Europa Mon Amour

Chapter 8

The image that we were looking at on the screen was simply unbelievable. It appeared to be a structure made out of an unidentified material floating at approximately three to four miles down in Europa’s hidden ocean. Roughly geometric in nature, it consisted of hundreds of open rooms packed together in a building-like structure. The open rooms were rectangular and of roughly the same size. This means that it’s not a natural artifact but rather something built by intelligent creatures.

“That looks like a floating habitat,” I said.

“That doesn’t make sense,” she said. “What could they have built it out of?”

“Maybe the lights will work now,” I said before turning them on.

The creatures didn’t react to the light. Either they couldn’t see light or it didn’t frighten them.

“Those creatures have green scales,” Marie said. “And, even stranger, they seem to have some sort of eyes. That’s impossible. If they evolved in this ocean they wouldn’t need eyes because no light can penetrate down here.”

“Maybe they only see in infrared,” I said. “That would make it possible for them to find things in the dark to eat.”

“I still don’t think they evolved here,” she said.

“That would suggest that they were put here by someone,” I said.

“See if you could get an infrared scan on the structure,” she said.

I activated the infrared spectral scanning unit and panned it across the structure. Marie looked over the scan and sighed. “This only makes it more mysterious. The spectral scans shows carbon-oxygen and carbon-sulfur bonds. It might be constructed out of shells form some species of mollusk.”

“That means that we’ve only scratched the surface of what’s down here.”

“I agree. We would need many days of exploration to detect what’s really here.”

I pointed. “Look at all of those small things swimming around. I’ll bet that those are the larvae of this amphibian species.”

“We need to capture one of them,” Marie said.

“They may not like us taking their prodigy,” I said.

“I doubt it. There must be thousands of them.” Marie used two manually manipulated arms to catch one of the tadpoles in a metal container. She used the arms to close the container and bring it into the cargo section of the sub. She had already captured several other species in the same manner.

“They don’t act as if they’re upset,” I said. “I can’t believe that they’re so tolerant.”

“How many visitors do you think they get down here?” she asked me in a sarcastic tone.

“Yeah, your point is well taken.” I looked at the ship’s status readouts. “Oh, oh!”

“What’s wrong?” she said, wide eyed.

“We have to get the hell out of here. Our batteries are running low. I should have been paying more attention to them.”

“Shit1” she said, making me smile. I hadn’t heard her use any vulgar language.

I pulled the stick back to make the sub rise. To help the accent, I blew some ballast, but I didn’t want to overdo it because we could end up smacking into the ice layer too quickly. I also activated the beacon locator. The beacon that I had deployed at the beginning of this exploration of the deep was still sending out a signal and I used it to guide the sub to its location. I left the sonar system on in order to avoid running into something on the way up.

“How are we doing?” Marie asked.

“We still have battery power, but it’s low. We’ll need some power to pull this sub out of the water and up on the surface. That could get tricky if we’re too low in power.”

After fifteen tense minutes, I said it. “Shit! The battery power is running too low.”

She gave me a worried look. “What are we going to do?”

“I don’t know . . . wait a minute. I think this sub has an emergency backup source.” I punched some buttons and suddenly the power increased. “Yes!” I turned to her. “We’re still not out of the woods yet, but this should make the difference.”

“We should complain to management about not having enough power to do a proper exploration,” she said, smiling.

“Hopefully, we’ll live long enough to complain.”

The beacon signal grew stronger, so I backed off on the speed so that we could better position the sub for an extraction. This is where it gets testy. We have to use the auger to bore out of the lineae. If the ice is too hard, we may end up getting stuck, and there’s no one out there to help us.

“This is the time to pray,” I said before starting the auger.

Marie made a sign of the cross.

The sub vibrated like crazy as the auger cut into the ice and slowly screwed the sub up through the ice layer. When the auger broke free, both of us were nearly thrown out of our seats. The sub slowly climbed out of the hole we had made and slid along the ice shelf itself.

“The shuttle lander is still here,” Marie said.

“Good thing,” I said. “This sub doesn’t fly.”

She chuckled, but it was tinged with nervous excitement.

I slowly backed the sub into the shuttle’s hanger. The clamshell door slowly lowered to seal us in and fill the hanger with air even though we didn’t need it because we had our suits on. We climbed out of the sub and into the shuttle command chamber. Here’s where it gets tricky again. The shuttle had been sitting on Europa’s surface for approximately eight hours. There was no guarantee that its engines would fire and take us back to the ship. The -200 C temperature at the surface is not too kind to electronics and hydraulic systems. The entire thing came down to what happened when I pushed the button.