Rescue at Io Read online

  Rescue at Io

  A Salvagers Series Prequel

  By John Michael Godier

  © 2013. Chalin and Harris Books.

  All rights reserved. Except as permitted under the U.S. Copyright Act of 1976, no part of this publication may be reproduced, distributed, or transmitted in any form or by any means, or stored in a database or retrieval system, without the prior written permission of the author.

  All rights reserved.

  The characters and events portrayed in this book are fictitious. Any similarity to persons, living or dead, is coincidental and not intended by the author.

  Cover image copyright © 2013 M. Godier

  Chapter 1 May 18, 2441. Io, Jupiter System.

  “They should call it 'Hell Moon,'” I said as I glimpsed a yellow landscape dotted with wafting columns of volcanic ash and sulfurous fumes. I moved on quickly to make room for Daniel to evacuate. We wanted our feet on solid ground rather than on a ship that was in the process of tipping over. At what I thought was a safe height I jumped from the exit ladder into the sea of yellow powder below. I didn't expect to sink deeply into it. When I did, I realized that something was very wrong.

  “Danny, this stuff is wet,” I announced. “It feels like mud.”

  “Don't be silly, Laz. Io is dry as a bone. There's more water on the surface of the sun,” he said confidently. “The ship has become really unstable now. Get out of the way. I have to jump.”

  I made way as best I could. He jumped from a greater height than I had and penetrated well past his knees.

  “Jesus, you're right. It is wet,” he exclaimed.

  “In fact it's not wet,” I reassessed. “It's dry. I can see it clinging to my suit.” I took a handful of the dust in my glove. “It's only behaving as a liquid when it's in contact with the surface. I've heard of this. During an earthquake otherwise solid ground can behave like a fluid.”

  “It's got to be volcanic tremors. We've got to get out of here. I'm sinking further,” Daniel said in alarm.

  “Over there I see some basalt cliffs. That area is our best bet for finding solid ground.”

  I unintentionally neglected Daniel while I concentrated on trying to walk. My boots sank inches deep with each step. In the cumbersome bulk of my moon suit, extracting them from the muck took every ounce of strength I could muster. The only choice I had was to try to keep moving to avoid sinking more deeply.

  “Hey, how are you doing?” I asked on the communications link after finally thinking to check on Danny. He didn't answer. I stopped to look back. He wasn't far behind, but he was struggling harder and making less headway than I was. I could see our ship behind him. We had thought that it had merely broken a strut on landing and become unstable. We were wrong. Our only transportation away from Io was sinking fast.

  I focused my attention back on walking but turned up the volume of my comm link as high as it could go so that I could hear Daniel. He was breathing very heavily, which worried me. I tried to move more quickly, hoping that if I found solid ground I could do something to help him. But the faster I tried to go, the deeper my feet sank until I was so mired down that I stumbled onto my hands and knees. I found some relief in a sliding crawl, but I was rapidly growing as exhausted as Daniel sounded.

  “Danny, try crawling!” I yelled.

  “I am, but I can't make any headway. I'm losing, Laz,” he wheezed. “I don't think I'm going to make it.”

  “Keep going, Danny. Stay with me. Fight it with everything you've got. We're not that far away now.”

  I didn't want to demoralize him, but it didn't look as though we were making enough progress. The dust seemed to liquify more as the tremors grew worse. I was too drained to keep fighting on my knees, so I resorted to lying flat and trying to pull myself along, slowing me down even more. I realized that it wouldn't be long before we would both go under and experience a slow, crushing death from the pressure of the dust.

  In what I thought would be my last moment of seeing sunlight, I felt my hand hit stone. I pushed forward with everything I had left until I could discern pieces of gravel beneath me among the dust. The farther I crawled, the harder the pack became. Then I stopped sinking altogether. I was able to stand up and stagger along until my feet finally rested on a solid volcanic outcropping.

  I turned to look for Daniel. He was shoulder-deep about ten meters out and struggling with his hands over his head. He had been following a course slightly to my left and did not appear to be hitting the gravel. I reached around and opened my pack—not an easy thing to do in a moon suit—and spilled most of its contents onto the basalt. I saw a rope and hoped it was long enough.

  I threw one end to Daniel, but it landed beyond his reach. I pulled it in as fast as I could and tried again. This time he caught it. Tying my end around a rock, I began to pull him with all my might. It was no use. He was still sinking.

  “Danny,” I yelled on the comm. “Pull yourself along the rope!”

  “I'm trying,” he gasped.

  Attempting to haul him in directly wasn't working, and I could see that the dust was now at the base of his helmet. I was running out of time and had to try a different approach. I walked into the tightened rope and pushed while Daniel held on until I was dragging Daniel sideways through the dust. I kept on until he found the gravel bank. He emerged slowly from the muck, brushing off the yellow sulfur dust.

  “That was close,” he said, collapsing onto the rock. “I thought I was going down for good.”

  “We'll have to stick to these basalt highlands,” I said. “We can't risk walking on anything that isn't solid rock. I doubt that any of this dust is safe given these constant tremors.”

  “I don't understand it,” said Daniel. “That sulfur plain returned a radar signal as though it were as hard as concrete. There was no way to know it wasn't stable when I plotted our landing. It just looked like a nice flat spot.”

  “Look,” I replied, pointing. “Our ship is going down.”

  We rested on the basalt outcropping and watched the last few centimeters of the transport slip beneath the dust. Moments later the surface flattened smooth again, betraying nothing about the presence of a twenty-meter vessel below it.

  “There goes my command,” Daniel lamented. “I don't know how I'm going to explain this to Admiral Hanson.”

  “Don't worry, Danny. I'll back you up. The word of a junior UNAG Intelligence Officer goes a long way with those Admiralty types,” I joked. “And you never know. With as much traveling as we do we might run across a shipwreck some day. No one's ever found the Cape Hatteras and all that gold it was carrying. Imagine that.”

  “Finding that derelict would take more than luck. I'll bet it doesn't even exist,” he quipped. “Lazarus, we're trapped here. What are we going to do?”

  “The only thing we can do. We have to head toward the position of the crash and wait for someone to rescue us along with the survivors,” I said while collecting my gear and activating an emergency beacon. “They should be able to pick up this signal on Callisto or the new Europa colony.”

  “But they didn’t hear the downed freighter's distress beacon,” Daniel said. He meant the signal that had brought us to Io in the first place.

  “It was a very weak signal, Danny. We're lucky that we detected it.” We had picked it up by chance while passing through the Jupiter system on our way to Mars. We thought that it would be a simple matter to land, pick up survivors of the crash, and be on our way again.

  “I'm not sure I'd characterize us as lucky,” he said.

  “Their signal was far weaker than this megawatt beacon. They can hear ours on Earth, but these Galilean moons are weird. If they line up the wrong way, they can block signals from each other or slip behind Jupiter
altogether and drop out of radio contact for days. The survivors must have been transmitting for weeks in the wrong geometry and run low on battery power. We may not find anyone alive. By the way, how much oxygen do you have?”

  “The meter is reading a little over five days’ worth.”

  “Same here,” I said. “We'll be fine. They've probably already picked us up on Callisto. I can see it right there in the sky, that bright pinpoint a few degrees from Jupiter's limb. It’s a straight shot for the radio signal.”

  “How do you know that's Callisto?”

  “I don't,” I said with a smile, “but we're standing on the only Galilean moon that doesn't have a colony. One of them is bound to hear us.”

  We stayed put for several hours. Daniel was mostly silent. I think he was still trying to fathom the loss of the ship. He was twenty-six, and it was his first command. Even though it was just a small transport, he was proud of it. I was more interested in contemplating how close to death we had just come.

  “Let's get moving,” I said, breaking the silence. “We've got to get off this rock.”

  “I can see why Io is the last place in the solar system anyone wants to be,” Danny replied. “Along with the survivors we're probably the first people to set foot on it in thirty years.”

  “It's no garden spot,” I agreed. “No wonder a colony was never established here.”

  “The crash site is at most two days to the north in a straight line according to the last position reading I saw before we left the ship,” Daniel remarked, “but these unstable sulfur pools are going to cause problems for us. I don't know whether we can get past them.”

  “We'll go around them. We'll be alright. Trust me. Have I ever been wrong?” I said, trying to reassure him. Daniel always did have a defeatist streak.

  “Often,” he jibed.

  We were forced to backtrack regularly as we wended our way through the volcanic hills. It seemed as though everywhere we turned there was another pool of that damned dust. After a day and a half of walking without any sleep, it was clear that we weren't getting anywhere.

  “I don't see a way through,” said Danny. “Can they pick us up from here?”

  “They'll detect our beacon,” I replied, “but that's not going to help the people stranded in that freighter. We need to know where the survivors are before their signal dies completely. I've caught it a few times on my suit's receiver, but it's very weak, and we're practically right on top of them. Besides, where would a rescue ship land? All the suitable flat spots around here are liquid dust. They'd sink just as we did.”

  “It's getting dark. We should get some rest. Let's try climbing one of the hills in the morning,” Daniel suggested. “Maybe we can spot a path from up there.”

  We slept as soundly as we could under the circumstances. Even during the night of Io's forty-two-hour diurnal cycle a constant red glow emanated from all directions. The ground’s vibrations rose and fell in intensity but never completely stopped. It was relentless, and we were cold. Even though Io had no shortage of heat, its atmosphere was too thin to retain it. Our moon suits had trouble maintaining a comfortable temperature in the depths of the night. We gave up trying to sleep after six hours and began our climb in the pre-dawn’s ruddy volcanic light.

  We reached the hill’s summit in time to watch the Io sunrise. Only a handful of people had ever seen one. Jupiter loomed as a great crescent covering a third of the sky. As the morning light passed through the clouds of settling sulfur dust, they glowed orange and then yellow. Then the sun rose into a black sky surrounded by stars. For all its harshness Io is surreal, a place of clouds but no atmosphere.

  We looked out across the plain that stretched before us. As the dust clouds settled, the landscape revealed itself to be a mostly impassable sea of powder before new clouds obscured it again. Then I spotted the freighter in the distance and what looked like a clear course to it, though the immediate surroundings were obscured.

  “I see a course,” I said. “It looks dark, as though it’s solid rock, but I can't make it out completely.”

  “I see it too,” Daniel replied.

  Then came a big letdown. The beginning of the path looked good, but as the clouds cleared we saw that it passed next to a caldera full of roiling molten rock with a fountain of lava at its center. Even worse, it appeared to be spewing out volcanic debris. If we were going to get to that downed ship, we would have to pass along the edge of the caldera.

  Chapter 2 The Dusts of Colchis Regio

  Dangerous as we knew our path ahead would become, we were just happy to know where we were going for the first time in two days. With a sense of direction the going was easy, and we resolved not to think about the caldera until we reached it. Perhaps taking our situation lightly was a natural reaction to stress, a way for our minds to deal with the danger that awaited us, but it led to overconfidence.

  “Yankee Doodle went to town,” we sang.

  “And stuck a feather in his cap,” Daniel continued.

  “You forgot a part,” I observed.

  “No I didn't. Wait, on second thought I might have. Something about macaroni. Bah! It's an ancient song from four governments ago. Who cares if we get the order of the lyrics right?”

  “I always liked UNAG the Brave. The government stole that one from. . . .”

  Just then my attention was captured by the path ahead. It was shimmering like a mirage. It shouldn't have been.

  “Danny, what's going on up there?” I asked. He was standing closer to it.

  “I don't know. It looks like some kind of gas seeping up from the ground. It's all around me. We’d better. . . .”

  Before he could finish speaking the shimmering gas flashed into flame and engulfed him. It happened very fast. An instant later he was still standing, his suit blackened, and trying to figure out what had just happened.

  “It's some kind of natural gas,” he said. “I guess the static electricity in the dust ignited it, but I don't know what gas could burst into flame in this environment.”

  “It's happening all around us,” I answered as another area not far away flashed into flame. “Are you alright?”

  “I think so,” he said. “Wait, hold on. Damn it. I'm leaking.”

  I instinctively bolted toward Danny to look at his oxygen gauge. It was dropping rapidly.

  “There's a patch kit in my pack. Get it quickly,” he said.

  I maneuvered around him and took it out. “Where's the leak?” I asked as I unwrapped it.

  “I don't know! Look for it.” He was beginning to panic.

  I examined his suit thoroughly. “I don't see anything, Danny. Wait, I've thought of something. The dust. Come on,” I said, motioning him to the shore of one of the sulfur ponds. I took handfuls of the powder and spread them across his suit until I saw the leak blowing the dust away. It was a pinhole in the middle of a burn on his suit's upper-arm segment. I mixed the adhesive, slathered it on, and affixed the patch. I then tested it with more dust. The hole seemed to be sealed, but the only way to know for certain was his gauge’s reading.

  “How's your oxygen?” I asked.

  “Stable as far as I can tell. I'll have to watch it over the next few hours, but I've lost almost a day's worth of air. I've only got two days’ left.”

  I had three.

  “We've got to move faster. Come on, Danny.”

  I was worried about him. The loss of a full day's air could prove critical to whether Daniel would survive. We had no idea when rescue might happen, but it was probably going to take a few days for a rescue team to travel from Callisto to Io. It all depended on where they were in their orbits. As we progressed closer to the caldera amid frequent detonations of the gas, the lava fountain loomed large, but it was difficult to determine just how distant it really was. We found out shortly thereafter.

  “Laz, watch out,” Daniel yelled.

  Right in front of me fell a large encrusted blob of molten lava. Upon impact its shell shattered, and l
iquid magma splattered, spread out, and solidified. If I had been under it, I would have been burned to death.

  “We're going to have to keep an eye out for those volcanic bombs,” Daniel cautioned. “We're lucky because in this low gravity they fall slowly. We'll have to keep an eye out for them while they are in the air and dodge them as they drop.”

  As we approached the caldera’s rim, we occasionally altered course to avoid the lava bombs. On one side was a sheer drop into the lake of molten lava. One the other was a sea of dust. Our path narrowed to just a meter of basalt. Finding room to dodge became more difficult, but we managed so long as we kept a watchful eye on the sky. The ground vibrations seemed to have calmed, leading me to wonder whether it had become safe to walk on the dust.