Authors: Ralph Kern
There were murmurs of ascent and some small talk about grabbing a good night’s sleep. Me? I was going to head to the nearest bar.
***
“It was her eyes…” I knew I was slurring, but then, so was Cheng. In fact, we were all pretty drunk. “They’re so intense.”
The club we had found ourselves in was on the Concorde University campus, and like student bars since time immemorial, the drinks were cheap and flowed freely. Despite Sihota’s insistence that he was going to leave after one drink, he was still out with us for what was turning into a night on the town, along with Frampton, who was engaging a young lady in what was clearly a deep and meaningful debate in the corner.
“I know. What I would give to romance her,” Cheng said as he knocked back his pint of lager.
“I would think Mrs. Cheng would have something to say about that,” Agapov said, the twinkle in his eye breaking through his normally humorless facade.
“When the cat’s away, the mouse will play. I mean, when the mouse is away and the cat’s at home…Fuck it, you know what I mean,” Cheng slurred.
“How about your kid?” I couldn’t help myself. “Won’t your family be disappointed if you go native and run off to Jupiter?”
“I’m sure they’d get over it,” Cheng said smoothly.
I took another swig of my drink. The world seemed mellow despite the pumping songs that were smashing out of the speakers. It felt like the first time I’d been able to relax, if only slightly, since I was sent to Sahelia. Who knew how long it would be before we got another opportunity to chill out.
“I tell you what, boys and girls,” I nodded at Vance and Sonia before gesturing at Frampton with my half-empty pint, “we must be in a weird alternative universe where the science geek is showing us how it’s done.”
“Don’t you be dissing my science geek,” Vance grinned. “Up here, the ladies value intellectual capacity, not you throwbacks who look like they’re about to cry when Linked up.”
“Throwback my arse, and what can I say? I’m a sensitive soul at heart,” I grumbled, leaning onto the high, round table. I swirled my pint in the glass, foaming up the head again. I had long learned that being defensive didn’t work with this kind of banter. It was far better to just roll with the punches.
“Don’t take it personally,” Vance chuckled. “Maybe one day you’ll find yourself a nice provincial girl out here somewhere. I hear the asteroid cities are always looking out for new DNA.”
“I’m sure they are, and prime DNA it is,” I said. The thought of spending my twilight years in zero gravity was not appealing to me in the slightest, nice provincial girl or not.
“Assuming, of course, that whatever we find out here doesn’t start an intersystem war.”
We all gave a theatrical drunken hush at Vance. Job talk had been banned for the night.
Vance held up her hands in mock surrender. “Just saying, is all.”
“All I’ll say is anyone who is hung over better be prepared to clean up their mess when I’m shipping you around Jupiter space,” Sihota said.
I gave a silent groan. The thought of going back into zero-g was already making me feel queasy. Either that or the booze was doing its job. I guess I just had to hope that the Sobex pills I had in my wash bag would do the job of calming things down.
My heart sank, though, when I saw Agapov head to the bar with his stated aim being to load up on shots.
***
I meandered my way down the gravel path, floating orbs of light illuminating my way. They looked so damn pretty, kind of like little floating moons—that’s right, moons. Night lay over the station. The sun strip was off, and extraneous lights were dimmed. Overhead, I could now see the stars winking through the transparent roof of the ring. No matter how hard I tried, the ability to travel in a straight line eluded me. The path probably had some kind of capability to twist and turn on its own, and some JAS agent was controlling it for kicks. I stumbled to a halt and squinted at my HUD, which was trying to guide me back to my room in one of the student accommodation blocks. It was the ultimate beer autopilot, but it relied on the person using it to be able to walk straight.
Spotting a bench, I slumped down in it. The world spun by me, both figuratively and literally since I was in a big spinning space station, which probably didn’t help matters. I leaned back and looked up. Through the clear roof, I watched the lights of spacecraft coming from and going to the central hub of the station. Concorde was a busy place.
I was feeling a little philosophical as the stars wheeled past the opposite rim. My life had certainly taken some strange twists and turns. A week ago I was in some god-awful desert, and now I was here, millions of miles away from home.
Humanity was an odd beast. We could make amazing things like Concorde and the space elevators, but the same species was just as capable of butchering a load of hospital staff and patients for little more than a few drugs and some implants for sale on the black market.
With a sigh, I hauled myself up, focusing on the little blue line that my HUD projected to lead me straight back to my block. And bed.
Fortunately, the Sobex did its job, and I wasn’t feeling too bad. In fact, Agapov looked a lot worse than me, which I found a sweet kind of justice. We had ascended the spoke elevator to the center of the station and back into zero-g. In anticipation, I’d taken a double dose of antinausea drugs to go with the Sobex, and I was feeling quite chipper.
Sihota met us in the docking bay, gripping a handle on the Icarus to support himself. The sleek-looking shuttle was my idea of what a spacecraft should look like. The cockpit and seating area in the back were small but comfortable and could hold eight people. The crewed areas were enclosed in a sleek fuselage that looked more like it belonged on a fighter plane. It even had wings that allowed it to handle Jupiter’s upper atmosphere.
“Morning,” Sihota said. “This is the ST-180 Icarus shuttle. It is one of the most common crew transfer vehicles in the solar system, which is why I’m checked out on it.” Sihota rattled off a series of specifications. The man took his job as the pilot seriously—enough to inflict a preflight briefing on us. I wasn’t quite sure why he felt we needed to know all this stuff, but at least he was knowledgeable, which gave a certain confidence in his ability.
Toward the end of the monolog, I was stifling a yawn. Finally, he let us board. Cheng called shotgun for copilot’s seat, and I sat in the second row with Vance. The others packed in behind with Frampton drawing the short straw of sitting next to Agapov. Karma, I guess. We had had to go find Frampton in that young lady’s room this morning, and he’d had a beaming grin on his face ever since. Even the thought of being in zero-g next to the queasy-looking Agapov wasn’t putting a dampener on his jubilant mood. I hadn’t quite had the heart to tell him that his performance with his new Linked friend had probably been visible to half the station—if she’d decided to share.
Sihota continued with his speech as we settled. “If we have a depressurization, a mask will drop down from above. Make sure you put that on first, and it will provide air. Under your seats are canisters of air dye. Spray that, and it will flow toward the hole. Nano-patches are stowed under there as well. If you can get at the breach, slap one of them on the rupture. That should hold until we make the nearest port.”
Sihota carried on in this vein for a while, speaking clearly as he flicked his way through the start-up procedure. Fans whirred, beeps started beeping, and the other machines hummed, doing their thing.
“Hatches closing,” Sihota called as they slammed shut with a sucking noise.
With hisses of gas thrusters, the Icarus moved toward the shuttle bay door at one end of the cavernous, slowly rotating hangar. It dilated open, and we drifted through into the red-lit airlock. Sihota was chattering constantly to Concorde Control in the incomprehensible technical language of pilots throughout the ages.
After a few moments, the imposing outer doors opened, and Sihota pushed the Icarus out into space. I slaved my HUD to what Sihota was seeing and was dazzled by an array of lines and numbers hovering in the cockpit window, mapping local space. To me, it was as impenetrable as his communications with traffic control.
“Shortly, I will activate our main drive,” Sihota called out. “You will feel it pressing you back into the seat. Ready?”
We gave our assents, and a rumble began from somewhere behind. I felt a pressure on my chest building. The Icarus wheeled sharply, and I watched the spiraling stars through the cockpit window while the rumble from behind intensified. We were heading to our first destination.
***
“My God!” I couldn’t help but murmur as I squinted over Cheng’s shoulder at the wreckage ahead.
We weren’t going to get too close to the cooling corpse of Io, and for that I was glad. The gaping wound on the surface had violently spewed out chunks of the moon, leaving behind a cloud of red-hot gas nearly obscuring it. Io still rotated, looking like a Catherine wheel, spreading flame-colored wreckage in every direction. Even stranger was that it smashed through a trail of its own debris and gasses left on previous orbits. The effect was like a holotank representation of its orbital track, only the trail the moon followed was its own rocky flesh and lava lifeblood.
“This is why we’re here, people,” Vance said in an awed tone.
“Can you imagine if this had happened to Earth?” Agapov had recovered enough over the journey to at least take part in the conversation now.
“Yeah, I’d rather not,” I said. I looked over my shoulder at Frampton. “So, is it going to come apart completely?”
“No one knows,” he replied with a shrug. “I don’t think anyone has managed to model this yet. I suspect whatever happens, Jupiter will have one hell of a new ring system. Io itself, though? It may disintegrate or it may keep enough integrity to hold together. In a few million years, it may even reform into another moon even if it were to come apart.”
I saw a small bright flash on the surface; it must have been huge to be visible from this range. “What was that?”
“Probably an antimatter bottle failing. The storage silos were widely dispersed and about as hardened as it’s possible to make them. Still, they need constant power, which they’re not getting anymore. They’ve been steadily popping since the strike,” Sihota said.
“So not only is the place falling apart on its own, antimatter is exploding all over the place,” Cheng said.
“There can’t be too many of them left. Sure, they can take a direct hit from a bunker-buster bomb, possibly even a low-yield nuke, but without power, they’re running on internal batteries. They’re only designed to last until they can be hooked back up to a power source or fired off into space,” Frampton replied.
“Christ, even grams of that stuff are worth millions of dollars,” said Vance.
“Yeah,” I thought out loud. “Maybe someone was tempted to try and get it, especially now when the moon is off limits, and the bottles are easy pickings.”
Another flash bloomed near the edge of the punished moon. It seemed to be on one of the massive eggshell-like pieces of crust floating above the surface. The whole chunk wobbled, a testament to the sheer power of the explosion.
“Yeah, but who would risk going to get it? The containment could go offline at any time, and that’s assuming you could get through all that debris. I doubt anyone would be stupid enough to make the attempt, no matter how greedy,” Frampton said.
I carried on watching the intermittently sparking wreckage of the moon. I was horrified by the devastation, yet it had a strange beauty to it.
Calisto looked a lot like Earth’s moon would if Earth’s moon had a dusting of glittering frost. The whole surface looked brutally punished with impact craters everywhere, big and small, most overlapping.
“That doesn’t exactly look like the kind of place I would want to live,” I murmured as I looked over the surface of one of the most densely populated places in Jupiter space.
“This is one of the oldest surfaces in the solar system here, Layton. It’s not as if this has happened overnight. You’re looking at billions of years of damage, all preserved,” Frampton called from the back.
“Still…” I knew I had a dubious look on my face.
“Calisto is actually a lot more conducive to life than pretty much anywhere in Jupiter space, other than Europa. It’s far enough out and has a decent enough ionosphere that it doesn’t get too much radiation from Jupiter. Plus it has a lot of water. They even found some microbial life here, the same as in Europa’s ocean, Pansemnia. It either evolved here and then scattered onto Europa via an impact or vice versa. Maybe it even came from somewhere else, a comet, for example.”
I vaguely remembered learning that at school. Despite the bookmakers laying the odds down that if life was going to be found anywhere other than Earth in the Sol system, it would be on Mars, it was actually out here that it had first been discovered. That was about where the excitement stopped, though, other than for a few microbiologists. The microbes were about as low down on the evolutionary scale as it was possible to go. It certainly didn’t fill me with a sense of wonder.
“Calisto Control, Icarus 513. Requesting landing instructions for Arcas City,” Sihota cut in as he cocked his head to listen to the reply. More graphics appeared on the cockpit window. I hoped they made sense to him.
“Agapov? How are you back there?” Sihota called over his shoulder with a rare grin.
“Don’t you worry about me,” he said with a sullen tone. He was a hero in my eyes for keeping it down.
With a stomach-wrenching lurch, the Icarus nosed down and plummeted toward the grey, cratered surface. I gripped my seat and groaned. I wasn’t the only one. A few moments later, Sihota pulled the nose up, and I couldn’t see the surface of Calisto anymore, just the looming gas giant that it orbited. It was almost worse not being able to see the moon getting closer.
The rumbling behind us grew angrier, and our pilot kept up a steady stream of chatter on the radio. Finally, Sihota announced, “We will be down in ten seconds.”