Lee made me feel like a terrible person today. The Chinese team has been jamming our communications systems for the past few days and today they finally were able to send a radio message through our transmitter.
Granted, I'm not really sure what their goal is, it seems like none of them seem to speak English so to us their words sound like gibberish. That is to all of us except Lee. Still, he made me feel incredibly guilty before revealing he could understand them.
I looked over to him when they first started communicating to us through the radio. I guess it is wrong to assume that just because he's of Chinese descent that he can understand what they are saying. He is obviously Chinese himself. To be fair however, in his defense I've never heard him speak Chinese and he speaks perfect English.
After pretending to be mad and explaining how he felt it was insulting for me to assume he knew Chinese, he finally added that he speaks Mandarin, and that Chinese is not a language.
I felt like an ass. The whole situation made Commander Hunt laugh though, which was a first. That smile quickly faded when Lee told us what the Chinese team wanted from us.
The Chinese team was making demands. Now that Europa was "under their jurisdiction" they were demanding we hand over half of our food and medical supplies and they threatened to take it by force if we didn't hand it over. We instantly relayed that information to NASA.
The take it by force part was likely a bluff, but it was still alarming. Obviously, our crew was unarmed. Why would we be? This wasn't some movie where explorers come to discover life on another world with guns drawn. The purpose of this mission was to preserve and observe any life we encountered.
We can only hope the Chinese crew is also unarmed. I would have to assume they are especially considering their mission launched before ours was even publicized.
We will have to await NASA's next instructions. For now, our plans to begin testing with the submarine have been put on hold.
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Europa
Science FictionIn order to embark on a mission to discover alien life on the icy moon of Jupiter Maria must leave her life on Earth behind, including her father and her seven-year-old son Diego. She thought the hardest part of the mission would be saying goodbye...
