Europa (Deadverse Book 1) (13 page)

- Emir –

It was at least forty-two degrees in the room, but Emir woke up covered in sweat. He was breathing rapidly, seeing specs of black and white swimming in his vision. There was a dim light on in his room, coming from his tablet. It was linked to him, and had awoken him. Looking at it, Emir saw the sleep patterns all over the chart for the past hour.

It had only been an hour.

Sweat continued to pour cold down his forehead and onto the covers. He watched every single one drop in slow motion. He tossed the covers aside and set a wet foot down on the ice floor. He put the second foot down and stood up quickly, but was held fast to the floor by the frozen sweat on his feet. He tore his foot painfully off of the floor and began walking to the bathroom, leaving behind frozen footsteps on the floor.

The light in the bathrooms used to turn on automatically, but everything had been turned off to save energy, so he fumbled a bit in the dark before going back for the tablet and using its glow to find the switch. The dim blue LED lights came to life suddenly, making him blink and rub his eyes. He reached into the shower and turned it on. Within a few seconds, steam began to fill the bathroom. Even with no power, there was always hot water, piped from the reactor coolants right into the base.

A shower on Europa was a rare luxury. Not that taking one was rare, because hot water was always there. No, a shower on a low gravity object was unlike anything experienced on Earth. The shower stall was sealed tight, and the water shot out of the shower head and actually bounced around the stall as it slowly worked its way towards the drain at the bottom. There, the drain actually had to suck the water down into it, or the stall would fill up. Steam and water hit you from all angles and sides. It was truly relaxing. Emir needed to relax now.

Fog filled the mirror and Emir wiped it away, catching a glimpse of his red eyes.

“What is wrong?”

He had seen the images, wires, conduits, paths of energy, data. He knew what they were, and at the same time, understood none of it. The alien ship had done something to him, and he was beginning to panic. He hadn’t slept in two nights now. Every time he closed his eyes, the images flooded his brain. It was driving him insane, and he didn’t know what to do. He could ask Gary for sleeping pills, but then he’d be scheduled for a talk with Horace.

Of course, the shrink was still out of commission.

Still, the good doctor would probably try to talk him up instead. The doctor and his harem. There were barely enough women for the men on the cold moon and he got two of them. Not that it mattered.

He only wanted one woman.

He rubbed his eyes again and noticed blood on his fingers in the reflection in the mirror. Surprised, he looked down at his own hands. His fingernails were cracked and chipped, and dried blood was crusted into the nails. He looked them over again, wondering how he had done that. Clenching his fists, he took another deep breath and closed his eyes. Instantly, the image of the pyramid with the lines coming out of it appeared. He coughed and opened his eyes quickly.

Fog had covered the mirror again, but instead of wiping it clean, Emir began tracing the image from his mind onto it. He stood back and watched as the image faded away slowly.

“What is it?”

He took off his clothes and stepped into the shower. Hot water washed away the chilled sweat and he felt instant relief and his mind cleared. The alien images were replaced by the image of the short redhead with the large breasts. It was his image of relief, but in another moment, that vision vanished in the steam. There, among the vapor, another image took shape. It was of a small orb, floating in darkness. Behind it, a thousand copies of the orb seemed to trail off into infinity. For that brief moment, the image of the orb was even more relaxing.

Outside of the bathroom, in the dimness of his tablet’s light, strange diagrams were carved out into the ice wall, with traces of red frozen in.

- Cary –

As she slipped the last thermal sock over her feet, Cary looked over at the sleeping forms of Susan and Gary. They had taken to sleeping in the green dome, tucked away in a corner, hidden behind a veritable wall of green tomatoes that towered nearly eight feet high. They had never really shared a bed all three of them in the past, but since the quake and their reunion, and, of course, their impending deaths, they had all three agreed to forgo that rule. Nothing had happened any of the nights, as by the time they got to bed, they were all exhausted, but just the feeling of the three of them, together in bed, was very comforting. No one else on base had ever really understood what was happening with them, and for the most part, she didn’t either, but no one said a thing.

It was about five AM EST by her clock, and she had work to do. She slipped on her boots and began to work on fitting her exterior work suit on. Cary stood up, fit the helmet over her head and onto the slips on her suit, and turned the lock. She turned the air controls on her tablet and watched as air cycled through her suit. The tablet read a perfect seal and she turned to walk towards the hatch. She turned and gave her lovers one last look. They would be able to sleep for a few more hours. Cary could have as well, but she really wanted to get a head start on the repairs for the day.

The past two days had actually seen quite a bit of progress as everyone worked fourteen hours or more each day on the repairs. They had managed to get three fully sustained domes, cycling all of the air through the green dome and one set of CO2 scrubbers under the central dome. A breathable atmosphere was not an issue any more, and there was plenty of it just under their feet. It just had to be thawed and broken down from the water.

Susan had even managed to get the levels set to where the CO2 was at the safest highest parts. It was her intent to use as much CO2 as possible to boost the plant growth in the green dome. It was impossible to tell just how much that worked in the two days since, but she was confident that they would get their food sooner than later because of it. Of course, if anything went wrong with the plants, or the scrubbers, they’d best hope it wasn’t while everyone was sleeping or they wouldn’t wake up. What made matters worse was that because of all the shifting in the ice, electrical conduits had been torn up all over the base, so nearly all of the sensors and alarms had to be rigged up again. The domes were turning into a spider web of wires, and even then, they didn’t work all the time.

Susan had gone over the numbers with her and Gary a few times over the past couple of days. Susan was an airhead, aloof and giggly, but she knew plants. She knew the chemistry and the math of plants, down to the molecules. She was supremely confident that they would have spinach, peas, beans and tomatoes, along with several varieties of soy and kale, in edible form, within thirty days. Cary had seen some of the plants, and they were barely sprouts. But Susan had the lights running nearly round the clock, and thanks to the repairs, nearly all of the electricity went to running the LED lights.

Of course, her request for a moon outhouse in the green dome had been a bit bizarre. She had insisted that no amount of biological matter be wasted, and that whenever possible, they had to use the bathroom there. All the material would be broken down by some of Susan’s super bacteria and fed right back into the plants. Cary understood the basics behind it, but found it gross nonetheles, using the bathroom over a hole in the ice. It reminded her too much of her childhood just outside of Tuscaloosa. She had grown up poor and an outhouse was a regular part of her life. It was something her hard work and brains had gotten her far from. It got her through college, engineering posts with the government and into a space mission that was the pinnacle of human history. And here she was, having to shit in a hole again. It made her laugh.

There were three buttons on the exit panel and Cary tapped the first one. Air equalized in the passage chamber and then the inner door opened up. As she stepped in, she heard a chirp over the helmet speakers and she glanced down at her tablet. It was Thomas.

“You ready for this?” she asked. She proceeded into the passage chamber and tapped the second button. The inner door sealed shut with a hiss.

“I guess there won’t be any sleeping in and brunch today,” Thomas replied over the comm.

The second light turned green and Cary tapped the third button. The air was then pumped out of the passage chamber and even in her thermal suit, built especially for a human being to survive the absolute cold harshness of the surface of Europa for several hours easily, Cary felt the cold seeping in already. The suit would keep you alive, just not comfortably.

“What? No omelets and steaks for us today?” Cary asked. The final light turned green and the outer door moved away from the dome’s hull and rolled away to the side. The bleak, gray towers of ice were scattered with shadows, provided graciously by the gas giant behind them. She stepped out and looked around for the rover.

“Eggs? Speaking of which, is Susan going through with the egg thawing today? Is that really going to work?” Thomas asked. Cary could almost hear him salivating over the comm.

“She found the crates with the experiment last night and is going to crack em open today. She has to find all the database entries and parameters for the experiment,” Cary explained. “It’s kinda creepy, really. They had to somehow put these eggs on some kind of prolonged incubation, stasis something or other. Once she gets everything hooked up, she has to, um, revive them. Yeah, zombie chickens. Can’t wait.”

“Oh, I’d eat fried zombie chicken right about now. Or zombie chicken scrambled eggs,” Thomas said in utter seriousness.

The rover had its wheels turned where Thomas had left them the night before in a hurry. He probably had been just as exhausted as everyone else and just wanted to get into bed as soon as possible, especially since the hours for actual sleep were limited. Cary lifted herself up and over the railing and into the driver’s seat with ease, thanks to the low gravity. With the exercise equipment gone in the ice quake, the past few days in the low gravity had left her feeling a bit week, and it had only been five days. She needed to remember to bring that up that night at the meeting, or they’d suffer from the effects after a while.

She turned the power on to the rover, and saw that it had about forty percent in the batteries still. In Thomas’ haste to leave, he hadn’t plugged it in anywhere. It didn’t matter much though, as she didn’t have far to go. Just a mile ahead, where Thomas already was, were the hydrogen tanks. The seven tanks and the pumps had been running nonstop to keep the reactor running as much as possible, but the lack in power was becoming a hindrance on repairs. Connie had suggested using the pressure tanks from the supply ships. About ten miles away was the field of debris from the supply ships. Large containers, cylindrical in shape, scattered over a three mile radius. This is where Connie would bring them down from the lunar orbit and rovers would take the supplies into base. The supply ships each had a DVMR booster and fuel, and the fuel was stored in pressure tanks. So on her initiative, they had started to cut them out and install them into the existing pipeline for the hydrogen reactor. Eight of these tanks had already been cut out and transported and now it was Cary and Thomas’ job to dig out a spot in the ice and weld them into the lines.

Welding around hydrogen. Always a dangerous proposition.

Thomas had already been out there for a while, using the plasma drill to carve small shafts in the ice where they’d put the tanks. Cary had the welding training, so she would be down in the shafts, with the ice on all sides, likely with just a few inches to spare, and the potential for an explosion. Thankfully, she knew what she was doing.

As she sped off at the lunar’s max speed of thirty miles per hour, Cary sat back into the seat of the rover and felt the push of the acceleration. It actually felt good against her muscles and joints. It was momentary, of course, as once she got up to the same speed as the rover, her body no longer felt the pressure.

The path from the base to the hydrogen reactor was a clear shot. When the base was first created, Thomas and Geoff had actually iced out a road, nice, flat and straight. They had also lined the edge of it with ice spikes that easily reflected light. To top it off, they had frozen LED lights into the ice spikes to light up the lunar highway. There were no lights on at the moment, as the power was needed for far more critical things, but the thought, nonetheless, made Cary smile for a moment. She stared at each ice spike on her left as they sped by. She had taken this path many times in the past two years as she had worked on the hydrogen reactor on many occasions. Every dip and turn of the ice cliffs to her left came into view, and she remembered every one. Oddly enough, they had not been touched by the ice quake. To her right, the expanse of ice went off into the unseen darkness of space. Jupiter, as always, was an enormous glowering giant behind her.

Then something caught her eye to her left. She glanced back over and saw what looked like a perfectly square ice carving. At first, she thought it to be the result of the ice quake. The tidal rift had ripped up ice everywhere and just thrown it about like jello. But this ice box was too perfect. As she approached it, she slowed down a bit.

“Hey, Thomas?” Cary asked into the comm.

“Yeah? You almost here?”

“When you came out,” Cary continued to slow down as she got closer to the ice box, “did you see this square ice formation out near the seven hundred mark?”

“Say again, Cary?”

Cary described the box in detail as she came to a stop. The formation was about one hundred feet off of the ice road.

“I don’t remember seeing anything,” Thomas said. “Why?”

“Give me a minute, it’s a little off putting. I’m gonna check it out.”

“Ok, I’ll just twiddle my thumbs here, waiting for you to finish your sightseeing tour.”

Cary began bouncing over towards the ice block. The closer she got, the better she could see the sharp and defined edges of the square. That set her off. If it was a natural formation of some sort, the odds were that the edges would be more rounded. Instead, they were sharp and very straight. It was almost a perfect cube. She reached it and instinctively reached out to touch it.

Smooth.

“What the hell is this?” she said.

“Is the camera in your helmet working?” Thomas asked.

Cary reached down and touched her tablet. The dull light lit up into the ice a few inches, reflecting white. There was no link to her camera.

“Nah, not working,” she said, looking back up at the ice. The light from the tablet sank into the ice and Cary turned her head just a bit in her helmet. There was something there.

“Damn it,” she cursed. The flashlight was back at the rover, so she bounced her way back, reached into her toolkit and took out the helmet light, and bounced back over to the ice cube.

“You coming yet?” Thomas’ voice squawked over the comm.

“Hold on.”

With her hand placed on the ice, she pressed the light up against the ice and turned it on. It was a powerful light, and it shone deep into the ice. Cary jumped and nearly dropped the light, but held it fast. Inside of the cube of ice were some of the drone soldiers. They were lined up straight, and set up into a pyramid, with four lying to form the base, and for more angled up to form the top. Four more soldiers, all stripped of their mech suits except for their boots and some of the attached gear on their chests, and all laid out at an angle downwards from each corner of the pyramid.

“Jesus, Thomas. Shit.”

“What is it?” Thomas asked.

“Get in your rover and come here now,” Cary said, stepping back away from the edge of the ice. The light dimmed away, but the image of the frozen men remained in her head. “Come now!”