by Jack Castle
“If you are looking for an exciting romp through space then you came to the right book!”
— Robert Bose, Author
“I’ve taught literature at several colleges over the last 35 years, and this read is a harbinger of great adventures to come.”
— Dr. J.P. Waller, former editor for Vice-President Al Gore
“Take a trip outside our universe with Jack Castle’s Europa Journal”
— M. Bonds, CDA Press
This book was the first book in years that I couldn’t put down. The gripping story of the characters and the way Jack Castle skillfully weaves between past and present creates a spider web of intrigue and suspense leaving the reader wanting more. I couldn’t put this book down. I fell asleep in mid sentence because I didn’t want to stop but still needed sleep. Needless to say, when I woke up I picked it right back up. I am on my third time reading this book and the more I read, the more I become part of the world that lies within the pages of Europa Journal
— Ryan Chidester, Award winning Actor
EUROPA JOURNAL
by Jack Castle
Copyright © 2015 by Chris Tortora
e-Book Edition
Published by
EDGE-Lite
An Imprint of
HADES PUBLICATIONS, INC.
CALGARY
Notice
This eBook is licensed for your personal enjoyment only. It may not be re-sold or given away to other people. If you would like to share this book with another person, please purchase an additional copy for each reader. If you’re reading this book and did not purchase it, or it was not purchased for your use only, then please purchase your own copy. Thank you for respecting the hard work of the author.
* * * * *
Dedications
Dedicated To Those Who Kept the Dream Alive…
My wife, muse, and soul mate, Tracy Tortora
My first and biggest fan, (and best friend), Chad Bryant
My mentor who helped me hone my craft, Dr. J.P. Waller
My other best friend, Greg Wahlman
My sister, Margie, who typed up my very first script, Hunter Joe
Our Lord and Savior
I would also like to acknowledge these folks for transporting Europa Journal from my nightstand drawer to your fingertips. Ella Beaumont, editor supreme and literary archeologist who unearthed my novel from her gargantuan slush pile. Photographer Jordan Carter, Janice Shoults for all her marketing and promotional efforts, Janice Blaine for cover design elements, Mark Steele for his book and eBook designs and of course, Mr. Brian Hades, the Mad Hatter in charge, who allowed all of this insanity to happen.
Contents
EUROPA JOURNAL
Dedications
Contents
Prologue
Chapter 1
Final Descent
Chapter 2
The Bort Report
Chapter 3
The Europa Moon Base
Chapter 4
The Inner Chamber
Chapter 5
The Specimen
Chapter 6
Harry’s Island
Chapter 7
Harry’s First Contact
Chapter 8
Crash-land
Chapter 9
The Caravan
Chapter 10
The River
Chapter 11
The Stray Dog
Chapter 12
The Wall
Chapter 13
The SongBird Goddess
Chapter 14
The City
Chapter 15
Millwood Junction
Chapter 16
Ore-Ship Station
Chapter 17
The Ore Ship
Chapter 18
The Prophet
Chapter 19
The Palace
Chapter 20
The Offering
Chapter 21
The Ruins
Chapter 22
Final Resting Place
Chapter 23
Mook Attack
Chapter 24
The Oasis
Chapter 25
Prisoner of the Gods
Chapter 26
Back in the Cell
Chapter 27
Angle of Attack
Chapter 28
Leo and Tae’s Impossible Mission
Chapter 29
Bomb Run
Chapter 30
Final Battle
Chapter 31
The Europa Moon Temple
BEDLAM LOST
The next new novel by Jack Castle
Chapter One
Hank
About the Author:
Details
“Those who from heaven to earth came eventually tired of their toils, so they created a primitive worker.”
— Sumerian tablet, c. 2000 B.C.
“Faith is the substance of things hoped for, the evidence of things not seen.”
— Hebrews 11:1
Prologue
On 5 December 1945, five TBM Avenger bombers embarked on a training mission off the coast of Florida and mysteriously vanished without a trace in the Bermuda Triangle.
A PBY search and rescue plane with thirteen crewmen aboard set out to find the Avengers … and never returned.
Chapter 1
Final Descent
Twinkling stars pinpricked the stark lavender sky and watched like spectators as one of their own arced gracefully across the darkening hemisphere and fell from the heavens.
The U.C.P. deep space transport plummeted from the upper atmosphere on its own decaying path; it slowly and delicately began to glow, its color changing from off-white to rich gold. The glorious blaze expanded into a burning sphere that resembled a shooting star.
Flames and sparks trailed from every engine and wing. Heat-shielding plates flew off the underbelly by the dozens as the space transport began breaking up, a thousand-mile-long jet stream of clouds and debris in its wake. The nosecone began to crumple under the onslaught of the burning winds. Unbelievably, the occupants in the cockpit still fought for their survival.
#
“MWAAP … MWAAP … MWAAP … Crashing! Crashing! Switch to manual!” the crash program’s computer voice announced. After a moment’s pause, it repeated the warning, as if the shuddering cockpit, bleating Klaxon, and flames shooting past the forward windshield weren’t enough.
“Really, no kidding,” Mission Commander MacKenzie O’Bryant, ‘Mac’ for short, replied to no one in particular. Behind the navigation console, she struggled to keep the quivering Explorer II from nosing over and pinning her crew beneath the flaming wreckage.
Out of the corner of her eye, Mac saw the young pilot on her right examining the gauges that screamed for his attention. ‘Lt. L. Dalton’ was stencilled over the right breast pocket of his uniform, a Canadian flag patch sewn onto the left shoulder. His expression betrayed his growing disgust as highly unacceptable readings came back on the console before him. “Vertical descent — one hundred and twenty-five thousand. No, wait: one hundred and sixty-five thousand — no, twenty-four thousand.”
“Which is it, Leo? Twenty or sixty?” Mac asked. It was a pretty big difference. Mac wore an American flag on the shoulder of her jumpsuit, as if her Southern accent itself wasn’t indicative of her roots.
While she waited for Leo’s reply, the few seconds seeming like hours, Mac cas
t a quick glance at the monitor displaying their three payload passengers who were located one deck below.
Not surprisingly, the three battle-hardened commandos’ stolid faces were the epitome of calm. Sure, as their bodies were crushed by g-force, their fists clenched to their seats, and their eyes fluttered and rolled back in their heads, but if they had any idea how bad the situation was, as she suspected they did, they should have been screaming. These men were professionals, the best of the best; they knew that they could do nothing to help, so they resigned themselves to their fate and placed their lives in her hands.
Mac wasn’t about to let them down.
“I don’t know. It keeps jumping back and forth between the two; I can’t get a proper altitude reading. First it’s in the twenties and then the sixties,” Leo replied, banging on the side of the console. “Wait a minute. There it goes: one hundred and twenty thousand.”
But Mac didn’t need an altitude reading to know that the ground was coming up much too fast. Passing through the atmosphere the ship had been engulfed in flames, blocking their view, but now that they had finished dropping through a thin layer of clouds, she saw a landmass, one that looked like a big island or a small continent. It came into view a mere 100,000 feet below them.
Mac frowned at her monitor, touched a button, and pulled back on the control column with even more fervor. If she didn’t get the nose up, the ship would go into a spin, and if that happened at this speed, they would be finished.
Displayed on the monitor was the image of a Korean man sitting at the flight engineer’s station. He announced, “Number two and four anti-gravity generators are still off line.” To Leo, he added, “I told you. I told you not to touch it, but you wouldn’t listen.” Mocking Leo’s voice, he said, “Why? What’s the worst that could happen?” Nearly hysterical, he replied in his own voice, “Well, we found out didn’t we?”
Mac wasn’t quite sure what had led up to this latest predicament, but it was pretty clear that her flight engineer felt Leo was somehow responsible.
“Hey,” Leo shot back, “I didn’t see you doing anything to help.”
“Give me an EC pressure reading,” Mac shouted to the flight engineer, cutting their argument short.
“EC’s in the pike, five-by-five,” Tae called forward. It was the first good news she’d heard in the last six minutes.
Of course, Commander O’Bryant had trained for landing a ship after engines failed following shuttle launch. She had even trained to land a malfunctioning transport in Jupiter’s infamous gravity well. But no training simulation in the known galaxy could have prepared her for landing a crippled space shuttle on a planet that had never been seen before by human eyes. Deep space travel was a breeze; it was atmospheric landings that caused the majority of shuttle pilot fatalities. As if the situation weren’t bad enough, the Explorer II hadn’t been designed to land under Earth-type gravity conditions.
Still miles above the planet, Mac saw a panorama of mountains coming into view below them. The range of white, snowy peaks was cast in pitch-black shadows and graced by a glint of the departing sun. In a way, it was kind of pretty. A nice little spot for their final resting place. No, she couldn’t think like that. She had to remain focused, stay positive.
“I have a visual line of sight,” Leo announced.
“I can see that,” Mac spat back, her tone tense. She didn’t dare look away from the landmass filling the cockpit windows, as if her will to keep the vessel aloft might waver the moment she looked away.
“Correct course ten degrees up, four minutes right,” Leo offered, monitoring the gauges.
Mac complied with his directions and was rewarded with a reduction in the maelstrom of bouncing winds and heavily quivering bulkhead. The ship, her ship, was finally beginning to ease.
“There, that’s a bit better. Try and hold it there if you can,” Leo added.
Impossibly, she and her flight crew were pulling it off. She felt her descending ship finally leveling out. There was actually a chance they were going to make it. Barring an extraterrestrial downdraft or some other unpredictable off-world catastrophe. If there was an Order to the Universe, by God, they were going to make it.
But just then, the opposite balance of the universe, the part that some call Chaos, dealt his nasty hand. A panel of circuitry in the molded helm console before Mac sparked several times in quick succession and exploded, enveloping her hands and face in a blazing inferno.
#
“Oh, geez!” Lt. Leo Dalton didn’t miss a beat and grasped his own set of controls the moment the panel erupted in his mission commander’s face. He risked a glimpse at her. She was slumped in her harness, burn marks on her cheeks and hands. He was unsure whether she was dead or unconscious, but one thing was for sure: it was up to him to land the spacecraft and up to him alone. Oh yeah, and Tae.
The ship suddenly jumped upward, as though in a reverse air pocket, and then resumed its hair-raising descent.
“Did a thruster just fall off?” Leo asked incredulously.
“Yup,” Tae replied matter-of-factly. “That’s okay. That one wasn’t working anyway.”
“I’m losing hydraulics,” Leo yelled back over his shoulder. He saw a yellow tongue of flame burst from the avionics bay and light up the nosecone like the end of a sparkler on Canada Day.
“That’s because everything is on fire,” Tae shouted up to him. “That last explosion knocked out another one of the anti-gravity generators.”
“Well, put the fires out,” Leo ordered through clenched teeth.
Tae flicked a switch and the WHOOSH of the interior cabin fire extinguishers, which were embedded in the fuselage, doused everything and everyone in thick chemical foam.
“Fires’ out,” Tae said dryly.
No hydraulic system meant no flaps and no brakes, but Leo doubted the ship would hold together long enough to reach the surface, let alone land in a manner that required brakes. One problem at a time, Leo, one problem at a time.
“Aw, geez. Terrain’s crap,” Leo said, but then he spotted a flat, open area just beyond a wide range of mountains. He maneuvered the crippled ship with what little controls he still had and aimed for the large plateau. “I’m going to try and spiral us in toward that mesa as best I can.”
The ship entered its final approach and Leo guided the Explorer II through a crest of mountains, fighting crosswinds and protesting gusts the entire way. Only a miracle prevented a rock wall from ending their glide path in an abrupt and squishy stop.
Sixty seconds before impact, Leo and Tae could just make out trees peppering the snow-coated peaks.
Ten seconds before impact, the trees and mountains parted like the Red Sea before Moses and revealed the large, flat mesa that Leo had seen from over a mile away.
“Flat land, five degrees right!” Tae shouted.
“I see it; I see it,” Leo replied grimly. He was so focused on coaxing the helm controls and maneuvering the falling ship in a do-or-die, wheels-up approach that his voice was nearly inaudible.
The last of the trees vanished, and the snow-covered mesa rose quickly up in greeting. “Wheels unresponsive. I’m going to have to put her down on her belly.”
“Six hundred feet and dropping,” Tae announced as he focused on the altimeter. “Five, four, three, two, here we go!” The hull vibrated and there was a deafening crash as the ship’s metal frame and the planet’s unyielding, jagged surface clapped together in unison: one, two, three times. The windows shattered on impact and blasted the exposed skin of the cockpit’s occupants with frigid air and thousands of tiny shards of glass.
The ship settled down in a heavy power slide through the snow. “Deploy chutes!” Leo shouted.
“Deploying emergency drag chutes,” Tae replied. The deployment of the quadruple chutes threw both men forward in their harnesses.
Leo strangled the fli
ght controls, feeling helpless as the ship slid for what seemed like an eternity. In actuality, it was little more than a half mile until the Explorer II finally came to a clumsy, unceremonious stop.
Aside from the sound of Tae purging the last of the fire extinguishers onto the numerous sparking and burning consoles, the only audible sound was the arctic wind rushing through the broken cockpit windshield. At least we’re on the surface.
Leo was the first to say anything, and as it was, he meant it only for himself. “I did it.” It was all his trembling lips could manage.
He stared blank-faced out the windshield. A pile of snow was gathering around the windows and spilling inside, but he no longer saw mountains or trees, only open sky. That’s strange, Leo thought. The ship feels level, so I should see something besides open air. Before he could investigate further, a slight groan from Commander O’Bryant drew his attention. He leaned over in his chair and felt the mission commander’s pulse. It was good and strong. She was a little beat up and had some first-degree burns on her face and hands, but it wasn’t anything that bandages and burn cream couldn’t fix.
Despite everything they had just been through, Leo’s thoughts gave way to fancy. Maybe, just maybe, after the commander found out what a spectacular job he did landing this wounded bird and after they got rescued, maybe, just maybe, she’d finally give him the chance he wanted above all else …
But that was as far as Leo’s fantasy went, for Chaos still had an ace up his sleeve, and he decided to play it. Leo’s heart rose to his throat as he felt the ship tilt. He watched helplessly as the ruined nosecone of the shuttle slowly teetered forward. The view was both breathtaking and horrific.
It was now clear to Leo that the Explorer II had not landed on an entirely stable area. The view of open-air nothingness was slowly replaced by a view of a vast ocean far below: the Explorer II was balanced on a cliff that had to be at least ten thousand feet high.
That’s why we couldn’t get a proper reading coming in, Leo thought. We were reading this plateau and the ocean’s surface below it.
Leo heard the sounds of rock giving way beneath the busted cockpit as the view tipped back to sky. The young lieutenant knew that they didn’t have much time. The thrusters and anti-gravity generators were totally stalled. If the ship were to fall now, they’d never survive. From this height, the watery surface might just as well have been concrete.
