Alien Impulses

"Yep. Want to head for the middle of the plain?"

"Perfect." We reoriented so that we would descend smoothly onto the flat area, tweaking our control sticks and responding to the shift in our approach each thruster firing brought. "OK, now when we get really low, like under a thousand feet, centre the stick and press it down. That'll give you a thruster firing directly underneath you, which will very nearly halt the descent. Allow the thrust to ease off until you're descending at about three feet a second."

"OK", Gemma responded curtly. She seemed to be concentrating hard, focussing on one spot where we would land. We discussed it again, finalising the site. "No, to the right of that... Can you see the black line across the middle, from left to right?" I could. "Just after that there's a jumble of blocks. Let's come in before the black line."

At just over a thousand feet, knowing that we would overshoot slightly, we both engaged the central thruster and came into a smooth hover. Beneath us was a patch of white-blue ice as flat as a bowling green. I allowed the thrust to dissipate, picked up some downward momentum and let myself fall towards Europa. Gemma was beside me, slightly above, descending more slowly. At 250 feet, I took another look down, confirmed that there was nothing beneath us which might break an ankle or cause us to topple over, and reigned in my descent to a gentle 2.4 feet per second. Gemma had caught up and we touched down almost simultaneously. My feet slid slightly on the icy surface but then the boots got some purchase and I shut down the thrusters.

The suit felt heavy in this new gravity, around the same as on the moon, one sixth-G. Gemma kept upright as she got used to the sensations of walking here, and the difficult footing. "Are you OK?", she called over from her landing spot only twenty meters from mine.

"Yeah, great. Some crampons would be good, but I think I've got it." She took her first steps towards me as I clicked open the straps which held the robot package in place. The relief at getting this weight off my back was considerable. I plonked the insulated package down on the ice and undid the latches to open it up. "Computer, are you reading us?"

We would be out of contact with the Phoenix for much of our time on the surface, as I had not thought to put in place a satellite relay system, but I wasn't too worried about that. "Phoenix calling, how do you read?"

"We're good, Phoenix, and we're on the surface and safe. I need you to instruct the Forager to build us some crampons which will fit our boots. Walking here is almost impossible."

"On the way". The little machine powered itself up and, using the three litres of water it had brought from the Phoenix, quickly manufactured high tensile strength crampons and straps to keep them on our boots. We donned these gratefully and took our first confident steps away from our landing site. Behind us, the robots were already getting to work. Solar cells would be built first, then several more construction robots. In a couple of years, a small army of mechanical beings would be exploring the ice crust and, we hoped, the ocean below, searching for mythical Jovian fish. More likely, I reasoned, a few half-frozen bacteria. I couldn't want to announce it, even at this early stage. So much had to happen before I could even tell anyone we'd been here. The ultimate stealth mission, a billion miles from Earth. Absolutely secret.

Gemma approached and we linked up to explore this patch of ice. "Hey, want to walk over and see what that black line was?" I agreed immediately and we struck off in the direction of Jupiter, looking up to gaze at the giant planet. The clouds formed bands of colours, reds and oranges, yellows and browns, which gave Jupiter a placid, pastoral feel. The only interruptions to these kindly bands were angry, red and purple storm clouds, hurricanes in the upper atmosphere which had raged for centuries. Galileo drew the Great Red Spot on his original observations of Jupiter using the very first practicable telescope way back in 1604. And he discovered the moon across whose surface we were walking, plodding onwards, planting our crampons securely in the ice and then bouncing slightly as we pushed down to make the next step. It was a curious combination of ice climbing and ballet, at once cumbersome and graceful. It was not tiring. I only wished we could hear the crunch of our boots in the ice. Inside our suits, apart from the faint swish of our air supplies, there was no sound from Europa.

The black line turned out to be a large, 100 meter across fissure in the surface, so deep that even the lamps from our suits could not penetrate. The ice exposed by this fissure, which looked like it had been carved with a massive meat cleaver, was an enticing blue colour. "Hey, we should drop one of those robot probes straight down this thing. I bet it leads all the way to the ocean", Gemma recommended.

Then it came to me, the boldest and dumbest thing I had ever said. "Let's find out if it does."

Gemma turned to look at me. "What?"

"Let's jump in."

She was aghast. "Are you fucking insane?"

"We can use our thrusters to get back up. And the suit will tolerate any temperature Europa can throw at us. We might actually find the ocean", I offered.

"What if we run out of fuel, or the water screws up our thrusters? I have no intention of dying on a little ball of ice orbiting Jupiter. I have a family. You want to tell them whose idea it was, if you get back and I don't?". She was genuinely angry at my having made this suggestion.

"Look", I tried, "we've got rope in our suit backpacks, right?" This was true, although there wouldn't be more than 30 meters of it, and that was intended for emergencies. "I'll get the Computer to have the robots build some recovery vehicles which can swim down and get us if we're in trouble. We've got nearly ten hours of supplies left and I want to stay here and get some science done."

"Fine. Go by yourself. I'm staying here. You", she added with unaccustomed venom, "are a maniac."

I was saddened. It had been a good idea. "Maybe you're right", I sighed. "I just thought it would be fun. Really add a highlight to the trip."

"Babe, we're walking on Europa, for God's sake. That's not enough?"

We stared down into the blue canyon together, standing right on its edge. The ice was glittering and beautiful at the top, near the surface where sunlight, and reflected light from Jupiter was reaching it. Further down, it became a subterranean, eerie space.

"Listen. We can jump in and just take a look around the top part here", Gemma offered. My ears pricked up. "But as soon as I say stop, we stop. Got it?"

I agreed instantly. I fired off a stream of commands to the Cruiser's computer, and prepared for the greatest caving expedition humanity had ever attempted. We held hands, took a couple of faltering steps' run-up, and leapt over the edge of the fissure. We fell unexpectedly slowly. "One-sixth G", I reminded her. "This is going to take ages. We'll have plenty of time to check out the walls. Look for anything out of the ordinary, patches of colour which don't seem right, or strange holes in the ice which might have been burrowed by a bacteria. Keep your eyes open".

In a minute, we were able to look up and see the small space through which light still came. We turned on our suit lamps, which were powerful and bright, illuminating the whole canyon. There was a slight sensations of falling, but the weak gravity rendered this slow, graceful and enjoyable. My suit readout showed 200m below the surface. I shone my lamps down into the fissure. It seemed to continue forever, certainly another mile, perhaps many more. It might even extend all the way to the ocean. If the ocean existed.

"How are you doing? Are we cool?"

Gemma gave my hand a squeeze. "We're cool. This is amazing. How deep are we now?" We were floating down past strata of ice. The colours changed every few hundred meters, deeper blues and almost a purple colour, in bands all the way across our field of vision.

"Just passing two thousand meters."

"And how far down is the ocean, Mr Scientist?"

I tried to remember what I knew. "Something like fifty to a hundred kilometres."

Gemma was silent for a second. "That's a hell of a lot further. Have we got enough juice to get out if we go all the way there?"

Just as she was asking this, a bright light appeared above us. "Hey, here he is, right on time." The replenishment robot I had requested had just leapt off the edge of the fissure and was now in a quick, powered descent to our position. "Terrific. Let's hold position here so that he can link up with us." Gemma and I used our crampons to slow our descent, skittering over the ice wall until they gained some purchase, and helping each other to avoid tipping back. In a few moments, after some slippery escapades which had us looking like a pair of climbers trying not to fall off a sheer wall, we were stable. A minute later, as we were still giggling with the ignominy of our arrest, the robot reached us. He was a simple machine, a thruster pack attached to several circular tanks, with a small equipment module slung underneath. The embryonic robot base on Europa was doing us proud already, on its first day of service.

I grabbed the little robot and attached it to the wall with one of its grapples. I then plugged the tanks, in sequence, into our suit's supply nozzles. Ten minutes of waiting, exchanging spelunking jokes and checking our systems, and both suits were fully fuelled, topped up with air and water, and in great shape. I unhooked the equipment module and we stored its contents in our suit pockets -- more lamps, a tiny probe which would cruise around in the ocean, taking samples, and a pair of sleep inducers in case we got tired.

We pressed on. Feeling more confident about the width of the fissure, which had remained at a steady 100 meters since we jumped in, we used our suit thrusters to speed our descent with short blasts pointed at the sky -- not that we had seen the sky for half an hour -- and we quickly passed though 10km, descending at a brisk 40 meters per second. The ice wall rushed by, our lamps causing glints and reflections in its smooth, cold surface. Every minutes or so, I pointed the lamps down to see what was coming. For a long time, almost hypnotically, we saw only the fissure stretching on, down, down into Europa's bowels.

We passed 58km below the surface of the moon. Gemma was still OK, perhaps as weary of the constant falling as was I, but still enraptured by this place, the glinting of our lights, and the promise of discovery beneath the ice. As I cast down my lamp beams into the abyss, I noticed a different type of reflection. "Hey", I uttered, almost without knowing it. "Hey, I can see something different down there." As we descended past 60,000m, the nature of the ice also changed. It seemed less hard and ancient. It was paler in our lamp light, losing its intense blue colour. The walls of the canyon were less defined, more chaotic, with knobs of ice emerging from some places, where others hid what looked like the entrances to enormous caves. "Get ready", was all I had time to say before we fell headlong into the frozen ocean.

My first instinct was complete panic. This was so different from the graceful, effortless falling which had taken nearly two hours. Instead, I was in a world of water. It took some moments to get my bearings, grab Gemma's hand and become comfortable in the water. I checked my suit. All was well, temperatures were normal. As I realigned my lamps, I shone them on a massive tower of ice which emerged from the depths, shot up vertically for miles, it seemed, and joined the huge hulk of ice through which we had just passed. The underside of the crust was hugely uneven and chaotic, riddled with cracks like the one we had fallen through, and decorated with towers, arches and tubes of ice which protruded down into the freshwater sea. My suit's cameras would catch all of this, I knew. Otherwise I would never have believed we had got here.

We spent half an hour swimming around the ice formations which comprised the furthest extent of Europa's crust. The ocean seemed even more infinite, stretching down into the lowest regions of the moon. We gazed down into it, both hoping for a strange, alien whale to swim past, or for an encounter with a massive-eyed octopus. It was still, seemingly empty.

I took out some of the equipment and put it to work. The little probe motored off to take samples. I opened simple test tubes to let in water from our location, and sealed them again, slotting them back into the pockets of my suit. We took endless footage of the ice sculptures with our suit cameras, both video and still images. After three hours under the ice, and noting that our oxygen supplies were slightly lower than anticipated, Gemma and I decided to get ourselves out and up, through the fissure once more. Knowing that Hal would need more fuel to proceed home at a high sub-light speed, I opened two insulated bags and allowed them to fill with the seawater. Gemma took one, hooked onto the base of her suit, and I took the other.

"Back the way we came?", she suggested, and I agreed. With supplies running thin, we couldn't afford the unexpected. We aligned ourselves at the crack and engaged our thrusters, which were even more efficient when pushing against water than when in vacuum. Like missiles emerging from a submarine, we shot out of the water and began a rapid, constantly powered ascent which sent us soaring up through the icy canyon.

Two hours down, seven minutes up. By the time we reached the surface and zoomed past it, we had achieved Europa escape velocity. The icy world stretched out beneath us once more. It seemed less intimidating now. We had proved people could work here, and that the ocean was real. We had done genuinely new science and I felt a real thrill, glancing down to make sure the sample tubes were intact.

Five minutes later, we were in our own orbit and arranging a rendezvous with Phoenix. The Computer talked us in, helping us to spot the silver shape against the backdrop of deep space. It could not have been smoother. Back in the airlock, we allowed the pressures to equalize and finally clambered, gratefully, back into the Cruiser's cabin. Neither of us could wait to strip off our suits, not only because of their confines, and the lengthy mission, but because now we could hold each other and gasp in collective wonder at the journey we had just taken.

By the time we had topped up Hal's water tanks, and had the Forager working on producing hydrogen from the alien seawater we had returned, it was nearly midnight. Phoenix accelerated quickly out of Europa orbit, swung past Jupiter at 10% light-speed, and then rocketed out of the Jovian system, on a course for home.

Inside the cabin, Gemma and I showered in 1-G, enjoying both the security of gravity and the warm, cleansing water. And each other. I soaped her lovely, full breasts while we talked about the trip, the colours of the ice, the incredible depth we had reached. And about what the samples might contain. Hal would be put to work on these when we got home. For now, there was time to kiss, to stroke and tease her pussy, under the pretence of washing her there, enjoying her wetness which flowed instantly, and to hold her close as I placed my stiff penis at her entrance and pushed it up inside her.

I loved watching her face while we had sex. She responded to each thrust, with a tiny squirming of her body, a little gasp, or a beautiful smile. She came every few minutes, helped by more intense strokes, probing deeper into her cunt. We tried some different positions in the shower, behind her or lifting her up, and she sucked me wonderfully under the hot water. By the time I was ready to come, buried in her pussy from behind, she had climaxed dozens of times and welcomed my sperm into her body with her customary love and enthusiasm. I let myself explode in her, showering the walls of her pussy with my hot semen.

There was time to sleep, so we chose a few hours of natural sleep while the Phoenix closed on the inner solar system. The Computer picked its way skilfully through the asteroid belt, mapping hundreds of new objects as it went, and refining the characteristics of hundreds more. All of this science, these new observations, the samples from Europa, even our discovery of an ocean under its icy crust... all of this must be secret. For now. I lay awake dwelling on this, with the naked Gemma floating asleep beside me. Perhaps I had done these things in the wrong order. Why couldn't I wait until the orbiters were established, until humanity had become used to the idea of cheap and easy spaceflight? It would only be a couple of years until we were offering three or four flights a day, hauling dozens of tonnes a week into orbit.

At the same time, I knew that the Cruiser's engines were powerful enough, if we had enough fuel, to haul an asteroid behind us as we approached Earth, and have it enter an orbit with us. All the resources a planet needs, locked inside an ancient ball of rock. But what would they make of it? 'Alien UFO Brings Killer Rock to Earth!'; 'Armageddon -- This Time It's Real!'; 'Terror from the Skies -- Mystery Man Promises Global Anarchy'. Fuck.

We passed the orbit of Mars as Gemma slept on. This had been a terrific weekend. No, that wasn't giving this journey its due. We had redefined the boundaries of human enquiry. We had become fully-fledged explorers in our own right. And Gemma had done so well, been so brave throughout. I had more respect for her than anyone I could think of. And I felt I was actually now in love with her.

I dropped off to sleep and we were both awakened by the Computer as we decelerated smoothly towards the Earth. Time for the final part of this weekend's plan. "Ready to break some more records?", I asked a sleepy Gemma.

"Hmph", was her reply. We put together coffee and toast from the replicator and reviewed the plan. Phoenix would make a high-speed pass of the earth, giving its best possible impression of a near-miss asteroid. Having shed its passengers, the ship would then enter a special solar orbit, keeping the sun between itself and the Earth until instructed otherwise. There was enough fuel for three or four years of these gentle, station-keeping manoeuvres, by which time I sincerely hoped that conditions on Earth would allow the ship to return, and pretend that it had been built here. For the meantime, it was too dangerous to keep the Phoenix on Earth, even in the deepest ocean. People were just too damned curious.

The Computer and I had our final discussions. I promised to send water whenever I could, and he described a large project of solar observations which he would beam back to Hal every month. I thanked him for another round of excellent service, and returned to Gemma in the cabin.

Gemma and I donned our suits one more time. We attached an equipment module to the back of each, and checked each other's gear as before. We had three minutes. Out of the front windows, Earth was a fast-approaching blue and brown circle. Phoenix would slow as much as she dared, and go as low as her heat-resistant hull would manage, in order to give us a head start, but she could not linger in orbit, nor was there hope of bringing her into land without being noticed this time. We had run that risk before, and been lucky. This time it was to be a hit-and-run.

Gemma and I climbed into the airlock and closed the hatch behind us. It was tight in there, barely room for us both with our gear on, but we had only seconds to wait. The computer counted us down to our exit point. Outside, through the airlock window, we could see the orange glow which signified the Cruiser's entry into the atmosphere. We had only one shot at this. The alternative was circling the sun for months, waiting for another meteor shower. Fun as it had been, being locked in the Phoenix with Gemma, I had things to do back home. Time to go.