What Neither Star nor Sun Shall Waken
By Ryan Notch
Copyright 2011 Ryan Notch
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Copyright 2011
Ryan Notch
Cover art by Janielescueta
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Thank you for purchasing this story. I hope you enjoy it. Well actually I hope it scares the hell out of you. If you do enjoy it, please consider posting a review at the site you downloaded it from. It's the best way to ensure you keep getting access to indie books, instead of just what big house publishers think you should be reading. And for those of you who don't think you have anything interesting to contribute to a review, you'd be surprised at how much stock a stranger puts in your opinion.
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Table of Contents:
1: Story
2: About the author
3: Other works
The ship fell.
The debris from its torn engine spun off at fantastic speeds into an orbit that would take years to sink to the moon below, but the ship itself could count the remains of its orbit in seconds.
“I can’t keep her steady,” pilot Conrad Gibson yelled over the screams of metal straining not to tear. “What the hell happened? Explosion?”
“I think we were hit by a meteor,” said Jack Edwards, the navigator and only other crewmember.
“That’s impossible, proximity radar would have warned us.”
“The gravity between Jupiter and Europa is chaotic. The meteor must have been whipped out of its trajectory. Gibson if you don’t get our angle up we’re gonna burn up in Europa’s atmosphere.”
But Gibson knew otherwise. The atmosphere of Jupiter’s smallest moon was less then 1% as thick as Earth’s. At any angle it wouldn’t begin to melt the carbon heat shielding layered upon their ship. Nor would it slow their fall.
“The remaining engine isn’t firing, and maneuvering jets aren’t going to keep us stable,” said Gibson. “Brace yourself, we’re going down.”
Jack began to send the mayday out to mission control, but Gibson was watching the moon below rise up to meet them. Its red crisscrossed lines against the gray background looking suddenly like nothing more then the inside of an eye. The fall started out in slow motion, only perceived at first as a slight heaviness when gravity first kissed them and pulled them into their chairs.
And pulled and pulled, and they fell faster and faster.
The momentary weight they felt disappeared as the effects of freefall took over. Gibson did what he could to keep the ship steady with the flaps and maneuvering jets, knowing if he lost concentration for just a few seconds the ship could spin fast enough to snap their necks.
“Gibson, I’ve switched to auxiliary control on the remaining engine...”
Gibson didn’t wait to hear the rest, they were maybe eight seconds away from impact and moving hundreds of miles per hour. He fired the rocket at full, redlining every meter on the console. Gravity's gentle kiss became a violent attack, crushing all his blood into pools at the bottom, blowing capillaries on one side just as they collapsed on the other.
We’re about to be the first men on Europa, he thought madly, right before a crash that turned everything to white.
Gibson awoke in darkness. Fighting nausea and dizziness, he felt for the auxiliary lighting switch on the console. Such was his disorientation that the ship felt like it was swaying.
No, it actually is swaying, he realized. A slow roll from side the side, somehow familiar. He found and flipped the switch for auxiliary lighting but only the console lights came on. Enough to see by, if dimly. He turned to check on Jack, and saw he was gone. His whole chair gone. He looked down at the floor where bolts strong enough to hold the weight of the entire ship had held the chair in place. The floor was buckled from the impact, probably shearing the bolts right in half. Gibson knew what he’d find when he turned to look for Jack, but looked anyway.
Even in the dim light Gibson could see that Jack was dead. He lay still strapped into his chair in the back of the cabin, his skull dented terribly. Gibson un-strapped himself and walked back to his friend, moving slowly because of the pain. He’d been slammed against the straps in his chair hard enough to bruise his ribs. He felt for Jack’s pulse, but it was long gone, the body already going cold.
The whole cabin is getting cold, he thought. He could even see his breath. Leaving his friend where he lay for the moment, he went to the console to try and get more information. That the ship would be cold was no surprise. The warmest part of Europa’s surface was –260 degrees Fahrenheit. The surprise was that the ship's heater wasn’t doing anything about it. Another slow roll almost made him lose his footing and he realized suddenly why the movement was familiar, why it was pitch dark out the veiwports.
Waves.
He decided to speak aloud, knowing that the black box was recording everything that was said on the ship.
“Captain Conrad Gibson of the U.S.S. Cairo reporting for ship's log. Ship damaged while in orbit of Jupiter’s moon Europa. The thrusters must have melted the surface ice enough for us to crash right through on impact. We…I…am currently at an unknown depth in the planet-wide ocean of water that exists under the Europan ice covering. Crewman Jack Edwards died on impact…
“Status of distress beacon unknown. I can’t tell if Jack got the signal out before we entered the ionosphere. Nor does it matter much if he did. By now the hole we punched in the surface will have frozen over, looking to all but close observation like any of the hundreds of meteorite impact sites created here every year. It’s almost impossible for the ship to transmit a signal through anything more then a shallow depth of water, let alone past the ice and into space. Not that NASA has anything capable of landing on this planet and taking off again even if they could find us...me.”
Gibson paused a minute, considering his next words.
“I’ll try the distress beacon anyway for future recovery efforts. I estimate the chances of anyone ever finding this ship at around 10%. Chances of anyone finding it while I’m still alive…0%.”
Gibson began running diagnostics, knowing it was ultimately futile but also knowing that astronauts weren't trained to just sit down and die. He wanted to see what had power and what didn’t. What had been crushed and what hadn’t. The ship got most of its power from the solar panels, but had enough battery power to run the oxygen scrubbers and heating for a few days. And if the probe was intact…
If the probe was intact he’d be able to continue his mission, even if only for his own sake. They’d been sent to drop a dual probe from orbit. After landing safely on the surface by parachute, the probe would then split in half. The first half was to stay on the surface as a radio relay. The second half was to use the heat from a nuclear engine to melt its way through the surface ice, ice that was kept as hard as granite by the cold. After it made its way to the ocean, it would swim around and collect data which it would transmit up to the first half which would in turn transmit it up to the ship. The probe was meant to study geological instability, take chemical samples, and most importantly it would look for life.
Though just smaller then Earth’s own moon, Europa was the only place in the solar sy
stem besides Earth with a liquid ocean of salt water. Sandwiched between a layer of permanent ice above and silicate rock below, with a metallic core in the center for good measure. The only other place in the solar system where life as we understand it might exist. Not millions of years ago, but today.
Of course it was a long shot. The moon was extremely cold, the water being kept above freezing by movement from the considerable gravitational stresses Jupiter put on it from afar. But if there were thermal vents on the ocean's floor, then anything was possible. Similar vents on Earth support life in a closed ecosystem, needing no light or nutrients from above. Some thought they were perhaps the very source of life on Earth. The discovery of these vents changed mankind’s understanding of the environments in which life was possible. The Europa probe had hoped to do so again.
A diagnostic told him that damage to the bottom of the ship had severed wires to the ship's heating and oxygen. But these systems especially had been made repairable from the inside of the ship in case of emergency. Removable panels on the floor gave him access, three years of mission training gave him the ability.
He debated whether to get into his space suit to keep warm while he worked, but the thing took twenty minutes to get into even with Jack’s help, and the gloves did not allow for very delicate work. He decided to race the clock instead. Working in dim light, he had to release the entire oxygen supply from both his and Jack’s space suits into the cabin to give him the time he needed, and was almost hypothermic by the time he got the basic systems of life back online, his hands numb and almost useless from the cold. A narrow margin of survival, but he found that knowing it would only make a few days difference at best kept him strangely calm. And as difficult as these few systems were to repair, everything else would be impossible. The ships remaining thruster and all external controls were ruined.
When he was done he used his still numb hands to put Jack into his space suit and closed it up, helmet and all. The ship had no body bags.
Try as he might he couldn’t get the interior lights on. He couldn’t even tell where they were damaged, as the diagnostic system said they were fine.
“Thank God for computers,” he said aloud, sarcastically.
The probe itself was heavily damaged as well. Its separation mechanism was destroyed, so there was no way to send it out into the water. The nuclear engine on the second half could provide years worth of energy, but it was impossible to connect that energy to the ship. Still, the scanners that had been made specifically for the Europan ocean were intact. He’d have access to sonar mapping for miles around. He would have traded complicated sonar for simple external lights, though. To see the alien ocean with his own eyes would be almost worth dying for.
The first ping from the sonar was enough to tell Gibson that they were on an outcropping of rock. A lucky landing, in a way. The outcropping ended only a few meters away from the front of the ship. After that it fell off in an undersea trench ten miles deep and hundreds of miles across. If they had gone into that trench instead, the ship would have been crushed by the pressure. It was lucky, but even so he was somewhat disappointed as well. Only at the very deepest parts of the ocean would there likely be thermal vents with life. Still, this was not Earth. Things didn’t necessarily work the same here. Anything was possible. Hell, the sonar might pick up the movement an alien fish swimming right by him. He left the sonar recording and sat back to wait.
Gibson awoke with a jerk to the sound of a scream. It was dead quiet in the cabin though. He breathed deep to calm himself and realized he must have dreamed it. He couldn’t even remember getting sleepy. He was shivering and his chest hurt like hell. A quick check of the temperature gage told him the heat was fine. He began to wonder if his three days of life might be cut short by internal bleeding. Then he jumped again when a squeal of static escaped the radio. He hadn’t dreamed it, the ship's receiver was picking something up. For a split second he thought it might be a signal from a rescue ship, somehow miraculously getting to Europa in time. But a quick check of the computer told him otherwise. The signal didn’t match any known radio frequencies. He spoke aloud again, for the black box.
“I’m getting noise on the radio. The electromagnetic reaction between the planet wide ocean of salt water and the spinning metal core must by spitting out white noise on a radio frequency.”
He checked the equipment while he talked, his voice becoming animated despite his usual reserve.
“This moon is even more seismically active than we thought. The sonar is picking up a lot of tectonic plate shifting. I have to assume it’s volcanic in nature, since an earthquake…make that a Europaquake, would have shaken the whole area. Maybe this outcropping is sitting on a layer of flowing magma. I’ll keep monitoring.”
Gibson realized how excited he sounded. And he was excited. He was where no man had ever been before, his childhood dream. But there was something else too, some other emotion.
Once he thought about it, it was easy to identify. Fear. It was small, but there for sure. Growing inside him. He spoke aloud again, this time not to the black box but to Jack, lying there in his suit.
“It’s normal I guess. Here I am in a sea of darkness, the only living thing on the entire planet. With the only ghost on the entire planet for company. No offense.”
Gibson laughed, a strange and manic sound in the dimly lit cabin. He stopped, sobered by hearing it. I’ve got to nip this panic in the bud. An astronaut's nerves are not supposed to fray so easily.
He got up and set to work trying to trace the wires for the internal lights along the ceiling, knowing he had to keep busy. While he worked the noises from the speaker became more frequent, lasting longer. There was an undulating sound to them, something almost hypnotic but nauseating at the same time. He wanted nothing more than to turn it off, but what if a ship did show up in orbit? He had to listen, just in case.
Gibson awoke on the floor. The cabin was even darker than before and he was even colder.
Must have passed out again, he thought. He started to get up when he realized that he could see his reflection in Jack’s helmet visor. It was turned towards him, whereas before it had been pointed straight up. It had moved.
Fear filled Gibson’s entire being, panic. Had Jack been alive when he stuffed him into the suit? The guilt that he had left his shipmate, his friend, to die alone was so overwhelming that he wanted to cry. He crawled over to the suit, reached for the visor. But something warned him not to open it. He was terribly afraid of opening it there in the dark cabin. But guilt pushed him onward and he slid up the sun shade to look inside. It was empty.
There were no hiding places in the cabin, no separate rooms, no compartments to fit a man. He turned around slowly towards the pilots seat, already knowing what he’d see.
But it was empty. He was wrong and it was empty. He was alone. The radio sparked to life again, the undulating cry being broken off by words. It was Jack’s voice, speaking hollowly over the radio.
“Jack to rescue. Jack to rescue. Gibson is dead. It’s getting closer now. Gibson is dead and it’s getting closer. It’s at eight. Four. Two. It’s at two. How close now?”
Gibson tried to scream but could only produce a thin whine somewhere in his throat.
The sound of his own strangled cries woke him. He was so filled with residual terror from the nightmare that at first he was afraid to move, even to breathe. Afraid he was just dreaming another false awakening. It was a small eternity before he forced himself to look to the left. Jack’s spacesuit, his body bag, was exactly where it had been. It hadn’t moved. Gibson went to the visor, not letting himself stall, not letting the fear claim him. He jerked it open. Jack was there, staring blankly up with dilated pupils. His eyes had been closed before, but it wasn’t unusual for a corpse's eyes to open on their own. Gibson took Jack’s pulse again, even took his temperature with a thermometer from the medical kit. Residual guilt from the dream wouldn’t leave him, but Jack was long dead. Gibson
thought he saw a look of terror on Jack’s damaged features now. The radio squealed to life again, nearly making him leap out of his skin as he spun to confront it. It was louder than ever. He felt stupid for being afraid of a noise, but couldn’t help it. He turned back to Jack, ignoring the radio for a moment.
“I’m sorry buddy,” he said, and shut the visor.
Gibson walked over to the pilot's seat and sat down. He couldn’t risk standing for very long, not with his injuries. He began to wonder if that tectonic movement wasn’t causing the static somehow and compared the sonar scans of the area with the times of the various broadcasts to see if there was any overlap. Luckily the sonar had done its most recent sweep of that area just moments before…
He began to wonder about something that couldn’t be true, but checked anyway. The last scan of that region, and the time before. It was true.
“Captain reporting for black box recording. I’ve made a strange discovery. Each time the sonar pings the area around the trench, a few minutes later I get a weird burst of static over the radio. Unfortunately the angle prevents the sonar from bringing back clear images from more then a few hundred feet into the trench, but my calculations suggest the timing is right for the sonar waves to bounce it all the way down and the radio waves to bounce back up a few seconds later. I can only conjecture that something down there is converting the sonar waves into radio spectrum and bouncing them back. But what kind of rock could do that, I can’t imagine. And what’s more, the duration of the radio broadcasts doesn’t remotely match the duration of a sonar wave. ”
The radio went on and on. Sounding now like a sine wave, now like moaning, now like piping.
“I’ll tell you one thing, the sound itself is maddening. It gets right down into you, into the back of your brain. It’s downright creepy. I’m checking the analysis of the latest ping and response now, to see if it’s…”