Chapter 13

…[ MATIVO ]…

It had been six weeks since we arrived at the Jupiter System. There had been highs and lows throughout that period. The best moment had been when the Ganymede Ice Crust Driller, otherwise known as the Ganymede Piercer, had broken through the one fifty kilometer ice crust and delivered the Ganymede Submersible into the subsurface ocean of Ganymede a week ago. The Ganymede Piercer had been left still attached to the crust. The Submersible had immediately started transmitting a plethora of data back to the ship. And the scientists will busy guzzling it up. Analyzing it and trying to decipher the secrets it told about Ganymede. But in all that, we had yet to encounter life, or any sign that life could have existed.

I was currently in the Bridge, watching the progress of all mission teams with my slightly upturned eyes. The Bridge Display was filled by windows, each showing a different view either from the same mission or another mission. The submersible’s window had been relegated to the left far side after a few days. Other than that, there were two more missions going on on Ganymede. One on the surface, and another beneath it. The views from the mission beneath the surface were up front and center.

They had been the second mission to land on Ganymede, and the first manned to do so. Their main mission goal had been to collect samples from different depths of the crust. They had a side mission of trying to break through the crust. Creating a long tunnel that could be followed from the surface to the oceans below.

The Piercer’s tunnel closed behind it, but the crew’s remained open. They had lifts to ferry the excavator crust material out to the surface. They had also been setting up support structures as they moved along. But we didn’t have enough resources to create more sturdy support structures, they were not that reliable.

The teams had been rotating every ten hours to keep the tunneling going on without pause. The members of the teams were always the same. The current team had Mũsango in it, and she had been vocal throughout the six hours they had been tunneling. Most of the time talking to no one in particular. Her team had tried keeping up with her but it was clear that they were struggling, so the Bridge had stepped in as her conversation partner.

She had been saying something when she stopped midsentence and her view swerved left and right, and then up. At first nothing was showing on the Bridge that could explain her behavior.

All of a sudden, chaos erupted. All the views we had of the team started moving and shaking rapidly. We could hear that they were talking, some even screaming, but they were so jumbled together it was hard to determine what they were saying.

Soon enough, everything settled. One of the views appeared to be covered in chunks of ice. Either they had fallen face down, or they had been buried. I determined it was safe to talk then.

“Zheng. Report.” She was the Exploratory Commander of the mission. And her view and vitals showed that she was relatively fine.

“Command. I believe that some parts of the tunnel have collapsed. The current region we are at has also moved considerably. From what I felt, my best estimate is that we are at least two kilometers from the tunnel right now. At most around ten.”

“Are you sure?” That sounded like too much. The whole event had lasted for around two minutes. Just how fast had they been moved?

“Yes. It felt pretty fast. And violent. Ten of the crew are relative fine, no visible injuries. Eduardo has a broken arm. And Rincon is unaccounted for.”

“He is buried somewhere, but still alive. His view is covered in chunks of icy crusts.” I turned to Chantel then. “Alert the rescue teams.”

“I think we are still moving.” Mũsango said as her view showed her looking at her interferometer. “Yap. Still moving.”

“We’ll figure out were Rincon is and send out a rescue. Hang on tight, you have nothing to worry about. Shit,” I cursed as one of the few hairs I called a beard came off in my absentminded rough tugging. I had the least there beard in the Mutinda family. With barely any hairs on top of my lip but the five-ten to the sides of my mouth and the scarce spindly things hanging on the sides of my not-fully-cleft chin.

I had hoped that something like this didn’t happen during the expedition. The risks were there, I knew that. Still, it would have been better for the whole expedition to be without any issues. Every member of the crew had a tracker on them. Figuring out where Rincon and the rest of the team were wouldn’t be a problem. Getting to them would.

…[ ANDREW ]…

Andrew had never thought that they would be called upon. The one time he had been assigned as part of the rescue operation, something bad enough to warrant a rescue happened. He had really hoped it would be the ones on the surface. That would have been easier.

But no, he had not been that lucky. They would be going to rescue the tunnelers. He too had done his share of tunneling. Nearly every one of the crew had. As it was, if the buried team stayed where it was and the sheet didn’t move again, it would take them two weeks to get to them. the issue was the guy who had been separated from the rest of the team.

They had around forty or so kilometers of icy crust to get through. They would be working in two teams, switching like before, only it would be after six hours and each team was still expected to maintain the same distance dug like when they had ten hours. After around thirty kilometers, a branch would be started to get to the separated team member. The others could comfortably make it to the two-week mark, while Rincon would struggle to even survive one week. It had been decided that two of the buried team members would make the excavation to get to him. The risk of collapse would be as high as seventy percent. They would be able to make it to Rincon in six days. Then they would hanker down and use the resources they bring with them sparingly to last until the two-week mark. If the rescue delayed for more than a day past the two weeks, they would die of thirst.

The ride to the start of the tunnel was sober. No one really said anything to anyone. They knew that it would be a long arduous rescue attempt. They would be called upon for more than once before they even managed to reach the stranded team. The experts in astrogeology had claimed that whatever had happened had zero chance of happening again within that area for the next three weeks. It seemed like they had more than enough time. But Andrew still worried, why had they not known, or at least seen the event coming. Andrew knew that that was wrong of him to doubt them, even he too got blindsided by the things he worked on. Ganymede was a new place, they still had no idea about how it all worked.

On arrival, they carefully maneuvered into the tunnel and started making their descent. The first sixty kilometers of the tunnel were still intact and safe. It was past there were trouble had brewed. The tunnel was large enough for the shuttle to fly through, and they would be needing it for lots of things. Carrying the cleared rubble out of the tunnel, or even making a quick escape.

Down below, Andrew was the first out of the shuttle. What he found astonished him. The new layer was clear cut piece of ice block. It looked as though the crust had sheared smoothly. The rest of the twenty-four crew team followed him, and they soon got to work while the shuttle waited meters behind them.

“How far away were they that no one got to the shuttle?” Breuer asked. He was one of the chefs, recruited for the rescue attempt. Like everyone else not currently on mission.

“One of them did try. But now he is nearly buried alive.” Mwaũra replied.

“Isn’t he crushed to death by the weight of everything above him?”

“No. Like I said, nearly buried not fully. He is in a pocket of some kind and at any moment it could collapse. Then he would be crashed to death.”

“How far away is the shuttle?” Breuer was full questions, it seemed.

“More than a kilometer from the separated guy.” Jonah, the teams’ joint Exploratory Commander, answered when no one seemed to.

“Is it getting rescued too?” This time, it was Aquila. Andrew wasn’t sure where he normally worked at, but they had been on another Exploratory Team together.

“Of course. That thing is worth more than the whole of us combined.” Murphy said.

“Human live is worth more than a piece of machine.” Breuer argued. Andrew would have expected that kind of response from a physician. But a chef wasn’t that off from a physician, they all helped take care of bodies.

“Not this piece of machine!” Murphy was adamant. “That thing can travel at the speed of light. Can you do that?”

“We don’t know if it can get to that speed. We’ve only travelled at 0.9c.” Asmo said, the Gym Deck officer. She wasn’t as buff as one would expect. But everything about her screamed power.

“That’s because the Bridge didn’t want us disappearing into a… What did Mativo call it again?” Silence, no one answered Murphy. Either they had forgot, or they didn’t want to misquote it. “Anyway, there is that race coming up. We’ll know then.”

“Man, I feel bad I didn’t make it as one of the pilot’s.” Asmo commented, wistfully.

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“Me I was never in consideration to begin with.” Murphy was laughing as he said that. It didn’t seem to bother him at all. You would think that it would, for an Engineer.

“Who do you think will win?” Breuer asked.

“I don’t know. It is hard to tell between the four of them.” Asmo said.

“Yeah.” Murphy agreed with her. “If Mũsango had been part of the race, then it would be easier to guess the winner.”

“Do you think he cares more about the shuttle than the stranded people?” Breuer asked again, already moving on to another topic.

“Does it really matter?” Mwaũra asked. “Anyway, all rescue attempts are being directed at rescuing the people first. I haven’t heard of any plans to retrieve the shuttle.”

“He is not going to leave it.”

“You never know, he might.” Mwaũra countered Murphy’s statement.

“No, he will not. It’s all a matter of priorities. The shuttle can survive in there for hundreds of years without suffering much in terms of structure or functionality. We can barely survive past the two weeks.”

“What if the shelves moved again? It could get crushed.” Aquila asked. All his questions seemed to be shuttle related.

“The shuttle is a pressure vessel with high standard technologies to make it capable of withstanding huge differences in pressure.”

Murphy’s tone as he answered Aquila’s question brought the conversation to temporary halt.

But Asmo didn’t seem to care, and she used the lull in conversation to start recruiting. “I’m creating a new tag team if any of you are interested in joining.”

“I thought you were part of a team?” Jonah asked her.

“I was.”

“And you are not now?” Murphy asked a stupid question, according to Andrew, that is.

“No. We disbanded.”

“Why? You guys were so good.” Jonah looked genuinely curious, but Asmo winced at that statement.

“We were dead last in the league standings since the league started six weeks ago.”

“I might be. But I’ve never played, so I might not be as good as your former teammates.”

“You don’t need to be. I just need enough players to keep playing.”

“You’ll need better players. DJ Pam destroyed you guys last week.” Andrew wondered if Murphy was just plain ignorant or just arrogant.

“Hey, aren’t you part of DJ Pam?” Mwaũra asked.

“No. I mean yes.” Andrew remembered that day. He remembered alright. Jacy had been angry. The reason, no one knew. And Dominic and Park were always out for blood. The end result, they had gone undefeated the whole day, a first for them. “I’m only a sub. I didn’t play that day.”

“I’m don’t play just to win. I also want to enjoy myself.”

“You can enjoy yourself while winning too.”

The others laughed at her as she ferried the collected rubble back to the shuttle. The banter continued as they steadily progressed, each minute of each hour getting closer and closer still to the trapped crew. Andrew thought they all made the extra effort of keeping the conversations going to keep from thinking about what they were actually doing. The thought of been the one trapped was truly unsettling, so Andrew too kept up with the conversation.

…[ MATIVO ]…

A week had passed since the accident. Rincon had been found by Zheng and Paul. Mũsango had wanted to be one of the two to rendezvous with Rincon but nearly everyone was against it. She might not think herself so, but she was a vital crew member. There were backup Helms on board but losing her this early on would be devastating. Robin was an experimental ship and only the best would be able to test her to her limits. If it had been an expedition on a tested ship, I might have let her go. She had finally relented when Zheng promised to go herself. And the rescue crews were more than halfway there. If they kept the pace up, the trapped crew might get rescued in less than the two weeks previously projected.

I was in my quarters, going through my messages from Earth. I quickly filtered through the nonessentials such as those asking how I was or even how the expedition was progressing. I knew they needed to know and I was the one person who could give them all the information they needed. But it still felt like too much. Maybe I needed someone to handle such tasks for me, what were they called of recent? I wasn’t sure. Their names kept changing as the decades wore on.

After replying to them with as much as I could manage without feeling the need to stab myself, I finally got to the juicy parts. The security report and Kanyele’s progress report. I started with Kanyele.

He started by saying that he had of yet to manage to perform another test yet. Saying that his team had been focusing on making sure that the engine core was stable enough. Apparently, as they went through the previous test’s data, they had noticed some irregularities that could prove catastrophic at such speeds. The core seemed to become unstable the faster they got than the speed of light. He had been forced to direct some of his resources on working on a containment field for the core. If not to stabilize it, then at least to keep whatever it unleashed when it lost all stability from affecting those around. That is what you want right? Not to destroy your own ship in the process. He had asked in the message.

He then moved on to talk about the data we send back to them after our 0.9c cruise. It had excited him beyond measure. I could clearly see him trying to control his smile in the video. He said that if the data was correct and not tampered with, something that could have happened during the encryption transmission or decryption of the message, then the ship could comfortably match the speed of light. Getting past that he didn’t think was possible. Not with the engine core and engines the ship had. He also very vehemently warned against trying to attainment such speeds.

He said based on the data we had send him, he theorized that the core he was working on could manage Light 7 when pushed to its limit. Based on the scale he had send me, that translated to 128c. That had me giddy all over. I mean, it wasn’t enough for the galaxy but it was a step in the right direction. Based on how fast and invested Kanyele seemed to be in his invention, he could have that speed more than doubled by the time we made it back.

They, him, his team, and my team back on Earth, had yet to figure out where the factor in the Light-speed shield had come from. They agreed with us it could be due to human involvement. They were waiting for the next data from cruising at such speeds to be sure. He also recommended that we try allowing Robin to accelerate herself at least once to be sure.

Then came the security report. They had finally gotten a lead on who was behind the scenes for my kidnapping. Juniver Research Labs. Or at least someone affiliated with them at least. They thought that Juniver themselves might not even be aware. It might have been an eager partner trying to impress them.

It didn’t seem plausible, Juniver had shown no interest in the field of space ships. They were a more human health oriented group. And the only thing I was known for, as far as I could tell, were spaceships and space exploration. I had literally become known after I started testing the prototypes to Robin.

I still suspected one of big space oriented companies, especially Union Space Industries. They had had the audacity to try and buy me when I started testing my ships. Seriously, what had they been thinking. Yes, they were the biggest name in the game, and their holding company, Union Group, was everywhere. Like literally everywhere. And the family behind it, the Sotiris, were the richest known to humans. Even the League of Nations couldn’t do anything to them. They had two colonies on the Moon, and controlled more than half of Mars, in all but name. And let’s even not talk about the Asteroid Belt.

But still, ever since the Mũtinda name emerged, we had been buying others, never selling. The only selling that happened, happened in family. Never out.

When done with the messages, I settled down on the sofa and switched on the TV. I decided it was time I relaxed a little. Too much work and no play was said to be bad for one’s health. I think. I didn’t believe that, but it couldn’t hurt to catch up with some of my favorite TV shows. I felt in the mood for an uplifting comedy, so I settled on one about villains. I thought that some of their reasons were just plain idiotic, but it was better than watching about heroes. Argh!

…[ ANDREW ]…

Andrew had lost count of how many times he had been down the tunnel. Was it two? Four? Ten? He didn’t know anymore. For the last thirteen days, he didn’t remember ever falling asleep. There were six teams available for the rescue effort. With their six-hour schedules, that meant that they only got twelve hours of rest and doing the other things required of them in the ship. After all, just because a team had been trapped didn’t mean that life on the ship had stopped. And when he removed the time it took to go and come back from the tunnel, Andrew was left with less than two hours to actually lay down. And also eat. There hadn’t been anything like it in their simulation back on Earth. After all, the longest simulation had only lasted four days. It had already been more than three times that. His body had gotten tired, then gotten used to being tired, and then moved on to the stage where he didn’t feel his body anymore. He imagined it was how zombies felt on those apocalyptic shows where they were just mindless body yearning for their next brain meal. The newer shows had started portraying them as capable of reasoning and functioning as any human could. As long as they had their prescribed dose of human brain. If Andrew was a zombie, then the trapped crew members were his dose of brain. He just had to make it past the pesky skull, made of cold hard ice. Andrew had lost count of how many times he had been down the tunnel. Was it two? F—

“Halt!” Jonah, the Exploratory Commander, shouted. Bringing a stop to Andrew’s broken record of thoughts on repeat. “We should have reached them ten meters back.”

Of course, they had veered off course. The question now was, how off were they? Meters? Tens of meters? Hundreds? Andrew stopped thinking about it. There was nothing to be done about it. They were four hours into their shift, with two more to go. Even if they were off by kilometers, they would still be the ones to correct it. The accuracy of their tracking device was down to meters, and their tracker was… Down? How had someone collapsed without anyone noticing? But by the look of it, it seemed he collapsed when Jonah called for a halt. How had Jonah even known how far they were? Ooh! Right, there had been talk about how close they were before they went into the tunnel, Andrew recalled. He must have been mentally counting down the meters.

The physicians had already rushed to him. And he seemed to be coming back to consciousness. Energy wasn’t the issue, it was exhaustion. That meant he had received a fine dose of adrenaline.

“We are off by twenty meters to the left.” Andrew was relieved beyond measure by Jonah’s announcement. They were done, or at least close to done with the rescue attempt. One of the physicians guided the tracker back to the shuttle as the rest reoriented themselves and got back to excavating. Andrew was sure he had known who they were when all this began, but now, they were just other zombies going through the motions of the mission same as he.

They still missed them a second time, but there was no need to course correct as three bodies suddenly fell on them. There were a few shrieks heard in their Comms earpiece. But Andrew didn’t have the energy to do that. Two were moving and one was not.

The name on the suit read Rincon. And his bio readings showed him to still be alive, but barely. Four of them helped carry the unconscious Rincon, while Andrew and three others helped Zheng and Paul limb-walk to the shuttle. Their part was finally over.

…[ MATIVO ]…

I was in the sickbay, watching twenty-two crew lying on the sick beds. Most of them with a whole week of doctor prescribed mandatory rest. The rest of the crew had not fared better, half of them were in their quarters recuperating from the most arduous two weeks of their lives. And another third was still at work, or scheduled for work, including me. I was not leaving a shuttle behind. We had days before the window of opportunity closed and the risk of another of those shelf movements occurring rose dramatically.

And the whole time I watched them, I had one question running through my head. Was it all worth it? One accident, and the whole ship was crippled for weeks. And it had been on a puny moon. What if it had been on a planet? Would we have had enough resources to successfully rescue them? How far away would they have been moved? How deep? And the gravity? We were not ready for this. Ill prepared even.

Mũsango waved at me as she turned on her bed. Smiling openly. I waved back, thinking. That one looks ready to get back to work. If we made it back to Earth, we would be more than ready for the next leg of our journey.

I looked at them again, all of them. And turned away, heading for the shuttle bay. My shift at the tunnel was fast approaching. The humans were finally safe, but I still had a shuttle to retrieve.