Europa Contagion

by Nicholas Thorp

  “Almost there,” Alice said. “How fast is your suit losing pressure?”

  “Fast. I don’t know why my suit didn’t try to seal the tear itself,” Navya looked down at her body and legs and began to search. “And I can’t find where the leak is coming from.”

  “I’m almost there,” Alice said. “Try the emergency button.”

  Navya pressed the ‘emergency egress’ button in the airlock but still nothing happened.

  “It’s not working either,” Navya responded.

  “Turn your back so I can see the back of your suit,” Alice said. Navya turned around showing her back to the viewing window on the airlock. Alice was moving fast toward the airlock and hadn’t left herself enough room to slow down. Slamming into the wall next to the door, Alice finally stopped and squinted through the viewing window hoping to find a tear in Navya’s suit.

  “There, I see it! It’s on your lower back, left side,” Alice said.

  “Where? Here?” Navya said as she awkwardly pointed with her left hand at where she was guessing the tear would be.

  “A little higher. No, more to the left now. Yes, right there,” Alice answered as Navya moved her hand to different spots on her back. With her other hand, Navya reached down and opened a small pocket on her right thigh. She reached in but didn’t pull anything out.

  “Of all the times for my hand to act up,” Navya pulled her hand up and waved it around then reached back down into the pocket and pulled out a bright yellow roll of tape. She then ripped off a patch of tape and transferred the tape to her other hand. She tried to roll the tape over the tear, but several times the tape rolled up on itself and Navya had to unstick the tape from itself before trying again. Finally she got it placed where she thought the tear was.

  “I think I’ve got it,” Navya said. “The pressure isn’t leaking as fast.”

  “You’ve got it partially sealed, but that might be good enough,” Alice said. “We need to get you out of that room. Why hasn’t the Habitat’s automatic fire suppression systems activated and doused the Nomad?”

  Another, different alarm sounded over the speakers:

  *Warning. Code Black*

  The lights in the Habitat turned off. Alice and Navya’s suit immediately detected the low light and automatically turned on the Laser-Diode lights (LD) on their helmets.

  A bright light suddenly lit up the hangar and another tremor shook them. Navya turned and looked at the Nomad. Another engine had exploded and several more flames had erupted.

  The pitch black hallway was replaced by red Emergency lights. Navya looked back at Alice, then back and the Nomad. Then, Navya began to head straight toward the Nomad.

  “Navya! What are you doing! You need to get away from there!” Alice shouted into her microphone.

  “If I can get in the Nomad I might be able to manually activate the fire suppression systems for the engines.” Navya was hopping toward the flaming Nomad as she spoke. Just as Navya was about to round the side of the Nomad another engine exploded.

  “Navya!” Alice shouted. Alice watched as Navya’s body flew across the room, slammed against the wall and slid down to the floor. There was one large piece of metal sticking out of Navya’s suit.

  “That’s not good, either,” Navya said. “My suit says I’ve got only twenty minutes before I run out of air and then bleed out. It won’t let me move.”

  Alice ran over to a wall that had an emergency hatchet built into it. She grabbed the hatchet, hopped back to the airlock and swung the hatchet as hard as she could at the small viewing window. The window had been designed to withstand the pressures and environments of space. When the hatchet hit the window, it simply bounced off, not even leaving a scratch. Again and again Alice swung the hatchet at the window but was getting no results.

  “I can’t get into the hangar. I’m not sure what to do in a situation like this!” Alice shouted.

  “Look it up on the computer,” Navya said.

  Alice dropped the hatchet and ran to the nearest computer. She knew looking through the thousands of different checklists for emergencies wouldn’t be fast enough so she filtered the results until she found what she was looking for:

  *Main Accesses to Hangar Obstructed*

  She opened the folder and began to quickly read through it. The checklist included doing a surface walk to get to the hangar from the outside. There were warnings and hazards of being on a surface walk, but she skipped through all of these. She could use the emergency exit pressurization chamber located near the surface. It also required opening the hangar remotely, so it could depressurize while the surface walk was taking place. Alice followed the instructions and pulled up the remote systems apps for the Habitat and had the hangar begin to depressurize. As she made her way to the exit, another loud sound erupted, followed by a deep tremor which shook the room. The red emergency lights flickered.

  “Navya? You still with me?” Alice asked.

  “Yeah, but not for long. Ten minutes left,” Navya replied.

  Alice had made her way to the surface emergency exit room and pressed the button to depressurize the room and let her out. As the outer doors began to open the red lights flickered again and then finally turned black. The Habitat was now without power and the doors were only left partially open. Alice squeezed through the small opening, hopped outside to the surface and began to make her way to the outside entrance of the hangar. The lights on her helmet detected the light from the surface and turned off. After only a few steps, her suit gave a warning.

  *Excess Radiation Detected. Return to Safety Immediately*

  Alice stopped. She looked forward toward the hangar and then back to the door she had just left. The hangar was far enough away that if she kept moving forward the radiation would probably do permanent damage and kill her. If she turned around right now, though, she might be able to make it back and stay alive. She made a decision and hopped forward as quickly as she could to get to the hangar.

  “Alice, that’s it. I’m dead,” Navya said.

  Alice’s helmet was issuing more and more warnings about radiation until finally everything paused and faded to black. Large letters filled their views:

  Simulation Complete.

  Alice reached up, pulled down her visor and looked over at Navya. Alice was breathing hard and was sweating. She reached down, released the strap around her waist and stepped out of the treadmill.

  “You really work up a sweat doing those Virtual Reality Emergency Drills sometimes,” Navya said as she also took off her goggles.

  “As if something like that could ever happen,” Alice said angrily. “There was no way that many things could go wrong at once. We had no chance of fixing everything!”

  “That’s why we train,” Navya replied.

  ----------

  Sonya, like most of the crew, was shorter than average and had been teased about her height as a young person. Perhaps to prove herself, she was rather stubborn and always pushed herself as she worked. The lure of an amazing discovery on Europa and getting credit back home on Earth was a big motivator for her on this mission and she pursued her duties with amazing focus and dedication. Attention to detail was one of her strengths. After meticulously studying the data taken directly from the Nomad, Sonya had found what seemed to be an outlier.

  The oddity she noticed was a reading from a device on the Nomad. The device had recorded a value that shouldn’t have been possible. The measurement wasn’t very big and could have been the instrument giving an erroneous reading based on an incorrect calibration. Normally, she might have ignored it. However, she had been the one to calibrate this particular instrument and she knew the device was working perfectly when it went out.

  Thinking that the device might have been damaged in the earthquake, she had asked Felix about it. In as few words as he could muster, he had said all the instruments were fine despite their arduous last journey. She had him open the compartment so she could check it herself. After a test, she concluded it
was still calibrated perfectly, exactly as it had been the previous time she worked on it.

  She might have ignored it but something told her to keep digging. Finally, she looked at the data from the satellite. When she had sent the commands to image the surface to find the Nomad, she had also ordered the satellite to take measurements of the area. At first glance, the data from the satellite seemed to show nothing. But looking very closely, Sonya noted that there was a small ‘blip’ in the graph of the data. She overlaid the graph from the Nomad recordings on top of the data from the satellite. It looked like it could be consistent with the Nomad’s data, only showing a much smaller reading. The signal strength the satellite measured was low. Yet, if it was to be believed, it also indicated that the signal must have originated from deep below the ice-crust, perhaps on the ocean floor. Again, if the readings were to be believed, there was a very tightly concentrated emission that had not been previously identified coming from the bottom of the ocean floor.

  Next, Sonya checked the same device built into the Habitat to compare it to the devices in the Nomad and the satellite. The Habitat’s version was larger and might be able to pick up the signal as well. However, it measured no such signal.

  The Nomad, she reasoned to herself, was at least eighty miles away from the Habitat when it took these readings. Not only that but if this is accurate, the source of the signal is very deep. The water from the ocean would absorb most of the emission before it reached the surface. Now that I’m trying to get the same reading from the Habitat, it’s not likely at all that I would get a reading. Unless... Sonya had an idea and decided to perform a little modification to the instrument in the Nomad.

  Felix was working under the Nomad on one of the Nomad’s wheels. When he rolled out from under the vehicle to grab a tool, Sonya was standing directly above him, startling him and making him jump reflexively.

  “Felix! I need your help with something!” Sonya loudly stated.

  Felix composed himself and sat on his garage roller as he listened to what she had to say. Sonya tended to talk to Felix personally instead of calling him on his wristband. He was never quite sure why she did that.

  “I’d like to take this device,” Sonya said, pointing at the detector on the Nomad, “and put it in Big Bertha.” Big Bertha was the nickname for the large underwater drone, the Unmanned Tethered Underwater Vehicle.

  “Yeah, yeah, sure,” Felix replied. He specifically didn’t ask her why she wanted it done, as he knew that Sonya would tell him in a moment.

  “I think,” Sonya continued, “that I can extend the range of the measurements if we can move it closer to where I want. But I’m not sure that will work. Maybe you could come up with an idea?”

  Felix didn’t understand what she was talking about and wanted to continue working on the Nomad since he was getting close to completing his repairs, but he begrudgingly went along and decided to do as she requested. He thought it wouldn’t take too long. The device Sonya wanted to use was rather small, and he was very familiar with how Big Bertha was built and operated.

  Although Sonya’s idea was sound, Sonya was right: her plan wouldn’t work. Placing the detector on the drone wasn’t a particularly daunting task, but the distance to the signal was very far, and there was little chance Big Bertha could travel as far as Sonya wanted and still detect the signal she was hoping to see. So, Felix came up with a new plan. Normally, a transceiver was lowered into the water. This allowed the crew to control a smaller, untethered drone, Little Missy, and know its location precisely, much like GPS. Rather than lowering the transceiver into the water, Felix placed it in Big Bertha instead.

  The Deep Remote Underwater Drone, Little Missy, could help. While Big Bertha was tethered to the Habitat by a long cable, Little Missy was entirely remotely operated and had no such tether. The idea was rather simple: by placing a transceiver in Big Bertha and piloting it to its maximum distance, they could then release Little Missy and increase the range of Little Missy by at least the same amount. Even with this idea, it was a bit of a stretch; Little Missy might still not be able to travel far enough to get the reading that Sonya wanted. However, it was within the range of possibility, and it was their best shot.

  The process of lowering the underwater drones into the water wasn’t as simple as dropping them down a large hole. A very large concern was to make sure that the ocean under the crust would not be contaminated by anything from Earth. The docking bay had a very elaborate and important component: a complete decontamination chamber for the underwater drones. The Decon Chamber sat in the center of the room and was the size of a Sprinter van. Decontamination of the underwater drones was a slow process, but necessary to ensure that they didn’t accidentally contaminate an alien ocean. It also prevented contamination in the other direction. If there was life in Europa, it could just as easily be dangerous to humans.

  Felix had raised the underwater drones from the ocean, let them decontaminate, and could now work on them. Felix fitted Big Bertha with a transceiver and then fitted Little Missy with the device from the Nomad as per the original plan. Next, they would need to send both drones out into the ocean. To do this, they would need Kato.

  Kato had just finished his workout when his wristband beeped. He looked at the LCD built into it to see that Sonya was calling.

  Whenever Sonya called him it usually meant that she wanted something. Usually, that meant she wanted something as soon as possible, too.

  He pushed the ‘accept call’ button on his wristband.

  ”Kato!” Sonya’s voice emitted from Kato’s earpiece. “We need you over in the docking bay right away! You’re not doing anything important, are you?” Kato had finished his regular check-ups so he had some time to help.

  “Yes ma’am, I’ll be over in fifteen minutes,” Kato replied.

  “Well, hurry up! We’ve got something interesting going on here!” Sonya spoke back and then hung up.

  Kato left the workout room and hopped down the hallways, past the medbay, and made his way to the shower area. After spending many years in the Seeker to get to Europa and having to conserve every single thing they used while on the ship, it was a luxury to have such abundant water that the crew could take regular - and even full-body - showers.

  After a quick shower, Kato made his way to the docking bay. The docking bay was a relatively small room at the bottom of the Habitat that had first housed the thermal drill when they initially arrived. After drilling the hole, the drill had been removed and stored offsite. Meanwhile, the underwater drones had been sent down the newly drilled hole to explore the ocean under the crust.

  When Kato arrived in the docking bay, he saw Sonya waiting for him. Her arms were crossed impatiently. He also noticed two green lights on the console next to the piloting chair, indicating that both drones were in the water ready to be controlled.

  “Kato! Good to see you! I’ve been waiting for you! I need you to pilot these drones!” Sonya spoke very quickly, which meant she was excited about what she was doing. It wasn’t the first time she had excitedly called in Kato to control the drones.

  Kato sat in the chair and did a quick check to make sure both drones were giving optimal readings. He noticed that Big Bertha and Little Missy were side-by-side in the water.

  “Looks like you have both drones ready to go? And where exactly are we going? To the vents again?” Kato asked.

  “No! This time we’re going here.” Sonya pulled up her tablet and pointed her finger at the screen. It was a section on the seafloor that was several hundred miles away. Kato knew there was no way they could reach that distance.

  Just before he could protest, Sonya spoke, “I know it’s too far to go, I’m just trying to get a reading off of Little Missy. I need you to pilot it as far as you can to do that!”

  Sonya also explained how Felix helped her increase the range of Little Missy by using the two drones in tandem.

  Kato understood immediately what the idea was, and began to pilot the drones. One
of the many great things about the drones was their pre-programmed routines. Kato commanded Little Missy to stay ten feet directly behind Big Bertha while he piloted Big Bertha.

  Although it had been initially very exciting to pilot drones in an alien ocean, one thing was certain: it was a very large ocean and it was mostly empty. As the drones traveled, the only indications that they were moving were small ice particles in the water that moved past the camera.

  Eventually, though, Big Bertha hit her limit. The cable reached its full extension of thirty-five miles. Then, Kato gave the command for Big Bertha to remain stationary and switched over to Little Missy.

  Kato, now in control of Little Missy, directed it to travel farther from the Habitat than it had done so before now. The plan was working perfectly and Kato had to admit it was a brilliant idea.

  As he neared the location Sonya was interested in, he began to see some interference in the video feed. This wasn’t too alarming, as he was used to piloting based on only instrument readings. He knew the speed, depth, and many other useful pieces of information just from the gauges on his console.

  “We need to go farther, Kato. We need to get as close as we can. No, go this way,” Sonya said into Kato’s ear. Although Sonya knew the general direction to go, she didn’t know the specific location they would end up at. She was mostly guessing at this point.

  Kato pushed the drone farther. Faster than he anticipated, he began to lose connection with the drone. This surprised him, as he knew that he wasn’t at the maximum distance for Little Missy. The interference on his video screen showed as static, and it became worse very quickly. He immediately commanded the drone to reverse. The drone obeyed. Slowly the interference faded from the video feed. After a few minutes, he had a good, solid connection again.

  “Kato! You could have gone farther!” Sonya said, obviously upset. “It’ll just have to do!”

  Although annoyed at potentially losing Little Missy in an alien ocean, Kato didn’t say anything and instead commanded both drones to return to the docking bay.