The next stage of the process was a particularly dangerous one. Being deep underground to avoid the deadly effects of radiation, they now had to transport the precious cargo up onto the surface and back to the Habitat. This meant taking time to load the sample into the Nomad while on the surface. Unloading was always easier and faster, but loading would take longer. The three people had to limit their time on the surface as much as possible.
Once the elevator reached its destination, the doors opened, revealing the hangar that stored the Nomad. As Alice and Sonya pushed the cart to load it into the cargo rack of the Nomad, Felix lifted himself to the top of the Nomad to detach and operate the crane. The crane swung out and four retractable straps became accessible.
“You get that side, I’ll get this side,” Sonya instructed Alice as she awkwardly maneuvered around to the other side of the cart. As if the regular suits weren’t difficult enough to work in, they now had to deal with the POWER modifications, making every action that required precision harder to perform, not to mention time-consuming.
Despite the limitations of the suit, Alice quickly placed the carabiners on her two straps onto the cart.
Sonya, on the other hand, always had a difficult time doing work fully suited up and was having trouble hooking her second carabiner into the cart. “You know,” Sonya began, “if there’s one thing that I won’t miss when we get back, it’s being in these stupid suits.”
“Hey, these ‘stupid suits’ are saving our lives right now,” Alice responded.
“Yeah, yeah yeah,” Sonya said as she continued to try and place the carabiner. “I didn’t study physics just to get a stupid hook into a… ah finally!” The hook found its spot and snapped in place.
Giving the straps one last check on her side, Alice nodded her head with approval and looked at Felix, saying “Alright Felix, everything looks good here.”
Felix pressed the button. The straps went taught and the cart began to rise off the floor. As the cart rose about halfway, one of the straps on Sonya’s side popped off, tilting the entire cart precariously to one side. Sonya moved quickly to the cart and placed herself under it with her arms up in an attempt to help right it. Felix instinctively let go of the button, stopping the cart from moving anymore.
“Alice, get over here and help me! We can’t let anything happen to the sample!” Sonya’s voice crackled over the radio. Alice had already hopped over to the Nomad, grabbed the rungs on the ladder, and pulled herself up the ladder into position next to the cart.
Alice grabbed the swinging strap and said, “Alright Felix, lower the cart a little bit. Sonya, keep your arms up just like that.” Felix began lowering the cart while Sonya kept her hands up. As the cart lowered, it began leveling out. Felix immediately saw what the plan was. Just as the cart leveled out, Felix stopped the descent and Alice quickly replaced the carabiner in the hook on the cart. Then, Felix began lifting the cart again.
Felix twisted his body around so he was facing Sonya and gave her a disappointed look for the second time in a few days. It wasn’t likely that Sonya could see the look through both her visor and Felix’s visor, but Felix’s body language still somehow conveyed disappointment.
At this point, Felix had put thousands of hours of work into caring for the Nomad. It was his baby, and the work he put into it always showed. Whenever the Nomad came back from a mission, no matter how short or how long, he made sure to go through every part, repair and replace any broken equipment, as well as modify it if necessary. He even cleaned the Nomad so well you could see your reflection on the side panels. At least you could see your reflection before it went out on a mission and came back covered in particles of dirty ice.
This time no straps popped off as Felix lifted the cart, moved it into position, and locked it in place. With the sample set, it was time to leave. All three people got down on the ground. While Felix and Alice did a walk-around of the Nomad to make sure nothing was wrong, Sonya went to open the hangar doors. With the initial checks done and the doors open, the three people stepped out of the hangar for a moment and onto Europa’s surface. All three couldn’t help but look upward at the sky.
The radio sprang to life again. “Look at that. To think that we were the first people to see this in person. It’s hard to believe,” Sonya said.
“Yeah,” Alice replied, “It really is something else.”
Felix, always the quiet one, didn’t say anything.
Above them sat Jupiter, twenty-four times larger than the Moon appears in the sky on Earth. Its atmosphere, made up of bands of gas roaring past each other at hundreds of miles per hour, was a sight to behold. Although typically white and orange with splashes of red, there was one feature that always stuck out to the astronauts, and that was the Great Red Spot: the largest storm in the solar system. The three astronauts had front row seats to its majesty, as the Great Red Spot regularly came into view from their home base.
The scenery around the astronauts was an entirely icy and mostly flat world. The surface was covered in large blue and rust-colored ridges and cracks made of ice. As the centuries passed they grew and shrunk while the gravity-induced tidal forces of Jupiter pulled on the moon. Rocks made of ice littered the terrain, making the otherwise smooth surface appear rigid and bumpy.
As beautiful as it was, it was also dangerous. The three astronauts knew that they couldn’t linger.
Once again Sonya spoke into her microphone. “Okay, let’s get this back to base. I know I’m dying to get my hands on this sample in the lab.”
Despite the temptation to stay and keep gazing, they hopped back to the Nomad and pulled themselves into the pressurizing chamber. After removing their POWER modifications and sitting in their typical spots, they could begin the trek back to the Habitat. Felix took the captain’s chair and began going over his checklist.
Driving was always a slow process. Very little of what anyone did on Europa was fast. Typically, hopping, rather than walking, was the most efficient way of getting around, as the gravity was only 13% that of Earth’s. Surprisingly, one could gain quite a bit of speed by adding extra momentum into each hop. However, there was always the chance that something could go wrong, and that tended to happen whenever something was moving quickly. So slow and steady was the mindset of everything constructed for the mission.
The engines hummed to life and Felix rolled the Nomad out of the hangar. At a safe and blistering speed of eight mph, it would take at least twenty hours to get back to the home base.
For the next twenty hours, the vehicle hummed along until it was within visual distance of the Habitat. As usual, they shared driving duties.
The trio finally arrived back at the habitat, entered the hangar and waited patiently as the hangar descended and went through its normal pressurization procedure.
Hopping out the back of the Nomad Felix grabbed the crane’s controls and lowered the sample cylinder. As it lowered onto the cart, Sonya and Alice took the carabiners and unhooked the straps. They began to wheel the sample to the lab. Felix stayed behind to tend to the Nomad.
Before they could look at the sample, they needed to run preliminary tests on the case that held the sample. Once Sonya and Alice descended into the habitat, they went directly to the labs.
There were two labs in the Habitat, biosafety level one (BSL1), and biosafety level four (BSL4). In BSL1, samples could be researched with basic instruments and little to no extra protection for humans. By the time one got to BSL4, one needed to wear an enclosed, positively pressurized protective (P3) bodysuit and the room itself had to be negatively pressurized. The risk of contamination to and from extraterrestrial life was worth the trouble of having the only extraterrestrial biosafety lab in existence.
The sample they gathered had come from a very radioactive source and could potentially harbor life. Luckily, it was contained in the well-shielded cylinder. However, to do any research on the sample, it would have to be done in the safest part of the Habitat: the lab in BSL4.
Navya joined Alice and Sonya as they made their way to the labs. They carted the sample through the Habitat and into the research lab and moved it from BSL1 toward BSL4, going through a special decontamination room that cleaned them after donning the P3 outfits until they finally arrived in the last room: BSL4. Everyone else in the base watched from monitors from the safety of another room, curious to see what could be in the sample. As they entered the room, Navya pressed a button on her suit which activated a recording. Everything from here on out would be carefully recorded for future use.
Alice slid the cylinder into a special chamber, and let the mechanism lock it in its place. Now that it was ready, it was time to scan the interior. The computer ran lasers across the sample, taking readings and creating a 3D virtual recreation of the interior.
The scan didn’t take long, but it would take a while for the computer to digest everything and give back a usable model one could view on a monitor.
“Come on, come on! Let’s see what we’ve got here,” Alice said.
It wasn’t safe to simply open the sample and expose it to the air - radiation being the main concern - so now the cameras in the cylinder turned on for everyone to see. At first, there was nothing to see. There had been dirt and sediment which had been disturbed like a snow-globe and swirled around, blocking the view. Soon everything settled and the camera could clearly see what was inside.
EIGHT
Domino Effect
The monitor showed them something that no one expected.
“My God! Are those… bones?” Alice was so surprised she was barely able to speak. It didn’t make much sense. Until now, they had only seen the most basic of life forms. This was something else entirely.
“Look at these,” Sonya said as she tapped on the monitor with her gloved finger to a series of small round objects that were littered around the bones. “According to the readings, these rocks are giving off radiation. They must be the source.”
Everyone studied what was on the monitor. If what they were seeing was what it appeared to be, this was going to be one of the most significant discoveries ever made. Not only was there life on Europa, but it was complex!
“We need to take a closer look at these,” Navya said out loud, mostly to herself. But being in a full bodysuit with a microphone attached, everyone heard.
“We’ll need to remove those rocks before we can take a look at them,” Sonya said in response.
Although no one could see it through her plastic helmet, Alice nodded and made her way to the joysticks on the left of the chamber. The chamber was about the size of a large oven and had two sub-chambers: one to scan and recreate a 3D model of the sample, and another to perform experiments on the sample. Each chamber was separated by a wall with a transfer door between. Using robotic arms built into the first chamber, Alice picked up each small rock and placed them all in the transfer door to the other chamber. The rocks were then placed in a transfer container. After placing all five of the small rocks in the container, she used the arm to close it and pushed it to the right side of the second chamber where Sonya could physically remove the container and move the rocks to the opposite side of the lab for analysis.
Sonya’s hands were already waiting for the decontaminated container to pop out of the chamber. The moment she could, she pulled it out. Trying to be careful, Sonya navigated around Navya, carried the container to her workstation and began to examine the rocks with various instruments.
Alice and Navya, meanwhile, began to take photos of the ‘bone’ fragments, in situ. Alice used the robot arms to gently place a measuring stick next to each piece and then moved the camera over to the lower-left corner and snapped a photo of the first entire piece of bone. Navya saved the name of the photo as B1, short for Bone 1. Several more photos snapped as Alice took pictures at different angles. Navya helped by telling Alice exactly which angles the pictures needed to be taken at.
Quadrant by quadrant the camera moved, taking photos of each piece of bone while Navya named them. Almost all of the pieces were broken, perhaps due to their recent disturbance from the ocean floor, and many more photos had to be taken of each broken piece. By taking the time to measure and photograph each piece in detail someone later looking at only the pictures could exactly recreate what sat in the container. All in all, there were eighteen pieces and six of those had been broken into smaller pieces.
Of the eighteen pieces, ten of them were small. Seven of the pieces were slightly larger and longer than the smallest pieces, but not by much. The pieces were small enough that it was difficult to know how they could have fit together. The last piece, however, was the largest. Like the other pieces, it was in poor condition, but its size differentiated it from the other pieces quite clearly. As Alice recorded the pictures she thought that the large piece looked like a hollowed-out bowl. Maybe this was where a brain would have been located?
As the photographs continued, Kato and Felix went back to their regular routines. The initial excitement was still with them all, but there was work to be done, and watching Alice and Navya take thousands of photos over the next several hours offered little excitement. They would wait for the report.
Sonya eventually finished her initial study of the rocks and came over to Alice and Navya. In her restrictive P3, she clumsily unhooked her hose and made her way around the island in the middle of the room next to both Alice and Navya, reconnecting another hose nearby.
“You know, we could be using that soon,” Sonya said, pointing at the island she had walked around. The island in the center of the room contained a small operating table where cameras and lights could be focused. It was the main location for researching any sort of specimen. So far, only microorganisms had been found, which meant the center island had not been used for its admittedly hopeful purpose.
Navya looked at where Sonya was pointing and responded, “I knew it was a dream to hope that I would be dissecting any living creature on Europa, but if we can get an actual specimen...” She trailed off lost in thought for a moment, then looked at Sonya and asked, “What did you learn about those rocks?”
“This is interesting,” Sonya said as she stepped even closer to Navya. “These rocks are largely uranium and are mostly made of radium. Specifically, RA-226, which has a half-life of 1600 years. Based on the decay, I’d say these rocks are at least 1000 years old. I won’t know more until I run a full scan, though. What’s odd is that the rocks are so smooth. That’s not how uranium naturally occurs.”
“So these bones might have been sitting there for a thousand years?” Alice said and thought for a moment. “Evolutionarily that’s not a particularly long time. I’m surprised we’re seeing something so complex and yet we haven’t seen anything like this before.”
Sonya stood there eyeing the bones on the monitor. All of them continued to work on the photographs without saying anything for quite some time.
Finally, Navya broke the silence, saying “Whatever this is, I bet that the radiation is what killed it. It might have gone into that cave, got lost, ran into these rocks, and died.”
“I was thinking the same thing,” Alice responded. “The entrance to the cave might have been sealed by an earthquake, just like it was opened by the most recent one, which is why it sat there undisturbed for so long. I can’t believe how lucky we are to have gathered these bones on our first scoop.”
All three women worked closely together with the bones. It wasn’t hard to stay close to each other as the room they worked in was small: twenty feet in width by twenty feet in length by eight feet in height. There were six hoses in the room: one in each corner and two near the center. The hoses connected to their P3s provided a steady supply of fresh oxygen and electricity. This eliminated the need for the suits to be fully self-contained, allowing for more mobility. This also allowed for anyone to be in the room for an indefinite amount of time doing research, although, considering how restricted one was in any bodysuit - making even the simplest of tasks like grabbing an object d
ifficult - typically, no one wanted to stay any longer than they had to.
Alice, Navya, and Sonya had many hours of preparation and research to do. The next report sent out to the Seeker would be groundbreaking. Hours passed as the photos were taken and finally complete.
“Alright, the photos are done. Could you get me the forceps attachment from the closet? Some of these bones are more brittle than I thought they might be,” Alice asked Sonya.
“Sure thing,” Sonya responded. The robot arms in the chamber had many different attachments. Alice was asking for an attachment that would allow incredibly small, precise, and therefore gentle, ‘pinchers’ that could apply just enough force to lift an object, but not too much that it would break it. Sonya moved to what was colloquially called the closet.
Each wall had counters with numerous pieces of equipment built directly into the wall. Many chemicals and miscellaneous equipment were stored in the closet and it was essential that the chemicals in particular stay dry and at a constant temperature. Thus, the room had its own air conditioning system and was sealed by a relatively heavy door. There was no exit from BSL4 other than a return through the decontamination area. It was one of the few rooms in the Habitat that had only one means of ingress/egress.
Sonya grabbed the forceps attachment, making a note on a sign-in sheet that she was removing it at that exact time and date, and returned. She handed it to Navya who handed it to Alice.
“Thank you,” Alice said as she placed and fit the new attachment in the chamber’s robot arm. She then began the process of moving the bones from the photo chamber to the inspection chamber. It was time to assemble the bones in a manner that looked anatomically correct.
Sonya looked at the readings in the chamber as the bones were being moved.
“How strange,” Sonya said. “These bones aren’t radioactive anymore. Normally, radiation permeates and stays with anything it touches for a very long time.”
Europa Contagion Page 10