Dreams of Jupiter

Part 3 - Dangerous Angles

The shaking seemed to last forever, the suited scientists getting bounced around the chamber like a handful of dried beans.  Then, as abruptly as the shaking had come, it was gone.  In its wake, Ardie, Stefan and the first geo team were left lying in haphazard heaps all over the large space.

"What ... the hell was that?" stammered the geo team's leader.

"I don't know," Ardie admitted, silently thankful for the weak gravity.  Any stronger and they would've gotten pulled back to the ground that much harder, resulting in more bruising and perhaps even broken bones.  He carefully began climbing back to his feet.

"But we need to find out.  And we need to find Tomasz and the second geo team."

Staggering to the machine on the tripod, still remarkably upright even though every other piece of equipment had been thrown around by the shaking, he pulled up the feeds from the seismic stakes on the screen.  As expected the mid-level devices reported a massive surge in activity at the same time the shaking had arrived.

However the ones that should've been at least half placed, the deeper ones being put in by Tomasz, the team's geologist, and his team, were not reporting.  Hopefully that didn't mean anything dire.

"Tomasz, this is Braun," he said into his comm, half turning to look back towards the shield wall.  "We just got hit by a massive shake up here.  Are you guys okay down there?"

He frowned when silence was his response, sending a ripple of anxiety through him.

"Tomasz, are you reading me??"

A wave of relief swept through him when, upon the second prompting, his comms crackled to life with Tomasz' familiar voice.

"We're reading you, Ardie," Tomasz said, sounding tired and in pain.  "We got bounced around a bit, but we're okay down here."  There was a pause as if the geologist was taking a moment to look around his location.

"We're nearly a klick down, in one of the side shafts the survey team made to test for minerals in a rock spur jutting up into the ice crust.  So we weathered that quake a bit better than if we had been in the main bore."  Another pause then: "Looks like parts of the bore have collapsed both above and below our position."

Ardie frowned with concern.  If half his people were trapped that far underground, that was a serious problem.  Thankfully Tomasz addressed that concern a second or two later.

"But I'm seeing enough space that we should be able to extricate through them," the geologist reported.  "We are not trapped."

"Thank goodness for that, Tomasz," Ardie said with a happy grin, nodding to Stefan as he joined his team leader at the console.  "Are you able to complete your mission?  Can you place your spikes and safely get out of there with any speed? Or do you need to withdraw immediately?"

"We can place our spikes, Ardie and climb through the tholin ice in good time.  But we're seeing massive cracks in the ice crust at this point.  Whatever happened during that acceleration phase has seriously compromised the ice crust's integrity."

Ardie nodded tightly.

"Then the sooner you can get out of there, the better.  Place your spikes and begin your ascent.  I'm sending the first geo team down the bore to see if they can clear some of that tholin ice out of the way for you."

"I'll go with them," Stefan quietly indicated.  "I've had some spelunking experience.  I might be able to hurry things up so that nobody dies down there."

Ardie fought the impulse to smile at the second mention of death from his old friend.

"Now who's the adrenaline junkie?" he asked and Stefan chuckled softly.  Then his second-in-command was sobering.

"The briefs mentioned a bit of a jolt from each acceleration phase.  That shake we got was anything but a simple jolt.  It was more wrong than anything that could've gone wrong."

" 'More Wrong?' " Ardie said with a frown.  "Wrong is an absolute state and not subject to gradation."

"Of course it is; it's a little wrong to say a tomato is a vegetable, it's very wrong to say it's a suspension bridge," Stefan quickly replied.  "So it would be a little wrong to have gotten some shimmy from unexpected graviton shear during the acceleration.  What we felt was way more wrong than that!"

Ardie grimaced then sighed.

"Fair enough.  Something did go very wrong.  Go and get Tomasz out of that hole while I see if I can raise the Tycondaroga on comms."

Nodding, Stefan turned to help the rest of the first geo team back to their feet in preparation to go back into the bore.  But before Ardie could contact the Tycondaroga, which was standing several thousand kilometres off Sedna monitoring the dwarf planet's transition, the console in front of him sounded an alarm.

His frown returning to his face, Ardie leaned forward to see what had triggered the alarm.  His frown deepened when he saw that it was one of the spikes the first team had placed, picking up a strange energy signature.

That, in itself, was unusual.  The spikes were specifically made to pick up seismic activity.  To see it detecting an energy signature shouldn't have been possible.

A quick triangulation request yielded another level of impossibility: the energy signature originated from somewhere below the ice crust and on top of the rocky core, at least 100 kilometres down.

"Whoa," Tomasz suddenly said over the comms.  "Are you seeing this, Ardie?  We're picking up an energy signature down here with our hand helds."

"Yeah.  Some kind of signature down deep ..." Ardie began to say before Tomasz interrupted.

"No, no, no, not deep," Tomasz said, clearly agitated.  "It's along this side tunnel, in the rocky spur we took refuge in.  Maybe ... maybe fifty metres from our position."

A second signature?  And only fifty metres away??  Then the console beeped in confirmation as the spikes picked up a second energy signature, this one considerably closer to the surface.

That must be the one Tomasz was talking about.  But what the hell was going on here?  First a problem with the acceleration phase that triggered a quake of some sort.  Then the bore collapsing and cracks forming in the ice crust, putting the second geo team in danger.  And now two unexplained energy signatures of unknown origin or type emanating from two vastly different locations?  What else could happen in what was supposed to be a routine monitoring operation?

Again Tomasz provided an answer to the unspoken question.

"Ardie, I'm moving the team down the tunnel to take a closer look at the unknown energy signature," he said, his breath coming a little fast from the effort he was extending.

"Stand by."