'That’s it, Koeniger, just as we discussed,' Miller said. 'If I can get this probe down to ten meters, we’ll park it there for a few hours. McKinnon, you keeping tabs on the depth for me?'
'If HE can get it down, huh? Someone’s in rare form tonight,' Pia laughed on her private link with Zee.
'Yuuuup.' Then to the main comm, 'Coming up on 5 meters, still at a steady rate. Damn nice work, Theo.'
'Oh, Miller will love that,” Pia told Zee.
'Nice touch, right?'
Theo was entering the airlock and Sara helped him remove his exosuit by the time the ten meter mark was reached. Zee triggered the slowdown, sending the reactor back into the center of the probe while flooding its outer hull with supercooled ethane. This effectively put the probe into neutral while it waited, not sinking further down, but still warm enough not to freeze solid itself. The nuclear reactor was in no rush; it could run for a few thousand years before giving out.
“Just in time to wait and do nothing?” Theo began as he watched the readouts on one of Zee’s consoles. Sara pulled him back by the belt away from the screens.
“You’ve been working for days, you big ox. You can afford to get some sleep.”
“Coming to tuck me in?” he suggested, grabbing her by the waist and lifting her up to his height. Sara simply glared at him and pointed a finger back to the ground. “I don’t think so, tough guy. Sleep, now.”
“Aww, no fun.”
Her face worked hard not to betray her true emotions, and she kept him at arm’s length with one hand while pointing to the bunks with her other. “Plenty of time for fun later. In the meantime it’d be great if you don’t pass out on us from sleep deprivation.”
As Theo pouted, she jumped up and gave him a quick kiss before slapping him hard in the ribs, sending him off.
'Speaking of sleep deprived, when’s the last time you slept?' Pia asked Zee.
'I’m ok, once I get this programmed up for monitoring the freeze, I’ll probably try to take a nap.'
'Probably? You aren’t a vampire or something, are you?'
'No, no space vampires here. Although if you want to come give me a kiss goodnight like Theo got, maybe I’ll go take a nap sooner.'
'Get your shit done, McKinnon. Then get some rest.' She was excited and more than a little bit scared at how close they were becoming, but wasn’t ready to let the rest of the crew see. Even while they were in the same room as they were now, their private comm link kept their relationship anonymous.
In fact, the whole secrecy of it was intoxicating. For someone who had kept herself isolated for most of her life, this was the perfect blend of vulnerability and professionalism. He could reach her mind at a moment’s notice, and she went through the day feeling his constant presence. It was incredibly freeing to be so independent in her work, while knowing he was always just a thought away.
An hour later she practiced her skills by attempting to check in on him. She found where he was easily enough, in his bed down in the outer ring hab modules. He could still be working from bed trying to fool her, though. The next part was trickier. She shut off any automated alerts and attempted to stretch her mind out into the channels which he normally used. No activity in the holocomp screens near him. Nothing being inputted under his ID. Satisfied at last that all seemed quiet, she left him to sleep.
A few hours later all sensors confirmed that the tunnel above the probe was solid again, and work began on expanding the bubble of melt water to make room for a valve. Nanostructures extended out as rods in all directions like the spines of a sea urchin. Zee had the probe heat back up again, but this time held it in place by burrowing nanorods further out into the surrounding ice.
Once there was enough room, the probe itself expanded, first doubling then tripling in diameter, allowing the melt water to siphon in between inner and outer hulls to relieve the pressure.
The whole process took less than ten minutes, at which point the reactor core separated itself from the now assembled valve. Tiny drone engines powered by the reactor’s heat fired in unison, pressing the core back upwards through the ice at a breakneck speed of a few centimeters a second. When it finally broke the surface the whole crew cheered.
“Now we can get to the real work,” Theo grinned as the noise settled down.
“Gabe, you're up,” Zee tapped Santos on the shoulder to give the go ahead. While the probe was in standby ten meters below, Gabe had set up a ring of bots on the surface.
Now they went to work in unison, some blowtorching the top layer and others vacuuming up the water into enormous tanks. This industrial excavation continued until the entire blast cavity had been cleared out down to within a meter of their target. The last bit of ice was chipped away pneumatically to reveal the matte black nanotubes of the valve ring through the ice.
Next up to work was Barton, who was ready to remotely pilot their modified submersible through any cracks or caves which it might encounter. Sara was up in the pilot bay at Miller’s insistence, despite her obvious grumbling.
The goal was finding a pocket of liquid large enough to replenish their tanks and begin separating into components for fuel. The submersible was equipped with its own heater, but this time a conventional induction nose cone to save space. Once she was in command of her tiny vessel, training took over and she was all business.
'I’m gonna see what this heap can find for us, firing full power.'
The tiny sub lurched against the ice in the valve core, then gradually sank down beneath it. The cylinder sealed itself at both ends and expelled the excess slush. A meter of crude airlock was left behind as the sub melted its way deeper. Not until an hour and nearly sixty meters later did she encounter any obstacles. Pia marveled at Sara’s focus, as she seemed as fresh and determined now as she did at the start.
'Some bedrock ahead of me, seems to be coming in at an angle. Rotating and beginning new pathway at thirty degrees west. Standby…'
As the craft began its maneuver, the crew roused themselves back to the screens in hope of some action. More ice followed the turn, and a trial cutback revealed that the angled bedrock remained shadowing the new diagonal tunnel.
'Ninety meters and no liquid in sight except for my snail trail,' Barton sighed.
The sub had dropped sensors along its path to light the way and test for conditions. To Pia’s surprise, the entire tunnel back up to the valve had remained mostly liquid. A quick diagnostic on the sensor trail revealed them to be more than they seemed at first. Each was a little floating motor, keeping the ice around itself at bay with a small heating unit. When the sub fell into open water, no one except for Sara even noticed.
'Take a look see at what I found!'
Vineland had stayed by her side throughout the exploration, and he was the first to help assess the situation.
“Throw it into neutral Sandy,” he told her quickly. He had the stern quiet authority that reminded Pia of her father. He never seemed to say a thing that didn’t need saying, and the crew respected him and his advice without question.
'Switching to manual,' Zee jumped in, 'let’s see what we’ve got.' Zee had taken full control of the sub’s sensors, and systems began humming to life by the dozens. Pia tried keeping up with the flood of data streams, but had to pull herself out of the feeds when it became overwhelming.
'Open water, we’ve definitely got open water!' Zee said quickly, 'it’s unusual though.'
Miller began asking for more details, but Zee cut him off mid sentence, 'there are some strange signatures here. It’s almost,' and he trailed off again.
'What the hell are you seeing McKinnon?'
The pause of a few seconds seemed interminably long, until Zee came back on over the comm, 'it’s warm. Well, relatively. 50 degr-, I mean 10 degrees Celsius.'
'How big is this pocket?'
Zee hesitated, then briefly reached out to Pia. 'You looking at the main holo?'
'Oiu.'
'Good, you’re gonna love this.'
/>
Zee switched back to the main comm and simply said, 'Ladies and gentlemen, let there be light.'
The wall holo screens in every hub were taken over by a single data packed video feed from the sub. The camera was washed out for a second as it compensated for the sudden glare. When the glow faded, the resulting view brought everyone into a stunned silence. At the top of the image was a bright ceiling of rock and ice shelf, but most of the screen was filled with sparkling water that seemed to dance with activity.
'What the hell is that?' Miller exclaimed.
The water was full of tiny flecks of light which darted suddenly a few centimeters at a time. Pia was immediately struck by the comical memory of sea monkeys she had as a child. The movement was small and fragile, but not entirely random either. They almost seemed to be moving towards the sub as it got near.
'Is that...alive?' Pia asked the question on everyone’s minds.
'Who cares, how big is the damn pocket?' Miller came through jarringly.
Zee punched up a depth overlay, and this time even Miller grew silent. The numbers only came up across the top sliver of the shot at first, with the lowest among them in the hundreds of meters. As the sub waited on the sonar pings to return, the resultant depth readings sped higher and higher. A thousand meters, two thousand, three, until the entire lower screen filled with infinity symbols.
'Depth is...unknown, sir.' Zee sounded utterly lost for the first time since Pia met him. 'Out of range for the sub’s sensors, it can’t read anything beyond three kilometers. But I’ve done a diagnostic check and even rebooted the sonar equipment. There’s no doubt about it. The sub is now swimming free in a Ceresian ocean of some kind, and it may not be alone down there.'
Chapter 4
Barton had taken the mini sub down nearly a kilometer before it gave out. The little explorer had glided down through shimmering water, sending more tracers fleeing from its pathway. Eventually the pressure built up too high and the live video feed blinked out.
For Hixley the ocean was a bittersweet discovery, sealing the fate of her solar arrays. Abundant water in this volume would fuel not only the rest of Cerex's mission, but entire future mining colonies. Miller tasked her with getting the arrays back up, but just long enough for Theo’s domed factory to start producing at full capacity. By pulling a double shift and concentrating on just two arrays on the nearby rim of Occator, Lara was providing power to the ship again within the day.
Theo was equally busy ramping up his hydrogen engines using the water gathered from when the ice tunnel was excavated. This left Santos and the pilots busy designing a sturdier sub for the next mission into the ocean. Pia dropped in to see the progress firsthand, and was surprised to see Zee in the middle of their huddle.
“Psst,” Pia whispered into Zee's mind. He didn't turn from the conversation, but she could sense his smile from the way it made his big ears lift up.
“I know that you just forgot to invite me, so I took the liberty of checking your schedules and came on over.
Vineland and Barton stood up quickly, their military backgrounds on display as they looked like cadets who got caught sneaking booze into their barracks.
“At ease soldiers,” Pia saluted them. “I just figured you might need the mission biologist since we may have, you know...found some sort of alien bugs swimming in a freakishly warm and inconceivably large ocean on a tiny frozen rock in the middle of the asteroid belt.” To her credit, Pia held a straight face for her entire speech. Not until Zee came up to her laughing and pulled her over to them by both hands did the pilots relax.
Zee came in close to her face and she panicked for a moment thinking of him kissing her in front of other people. At the last moment he veered to the left and gently pushed her hair back behind her ear before whispering back to her.
Pia quickly tapped her temple and shut down her main chip functions. Only the main channel was kept open one way for emergencies.
“What’s going on? Why the secrecy?” she asked after making sure that she was disconnected.
“To be honest, I’m not sure.” Vineland took the lead, eager to explain his actions. “That’s also why we wished to keep the others, and you, out of this talk for now.”
Sara had served with the Colonel long enough now to sense when he was going to beat around the bush. She sat down in front of Pia and balanced herself on her balled up fists.
“Miller is going to get us all killed. You must see that, right?”
Pia quickly scanned the room, but found only expectant faces watching her right back. She closed her eyes and took in a deep breath, letting the exhaled air cool her parted lips before opening her eyes again.
“Laisse tomber, il ne sait rien faire de ses dix doigts, celui-là,” she rattled off quickly, suddenly letting the French flow out to relieve some of her stress.
Sara sat back and grabbed her knees as she snorted loudly. “My god, we brought a lady to a mutineer meeting!”
Pia’s cheeks reddened before translating, “Miller’s an idiot, he’s completely useless.” Then checking herself, she continued, “no, not an idiot. Letting ourselves think that would be a mistake.”
“I agree, mademoiselle.” Vineland winked at her. “I dealt with him for months before our launch making preparations and designing Cerex. He may have a paper thin ego and the empathy of a dung beetle, but he’s sharp.”
“Ruthless,” offered Pia.
“Dangerous,” Sara repeated her claim, this time more conclusively. “Between the rushed zero-g launch, the risky maneuver getting to Occator, and the Multinat attack, it’s a miracle we’re still alive. Thank god Zee has pulled our asses out of the fire more than a few times, but that luck won’t last forever...no offense Zee.”
“None taken. We need to stick together and get this base camp up and running fast. Miller will do whatever it takes to get back to Earth with his treasure. I say we get everything stable, gather enough to fill the ship, then find the first excuse to get the hell back home.”
“Not good enough,” Sara shot back. Vineland raised a hand in a calming motion, but she continued, “what? Nothing is ever stable with Miller in charge. I say we tie him up to one of her bee hives and leave him there until we get back home.”
“Not that simple, unfortunately,” Vineland said, “he’s not alone. Coburn is attached to his hip. A true lackey in every sense of the word. No way he goes along with removing Miller from command."
Zee grimaced as he thought out loud, “I could nudge CereSat around, but controls for it are linked directly to Miller and Coburn’s chips. We mess up a hair on their heads and they'll call home to rat us out in a microsecond. We’ll be in prison once we return. Even if we took them both out quickly enough that they can’t send a message home, we won’t be able to either. CereSat is our only link with Earth, and they hold the keys.”
They all sat in silence for a moment, each coming to terms with what they already knew before the meeting. Vineland finally gave their thoughts a voice.
“Keep your heads down and let’s get to work. That's our only choice right now. We still have a submersible to build.”
“And an ocean with bugs or something floating around in it.” Pia bounced up out of her seat. Everyone else looked depressed and Sara rolled her eyes, but they all began standing up to join her over near the schematics holo.
“What?” Pia asked. “We can handle Miller. There’s a damn ocean under our feet, get excited already!”
After a few different craft redesigns, they ended up building a ship Pia nicknamed the Sting Ray. The electronics and sensors were all packed into a central sphere small enough to fit through the airlock, and strong enough to keep working in the crushing depths it would encounter. The ship had a long whiplike antennae trailing behind it like a tail.
At Theo’s suggestion, mechanical propellers were scrapped in favor of a magnetohydrodynamic drive. After learning how to pronounce the damn thing, Pia promptly gave up trying to understand how it worked. Some
thing about using magnetic fields to control the water flow, but after that it was above her pay grade. Zee seemed excited about it though, and got to work making it happen.
The pilots had insisted on wing structures, a feature missing on most Earth submersibles due to technology restraints at the time. Gabe managed to come up with a beautiful pair of flexible graphene flaps which were controlled by varying the current passing through them using a gridwork of wires. They could travel wrapped up tightly around the core while getting through the tunnel, but extended to over a meter from core to tip on each side.
It was a week of constant struggle printing ship parts and wiring while the rest of the crew kept asking impatiently when they could get something back into the water.
The massive increase in their water supply finally let Pia stop policing every project that needed it. She regularly searched for excuses to go ask Zee some technical question in person, tiring of the disembodied flirting that made up most of their relationship so far. She was as physical as he was digital, and craved the feeling of his hand in her hair again more than she could logically explain.
Sara and Pia were assigned the task of controlling the Sting Ray’s first mission. Both were jumping out of their seats to get on with it, but Vineland managed to delay them long enough for some basic debugging and diagnostic checks to get done. At last, nearly ten days after discovering the Ceresian ocean, they once again had the greenlight from Miller to return.
The valve had been kept scraped clean of ice build up and the surrounding area even got upgraded with some rudimentary stairs and an equipment conveyor. Theo and Gabe took the Sting Ray out to the fissure and carefully dropped a smart flare down through the airlock. Resembling a cross between a backyard sparkler and a soccer ball, the flare cooked its way down nearly ten meters. It reopened the original pathway and then halted momentarily. Guided by Zee back on Cerex, the flare shifted sideways and burrowed out of the way into the surrounding ice wall.
Mission Cerex Boxset Page 10