“Reese, we’ve got a spot for you over there,” Hanson told her as she snapped out of her gaze. He pointed to the work area near Mara’s research desk.
Reese looked to where his finger had pointed. The entire operations console was set up for them and ready for use. She had an array of tools and diagnostics at her console. Transmitters, video readouts, and other instruments were all present. A headset for each of the scientists was sitting on the counter. Each was complete with a three-dimensional heads-up display, and motion sensors that would move the camera wherever the host wanted by reacting to the wearer’s head movements. There were three workspaces, an additional one placed beside Mara and Reese for the mission geologist Julian, who would be needed when the sub reached below the ice and to the seafloor.
“How we looking, Reese?” Mara called to her as she looked over the instrument panel.
“All systems are checking out. Headsets appear to be working. We’re recording video, feeds to the Hab are good, relays up, diagnostics all positive; everything’s fine,” she said. “Hell, better than fine.” She felt a smile flash across her face.
“Hanson, how’s your team?” Mara called.
“We’re good. We’ll be ready when you are.”
“Did you decontaminate?” she asked him.
“You mean the sterilizer? Yeah, it’s done.”
Mara kept her gaze on him looking for any signal, anything, that would indicate he had been lying to her.
“It’s decontaminated. I can show you the empty de-con barrels if you want,” he claimed.
Reese heard the conversation between the other two and she turned her focus back toward the control panels. She checked some of the settings and controls, hoping to avoid them. They seemed to stare each other down for a moment.
Then Mara finally issued the first command. “Let’s drop five-hundred and see how it goes,” she said.
With that simple order Hanson turned to his men and waved his hand in the air, pointed his finger toward the ceiling, and then rounded it about in tiny circles. Activity from the miners and their machines suddenly overtook the room.
Men were yelling at each other. They turned knobs and valves and cranked on handles, and the motors worked loudly on the crane. The sound of their activity and the machines filled the chamber with a deafening roar.
The crane dropped the submersible toward the cavity almost immediately. It was nearly a perfect fit, engineered to the miner’s standard drill size, and within seconds the submersible named EUNICE was nose to shaft.
“Hold here,” Mara shouted.
Hanson gave another hand gesture in response, confused at the sudden change in command. The crane stopped. “Check all systems again,” Mara called out.
“Again?” Reese asked. She turned to her read-outs. “Ok… video still good, systems good,” she told her. “No changes, all systems ready.”
Mara and Reese then placed their headset visors on. They showed the camera feeds from the sub on a three-dimensional display within the visor panel that was built into the headset. The images they saw from the sub’s cameras were showing the long tunnel below the sub, lit by artificial lights that tapered from white ice in the foreground into the pure darkness below them. They stared down the shaft into the unknown. The answers to all their questions would be down that dark tunnel. Exploration of the sub-surface of Europa was about to be fully underway.
Reese felt Mara hesitate for a second, taking in the moment, and then she issued the command.
“Drop it,” she shouted, and her words elicited another hand gesture by Hanson. The sub slowly disappeared into the shaft.
“Hab One,” Mara called into her headset. “Descent of the NASA underwater submersible named EUNICE is underway.”
“Copy that, Mara,” Dr. Aman answered from his monitoring station.
The only sound in the drilling outpost was now the crane lowering the sub into the drill shaft. During the descent, the trained scientists carefully watched their visors for any sign of disturbance, glitches in the sub, and clues to the composition and condition of the ice.
Mara pointed out to Reese and Hanson how the ice was stratified just beneath the surface, having been deposited in layers. There were occasional reddish colored strata. “Those are possibly from eruptions,” she said into her headset.
Mara was so excited to be seeing the video that she was speaking out loud to herself, talking through her observations, but Reese appreciated constant commentary.
She listened as Mara explained what they were seeing. “Over time the eruptions spill water, one eruption over the other, and they create layers like this,” she said.
The strata passed by their cameras. It was twisted in places, with slight variations in color, likely indicating different chemistries and stresses at work on the ice.
She listened as Mara described even more features. She seemed to pick details out of the ice where none existed, her curiosity was driving her to look for the slightest detail or clue, and her trained eye was seeing things that would have appeared arbitrary to anyone else. Reese felt like she was being taken on a personal tour of Europa’s ice shelf as she listened to Mara describe what they were seeing. There were more strata, crevices in the ice, pockets of gases, and more. Each of them cataloged by the video and the camera feeds.
Every minute that elapsed dropped the sub meters further into the darkness, revealing nothing but more ice. It went from a white and layered appearance to a blue hue as the sub went lower, and then it became transparent. The lights began to illuminate the ice beyond the shaft as it became more and more clear. The crystalline blue colors at these depths were startlingly beautiful and captivating. They could see stress fractures and occasional trapped gases in the solid ice, but there were less and less of them as they descended.
Mara explained to them that the deeper they went the ice would become increasingly compressed. They were now seeing ice that had been squeezed into its purest state, as opposed to the white snow-like substances at the surface. A heavenly blue began to emanate from outside the sub. It reflected light toward the cameras, revealing mesmerizing prisms of bluish light. None of them had ever seen anything as pure or beautiful or pristine.
The sub continued to descend through a tube of solid ice that looked like glass. At these depths even the tiniest bubble of gas or other imperfections were giving away to the high pressures, purifying the ice into solid perfection.
“Five-hundred meters,” Reese called. She just now remembered she was supposed to be monitoring the performance of the sub and not just staring through her visor. She checked a few buttons and read-outs on her display just to make sure that everything was still good. “Everything’s working perfectly,” she told Mara, smiling. “Good job, baby,” she mumbled to herself.
“Let’s keep going to two-thousand and run another check before we splash down,” Mara said.
The sub continued. The ice crawling by the lenses of the cameras became a monotonous scroll. There was little variation at these depths, and little to study from the images. Reese noticed Mara was speaking less and less. Slowly but surely the sub was passing through ancient ice as old as the moon of Europa itself. The water-ice here had been locked in a dark and frozen tomb, forming a barrier between the universe outside and whatever oceans and creatures existed below it; a sacred barrier that was now being violated and forced to share its secrets.
“One-thousand meters”, Reese called. But there were no strange creatures to see, nothing unusual or unexpected. They were watching nothing more than a blue scroll of compressed ice sliding by the cameras at an agonizingly slow rate.
Hanson stayed near the scientists and the console the entire time, watching the monitors and keeping an eye on the situation. Reese knew that if anything were to happen to her sub and his crew needed, it was his responsibility to be appraised of the situation. She appreciated his commi
tment to stay near on the off chance anything happened to her sub.
Hours passed as they watched, and the wait was growing difficult. The excitement that Reese had felt at the day’s beginning had subsided. With nothing to see but ice scrolling by the cameras, and nothing to report, she worried that her expectations had possibly been too high. She was even starting to feel disappointed.
It felt to her as though they should have to work harder for access to the secrets beneath Europa. She was expecting something to go wrong with her sub, a price to pay for access to the mysteries below. She had prepared herself to have to fix it, contend with a malfunction here or there, or issue updated commands, but there was nothing for her to do. “This was too easy,” she heard herself thinking.
“Two-thousand meters,” she called to Mara, and Hanson gave a signal for the crane to stop lowering the cable. Both Reese and Mara stared at their screens looking for any sign that anything was wrong. They checked off on all systems. It had been a perfect drop.
The sub sat motionless in the cavity. The video monitors showed a static tube of ice before them. They stood up and stretched their limbs after the long wait.
“How much further down… before we get to the ocean?” Mara asked Hanson.
“We hit pay-day at around twenty-three hundred meters. That’s where we punched through and your little fishes showed up. We can descend further… if you want to,” Hanson said.
Mara started to respond, but Reese interrupted her. “I want to check all the systems again first,” she said. “We need to see how the sub is holding up down there. Tomorrow we can increase the speed if you want and get to the end of the drill cavity. If things look good.”
“Tomorrow?” Mara asked.
Reese leaned in her direction before responding. “Look, why don’t we run a full system check and diagnostic before we continue?” she asked sternly. “All systems appear good now, but there could be external pressures that we don’t know about, damage that we aren’t aware of. Temperatures could be getting to her too. Let me take a good long evaluation and run some further tests. We’ll look at dropping the last three-hundred meters tomorrow. Besides, one little thing goes wrong here, and you don’t get to run your cameras and sensors under that ice, right?”
Mara looked away, conceding the argument. Reese knew Mara had expected to see something wonderful at the end of the long drill shaft, and the anticipation was getting the best of her. She began hitting the buttons for the first test, and that’s when the shaking began.
It started as a low rumbling sound. Then the room heaved violently. Mechanical tools fell off the walls, data rolls slid off tables, and everyone in the drill chamber took cover next to the nearest equipment, or even under it, if they could.
The shaking grew stronger. Everyone seemed to duck in place, lowering themselves to the floor with their arms over their heads, anticipating falling debris. The machinery and the drill chamber itself came under immense stress. Equipment fell from storage shelves and walls. Lights flickered and sparks flew. Some of the lights blew out in a crash of glass and carbon fiber, and smoke filled the room. The ice beneath their very feet buckled and cracked. The rumbling and convulsions continued for nearly a minute; a long minute for those within the drill chamber.
Reese suddenly realized how scary it was to be this far away from home and experience this kind of disaster. She knew they were months away from a rescue. She gripped tight to the nearby console, hoping not to slide across the floor underneath the falling machinery.
The scientists had known the ice of Europa was not stationary. It moved and slid past each other like tectonic plates on Earth did, but it was not supposed to be this common or severe.
Then it stopped. Power had gone out, and the shaking had rendered the room dark and quiet. None of the machinery was working. They listened in the quiet for anything, any sign of trouble. There was the sound of bending and twisting metal… In the darkness there was nothing but the emergency lights that were illuminating the exits. It was a disconcerting thought that they would be forced to use them; forced to rush outside of the massive mining structure if it were to collapse onto them.
The sudden stillness carried a sense of foreboding with it. The generators, lights, machines, life support… none of them were working. A sense of life-threatening danger encapsulated the crew. They suddenly realized they may be in a severely perilous situation just being here on the surface of this moon.
Reese looked quickly around the drill chamber. She saw that Mara was also trying to gauge the situation. When their eyes met an expression of disbelief seemed to pass between them. Beyond Mara, and through the cloudy haze of electrified air, she could see the terrified faces on the miners. She was certain she looked just as frightened. Their lives were in danger.
None of them had intended to take this big a risk for this mission, and especially not the mining crew.
There was a tense minute of silence as they waited for any further sign of shaking. The occupants of the room stood in that moment as if they were carefully balanced on an edge, bracing themselves for another quake or an aftershock to strike at them. The anxiety lingered in the air until slowly they relaxed, expecting the worse to be over.
As it remained quiet the miners began to look over each other making sure their equipment was safe. They started to pick up fallen tools and check the machines, but there was an unsettling mood. Fear and tension dominated the room.
Reese was already starting to check the diagnostics on her console when Mara returned to her feet in a panic.
“EUNICE!” she yelled. “Reese! How is she? What does it say?” Mara lunged for the control panels searching for her camera feeds and her visor. “The cameras are out!” she yelled as she placed the visor quickly over her eyes.
Reese noticed the flashing light on the console indicating loss of signal from the sub. She started punching commands in as fast as she could while Mara was checking her visor.
Suddenly the fate of the entire mission rested on regaining communication with the sub. She worked as fast as she could while Mara hovered frantically over her, unable to think about anything else.
Reese considered the cable may have been cut, or the sub itself could have been crushed between massive slabs of ice. Hope seemed to be leaving them as they searched for the signal.
The flashing light indicating loss of signal continued to turn on and then off again. It was a stab to their heart every time it pulsed, but there was nothing. No signal.
Months of anticipation and then disappointment were coursing through them as they tried to work the console. Mara sighed and kicked the stand that their equipment was on, causing Reese to look up at her.
“Hold it together,” she said. “We’re going to be here a while. And don’t touch the console…”
Mara sighed.
“There was a power surge with the quake, then an outage. The whole system needs a re-boot and a diagnostic,” Reese told her.
“How long to run the checks and get the sub back?” she asked.
“You felt that quake, didn’t you? We need to see if EUNICE is even operational. I’ll need several hours. Maybe if we restore the connection we could proceed after dinner. That would be a best-case scenario, Mara. And you better check in with the Hab and see how they are doing. We could be in real trouble here…”
Mara turned to Hanson to see if there were any better news.
“Nothing good here, I’m afraid,” he said. He looked over at a twisted pile of metal where the crane had been.
A sober expression crossed Mara’s face, as if she couldn’t believe what she was seeing and hearing.
“There is some damage to the frame… motors are misaligned,” Hanson continued. “I’ll get working on it, but this won’t be easy to fix.” He bent over and began assembling his equipment again, picking up various tools from the floor that had shaken loose from a
worktable. He started placing them on a cart.
Mara threw herself into a nearby chair. The crane was essential for getting the sub into the ocean below. Now they wouldn’t be able to use it.
Reese heard Mara sighing loudly again. “Mara,” she said. “Why don’t you go check on the Hab?” She glanced over after suggesting it.
“You want me at the Hab? But, we just lost connection to the sub!”
Reese hesitated to answer her. “Someone needs to check on the Hab,” she said. “And I’m going to need some time here. There’s nothing that can be done if I don’t get a connection.”
Mara stood up angrily and then marched away from the console. As she left, she pushed her examination tray out of the way. It rolled across the floor and slammed into the pile of equipment that Hanson had begun reassembling. She continued past him, making no effort to acknowledge what she had done.
Hanson stood up near his disassembled pile of equipment as she walked by. He tried to follow her, but Mara stormed quickly out of the airlock and left the drill chamber.
Hanson was still looking at her as she walked outside. He watched her leave. He looked like he wanted to project angry words at her through the glass and doors, but he turned and walked the few steps back to the console and stood near Reese.
“What was that?” he asked. “I thought you astronauts were trained to work in high-stress situations?” he said. “Or maybe the radiation is getting to her?”
Reese turned from the console and saw how angry Hanson had become. He was breathing heavily, and he looked down at her. His eyes seemed to make a journey around the room as if to point out what Mara had left them with.
Diamond Moon Page 5