Chapter 15

…[ ANDREW ]…

Andrew was surprised by how the crew had reacted to the whole Europa situation. Most even seemed happy with the whole thing. Of course there were the few dissidents, but those were near non-existent. The overwhelming majority was more than okay with how things had turned out.

Of course, the crew had spent the first few days after the news in the Gym Deck fending off the energy of their disappointment on each other. The bouts had been brutal and sometimes injury prone; surprising for a ship full of scientists and engineers. Andrew had been worried that things would just escalate. But they had not. The bouts’ brutality slowly bled out and the overall mood of the crew had improved considerably.

All they could talk about had turned to the plunder and treasure they would extort from unwitting aliens. The form that plunder and treasure would take was the big mystery. No one knew for certain, and there were crazy ideas going around the ship. Andrew didn’t think much about them. He just could not.

He forced his brain back at what he was working on. Him and Park. When they had started on the project, Andrew was the systems developer, while Park had been the nanobots developer. But over the years, their fields had been intertwined so much that they usually worked together most of the time.

His encounter with Dr. Anatoly had led to such fruitful breakthroughs that he was sad they hadn’t been able to think like that on their own. Then again, what he and Dr. Anatoly had been talking about was a completely different thing, it just so happened that the principles applied to their nanobots too.

They had been able to see the nanobots in new perspectives, and in so doing, figure out their way out of the misbehaving safety module. It was talks like those that helped create breakthroughs in the fields of research. A scientist got used to seeing something that it became hard to look at it any other way. So, an outside perspective, a change of view, had been known to unstuck stuck scientists.

They were currently working on the systems part of the nanobots.

“Sometimes, working like this brings back memories of the old college days.” Park said as he took a sip from his energy drink. “Back then, we would go on coding marathons for days. No showers, no cooking. Everything just ordered.”

“And the smells by the end were just awful. Then there were people not going to the toilet because they were afraid to lose the flow.”

Park laughed at that. “I thought it was just our group that had that problem. This one time, we had been going strong for three days when this guy, I don’t even remember their name, but they got up all over sudden and rushed to the toilet. They never made it.”

Andrew looked at him then, surprise clear on his face.

“Don’t look at me like that. I’ve stayed long enough for a few drops to escape myself. I know it’s possible.”

“I’m not doubting you.” Andrew knew it was possible. Especially when the bathroom just so happened to be a bit far away. “I’m just… who cleaned up?”

Park was thoughtful for a while before answering, “I really don’t remember. All I can recall is that we stayed for two more days before we called it.”

“You didn’t take a break immediately? Wasn’t the smell… what am I asking? It didn’t smell that different from before.”

“No. No, it didn’t.” Park agreed with him. “Anyway, back then, we would worry how much space a module consumed and how efficiently it utilized the processor. Now, we are still doing the same, just on a much smaller scale.”

Andrew couldn’t agree more. The only difference was that they weren’t smelly anymore or holding their nature calls for prolonged periods of time. Only because Mativo forced mandatory breaks on them. Otherwise, he was sure they could have worked like the good old days.

“I can’t even tell whether we are doing better or worse compared to then.”

Andrew was sure of the answer to that though. “We are. Given what we are working on, compared to what we were working on then, I’d say we are.”

“I hope so.”

They slowly went back to their work. They had a payday to earn. And Mativo was very stringent with his money. It wouldn’t surprise Andrew to find out that Mativo was actively timing them. To calculate the time they spent working for him.

Andrew wasn’t sure why what they worked on actually worked. Jacy was of the opinion it could work for anyone with the necessary equipment, i.e the chip and the nanobots. Dominic, on the other hand was of the opinion that Mativo was a freak of nature, and if they actually tried using them on anyone they could prove crippling. Maybe even deadly. Their tests before Mativo became the sole test subject seemed to agree with that theory. The test subjects had been able to access whatever it is Mativo accessed, but what happened to them afterward? It was best not thinking about it. Maybe they had made enough progress that anyone could use them. But Mbithe strongly disagreed. Her stance on the matter was that no living thing should be using it at all. And it wasn’t because of beliefs, rather what it did to the stuff that makes up living things. Andrew and Park were neutral on the subject, they were the less biologically inclined of the group.

Their current problem was the pursuit of the diamond. For starters, no one knew whether the problem lay on the nanobot side of things, or the biological side, or even the conceptual side. Was Mativo not being imaginative enough? Or did he not have enough energy? Or conduct it well enough? It could be one of those things, or all of them. It was hard to tell. That was the problem with an emerging field. It was all guess work coupled with trial and error.

As it was, they were trying to figure out how to turn an idea, intent, into a form of energy. Correctly translating the ideas that the chip received into the form of energy that would be later expressed as diamond was the issue. It could take years to come up with a solution for that. They were dealing with vague ideas and data that meant little to them if they viewed it from their normal understanding of the universe. Quantum physics was bizarre when compared to classical physics; and now Mativo had introduced them into a realm that much more bizarre than the quantum realm. It begged the question; where had Mativo gotten the idea from?

..[]..

Hours later found them in the Gym Deck. The whole team was together again. They had to be, after the physical training, they had the tag team practice to get through. Though calling them tag teams was a misnomer. Andrew saw them as the true military assault teams they actually were. The degree of tactical and strategic planning and execution that was displayed was astounding. It was safe to refer to them as war games.

But first, they had to get through the mandatory physical training. At first, it had been fun. He had been something of a gym bro before he got recruited by Mativo. But that view had soon evaporated. What Mativo wanted from them was not to stay fit. It was to be capable of performing. He had fast learned that there was a big difference between having muscles and knowing how to efficiently use those muscles.

And ever since then, every time they seemed to be getting used to a program, it would change. Over and over again. And that training is what had turned the tag teams into military assault teams. If anyone ever dared attack them, they would be met with a swift aggressive response. Assuming they had no issues with attacking other people, that is.

They started the session with minutes of warmups and stretches. Then followed half an hour of mock mortal combat matchups, as their supervisor liked to call them. You would think with his height and build he would have a huge advantage over his colleagues. But that was not the case. He still won most of his matchups, but he had to work for them.

Getting to the tag team practice, they were all sore and tired. And most of them nursed bruised egos from their losses in the mock matchups. They made up for it by being extra attentive on him. No one biasedly went after Jacy, even though she won just as much as he did. Unlike her, he made for a nice large target that could barely manage to protect itself. It was so unfair; guns should never have been invented.

By the end of it all, he was pretty much dead tired. What with the mock mortal combat matches followed by the jumping, climbing, diving, rolling, running and getting shot at that entailed the tag team practice. He slowly limped his sweaty tired body to his quarters for a nice relaxed bath. The Gym Deck had showers of its own, but he preferred his privacy as he soaked away the soreness from his muscles.

He could rest easy given the schedule of the coming weeks. No one, other than the three teams heading for Io and the small team heading for Jupiter, were scheduled for anything major. There were still things required to be done for the normal operations of the ship to keep going. But Mativo had asked the crew to take a break as they needed.

Stolen from its rightful place, this narrative is not meant to be on Amazon; report any sightings.

…[ MATIVO ]…

We had spent more than twenty-four hours on Io. No, not around it but on it. To be specific, in the maze of tunnels under its surface. And there were a lot of them. It was like being in an anthill. Or was it a termite mound. I’m not sure which one has crisscrossing tunnels as Io did. Every few meters an opening to another tunnel. Some joined together soon enough. Others, went on for kilometers without ever joining.

See, the thing is, we got lost. One thing led to another and we found ourselves lost. Easy as that. Just my team, the other two teams were fine. They were in and out as they had been expected to. It all began when our navigator lost his equipment down a tunnel. Why he had unclasped it from his back, I will never know. All I heard was a clank as something fell onto the ground, followed by a ‘oh no’. When I turned, I caught a glimpse of our navigator’s equipment disappearing down a tunnel. A sloping tunnel. There was never a thud to indicate that it had stopped.

Everyone had been silent for close to a minute, some staring down the tunnel while the others just stared at our navigator. All had the same look, horror. We all had locator apps on our Comms, but those were highly unreliable. Especially where meters mattered. That’s why we had brought the more sophisticated navigator equipment. But that was gone now. And we were stuck in a maze of lava tunnels. The risks of lava bubbling up to meet us was low, but not nonexistent. Less than twenty percent, our astrogeologists had said.

Then the arguments started. Some wanted to go after the navigator equipment, they knew getting out without that equipment would be near impossible. Others wanted us to head back to the surface, retrace our steps, they said. They just hadn’t realized that there were no steps to retrace. It was hard ground, and we had left no traces of us behind. Then the last group, they didn’t seem perturbed at all. They wanted us to explore further, before heading back. They all were very good points, and they were all crazy. We were very screwed.

The group that wanted to explore further was the first to give in, followed long after, by the ones that wanted to go after the equipment. Someone had claimed that they felt like the temperature was rising. It wasn’t. But given where we were, that was all it took for them to agree to start our journey back.

With the locator apps on our Comms, we could get a general idea of where the shuttle was. They all agreed on that. It was getting to the shuttle that proved daunting. That was when we faced the first of many problems to come. There were no steps to follow.

We still had a general idea of where we had come from, so we started that way. Then came the next problem. The shuttle wasn’t in the direction we were heading. In fact, it looked like it was in the direction we had been heading to before. I wanted to keep on going until the tunnels felt unfamiliar, less unfamiliar, before starting to try and follow the locator apps. But me and my proponents were outvoted, I could have forced the issue but decided against. They could have been right, but mainly because if push came to shove we could easily be excavated out. After all, the crew were experts at that by now.

I still notified the Bridge of our situation. Hours passed and we still hadn’t made it back to the shuttle. We had come across a few openings we could have used to get to the surface, but the shuttle had been considerably far. No one wanted to be exposed to that much radiation. We had treatments that could save lives even with such lethal doses, but the experiences were never fun. If it could be avoided, we avoided it.

Even with the help of the Bridge, we still seemed to be running circles around the shuttle. Always getting near but never actually making it. At one point, Asura, our physician, stumbled a tunnel. The team reacted quickly, and suddenly seven people were hanging down a highly slopping tunnel. I wasn’t sure where I was in that chain; somewhere around six or five. We slowly pulled each other up, only to get a laughing Asura. Apparently, the tunnel levelled out less than a meter from where she had stopped.

The experience scared the Bridge as much as it did me. They offered to send a shuttle to the nearest opening to rescue us, but I declined. We were well past the twenty-third hour, ten hours past our scheduled return to the ship. Six of those, Jupiter was to blame. A radiation surge had cut off our communication to the ship. I asked for an hour to try and get the team out. After that, they could split Io in half to get us out for all I cared.

It had been fun trekking and gliding through the lava tunnels, but I drew the mark at twenty-four hours of overtime. The fact that no one seemed exhausted enough to require urgent help, even after been awake for more than twenty-three hours, showed that I had been doing something right with the crew. Or we were all a bunch of insomniacs.

I took over the reins of the team, and no one even complained. They were too tired for that. And started off on a random direction, yes, I said random. See, I had this sense I liked to call it a fact sense. If something felt right, then it usually turned out right. Emphasis on usually, not always. But that needed me to surrender all my other senses. So I needed to feel lost for it to kick in.

With the assurance that the Bridge could easily rescue us if things went south, I felt free to test myself. I kept a fast pace taking turns left and right without doubting myself. The moment I did that, I would be doomed. And lucky me, forty minutes afterwards, we found ourselves at the opening directly next to the shuttle.

And our twenty-four tourist ordeal at Io was over. Well, there were a few minutes past the twenty-four-hour mark, but who was counting.

..[]..

Humans are idiots, crazy, lunatics, insane, demented. That was the only reason I could rationalize what I was watching. I mean, who, in their right mind, decides to take a plunge into Jupiter? Idiots, lunatics, crazy, demented, insane people. That’s who, I tell you.

Ever since the expedition was on the drawing board, there had been plans to take a plunge in Jupiter. But only an unmanned shuttle. Totally unmanned. It was programmed to fly until the shuttle system felt that it was near structural damage then plunge back out. It had been revised until the agreed upon structural compromise would, theoretically, just allow the shuttle to fly out of Jupiter. The mission goals had been to gather data and test the structural limits of the shuttle, and what the shuttle system deemed as critical structural damage.

Then the humans had learnt of the mission. And things had changed. I had thought no one would be crazy enough to be in that shuttle. I had been wrong. Oh, so wrong. There had been twenty interested candidates. They had asked about the crew who would be on that shuttle; even though there had been no indication the shuttle would be crewed. They had just assumed it would be.

Their interest had caused us as the planning committee to rethink the mission. We tried to make it safe, by having the shuttle pull out earlier than intended. An effort to reduce the risk of human death by squishing. But they had complained about that. They didn’t want to dive a safe distance into Jupiter, they wanted to test the limits too. And being who I was, I quickly agreed. We had been forced to narrow down that number to five, though. And I watched as the shuttle ferrying the selected five disappeared into the clouds of Jupiter.

“Would you stop crying already! They are gone.” Chantel chastised Mũsango.

“I’m allowed to cry,” Mũsango was quick to throw back, tears streaming down her face. “I wanted to be on that shuttle.”

“You should have thought of that before goining for the Helms position.” Pon told her.

“I didn’t know about it until it was too late.” Mũsango whined back, but she was calming down. Being forced to talk was keeping her from crying.

“Because you were so focused on being the Helms.” Chantel said in a sigh.

“Who doesn’t want to fly a ship at near the speed of light?” Mũsango asked in defense.

“Those who want to dive into Jupiter.” That sounded very sarcastic, even to me. And it didn’t end there. “There is also the shuttle race. Those guys will be able to fly even faster than we have being flying. Nthambi will be racing too.”

“I didn’t know about those either.” This time Mũsango sounded defeated.

“Of course you didn’t.”

As they talked, the shuttle had made it past the top fifty kilometers of ammonia into Jupiter. The high white ammonia clouds were still visible due to the low lighting of the little sunlight they themselves let through. The view from the front viewing camera was steady.

Rolling brown ammonia hyrosulphide and ammonia sulphide clouds were dazzling, the crew’s opinion not mine. They got more and more brown as the shuttle descended further down into Jupiter.

Hints of blue and pink flashes of lightning could be seen. Inside, the shuttle passengers were looking around in awe. Nthambi was sat at the pilot, but for this trip, she was a passenger same as all the others.

Then came the big strikers, flashes of lightning that looked thousands of times as powerful as those found back on Earth.

Lower and lower they fell, and little could be felt inside the shuttle as far as we could tell. Maybe another dive was called for, only it would have the Anti-Acceleration field off to allow the crew in the shuttle to experience the true turbulence of Jupiter’s atmosphere. Food for thought.

The shuttle had made it past the deepest any known human probe had ever explored into the gas giant planet. In 1995, NASA’s Galileo probe had made it as far in as around three-seventy kilometers, before it was destroyed by Jupiter’s crashing atmospheric pressure with readings of hundreds of times that on the surface of Earth.

But we didn’t need to worry about that, not yet at least. The shuttle was designed to survive much more demanding situations than those found on the top layers of Jupiter’s atmosphere. The outside illumination lights had switched on to show the surrounding swirling clouds, but the feed cut off soon after.

The radio blackout period lasted for close to an hour. Fifty-four minutes and twelve seconds to be exact. When we got the feed again from the shuttle, on the outside everything was dark. Too dark to make anything out, but on the inside the passengers wore faces of glee. I might have seen one crying. Whether from happiness or fear, I will never know.

It was another finger biting six hours before the shuttle cleared the top of Jupiter’s cloud layer. From the Bridge, it still looked as it did before it went in. But if it was back out, it must have sustained damage of one kind or another.

As the shuttle made its way back to the ship, we left to welcome them back to the ship. On the way, I saw little to no one heading to the shuttle bay. I realized why when we made it there. Nearly the whole crew was there to welcome them back. They were all standing in wait in the Shuttle Bay as the hangar doors started to slowly open. The restriction on no one being there when the doors were open had become lax as the missions mounted up. It had crumbled quickly during the rescue attempt at Ganymede.

The doors stayed open as the shuttle slowly settled down on the Shuttle Bay. It was a long few seconds of bated breath before the shuttle doors slowly opened and Nthambi walked out first. They must have talked about who would, that was the only explanation. The others slowly filed out after her, and the crew cheered as the last of the five got out. They had gone on what was an assuredly suicide adventure and came back whole. The hangar doors closed then, as if to keep the cheer from escaping into the fathomless depths of the universe.

The rest of the crew congratulated them as they passed, on their way to us. They paused before us, or was it me, and did a short bow before clearing the Shuttle Bay. The rest of the crew followed them right after.

The whole time, I was sure I was grinning like a maniac. Because on the inside, I was jumping up and down in glee. Not because they had come back alive, but because I now had a way to plunge people into Jupiter and bring them back out. Still alive, and seemingly healthy. People would pay sweet money for that trip. Ooh, they would.