn’t had the interactions that Emir and Glorin had, though, and this worried him. It worried Ben too, Gary could tell.

  “Just find out something, anything. I have to stop this before it gets past the point of creepy,” Ben had asked.

  And so, with Cary and Thomas’ help, they had stripped the mechs down to the human bodies inside, and in the frigid moon surface, with just unwieldy gloved hands, he did a few autopsies. Ben wasn’t going to be happy with that he found. They had died from CO2 poisoning, likely brought about by them being trapped in ice. Because they had been frozen, it was nearly impossible for him to determine if they had died a mile under ice, when the tidal forces had ripped through the base, or if they had somehow survived and then, been murdered by whomever had committed this insane crime, if it could be called a crime.

  Thomas had a major issue with that theory, though, and Gary agreed. The drones were top of the line military units, with AIs specifically programmed for combat. If they had somehow survived the ice quake, it was highly unlikely someone on the base run by scientists and engineers, would have been able to take one down, much less a dozen of them. So they must have died, buried in the ice, and then somehow, almost magically, been removed from a mile down in the ice, put into a pyramid, and refrozen.

  Of course, there was one more theory.

  “You know what Susan would say,” Cary said as they finished up the last of the drones.

  Gary nodded his head in the helmet. “Yeah,” he chuckled lightly, “she would say the aliens did it.”

  Cary laughed along with Gary. They loved their other partner in this unconventional love triangle, but understood that while she was a genius in botany and biology, she was a bit naïve in many other matters. It was a source of humor for them, even if Susan didn’t quite get it.

  Thomas didn’t laugh.

  “Wait,” Cary stopped, “seriously? You think that’s possible?”

  “When you have eliminated the impossible….” Thomas started to say, and both of them responded to finish the quote.

  “It’s weird…but Gary, you were in there, just how weird was it?”

  Gary thought about it for a moment. He had been so busy since he had returned from the time warped trip inside of the alien vessel that he hadn’t thought much about it.

  “You know what’s really weird?” Gary asked. “The really weird part is that, oddly enough, it didn’t feel weird. It felt, I don’t know…familiar.”

  Gary described the inside again, the layout. It felt like an American submarine he had served on for two months when he was younger.

  “Ok, I get it,” Thomas continued, “but, the green light thing, and Glorin and Emir and talking to the ship, that’s weird right?”

  “Is it? We just took apart human-machine drones, where a computer program talks to the human brain to tell it what to do. Isn’t that about the same?” Gary pointed out.

  “You know what, doc?” Thomas pointed a finger at him. “Quit making sense.”

  Cary hid a smile underneath the helmet.

  “So, now what?” Cary asked.

  “Ben’s not going to like it, but we are clueless here.”

  Thomas had already melted out a twenty foot deep hole in the ice which they then placed the bodies of the drone soldiers, now free of their mechs. The drill then began to lightly melt the ice from the side of the cliff they had moved them up to, and water rushed into the hole, freezing nearly instantly. The mech suits were put in a far shallower ice hole in case the parts were needed at some point. The biggest agenda was simply making sure no one else saw what they had done out here.

  “I don’t like keeping this from everyone else,” Thomas said as they slowly bounced their way back to the rover. “How do you keep that from Susan?”

  “Or from Connie?” Cary added.

  “Yeah, this whole place just sucks. Two years of boring, then two weeks of hell.”

  The rover hummed to life and Thomas began driving it back slowly over the bumpy ice towards the ice highway. Just as he turned in to head back to the base, he looked to them.

  “But, really, you both think it was Emir, right? The guy has been a creep, so maybe now he just cracked.”

  “I can’t…” Gary began, but Cary cut him off.

  “He is an ice engineer, after all.”

  That realization created silence between the three of them. As the rover turned onto the ice highway, still smooth and shining Jupiter’s colors off of its surface, it picked up speed and they headed back to base, not feeling any better about what they had done out there.

  Day 21 AE

  - Susan –

  A small crowd had gathered in the green dome, awaiting expectantly to see if the experiment would work. A large half dome, about six feet in diameter and three feet high, stood on top of a large metal container. Inside was a collection of eggs, all gathered under a heat source. Two dozen eggs of an off white color sat gathered together. One of them had a pip hole, signs that the experiment was in the last stages.

  They were chicken eggs, incubated to within three days of hatching, and then placed in a jelly-like substance and finally, frozen, completely stopping the growth of the chick inside of the egg, but not killing it. Susan had been fascinated, but wanted to find out more. Experiments on Earth had shown they could keep an egg viable this way for nearly nine months. The biggest reason for such an experiment was to show the viability of the stasis gel on life, and of course, humans. The everlasting search for the stasis chamber was yielding results in the gel. Being able to travel great distances in space required some form of deep sleep. On Earth, the gel was a life saver for those whose diseases had no cure, but were possibly in the works for one.

  For the Europa mission, the eggs had been sent several months back with the purpose of seeing if they could survive a fourteen month deep space journey. As the egg cracked a little further, it appeared that the gel had done its job.

  In nearly all other cases, Susan would have been taking notes, recording the event and saving all the data. After the ice quake though, the experiments were all put on hold. This one was not for some company on Earth, but for their own survival. The chickens within the eggs were of a fast growing breed, ready to lay eggs or be butchered in three months. It would provide a much needed source of protein, especially in the case of the worst scenario.

  Twelve years ago, Susan had been a part of a group that had run
a complicated series of experiments to simulate living in a completely sealed environment, extremely similar to the one she was in at the moment. Twenty separate closed environments were created and Susan and three other people were placed into each of the domes. The domes were small, barely the size of a small house. There were four people to a dome with all the seeds, water and materials they would need. The outside would provide food and air for two months, but then, it was up to the four people inside each dome to make the system work.

  Her dome was one of two that made it through the fifteen month program, and of those two domes, her dome was actually thriving.

  The botanist had a keen sense of natural balance. She clearly understood the chemistry and biology behind life, but beyond that, she could almost see the cycle of life in an environment. It was almost instinctual, she explained. She could see the entire planet if she really tried, but for those fifteen months, locked up in the small structure, she was able to see that cycle clearly. It had been the best time of her life.

  Now, here she was, millions of miles from the planet she adored, just under the surface of a frigid moon that had almost no way of supporting life, watching life erupt from a calcium shell. She heard some peeps and someone behind her shouted in excitement. They were all grown men and women, yet the thought of a tiny baby was enough to work their emotions.

  Susan stepped away from the clear dome to allow others to see the little miracle finish working through her shell and come popping out. Everyone cheered and Crysta looked up in tears, and said that they should call the chick ‘Nugget’. There was laughter and more cheering. Susan looked through the bodies and saw the chick, slowly twisting itself to get on its feet. It was coated in a thick ooze, looking like a wet rat. In a few hours, it would be completely dried off and would be completely adorable.

  It would also be pouncing off the sides of the little dome they were in. She needed to keep an eye on how they reacted to the low gravity before they hurt themselves. She stepped away and walked towards the pile of materials that had been included with the experiment.