The Life Below

by Alexandra Monir

  Go outside.

  As soon as Jian mentions opening the airlock, the celebration freezes.

  “Can’t we just . . . enjoy this one victory a little longer before going out there?” Sydney asks with a shiver. “I mean, I still don’t know what I believe, but—what if Dr. Wagner was right? What if we really did just land in the most dangerous spot?”

  There’s a long pause. I can tell that the prospect of venturing beyond our safe haven puts all of us, even Beckett, on edge. But we can’t hide out in the spaceship forever.

  “It’s not like we can launch back into orbit and fix our destination,” Jian points out. “We don’t have the fuel or propulsion left. If we decide to make the trip to Agenor Linea, we’ll have to drive there by rover. Which means, either way, we’re going outside.”

  “One of us should go first, to get the lay of the land and see what we’re walking into, before everyone else leaves the ship,” I say. “And it should be me. The rest of you were actually chosen for this mission, so your safety comes first.” I crack a smile. “I’m here to be the guinea pig.”

  “I’ll go with you,” Naomi offers, but I shake my head.

  “No. I have to do this alone.”

  Beckett raises an eyebrow at me, and I wonder if he’ll refuse, not wanting anyone else to claim the honor of being the first to walk on Europa. But he stays silent, which only adds to my nerves. He’s not fighting my decision—because he knows I’m taking the biggest risk.

  Naomi and Kitt help me into the multilayer pressurized Europa space suit, attaching the hard fiberglass shell to my torso that sustains my upper body and life-support backpack, and securing the Extravehicular Visor over my helmet. I switch on the lights and cameras inside the visor, check the suit pressure for any leaks, and then—it’s time. I walk forward, alone.

  The airlock unseals with a hiss, and my heart rises in my throat at the first sliver of light through the opening door. A close-up of something silver turns into a tapestry of ice as the scene widens, until I can see it all—the new world, spread out before me.

  There is so much to look at, I can’t focus my eyes in one place—not on the sky, dominated by the jaw-dropping enormity of Jupiter; or the ground, where red-veined ice awaits its first touch. My surroundings take on the surreal, blurred quality of dreams and I blink rapidly, trying to clear my vision, as a voice in my head nudges me to move. But I’m frozen in place, my legs as rigid as the landscape in front of me.

  The lander’s side door shudders open, and a short flight of stairs unfurls. The sound jolts me out of my trance, and I step forward, making my way down the stairs in what feels like slow motion.

  This is it. The thousands of astronauts who trained and dreamed before me, the billions of dollars devoted to the space program over the last century, were all leading up to this—a moment I’m fairly certain I’m not worthy of. The best I can do is come close.

  I’m at the final stair now. I take a deep breath behind my helmet, readying for the first step. And then my boots meet the ice.

  I gasp at the feel of solid ground beneath me, a practically foreign feeling after months of moving floors and floating corridors. But no sooner have my feet touched the ground than I’m back in the air again, my body bounding forward from the microgravity like some kind of wily cartoon character. I laugh out loud, the sound reverberating across the empty landscape. And then my laughter turns to tears as it hits me just how far I’ve come from where my family left me—so far, I’m not sure their spirits could find me here. But I know they would be proud of who I’ve become, how much I’ve changed since those desperate months alone in Italy.

  “There it is,” I murmur into my headset. “The first human steps on Europa.”

  I try to think of something else to add for posterity, something as poetic as Neil Armstrong’s “one small step” line from a century ago. But all I can do is whisper in my home language, “Bellissimo.”

  And it’s true. Europa might be all jagged ice and rock, but there is still something starkly beautiful about it. Especially when you look at the sky: half of it ablaze with color from Jupiter, while the other half remains shrouded in darkness. It’s like day and night existing at once, splitting the same sky. Even the most extensive training and mock-ups couldn’t have prepared me for that.

  A sudden chill runs through my body, and that’s when it hits me: the miraculous reality that I’m actually outside again. There are no tight confines out here, no walls bearing down on me. Even the shock of the cold, biting enough to feel through my heated space suit, is a welcome change. After months of living in a perfectly regulated, temperature-controlled flying machine, I’d almost forgotten what extreme temperatures felt like. Now the chill makes me feel more human—more alive.

  “Tell us everything.” Naomi’s voice bursts through my headset. “What does it look like from your point of view, what does it feel like?”

  “I could get used to this feeling, actually,” I say with a grin as my body springs effortlessly across the red ridges. “Turns out microgravity is a lot more fun than zero g.”

  I come to a halt as my path splits in two, with one long artery in the ice jutting to the right. After a moment’s hesitation, I make the turn. And then, after a ten-minute stretch of the same blank canvas, the scene changes. I stop in my tracks at the forest of ice spikes looming before me.

  “Whoa,” I whisper into the headset. “Are you guys seeing this through my cam?”

  “The penitentes,” Sydney’s voice breathes. “They’re so much bigger than I thought. . . .”

  I hear Naomi urging me to be careful, but I’m already moving, the microgravity landing me at the entrance to the ice forest in just two leaps. Towering silver-white blades rise up on all sides of me, rows and rows of them, engulfing me like an ant in a field.

  “We just lost you in our direct sight line,” Jian says sharply. “Come out of the spikes, Leo.”

  “Wait. I’ve never seen anything like this. . . .” My voice trails off as I crane my neck to look up at the soaring ice. “They’re all uniform—the same height, the jagged edges in the same places. What are the odds of that?”

  “We’ll check it out later when you have backup,” Naomi says hurriedly. “Come back to the ship, Leo, please.”

  The worry in her voice gets me, and I turn back—but not before reaching my gloved hand to one of the spikes. And then I draw back my hand in shock.

  Something just . . . stung me.

  I frantically study my glove, breathing a sigh of relief when I see that it wasn’t punctured. That was lucky. But then . . . if nothing penetrated my glove, how to explain what I just felt?

  “My hand,” I mutter into the headset as I weave past the spikes. “I felt this—this hot stinging through my palm when I touched the spike. I still feel it . . . but my glove wasn’t breached.”

  “You touched the spike?” I hear Naomi exclaim, while Minka says calmly, “It’s just your imagination. You couldn’t feel something like that through your gloves. If anything, maybe you were just anticipating the extreme cold of the ice, like the sting of frostbite.”

  “Yeah,” I say doubtfully. “Maybe.”

  “So is there anything else?” Beckett’s derisive voice cuts in. “Anything more interesting to show us than ice spikes? Where are the aliens you were so insistent on helping us with? I thought you and Greta Wagner said this was supposed to be the ‘Extraterrestrial Hot Zone’ or something.” He snorts.

  I stop still, clenching my fists.

  “You really think discovering life happens that fast? We haven’t even been here a full hour.”

  “Long enough to know it’s a wasteland,” Beckett says. “Look around you. The only thing alive on Europa is us.”

  I open my mouth to argue, but then I realize . . . I have no comeback. It kills me to admit Beckett could be right about anything, but I don’t see or hear a single sign of activity. The entire landscape is devoid of life. Then again, we’ve only just scratched the
surface. The others might be quick to write off Dr. Wagner—but I still believe.

  Back at the lander, the others step out of the airlock one by one to join me. First is Jian, who takes one look at Jupiter above us and the rocky ice below, and lets out a victory yell—the most unrestrained I’ve seen Jian since the day he learned he’d lost his family. Sydney follows him, and when the microgravity knocks her off her feet, she doesn’t try to get up. She stays kneeling on the ice as if in prayer, running her gloved hands across the alien ground. And then Naomi comes stumbling toward me, her expression frozen in awe behind her glass faceplate. For everything the six of us have experienced up to this point, nothing comes close to this—stepping into the new world that was once far more fantasy than fact.

  “Look.”

  Naomi grips my gloved palm in hers, and I follow her gaze to the lander steps. My mouth falls open at the sight of Tera and Kitt, their mechanical bodies morphing the second they step onto the ice. Their limbs lengthen, thick blades form beneath their feet, and a clear plastic coating falls across the metal masks that make up their faces, unraveling and shaping itself to their bodies. And then the two AIs glide smoothly across fractured ice with none of our human clumsiness, instantly adapted to our new environment.

  “Greta thought of everything,” I say, swallowing the lump in my throat.

  Beckett and Minka are the last to emerge, and when Beckett touches the ground, it’s without his usual cocky swagger. The magnitude of this place has humbled us all.

  The six of us and our two AIs stand side by side, facing the pale landscape ahead. And then Minka asks what we’re all thinking.

  “So . . . what happens now?”

  Jian glances back at the lander, its hefty cargo bay holding the supplies to keep us alive.

  “Now we build.”

  The empty ice transforms into a hub of activity, with the crew and two AIs hauling cargo out of the lander while Tera directs us to where the X is marked: the spot on the Europa map chosen long ago for our surface habitat. Except . . . the path they’re following is the one I was sent here to interrupt.

  Everyone else is in motion: Sydney and Minka assembling the first solar panel to get us powered up and online, while Beckett and Jian haul out heaps of aluminum and canvas that will inflate to become an eighteen-hundred-square-foot temporary home. Meanwhile, Naomi and I huddle off to the side, debating what to do.

  “I could just run into the lander, unload the rovers, and insist we follow Greta Wagner’s map instead, before we get in too deep here—” I start to say when Jian’s voice crackles through my headset.

  “Leo! Beckett!” He beckons us toward him. “You two were the ones trained in using the nuclear hydrothermal drill—now’s your chance to use it. Naomi, Minka needs your help linking her computer with the drill system for the first sample analysis.”

  My stomach drops. Naomi and I exchange a look of alarm.

  “You—you want to drill through the ice here? What about everything Greta Wagner warned me—us—about this location? Who knows what life is under there, what it’ll do—”

  “Give it a rest, Danieli.” I can practically hear the eye roll through Beckett’s voice. “We caused the biggest disturbance already when we landed. If there was any life to worry about, it would have shown itself by now.”

  From across the ice, I see Jian glance at Naomi with an apologetic shrug.

  “You know I was willing to change course for Wagner’s theory, but now that we’re here—well, it seems Dr. Takumi and General Sokolov were right. It’s just what they said it would be: empty, untouched. And since it’ll take days to melt the ice, we need to start now.”

  “But what about underneath the ice?” I press. “For all we know, we could be waking a sleeping giant under there.”

  Jian hesitates, and I cross my fingers that I’m getting through to them.

  “We should all have a say, remember?” Naomi speaks up, her voice firm. “So. All in favor of taking the rovers to the safer zone indicated by Greta Wagner and drilling there instead?”

  Ours are the only two hands that go up. I turn to give Naomi a half-hearted smile. At least we tried. There’s nothing I can do now but pull my weight—especially if my role here turns out to be as pointless as Beckett would like to believe.

  I force myself to look my rival in the eye.

  “Let’s do this, then.”

  “You don’t know how to get into the vault where the drill probe is stored,” he says with a smirk. “I’ll go into the lander to launch it. You can stay on the ice to set up the first sample collection.”

  “Fine.”

  I wait, my palms sweating in their gloves despite the cold. And then, more than ten minutes later, the ground starts rumbling. A long mechanical arm swings forward from the side of the lander, like a sharp-toothed cousin of the Pontus’s Canadarm. I jump into action, grabbing a test tube from my supply pack and attaching it to the drill blades, before guiding it onto the ice.

  “Go!” I shout into my earpiece. And then the rotating blades start to gnash their teeth against the ice, while jets within the drill shoot out heated water to speed up the thawing. I can’t look away from the sight.

  I feel a warmth beside me and glance up to see Naomi. As her gloved hand slips into mine, I know we are thinking the same thing.

  If there really is life on Europa—the life Greta Wagner wrote and theorized about; that Naomi spent her entire time at space camp investigating—we’ll find it right here.

  Later, while the robots finish unpacking the lander, the six of us assemble our habitat under the light of Jupiter, firing air into industrial-strength canvas using pressure equalization valves. Watching the canvas transform into the walls and ceilings of a home is another surreal moment in a sea of them as we put into action what we practiced during space camp training a lifetime ago. And then Minka’s computer emits a series of beeps.

  She and Naomi drop the half-inflated corners they’re holding and dash over to the folding table that we’re using as a makeshift data-analysis station. The rest of us crowd around them, holding our breath as Minka swipes the screen.

  “The first sample results are in!”

  She peers forward, and her whole body turns rigid—just as Naomi gasps and grabs Minka’s arm. It seems they’ve both arrived at the same discovery. My heartbeat speeds up as I watch them.

  “Well? What is it?” Beckett nudges his way forward, staring at the screen.

  “The water.” Minka’s voice wavers. “It’s—not normal.”

  “What do you mean?” Jian’s voice rises in panic. “Are you saying it’s not safe to drink?”

  “No. I might be saying the opposite.” Minka studies the letters and numbers on-screen, her eyes wide. “Look what was found in our first drill sample here.”

  She points to a row of symbols, her hand resting on a chemical formula I don’t recognize offhand: C12H22O11.

  “Sucrose,” Naomi whispers. “A food source.”

  My jaw drops.

  “Seriously?” Sydney stares from Naomi to Minka in disbelief. “You’re saying the ocean contains naturally derived sugar?”

  “We have to do more testing to confirm, but it looks good.” Minka smiles at us, a giddy look in her eyes that I haven’t seen before.

  “Too good,” I say slowly, fixing my gaze on Naomi. “What are the odds of us stumbling upon that kind of miracle?”

  “Except we didn’t really stumble on it,” Beckett says. “Why do you think Dr. Takumi and the general were so insistent on this location?”

  His words stun us into silence. But if they knew . . . why keep it a secret?

  “That’s why they were willing to put the Final Six through every risk,” Naomi says numbly. “A new world with its own natural food resource and water ocean, wrapped in one? That’s too rich a prospect to miss—even if it means sacrificing us in the process.”

  “It was only a theory until now,” Beckett says, gazing at the computer screen in awe
. “Nothing definite enough to announce, in case they ended up being wrong and disappointing the world. But they had some data that hinted at this—enough to discuss it at the White House.” A smile spreads across his face. “And now I—we—get to tell them all that we discovered it.”

  “Well, hold the celebration,” Naomi says flatly. “Because wherever there’s nutrients, there’s life, to feed on it. And whatever that life is, we can’t expect it to willingly share its food and water and world with us.”

  For once, Beckett doesn’t have a comeback at the ready. And then Minka turns on her heel, away from our half-constructed home.

  “I’m going to go get the imaging spectrometer from the cargo bay. It’ll help us see the composition of the ocean in even more detail. . . . Be right back.”

  “All right.” Jian picks up one of the pressure equalization valves. “Back to work.”

  Hardly anyone speaks while we finish inflating the Hab, though there’s an electric energy running through us. I know our minds are all occupied with the same thing: the water, and what it means. But in my case, there’s something else I can’t stop thinking about. Did Greta have any clue about this? If so, why keep it from me? And if not . . . then is there something else important she might have missed? Was she right, or was she wrong about Thera Macula, and the reason I’m here?

  It feels like hours later when the loud popping sounds from our inflating Hab suddenly cease, and Naomi lets out a little whoop.

  “You guys, it’s done!”

  A sprawling rectangular structure stands upright on the ice, the size and shape of a family home back on Earth, but with round airlocks instead of doors. I stare ahead in wonder. Looking at it now, it’s hard to believe this sturdy, spacious place was nothing but a heap of canvas just hours ago.

  “Impressive,” Jian says with a grin. “Let’s go claim our bunks!”

  We rush forward, spirits high at the prospect of getting to go inside and ditch our helmets and bulky space suits in this new, oxygen-pumping habitat. But before we make it to the first airlock, Naomi says, “Shouldn’t Minka be back by now?”