by Dean M. Cole
He pressed the transmit button. "Damn it, Sandy! I appreciate what you're trying to do, but that's gonna be like balancing two bowling balls on top of one another."
As Richard floated weightlessly in the surreally silent and now nearly motionless cabin, Europa's surface crept across his field of view. Then the moon's horizon slid into the bottom edge of the displayed image.
Great! On top of everything else, I'm going in head first.
An image of Major Fitzpatrick's fighter zipped across the display and disappeared overhead, beneath his inverted ship.
"Damn it, Sandy! I said to get the hell out of—"
After an audible thump, he felt his fighter start to decelerate, pressing Richard head first deeper into the emergency restraints.
"I was able to override the safety protocols with my EON. The computer is helping me stay centered under your mass, but it's a lot of mass. Hopefully, I can arrest your fall before we hit the surface."
All of the icons in Richard's EON-generated virtual vision remained grayed out. He still couldn't access any of the ship's systems. The impact had apparently knocked out everything except the nanobots and one section of the display.
He keyed the radio. "My ship is completely dead."
Outside, something suddenly fell through his field of view. He pressed the transmit button again. "It's working! We're starting to slow down." The object he'd seen was a small asteroid that had a moment before been flying along in formation, but as they slowed, it hadn't; the rock had fallen away from them and raced toward its date with European destiny. However, through the display, he saw the icy horizon continue to rise as their long fall into Europa's gravity well persisted.
A deafening report came from under his feet. The ship rocked sideways, almost tumbling off of Sandy's fighter.
"What was that?" Sandy asked.
Richard felt the floor shift under him as she corrected for the altered center of gravity.
"I told you to get out of here," he said. "Now that we're slowing, the rocks that were falling with us are still falling." He frowned sardonically. "It's starting to rain asteroids, woman!"
He felt her shift them sideways again. A moment later, a huge piece of asteroid flashed downward through the display's image.
"I guess it was too small to show up on my hologram," Sandy said. "I'm using it to keep us out of the way of the bigger pieces."
"Okay," Richard said, drawing out the first syllable.
The horizon rushed toward the falling formation of space fighters. From his ever-closing point of view, the surface's reddish-orange fissures gained a depth and breadth not previously appreciable. Many looked like chasms with soft, rolling edges and overhangs. The spaces outside of the canyons looked like gentle plains covered by dirty snow.
Another booming report reverberated through his fighter, this one so loud it left Richard's ears ringing. After a moment, he heard a new noise rise above the ringing: the hiss of escaping air. Through all of it, he heard and felt his ears popping as they tried to compensate for the rapidly dropping pressure.
"That last one breached my—!" His helmet suddenly deployed, cutting off his words mid-sentence.
He toggled the emergency radio. "Phoenix Seven … Sandy! Can you hear me?"
Nothing. Even if she were responding, he wasn't sure he would be able to hear her. Sound wouldn't propagate well in the ship's rapidly thinning atmosphere. Soon hard vacuum would eliminate it altogether.
The last thought reminded him of a contingency he'd heard an astronaut discuss during a TV documentary. In the event of a communication failure during a spacewalk, they planned to communicate by placing their helmet against the skin of the ship. Theoretically, the physical contact would convert the helmet's sound wave-induced vibrations into something people in the space station could hear and understand.
I hope that same theory works with a handheld radio, he thought.
With a mighty tug, he broke the radio free from his hip. Struggling against the safety restraining system, he finally raised it to eye level and planted its speaker firmly against his helmet. Immediately, he heard a tinny, unintelligible voice. Listening intently, Richard slid the radio around until he found a sweet spot. Sandy's words resolved. "… Six, this is Phoenix Seven. Come in, Richard!"
For her to hear him, Richard would need to place the microphone against his helmet, but it sat in a separate part of the device. He slid the handheld radio up until the microphone's smaller grill touched the visor in front of his mouth.
Yelling, he said, "Sandy, this is Richard. Can you hear me?"
As he shouted, he looked past the radio and into the display. Richard's eyes widened. In spite of their continuing deceleration, the surface was rushing up to meet them.
"Oh shit," he whispered as he slid the speaker back to the sweet spot. He found it in time to hear the last part of her response. "… scared me there, Richard. Hold on tight. This is going to be a rough landing."
At the same time, he felt her shift them sideways. Another large chunk of asteroid debris screamed across the display. A brief moment later, a geyser of ice and asteroid shot upward from the surface and crossed his field of view again, traveling in the opposite direction this time.
Then they slammed into the moon.
An ice storm sprayed out in all directions. Debris from their crash-landing mixed with the ejecta from the previous asteroid impact. Their sideways pre-crash jaunt sent the two fighters skidding across the moon's icy surface.
Richard saw Sandy's fighter pinned between his ship and the ice. Through the miraculously still-functioning display—which happened to have ended up pointed in the direction of their continuing skid—Richard stared with wide-eyed amazement as her ship plowed a path through the white field, icy powder spewing laterally from its sides.
From his upside-down point of view, the horizon began to resolve as they cleared the cloud generated by 3rd Squadron's handiwork. If they survived this, Richard was going to have a serious discussion with Major Snead, the Squadron's flight lead.
Weak gravity coupled with the icy surface's low drag coefficient allowed their slide to continue almost unabated, farther than Richard would have believed possible. Then he saw they were riding up an incline. Yard by agonizing yard, the unlikely formation finally slowed in earnest.
Just as Richard began to think that they might actually survive this, they crested the large hill—which he now realized was a ridge line. At the same time, a distant cliff face rose into view. It appeared to run parallel to the ridge they'd crested.
"You're shitting me!" Richard yelled. He pressed the radio button. "It's a fucking canyon!"
Like Olympic class lemmings, they raced toward the edge of the crevice. Apparently having been thrust upwards by plate tectonics, the canyon's far cliff wall loomed. It's sheer wall towered over their side of the chasm.
The vibrations generated by the skidding ships transmitted silently through his ship's hull to the safety restraints holding him securely in place. The frequency of the vibrations steadily decreased as the decelerating pair slid closer to the crevice. Its precipice crept into view as they slid toward the all-too-close horizon created by the ice field's sudden disappearance.
Just as they reached the edge of the chasm, Sandy's ship pitched up on a cornice-like lip.
Finally, the two ships skidded to a stop.
Richard stared for a long, breathless moment. They didn't explode, and the canyon wall failed to collapse beneath them. When neither those nor the other myriad movie tropes currently streaming through his mind's eye failed to manifest, he released his held breath in a long, braying laugh. "Holy shit! I can't believe that just happened!"
The fighter's emergency restraint system gently lowered him to the ceiling-turned-floor.
Rolling onto his feet, Richard squatted and looked into the display. From his partially blocked perspective, he could see Sandy's fighter still pinned under the front of his ship. It appeared to be balanced precariously on the
precipice of the ice chasm.
Richard placed the radio against his helmet.
"Sandy! Are you okay?"
"Yeah, just peachy. The impact knocked my drive offline, and I'm hanging like Spider-Man in his freaking web," she said wryly. "I disabled the shields so that I wouldn't have to deal with the balancing bowling balls dilemma." She paused and then added, "The drive still won't respond to EON commands, but the shields are booting up … now."
Suddenly, a jolt sent Richard rolling across the floor of the fighter.
He heard Sandy string together a series of words that would have left Jake slack-jawed. Then Richard's fighter rocked backward again.
Sandy's voice crackled over the radio. "Oh …! Oh shit!"
The expanding shields had shoved the two spacecraft apart, knocking Richard's fighter backward. Now lying on the ceiling-floor, he saw Sandy's ship had moved even farther in the opposite direction. It teetered and then cascaded over the rim, disappearing into the icy chasm.
"Sandy!" Richard screamed through his helmet.
She didn't respond.
He stuck the radio to the right side of his suit and headed toward the airlock at the back of the ship. He was relieved to see the appropriate portion of the spheroid's skin dissolve. He stepped into the airlock. A moment later, the lock's outer wall dissolved as well. Richard lunged through the opening. Outside, he stood a little too quickly. In the low gravity—roughly one-seventh of Earth's—his feet left the ground for a moment.
After landing again, he held out his arms and caught his balance. Richard rounded the back of his heavily damaged fighter and hop-walked Apollo astronaut-style along its side. Traversing the surface in long, bounding strides, he approached the precipice.
The colonel slid clumsily to a stop at the canyon's rim. The near side was not the vertical cliff he'd imagined. It sloped steeply away to a point a quarter mile below his current position. There it gradually flattened out and disappeared under the overhanging far canyon wall. Tracking Sandy's long skid line, Richard saw her fighter. Still moving, it had somehow turned right side up and was riding its shield bubble like a giant, invisible sled. As it reached the bottom of the chasm, her fighter slid out of sight beneath the far wall's underturned ice sheet.
Looking over his shoulder, Richard studied his fighter. That thing was never going to fly again. It was toast, and there wasn't anything in it that would help him here and now. Its emergency beacon had started broadcasting the instant he'd lost main power. Someone would find them soon, but Sandy might be in trouble right now.
Richard looked back down into the crevice, frowning and shaking his head.
Finally, he said, "Fuck it," and launched himself down the steep slope.
CHAPTER SEVENTEEN
Flying a few feet above the ice, Richard sailed more than a hundred feet down the steep slope. Even in Europa's weak gravity, the velocity of his slow-motion fall soon built to a disturbing speed. With mounting horror, he watched the slope's surface rush up to meet him. Bracing for impact, he aimed to land on both feet, intent on another lunar-style bounding hop. But as soon as they hit the ice, his legs shot out from under him. The combination of inertia, low gravity, and the slope's virtually frictionless surface shattered his plan.
He slammed hard onto his back. "Shit!" Richard yelled, dragging the word into two syllables. For a moment, his feet shared the sky with a sea of crisp stars as he slid down the steep slope, careening toward the distant canyon floor. Using skidding arms and hands for leverage, Richard lowered his legs and tried to dig his heels into the ice. Even as he did so, his speed increased alarmingly. His arms and legs flailed, but nothing worked; he just kept going faster.
The colonel's heart raced. The initially distant canyon floor now rushed to meet him. As he descended deeper into the chasm, he skipped across raised dark, rough bands like a truck driving down a washboard road.
Still on his back and racing across the ice feet first, Richard steadied himself on his elbows and forearms. Again he tried to dig in his heels. Finally, they found purchase on the roughening surface. He began to slow. Twin rooster tails of spraying ice and dark pebbles sprayed across him. The icy spray and debris soon coated Richard from head to toe. His visor iced over, threatening to blind him to the onrushing terrain. He shifted his weight to one arm so that he could wipe it with the other hand, but a thin strip of material peeled away from the neck ring and began to wipe the visor from bottom to top and back again.
The combination of the fading slope coupled with the textured surface allowed his feet a better grip. Yard by yard, his speed slowed.
Overhead, the visible portion of the sky was shrinking to a narrow ribbon as the far wall towered over him.
"Shit! Ouch, ouch! Shit!" Richard screamed as he traversed a series of spine-jarring ridges. In a cloud of ice spray, he passed under a shadowed ledge and finally came to a stop. Unimpeded by an atmosphere, the tumultuous cloud thinned as its individual components continued to fly away from him.
Looking up through the rapidly clearing sky, Richard saw that he'd slid to a stop just below the same overhanging wall under which Sandy had disappeared. Tectonic forces had apparently sheared off the bottom twenty feet of the two-thousand-foot-tall ice cliff. Two stories above him, the canyon wall's smooth face curled under to form a ceiling of bluish-white ice.
Richard sat up and saw Sandy's fighter. It had stopped forty feet deeper into the cornice-shaped cave. The ship had come to rest wedged into the narrowing sliver of space where curled-under chasm wall met canyon floor.
He scrambled to his feet and reached for his radio.
It was gone!
Turning to face the slope, he visually scanned the long trail he'd left in the ice, but didn't see the dark, rectangular cube.
He hoped Sandy's drive had come back online. If not, they might be in trouble. The steepness of the chasm's walls made getting out that way hopeless. And with Sandy's ship tucked under a quarter-mile-thick ledge of ice, the signal of its emergency beacon wasn't likely to broadcast beyond the floor of the chasm.
Turning back toward Sandy's fighter, Richard started to hop toward her ship, but he tripped over something. Looking down, he saw that he'd stumbled over one of the small ridges. It looked the same as the ones that had jarred his spine during the last part of his skidding stop.
Studying its textured surface, Richard blinked several times. "What in the hell is that?"
He suddenly realized that the dark ridges must be material pushed to the surface from the liquid ocean below because tiny, reddish-brown shells covered each ridge like an encrustation of barnacles. Looking left and right he saw that the brown strata of shells continued down the length of the chasm.
Turning, he walked back to the next ridge. It, too, owed its dark color to the multitude of small, round carapaces embedded in it. Dropping to a knee, he picked up one of the thousands of shells his skidding stop had dislodged. Holding it at eye level, he studied its spiral form. About a quarter-inch wide, it looked like a cross between a nautilus shell and that of a snail. Flipping it over, he searched its opening for signs of its long-dead occupant.
It suddenly occurred to him that the shells had the same color as the red stripes he'd seen from space. Evidence of extraterrestrial life had been staring them in the face for decades.
Suddenly, something touched his right shoulder. Richard jumped. Snapping around, he half-expected to find the creature's big brother towering over him.
To his relief it was just Sandy.
He heard her snorting laugh come through his suit's speaker.
"You nearly gave me a heart attack! I've told you a million times: never sneak up on me when we're stranded on a frozen moon!"
After a final snort, she raised her hand in a mock salute. "Yessir, Colonel Frosty!"
Richard looked at his body. The thick coating of white frost and brown shells almost looked like fur.
"You look like the love child of a polar bear and a grizzly," Sandy said and then
dissolved into another fit of snorting laughter.
"I take it you're fine?" Richard said.
"No worse for wear," she finally said after a long sigh.
Richard picked one of the brown shells from his chest and held it out to her. "Did you see these?"
Glancing at it and the band of material, she shrugged. "You ain't seen nothing yet."
She turned and began bounding toward her ship. "Follow me."
He took off after her. Ice spray launched from the surface with each landing. The trajectory of the ejecta reminded him of the old Apollo videos. Unencumbered by gravity or an atmosphere, the spray shot out in all directions from each foot's point of impact, only begrudgingly surrendering to the moon's weak gravity after it had flown a few feet.
"Considering our present situation, you seem awfully chipper," Richard said between hops.
"Well, I know something you don't," Sandy said.
"What might that be?"
"You'll see it when we get in the ship, but first there is something I want to show you over here," she said, pointing to the left of her fighter.
As they went deeper into the dark cave, their suit lights deployed. Sandy's fixture cast a bouncing blue spot over the cave's wall and ceiling. The radiance reflecting off the shiny surfaces cast a swarming kaleidoscope of lights and shadows across the surreal scene.
Slowing to an awkward walk, she went around to the left side and disappeared behind the fighter.
Richard followed. As he passed the ship, he froze in place. Again, he had to blink his eyes a couple of times to make sure he wasn't having a hallucination.
"Oh my God!" he whispered.
Sandy was standing next to a large, frozen carcass that protruded from the point where the two sides of the canyon came together.
After a moment, he was able to unglue his feet from the icy floor of the crevice. As he approached Sandy and the beast, he panned his light from its protruding head to the point where its body disappeared into the ice.
"Holy shit," Richard whispered. "That thing is huge! It's as thick as an SUV and must be at least thirty feet long. And that's just the part sticking out."
