It didn’t take long for the humming to go away as the silence was broken. Joyce came crashing into the room, pulling herself along rails on the walls. The floor inside the central command was still magnetized though, and she sighed with relief when she could walk with some ease.
“Sorry,” she said, slightly out of breath, “I would have knocked if I had any free hands.”
Ben waved her on towards his desk. She walked over and set down several tablets.
“Here is all the comm data for the past six months, with heavy emphasis on the past two months. I would have put it all on one tablet except for the lack of any networking down there. Crysta has cannibalized every last working computer on base.”
“No worries. Did you look at any of it?” Ben asked.
“Just briefly. Nothing unusual. There is a lot of bad data in that last batch, probably right before everything went dead.” Joyce stood behind the desk, reaching out and grabbing a tablet before handing it over to Ben.
“Ok. What about now? Any luck with the dishes?”
“Yes and no. There is a lot of noise, but it’s really hard to go through the mess and figure out what comes from Earth, and even that, which of the streams is of anything useful. Crysta says she recognizes some of the streams of signals, and that they are purely military automated signals. I need the AI to run through all the signals to see if anything in there is a live feed, but it’s been kind of busy lately.”
Ben nodded. No one knew yet what the AI was running for him.
“What about TV or radio broadcasts?”
“Nothing. All dead,” Joyce sighed a bit. This had been the true goal of her little experiment. “And that’s not good either. I should be able to pull something. Well, maybe there is something in all the streams, but I thought I’d be able to pull signals that I could easily tell were radio, and I can’t.”
Ben had hoped for better news, but always knew deep down this was what he expected to hear. For nearly two hundred years radio signals had been blasting off Earth into space. That there were no signals to be heard, even this far away, was a bad thing.
“Now, just remember, we’re orbiting around the solar system’s second biggest radio station. It’s very possible anything coming from Earth simply isn’t strong enough compared to the Jovian radio signals.”
The large gas giant was a burst producer of radio signals at the 20 MHz range. Oddly enough, it was the position of one of the other moons, Io, that determined how that signal worked. It was certainly strong enough to be heard from Earth, and Joyce had spent countless of evenings studying the signals and mapping them according to Io’s movements for research on Earth.
“So we still have no idea what is going on back home…” Ben trailed off.
Joyce nodded.
“All right. So then, in your opinion, is there any reason in wasting valuable energy running the dish equipment?”
Joyce hadn’t expected that question.
“Well, to be honest, they barely take a fraction of all our electrical needs. But…”she stopped and thought a bit more. She turned and walked to the door before looking back. “What would we do if we did find anything out about home?”
“Maybe make us work harder,” Ben said without looking up from the tablet he was reading, “or hope better.”
“We are all working really hard,” Joyce responded, “and we will make hope work with whatever we get.”
Ben heard her but was so engrossed in a few lines of data he was reading through. When he looked up, she was gone already and the silence had returned. Quickly, he reached over for his personal tablet, tapped a music app and removed the silence from the room. It wasn’t loud, barely audible actually, but it helped so much.
He had seen it already. The rest of the crew worked hard and made the best of what they had. Most of their evenings were filled with laughter and stories, despite the losses in life and hard work. Most, if not all of the men and women had come on the mission because it benefitted them greatly. They all had great stock in the mission. It was clearly a high risk mission, a feat of human exploration on a scale never before even imagined. They all stood to become the leaders in their respected community of peers as well as incredibly wealthy. It was surprising to him that despite the near disaster they all still managed to work.
He didn’t know any better. All the reports that came in from Horace spoke of the same thing. Everyone was in unusually high spirits. He didn’t attribute it to any false hopes, but he did mention something about a form of denial. He had even compared it to grieving mothers who lost a newborn child. These would return to work immediately after and seemed oblivious to their loss. It was a method of coping.
Two days.
In two days, their hope might be unfounded.
Or maybe, he was the only one doubting.
Day 32 AE
- Connie –
Two days preparing for this. She had done this same routine many times over in the two years she had been on the moon. She had done it many more times in training on Earth’s moon. She had it down quite well. Yet, here she was, getting ready to get into the ‘Tin Can’ on what seemed like the most important day of her life.
Two days preparation meant getting everything right. Making sure there was no corrosion anywhere. Ensuring that the hydrogen had been securely transferred into the orbital ship without any leaks. Frozen hydrogen anywhere could turn into a disaster quickly. She went over the entire hull of the ship, just to check for any holes, anomalies, stress fractures or freeze fractures. She would wear a suit the entire time, but she just wanted to be sure.
Every three to six weeks she blasted off into Europa’s low orbit to hook up with the supply ships coming in from Earth. From there she would slow them down and descend them onto the surface safely. It was usually a four to six hour procedure; she rarely even needed to use her suit’s toilet system. She listened to music as she blasted off and into orbit, waiting for the two ships’ systems to link, and all she had to do was turn the ship around and let the computers guide their way in. She just had to make sure nothing went wrong, and in those two years, nothing ever had.
She remembered the first time she went up. This was how she felt. Her hands were shaking and her breath was faster than usual. Everything was good to go, but she knew what might be on the other end of the trip. Hope, or disaster.
The ‘Tin Can’ was essentially that, a large cylindrical hunk of metal that sat on six stilts. Under the can sat a three engine booster that provide a fairly powerful 300,000 pounds of thrust at its max. Only a small fraction of that was needed to get into Europa orbit. Most of the thrust was needed to slow down the supply ships in orbit, as they were far greater in mass than the ‘Tin Can’.
Inside, and on top of all that fiery horsepower was a tiny compartment where Connie flew the ship. Six small windows and several cameras all around the ship allowed her to see in every direction. Having to see in space was mostly cosmetic and the flying was done by computers with minimal assistance by Connie. Her job was to ensure that all the systems worked together, and input changes into the computers as she saw fit. The Base AI coordinated with her and did all of the instant calculations. Connie wasn’t a space ship pilot, she was a handler for a very large flying tug.
She knew it, too.
The small ship sat on top of a smooth ice platform. Every time the ‘Tin Can’ landed, it had to be brought back to this platform, which in turn had to be smoothed out after every blast off. Thomas stood with her to make sure the platform was ready when she returned with her ship. That routine with him was probably why they got close to begin with.
“All right, base, I have a clear on the external checklist,” Connie said into her helmet speaker.
“Roger that, Tin Can,” Joyce echoed back through the comms.
Connie turned and found Thomas about several hundred feet back from the platform.
“You ready?” he asked over their private channel.
“Yeah,” she said, wa
ving back at him, “I’ve done everything I was supposed to do.”
“Well then, babe,” Thomas said, waving back, “go and bring us back some good news.”
“No pressure, huh?”
“No pressure.”
Thomas was already walking towards the rover. He would want to be much further away before the boosters went off. Connie watched as the rover spun out chunks of ice and sped off.
Pulling herself up the ladder, Connie reached the hatch near the top of the can. She had always wondered, before she got any formal training, why they hadn’t put a pointy end at the top. It would have looked better, more like a real space ship. Of course, there was no need for aerodynamics in space. A flat, ugly end was just as good as a pointy end, and a lot more effective at docking with large supply ships.
Connie pulled the hatch shut behind her after crawling into the tight space. They had designed the compartment specifically for her, and had anything ever happened to her, only Joyce or Susan would have been able to fit. Emir was a small guy, just a little too padded around the midsection to fit in the cramped space. There was a small compartment underneath the main cabin that could be adapted to haul some extra cargo or if necessary, two more people. She swung her feet up, sat back into the seat and felt her back sink into the memory cushions. She looked up at her feet and wiggled her toes. It was something she did every time, and every time she’d pretend they were actually out of the bulky boots.
Behind her were the seat belts and it took her nearly five minutes to get them on. Every kind of stretching and twisting in the suit became a fight against normal body motions. It didn’t help that there was very little gravity. Once she got all five points of the belt system hooked up, she stopped to catch her breath. It always reminded her of Yoga, if Yoga involved sitting on thousands of pounds of explosive hydrogen.
After catching her breath and setting her tablet into its designated handlebar in front of her, she began the internal checklist.
“All right, Hammy, let’s start,” she spoke at her tablet.
The base AI linked her tablet with the Tin Can’s computers and thereby linking the AI to the ship itself. As the AI worked on running the self-diagnostics on the ship’s computers, Connie strapped the tablet into the handle bars. They were designed to hold the tablet, but on her third take off, the tablet had come loose and smashed her in the nose. From then on, she learned to always fly with the face plate down and she worked up some straps to keep the tablet in place. She could still feel the pain and the blood trickling down into her mouth. It was a moment of panic she would soon rather forget.
“All internal computers booted and ready. OS integrated. Memory cleared and open. Beginning to upload checklist parameters.”
The AI’s synthesized voice was a mesh of Crysta’s voice and a popular singer back on Earth, all set to a lower tone to make it sound masculine. It was always odd hearing it.
“All right, beginning fuel cycle and hydraulics check,” Connie answered as the green light came up on her list.
She reached out and turned up two knobs to a setting of 100%, then flipped the two switches under each knob. A small readout on the tablet began to show the fuel cycling from the storage pods into the engine and then back out. There was no sign of leakage.
“All good here,” Connie said. “The rest is yours.”
The AI continued the checklist, running all the diagnostics needed to make sure the craft was ready and safe for blast-off. It only took seven minutes, but it was the time that Connie took to close her eyes and relax. She could still feel her hands shaking a bit, so she concentrated on her breathing. She caught herself tapping her right foot rapidly and stopped.
“Connie?” Joyce chimed in. “You OK in there? You’re a little more tense than usual.”
Everyone had been in the control room for her first blast-off, but since then, only Joyce had monitored her flights. She was familiar with the routine and with Connie’s demeanor on the flights. This time, once again, the control room was full, and Connie knew it. She knew that if she reached orbit, and the ship wasn’t there, that it wouldn’t be her fault, but she sure felt the pressure. Maybe that was part of her anxiety, if that is what it was.
“You know, live or die Joyce, live or die,” Connie voiced her opinion.
“That’s a tad harsh, don’t you think?”
She was right.
“Is everyone still there?” Connie asked.
She heard static over the line, then the comm opened up again and she heard cheering in the background.
“Aw, you guys,” she smiled.
Connie glanced up as the seventh check list light turned green on her tablet. She tapped it to acknowledge it. The minutes continued to pass as she watched the diagnostics complete, one by one. She knew them by heart, and began preparing for the next step. The twelfth light turned green; the checklist was complete. A large green check mark appeared on her tablet screen.
“Central, I’m clear here. Please confirm.”
“Confirmed. Beginning pre-burn on your mark,” Joyce replied.
“Hammy, confirm?” Connie asked out loud.
“Confirmed,” the AI responded, a small green check appearing next to the big one on her tablet screen.
Connie swallowed hard, then reached out with her right hand and tapped the green check mark. A circle formed around it and it vanished. She felt a small tremble come through the ship and she knew that the primary ignition had fired up. A small digital gauge began to fill up as she watched the temperature rise. When the gauge filled up, she tapped the screen, and a secondary confirmation came up.
“Tin Can ready for go,” Connie spoke into the helmet mic.
She tapped the confirmation check. The screen went blank and was replaced by a large circle that began filling up, counting down from seven. She spoke the numbers out loud until it got to the number two, then held her breath. The circle filled up and the windows in front of her lit up in a bright light. For a moment, nothing happened, but after a few seconds, she began to feel it. She certainly could hear it. Instead of the sound coming from the outside, as it would have on Earth, she could hear it through the cabin, erupting from under her. She sank into her seat as she began to lift off.
Taking off from the surface of Europa didn’t require much thrust, nowhere near as much as on Earth. Within a minute she was blasting into the sky at nearly three miles a second. She kept her eyes on the instruments display on her tablet, knowing full well that the AI was running it all. Two minutes in, she checked the distance traveled.
“Hammy, start decline,” she said out loud.
“Confirmed.”
The rockets began to blast at different rates in order to start tipping the ship down to put it into orbit. The escape velocity of the moon was just barely over a mile a second, so it didn’t take long to get far off the planet’s surface.
“Hammy, I have a two degree variance. You copy?”
“Confirmed. Correcting.”
Connie swore she could feel whenever the AI made the miniscule course corrections, but Gary had told her there was no way her body could actually tell the difference. She had chosen to disagree with him, but she’d never let him know. It was better that way.
“Corrected. Sub-orbital insertion in twenty-seven seconds.”
It didn’t take long to leave the surface of the moon. It was because of this that flying the Tin Can was so exciting. It took just four minutes to reach sub-orbit. From there, the rocket was backed down considerably. Connie felt the roar die down behind her and felt that floating sensation of zero gravity for a few seconds before the rockets took off again, albeit, at a far slower rate. The Tin Can would now orbit the moon twice as it rose higher and higher to achieve stable orbit.
“In sub-orbit now. Beginning climb. Going quiet for the first time.”
“Copy that, Tin Can,” Joyce’s voice echoed with a little static.
As the ship flew away from the base, it would lose radio contact as it di
pped beyond the horizon, leaving Connie alone with a shell of the AI running her ship. She watched the telemetry on her tablet as they dropped down beyond the horizon of the base. It would now be thirteen minutes before she came around the other side.
“Hammy, could you fly these missions by yourself if you needed to?”
“I have the required programming. I don’t believe I have the access to do so, though. I am also not programmed to allow changes to the flight plan without human consent.”
Connie hadn’t realized that.
“So, I’m just along to give you permission to fly the ship?”
“That is correct.”
If she hadn’t felt useless before, she certainly did now. A few check marks came up on the tablet and she marked them complete as she saw read them out loud to the AI for confirmation. Flight path, orbital path, fuel consumption and temperature readings were all reading exactly like they should. As she held her hand up to tap through the checks, she happily noticed her hands weren’t shaking anymore. For a few minutes, Connie had forgotten why she was even up here.
“Oh, yeah,” she remembered, feeling her heart race again.
The Tin Can continued to rise higher into orbit as it sped around the frozen moon. Connie opened up a small app on her tablet and, as had been her custom on every orbital pick up flight, she continued reading one of her books. It was a crime thriller written nearly thirty years before she was born. She had started it on her first flight and only read it while in space. It was a small habit of hers, and she was really hoping she could finish it. She got into the current chapter when her speakers cracked to life.
“You’re in range again, Tin Can,” Joyce’s voice chirped.
“Anything from your end?” she asked.
Europa (Deadverse Book 1) Page 17