Europa Mon Amour

Europa Mon Amour

Ryan Taylor is a seventeen year old on a mission to Europa, a moon of Jupiter that supposedly has an ocean under its ice crust. He is teamed with a girl his age that has a mysterious past. Their mission is boring at the start but when they penetrate into the moon’s vast ocean they’re in for the adventure of their lives, and it doesn’t end there.

Ryan has blond hair and good muscular definition. His good looks are obvious but he’s shy and reserving.

All rights reserved, 2014. Names and references are fictional. No offense to anyone or anything is intended.

Chapter 1

I can’t believe that I’m being sent on a deep space mission. I’m only seventeen and a Junior Astronaut. Junior Astronauts spend time repairing equipment, attending boring space science classes and kissing ass, not going on important missions. What’s even more unbelievable is the fact that they’ve teamed me up with a girl my age. That’s plain crazy or a stroke of genius, depending on one’s situation.

They told me that the reason they’re sending me is because the mission involves a long journey and that they think I would be ideal for handling the boredom. I find that hard to believe. I think they picked me because I’m expendable, and I’d bet the house that the girl they’ve paired me with is also in that category. It seems strange to me that they would risk trusting two teens with a ten billion dollar spacecraft, especially since neither of us has ever been on a space mission before. We’ve been trained on simulators and have practiced working in spacesuits underwater, but that’s only a simulation, not the real thing.

Delta-1, the Europa mission’s space ship is in orbit around the Earth near the space station Hero-1. It’s too large to be parked anywhere else. A thousand meters long, the advanced spacecraft has a rotating crew section to create artificial gravity by centripetal force. The front section or bay, which does not rotate, is where the landing shuttle is located. A deep diving submersible is stowed on board the shuttle, and it’ll be used to penetrate Europa’s ice crust layer and explore the supposed ocean that lies below the Jovian moon’s icy surface. At least that’s the plan.

I have to admit that this mission excites me. It could become the first mission to locate extraterrestrial life. Scientists believe that Europa may be the most likely place for life because of the liquid water below its layer of ice. Heated by tidal forces as it orbits Jupiter, Europa is continually squeezed and expanded by the powerful gravitational force of Jupiter, the largest planet in the solar system. Heat is generated by this action much like a rubber ball heats up when one squeezes it many times.

I met Marie Gonzalez, the person I would be traveling to Europa with, in the staging area of Space Station Hero-1. She’s a Mexican girl with a pretty face framed with dark curly black hair that seems to drape more on the left side. I also noticed that she turns her head as if she were trying to avoid me looking at her left side.

What is she hiding?

What I really wanted to know is why I wasn’t aware of her being a Junior astronaut. I know all of the Junior Astronauts and no one ever mentioned her. That made her addition to this mission a mystery.

“Hi,” I said, trying to add a coy smile.

“Hi,” she replied with no smile. Her luscious lips twisted slightly as if to say that she was unsure of me, and her pretty eyes were averted, only briefly glancing at me.

Like me, she was suited up with the latest NASA space suit technology. This was necessary because we had to travel over to Delta-1 from the space station on a cable transport, essentially two taunt cables stretched between the space station and the ship. The cables support a motorized rig that carries us to the ship.