Perpetual Winter: The Deep Inn (20 page)

Chapter 17

Blue

“What are you saying, Lucas? Repeat,” Andrew asked. “The signal is weak. I didn’t hear you.”

              “There’s news, Andrew. News that changes everything. We’ll talk soon.”

              “Start on your way back. You’ve been out for seven hours, and we’re not sure about the Rover’s viability.”

              The return trip took a little more than an hour and a half. The Rover had performed well and both safely entered the ship’s ramp. Andrew gave him an hour to recuperate while they studied the data from his spacesuit and the Rover. Lucas took a hot bath, imagining how things would go if there were another Portuguese astronaut on that vessel. Wait an hour for him to recover, like they’d done with Caroline, now that’s something that wouldn’t happen.
Maybe they’d wait a second or two.
It seemed like he wanted to tell what he knew more than the others wanted to hear it.
Unreal,
he thought.
I’ll never learn to live like that.
He took a gram of acetaminophen. They served him a delicacy from the back of the pantry: coffee and bread with sardines topped off with six cherries from Fundão. Since almost all food was a type of gasified pudding, that sampling of real food seemed divine to him. One of the things attracting them was knowing that in the logistics ships, there were foods that were not blended, mushes or pudding, which is what the white polar ship had to offer.

              Lucas described what he had found. He remembered almost everything, despite the thermal shock. He had no doubt that the warriors he’d seen were not statuettes, a Ganymedian version of the Chinese terracotta army. They were frozen people, with no alien features. They were all of European ancestry, male, wearing retro-looking military winter uniforms. From the 60s or 50s, he didn’t know. He had not retained symbols or banners. The scenario was dreamlike, in the darkness, with the light from his lantern illuminating the ice in the middle of the Ganymedian night. He could not rule out their being Americans, but he had seen no Negroes—they were white, all of them, or at least the ones he’d seen. If he had to guess, he’d say they were Russians. As for the settlers, not even a shadow of them.

              The truth did not surprise them—it bowled them over. Someone had already been installed on Ganymede with weapons and baggage a long time ago. Or could that be nothing more than a hallucination provoked by the cold.

              It could be. Lucas’s suit had lost its frontal camera, but they did have registers for altitude, temperature, and activated buttons/commands. Everything confirmed Lucas’s story. He had descended below the surface and the temperature outside the suit had risen. The titanium alloy pick had been used. The cable winches had been used.

              The Rover had performed very well. After this incursion, they had more confidence in their vehicle and the parameters of its operation
s
were optimized. Andrew designed a crisis mode program that facilitated things. They all wanted to know what was in the cavern, but their priority was survival and that depended on finding energy.

              They loaded the Rover with material for a prolonged expedition and sent it on autopilot to stop next to the first logistics ship, where the automatic unloading program worked perfectly. They sent it a second time with the same purpose.

              The robust suits, for long term survival, offered less mobility because they did not follow the philosophy of being a second skin and they used more energy since they had several servo control elements. One of the suits’ characteristics was its resistance to radiation.

              “Each one of these spacesuits is a mini spaceship,” Steven confirmed.

              They had an alternated internal pneumatic compression lining that cushioned the suit with an inflatable anti-bedsore padding so they could sleep in the suits. The system for control of humidity, ultrasonic cleaning of the skin surface and depuration of volatile molecules were straight out of science fiction. Once Caroline had decided to put on one of the robust suites instead of taking a bath and proclaimed that it was the best spa she’d ever visited. Being naked in the suit was unexpectedly comfortable and she said that it was sexy imagining everyone nude inside the suits.

              “Everyone nude inside your suit, Caroline?” Sofia said, feigning shock.

              “Is that an invitation?” Pierre wanted to know.

              “Why don’t you shut up,” Caroline shot back.

              She had been dirty and sweaty when she got into it and had come out clean and perfumed. She couldn’t understand why they continued bathing when they had that spectacular dry cleaning system.

              “Because of the price,” Vice President Andrew explained. “Each suit costs ten million dollars and the cutaneous integrity maintenance system is responsible for two million by itself. It’s a good idea to conserve it.” It had a liquid feeding system with self-cleaning conduits that could be filled using external bottles. The problem with prolonged outings was the bladder and, principally, the intestines. Even using intestinal cleaning followed by constipation inducing drugs, which they did use, they had to take the perineal drainage systems for outings longer than two days. They already knew that those devices would not last for months, but they worked better during shorter periods.

              The six prepared for a one-week sortie. Steven and Larissa would stay in the ship. The Rover had a two passenger mode and a six passenger mode, with heavy cargo in rear side spaces strapped on. It was a six-wheeled articulated caterpillar in which, because of the gyroscopes, each pair of wheels was balanced independently. Arriving at the first ship, they went in and soon found the hydrogen bottles. They took the bottles to the Ganymedian caterpillar and sent it back to the mother ship on autopilot, where it unloaded the cylinders. Perfect.

              Sofia, Andrew, and Lucas made the descent into the grotto, after lowering batteries, oxygen, water, food and tools, including a robust portable computer, to the ground inside. For the first time, Lucas carried the specific tools of his mission with him: weapons. They camouflaged part of the logistics deposit with a second generation Chameleon invisibility cover. It worked very well. They advised those on the surface of the deposit’s location since anyone who did not know where it was would not see it.

              Before proceeding, Andrew reminded Lucas why he was armed: to facilitate his own escape to the surface. There was no possibility, in case of a confrontation, that they would survive intelligent aliens on their own terrain: it would be shots fired, decompression, and death. If a conflict arose, Andrew and Sofia were expendable. Lucas had to get to the surface to defend Pierre, Mariah and Caroline’s retreat to the mother ship which, piloted by Steven, would immediately be launched to relocate, even under winter conditions, to near the equator station. Lucas was also expendable.

              Andrew went first, followed by Sofia ten meters behind him and Lucas twenty meters back.

             
They are two of the three geniuses in service,
Lucas thought.
It’s a decision of doubtful quality that they, two of the most brilliant in the group, be expendable. Only Pierre will be left if they die.
But the decision had been made and he had not spoken during the discussion phase. Now, the rules were to carry out the decision. He would do so with no hesitation. They were expendable and would be expended. That is, if he were able to abandon Sofia, which seemed to him as probable as going one millimeter beyond infinity. If there was something that he had gotten from his father, it was an absolute intolerance of aggression against women and children. Andrew did not know that, of course, but Lucas would always die, no matter how irrational the solution was, if chance put him between a threat and a woman.

              They reached the door. They took several readings and obtained samples. When Steven verified them in the laboratory, they loaded the first drone and launched it. It seemed like a waste to use one of the two drones for samples of a door and rocks from the grotto, but in case they did not return, they would help the team understand the nature of the threat. Was it human technology on Ganymede, which it looked like, or an unknown technology, alien, until proven otherwise?  The door was still open, as Lucas had left it. It was amazing that Lucas had been able to make it yield since it was a watertight door, sealed, like those in submarines. It probably had a manufacturing defect or had previously been forced open from within.

* * *

When they entered and turned the projectors on, they could not believe their eyes: thousands of Nazi SS soldiers had been frozen in blocks of ultra-transparent blue ice, five meters wide, three high and fifty in length, in two columns of men per block, commanded by an officer and a sergeant. Their faces, their posture, their uniforms, and their weapons left the historical image recognition system with no doubts. They were World War II era German soldiers. On Jupiter.

              In the front, they found a group that confirmed their suspicions. Three hundred Spanish soldiers from the Blue Division. The Blue Division had fought for the Germans very stoically on the Russian front. The recognition system guaranteed: men with equipment used during the siege of Leningrad. Andrew asked Sofia if they could possibly be alive or if they were preserved cadavers.

              “They are not alive, which does not mean they’re dead. They have been stopped halfway through that crossing. Death is defined by its irreversibility. They are in suspended animation. They can evolve toward death or toward resuscitation,” Sofia explained.

              “And thawing them out?” Andrew asked.

              “It would, in principle, kill them. We have not mastered the technique of thawing/reheating,” Sofia said.

              “No one invested this fortune to store thousands of cadavers. There has to be a way to bring them back,” Andrew pondered.

              “I don’t know if it’s advisable for them and I doubt that it’s advisable for us,” Lucas said.

              Both looked at him. Their discussion was, in fact, academic.

              “Let’s take a look around. Somewhere, there must be information about their presence here and how to revert this process later,” Andrew proffered.

              In the mesmerizing basilica’s gigantic central nave, there was nothing more than blocks of ice and their silent inhabitants who were waiting, without know for whom or why. Sofia thought it would be a good idea to collect ice samples for more detailed studies in the ship. The vault door, more than fourteen meters high and seven meters wide, at the end of the hangar, was sealed. There was no opening system beside it on the inside. Probably only on the outside, but how would they get outside? They took samples of the huge door, the atmosphere and the grotto’s rocky wall using the laser cutter. They took photos of the officers’ faces and dog tags. They sent everything using the second drone.

              The grotto’s temperature had fallen discretely, and they hadn’t found any sign of any type of active heating system. The grotto’s walls themselves were warmer than the atmosphere and slowly those walls were cooling off after they had opened the door, losing their heat to the surface. Andrew called a crisis meeting via video conference. He described their findings in detail.

              “The cold is coming from the surface and is destabilizing the cavern’s internal thermal state,” Sofia said, after Andrew’s exposition. “It’s not impossible for it to be coming from an external generator, but it is improbable since this has existed for a long time and the external nuclear generator arrived here shortly before we did.”

              “It’s possible that the first two doors have been damaged by a previously existing positive pressure in the frozen army’s chamber, in relationship to atmospheric pressure,” Steven said.

              “The question is whether we should advise Earth or not. We will soon be coming out of the solar alignment,” Andrew put on the table.

              “Why would we not advise them?” Caroline reacted, surprised.

              “Because that fellow, Hendriks, from what Sofia said, dedicated himself to freezing and unfreezing animals, rereading articles and other German documents. Those are German soldiers. He could choose to sacrifice us in order to obtain information about the process or just to keep this secret,” Pierre said.

              “Could this technology save people on the Earth if the predicted collision occurs?” Caroline tossed out.

              “They are a lot of male genes...” Mariah let escape.

              “You’re right,” Pierre said. “These thousands of people, in case we were sent frozen women, would accelerate populating Ganymede, if conditions existed to give them oxygen, water and food.”

              Sending frozen women. The idea was appalling. But perhaps it made sense in the mind of someone like Hendriks.

              “They would also help with the colonization of Venus in five hundred years if they could be thawed when they arrived there,” Andrew said.

              “These building blocks fit well in spaceships,” Lucas said.