by Ralph Kern
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.
CHAPTER 16
CALISTO
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.”
I crushed the seat arms with my grip, feeling the push on my back intensify before I felt a slight, anticlimactic thud. We were down. Through the cockpit window I saw the outer doors of the landing pad shut. It felt a little like being inside a giant mouth.
***
Our stay on Calisto wasn’t a long one. We climbed out of the Icarus, and I found myself in an umbilical tube on the landing pad of Arcas City.
I looked around in wonder at the landing pad, which was situated in a large chamber that, like pretty much any structure on Calisto, was built within one of the many impact craters. This was just one of the smaller ones that surrounded Arcas City. Even so, the cavernous hangar was over a kilometer across and filled with dozens of spacecraft, service vehicles, and long, transparent umbilical tube
s connecting to the walls of the crater.
While Sihota was talking to a gum-chewing tech in the entry way, I bounced a couple of times, playfully testing the low gravity, which was only a tenth that of Earth’s…until I ricocheted my head off the top of the tube. The tube was soft and gave, but even so, I decided it was best to stop before I made a total fool of myself.
Frampton and Vance had grabbed their duffle bags and made their way along the tube toward the wall. I turned and looked at Sihota and the tech with a raised eyebrow.
The tech grinned at me and said, “Turnaround will take about an hour. If you go to the wall and catch the circumference tram a quarter clockwise, there’s an observation tower you can go up. It shows off Arcas City quite well, if I do say so myself.”
“Go on, Layton, take the others with you while I get the Icarus prepped for the next leg.” Sihota inclined his head in the direction of the tube.
I didn’t need to be told twice.
***
We were standing in the lift as it shot up the side of the tall tower toward the peak. The vista opened up in front of us—Arcas City in all of its splendor.
I opened up my HUD link and a wealth of tourist information unobtrusively appeared in my vision as I looked over the crater city. It was vast, sixty kilometers wide with a clear dome over the crater. The buildings twinkled away, mostly at the crater’s edges, while the interior contained vast tracts of farmland, lakes, and forests. In the middle of the crater was another cluster of buildings encrusting a dome of rock.
On the other side lay another crater, smaller than Arcas City but still about forty kilometers in diameter. Inside, it was raw and grey, but around the edges, another transparent cover was growing from the outside in.
More information appeared on my HUD. Even as we watched, billions of nanobots were creating that cover. It had incredible tensile strength. Like Concorde, the space elevators, and the gas miners, it was a product of the nano-industrial revolution. Nothing on this scale could have even been attempted before the advent of nanoscale engineering. Still, forty kilometers was a good distance to cover, and it would take years to complete. But when it was finished, they would have the land area to sustain population growth for decades. And by the time it had been filled, I was sure another crater city would be complete.
At some point, most of the refugees would find themselves here, but for the time being, they were in the temporary relief facilities scattered around the JA.
The people here were more “regular” than the Linked. Many of them were even Naturals. As far as the Jupiter Alliance went, Calisto was the bread basket. It complemented Europa with its unlimited reserves of water and Ganymede with its metal-rich makeup. The three of them formed the triumvirate of worlds that would grant the Alliance independence from the inner systems.
It was rapidly becoming obvious to me that if someone truly wanted to harm the Jupiter Alliance, they would have struck one of these worlds or Concorde, the administrative center. They were the locations that were indispensable. The loss of Io was an inconvenience. But the loss of one of the other three Galilean moons or Concorde may well have been fatal for the Jupiter Alliance.
CHAPTER 17
HIBERNIA
Sihota was taking Cheng and me to our destination next, and if I thought the ride into Calisto was rough, it had nothing on the journey to Hibernia, one of the gas miners speeding through the upper reaches of Jupiter’s atmosphere.
The view as we approached Jupiter reminded me of the journey we had taken in Erebus—dizzyingly fast, nearly suicidal. The massive sphere of the planet flattened out as we approached through massive, wispy clouds and moon-sized thunderheads. I was both disappointed and relieved that our course wouldn’t take us near the Great Red Spot, the most distinctive storm in the Sol system. The spot itself had waxed and waned over the last couple of hundred years, at one point nearly disappearing, but for the last few decades it had returned with a vengeance. Even the hardy gas miners avoided that maelstrom.
Through the cockpit window, I could see a steadily growing speck. Before long, the Hibernia’s shape and true scale became distinct. It was huge. Not as big as Concorde, but where that station was clean lines and grace, this facility looked like a wing-shaped floating chemical factory that stretched left and right out of view.
“This is Hibernia,” Sihota called out. “Basically, its job is to dip into Jupiter’s atmosphere when it’s at perigee and suck up a load of hydrogen and helium. It continues its orbit, and then, when it’s at apogee, the furthest point from Jupiter it orbits, the station will shoot cargo balloons at a capture station before continuing back around.”
The Icarus crept closer and closer to the station. I couldn’t even see where we would dock on the damn thing at first, it was that complicated an arrangement of pipes and modules. Finally, I could make out a rectangle of clear, white light. Our rate of closure had slowed to what felt like a walking pace. Finally, we nudged our way inside.
***
The Hibernia was about as far removed from the cosmopolitan space city of Concorde or the sedentary agricultural nature of Arcas City as it was possible to be. The habitable sections of the station were cramped and labyrinthine, all long twisting passages, pipes, and low lighting. The living quarters were built around the machinery, not the other way around. This was a working station, where the comforts of humanity were not the primary concern. Nevertheless, because the gas miners ran with a skeleton crew, they had plenty of spare life-support capacity to keep a good portion of the refugees.
Melissa Gant, the guide who was showing me and Cheng to our temporary quarters, spouted tedious facts about the station, clearly proud of the place and completely ignoring our dubious faces. It didn’t help that the whole station was in free fall around Jupiter. We were in zero-g again, this time with no respite other than the brief periods of thrust when Hibernia sped up to compensate for the drag of Jupiter’s atmosphere.
“Currently, we have nearly a hundred refugees onboard,” Gant was saying as she pushed herself gracefully down the dark, pipe-filled corridor. “That’s not a problem for our life support in the slightest. The stations were designed to act as redoubts in case of a major catastrophe in one of the space cities. We share the load up here.” She beamed proudly.
“I’m sure,” Cheng said, hauling himself only slightly less gracefully after her. “I presume you have set aside some facilities for our use?” Cheng had switched into G-man mode. His normal levity had all but disappeared, replaced with an authoritative voice.
“Yes, we have set aside an office in the emergency shelter for you to use,” Gant replied. “There is full integration with the Jupiter net here and the Hypernet back on Earth, subject to normal time delays, of course.” We finally reached a set of doors, and she waved her hand, opening them. “These will be your quarters. Sorry, they’re a touch Spartan, but I’m sure you appreciate we don’t have much spare room at the moment.”
I poked my head in. It seemed we were sharing. I could see two bunks, well, alcoves, like two graves next to each other or against the wall, depending which way you looked at them. Without a word, I tossed my backpack toward one, which contained all I needed for what I hoped would be a relatively short stay. Cheng did the same with his own backpack, and Gant led us back out.
Gant droned on with the small talk about Hibernia. I let it wash over me. Anything I needed to know, I could get over Link. Instead, I was thinking about the people billeted around the station. This lot had all come off Io itself. Vance and Frampton were going to be speaking to the people off Magellan at Arcas City, and Agapov and Sihota would be questioning others from Magellan over on Europa. Drayton was going to be coordinating with the other investigation teams...and Cerise, the lucky girl, back at Concorde.
“And these will be your offices,” Gant said. The slight smile on her face told me a lot about what kind of environment was awaiting us. Sure enough, upon the door’s opening I could see that we had an empty room with a
table and a couple of chairs bolted to the deck. “I’m sorry we can’t be more hospitable. We have another store room down the corridor that’s empty, which you can also use if you wish. Just say if you want any more furniture brought up, and we’ll try to oblige.”
“We’ll use one as our office and the other as an interview room. Can you see if you can square away getting it fitted out like this one?” I asked.
“Sure, we should be able to sort that out for you. I’ll get right on it.”
“Thank you, Ms. Gant,” I said to the enthusiastic lady.
CHAPTER 18
HIBERNIA
“So Lana,” I said, reading her bio off of my HUD. “You were on Io for—what? Six months? At…let me see…Danube Planum? Prior to the incident?”
“That’s right,” Lana Shaftsbury replied. She was a small lady in her early thirties, and she regarded me with a mixture of fear and confusion flickering across her face. I didn’t think I was that scary, but then, I wasn’t sitting on her side of the table. I smiled at her to calm her down. The VRs tended to have us cops shouting and swearing at suspects and witnesses. In real life, we got far better results by building a rapport and keeping them talking.
“And what was your job down there?” Lana opened her mouth to reply. I held up my palm and gave her another smile, preempting what I suspected would be an in-depth explanation that would mean nothing to me. “And remember, Lana, I’m just a police officer. Give me the basics.”
“Well, my doctorate is in Io volcanism. My job was to record and monitor a volcano at the northern end of the Danube called Pele. It’s one of the most active volcanoes in the solar system. We’re trying to get an insight into the structure of the moon. Well, we were…” She tailed off. Clearly, she realized that all her work for the last few years was gone.
