Diamond Moon Read online

  “And they love me back,” Mara said, and a half-witted smile crossed her face.

  “Hey, bring some fish for dinner,” Reese answered.

  “Funny.”

  Mara signaled that she was ready. She stepped to the doors with her face lit by her visor, and she heard the soft hum of pumps and regulators managing her vital systems. They coursed through her suit as she stared through the portal to the outside. A deep breath of fresh oxygen prepared her for the shift ahead. Caffeine and a protein bar were the only food to fuel her day.

  She could feel the world watching her as she stood near the airlock. The images here were relayed to a feed on Earth for anyone to watch. She regretted feeling she had to perform for her fans back home. She had never wanted to be famous or have this attention, but here in front of the cameras she was forced to accept that she could be on the verge of the most amazing discovery in the history of mankind. She had known it would thrust her unwittingly into the public spotlight. She tried hard to keep those thoughts out of her mind, but the cameras were a daily reminder that the world she had wanted so much to leave behind her was still watching her.

  She waited at the entrance of the airlock for Reese to buzz her through. A quick thumbs-up and Reese was pushing the controls that managed the door. A sequence of warning lights and decompression would soon begin.

  She stepped into the airlock and waited for Reese’s command. Yellow safety lamps hurled glowing balls of light around the room as alarms sounded. After stepping into the sally-port, the doors closed around her and prepared to release her onto the icy surface.

  “I’m eyes on,” Mara said into her comm-link. She stared down a familiar path, toward her destination only a hundred meters plus away.

  “Send me a signal when you are buzzed in,” Reese answered.

  She walked in a silent vacuum. The only sound was coming from her helmet; the breathing apparatus and other pressure regulators churning in her ears. They served to enhance the feeling of isolation and desolation the landscape presented her. She kept her gaze forward.

  The icy surface was lit by the occasional lamp from the mining rig. It towered over her. As she walked, she could make out the dirty and dusty letters Z-E-P-H-Y-R in white paint on one of its four legs, each housing a massive booster rocket. The paint that spelled the vessel’s name had been chipped and scraped away and until it was barely legible.

  The rig was a monstrous piece of machinery, designed solely for excavating and transporting enormous amounts of raw materials. It was covered with occasional safety lights along its frame. Its network of steel columns and supports and bracings created an intricate pattern of light and shadow above her. It reminded Mara of the oil platforms she had seen growing up on the gulf coast of Florida.

  It was not an enjoyable place for her. The mining rig was a dirty and wretched operation where grimy men scraped out an existence in return for rare and precious metals mined from the leftovers of the planets. The materials would make them wealthy men back home, should they live to return there. Many wouldn’t. Such is life on the edge of the solar system, where fortunes are won, and lives lost, on the random tumble of an asteroid.

  And she was not a good fit there. Not with these kinds of men. Her disciplined and scientific nature seemed at odds with them. She limited her involvement with them to the daily inquiries about her work, the drilling, and the samples of ice she required for study.

  Mara knew the feelings were mutual. She expected the miners said things about her when she wasn’t present. They regarded her as a know-it-all, a stiff, overly privileged… The relationship was one of expedience, and she took solace knowing it would not be for long.

  She spotted a familiar face through the portal window. It was Hanson, who was first mate on the rig. He had been Mara’s host while inside the drill chamber. She thought of him as out of place here, though she couldn’t say exactly why. He was clean and articulate, at least more so than the other miners… handsome even. That was about the best compliment she could think to say about any of these men. She figured him misplaced, until she remembered that even a clean and well-spoken man could be attracted to the greedy and dirty lifestyle of space mining.

  Hanson had set Mara up with a lab just outside the Zephyr mining rig. It was isolated outside for bio-contamination control. It had an examination table complete with microscope, storage chambers for ice-cores, and other testing equipment she required. It was as comfortable as could be expected for a makeshift laboratory located half-way to the edge of the solar system. She accepted the arrangement considering the circumstances.

  She signaled for Hanson to open the airlock. Mara stepped inside the first set of doors and faced him as she waited for the pair to close behind her. Hanson had already carelessly reached for the interior set to open before the first had shut, and he had come dangerously close to breaking the airlock for the entire facility. Mara was nearly sucked into the vacuum for his mistake. It would not have killed her, but it would have quite possibly injured her.

  She jumped in panic when she noticed his mistake. Her face grew red as she settled her feet beneath her, and Hanson had begun to laugh. She demonstrated her displeasure by giving him an angry stare, and she saw that he had amused himself with the mistake.

  “You gotta be quick around here,” he told her as she stepped inside. He was still laughing. “You should’ve seen you’re face. I’ve been waiting on you twenty minutes, you know.” He turned toward the large drilling apparatus near the center of the drill chamber to call attention to their progress.

  “I wouldn’t need to be quick if you’d be more careful,” Mara told him. She walked inside with a disgruntled expression.

  The drill chamber was a large dome-shaped room directly underneath the mining rig. It was sealed from the outside and therefore airtight and pressurized, and the icy surface of the moon itself created the floor underneath them. It had been left exposed for drilling. Mining equipment from dozens of operations were scattered all over the room, most of it dirty and greasy, reflecting the occupants of the space.

  The large machine at the center of the drill chamber was working an auger deep into the ice beneath their feet. It was nearly two feet in diameter, large enough to send a probe through. Men tended to the large machine, and it echoed like a freight train within the room. The framework for the drill and crane itself was dirty and grimy, stained with the refuse from their operations.

  “Down about another three-hundred meters since last check,” Hanson shouted over the sound of the drill.

  “You’re slowing down?” Mara asked.

  Hanson continued to yell. “We’re hitting ice-seven. It’s a different kind of ice. Super-compressed, hard as granite. Drilling is slower… but we could also break through any time, so we don’t want to overshoot it. I think when we hit through, we’ll get a good kick of water coming up. We may even have to cap it. We’ll let you know. Oh, the samples on your desk are from about two k’s down,” he added.

  Mara walked toward her desk, attempting to get beyond the daily talk. “I need to know exactly how far down,” she said with emphasis. She had known for some time now that details were not the miner’s specialty.

  “Let me see,” he uttered as he consulted the logbook. “Make it 2.24 kilometers,” he said through a yawn.

  Mara glanced up at the page where he had pointed his finger. She was convinced he was making up a number just to mollify her, and Hanson had seemed to take offense.

  He pulled the logbook away quickly. “It’s accurate,” he told her, shaking his head as he walked away.

  Mara watched him go, still angry about the airlock. Her jaw slide sideways in frustration. The tension between the two had nearly reached a breaking point on several occasions. She reminded herself that she needed to get to work.

  She turned to her samples. She was going to run a series of tests on the ice cores they had acquired
in her quest to find signs of life. Any telltale traces should be visible through the magnification on her monitors. Just one microbe is all it would take. Anything embedded in the ice was certain to be indigenous. Even a dead fossil would be a miracle. It would be a discovery as big as any in the history of mankind. It would mean there was life on another world.

  She did her best to appear preoccupied, happy to steer clear of the mining crew. Her work began by meticulously cutting small portions of the ice cores to place on the magnification slides. With careful precision she lined them up one after another, working through thick gloves, and her mask remained on her face to prevent any cross-contamination.

  The suit and mask were standard protocol when working with the possibility of encountering extra-terrestrial microbes. NASA had stressed the cross-contamination issue so much that even the mining crew was required to wear their bio-suits inside the drill outpost, despite the room being pressurized and oxygenated.

  The drill and auger itself were sprayed with a disinfecting agent before being lowered into the ice. NASA was determined to spare any possible instance of contamination that could throw the discovery of even the tiniest microbe in doubt, or cause a cross-contamination event that would spread through either biosphere. The importance of this arrangement was stressed to both the astronauts and the mining crew before the mission, although Mara was perpetually skeptical of the miners and their practices regarding these rules, among many things.

  She began to look at her slides through the magnifying equipment. A video monitor displayed her subjects through the lens of the microscope, magnifying anything she wanted by an almost unlimited amount. Her trained eye carefully studied each slide as they whisked through her monitor. With her work finally in front of her, the loud noise from the drill and the men shouting at each other drifted pleasantly into the background.

  Then something caught her eye and she paused to look through her microscope. Strange grooves were formed in the ice, almost as if a trail had been cut, or maybe a network of channels. “It looked like an ant farm,” she thought to herself. They were small, far too small to be anything but single-celled. Then her spirit faded when she realized what they were. “A natural feature.” She dismissed it, tossed it aside, passing it off as micro-fissures in the ice.

  The ice had been twisted and sculpted into a network of stress fractures like a maze over time, all by the tidal stresses the moon was subjected to. “Common,” she thought, and she moved on, angry for having suspected it to be a sign of life in the first place.

  As she concentrated on her next slide there was a shudder. The drill room shook and rattled, lights flashed on and off, and the entire room heaved upwards. A falling sensation overtook her and everyone else in the room as it settled downward. There was more shaking. Violent, turbulent motions rattled the equipment and its operators. The crane swung like a pendulum around the room.

  Machinery, tools, her samples; all of them jostled about and some fell to the floor. One of Mara’s ice samples broke like glass on the snowy floor beneath her. In an instant there was a weightless feeling that washed over the room and its occupants. It was a penetrating and foreign experience, as if the room was suddenly suspended, freed from the bonds of gravity and time. Then nothing. It was as still and silent as death, and every bit as terrifying.

  The startled crew looked at each other but only found concerned faces staring back at them. Suddenly, a reddish liquid began to come into the room through the drill cavity they had created. It made gurgling sounds as it frothed through from below. Murmuring sounds trickled throughout the chamber. The mixture of liquids was gushing out onto the floor, and it didn’t seem to be stopping.

  It started as a simple mound of slushy water, churning over the rim of the drill hole and spreading across the chamber. The men watched, frozen in place. Most of them appeared frightened, and it only grew faster.

  Mara asked herself a hundred questions upon sight of the fluid. “How much water would there be? How much pressure was it under? Was it safe, or was it toxic? Would it ever stop?”

  It had a tinge of rust coloration to it. “Could be iron,” she thought. “Or was it organics? Maybe it was an elixir of fluids that didn’t even exist on Earth? Maybe it was an exotic material unknown to science?” The possibilities were endless, and she entertained herself thinking of them for the few seconds she could keep her thoughts in order.

  She put aside her sense of panic and watched, delighted at the chance to sample this fluid as it welled up from below. She watched the miners run to all corners of the chamber, then swarm at the feet of the large machines, trying to climb to higher ground.

  The fluid didn’t stop. The flow continued unabated and then increased. The trembling and shaking had settled down as a rush of water continued from below. It was steady, constant, and invasive. It was like the liquid had been searching for an escape from a life of darkness, and the miners had unwittingly freed it from an icy den.

  Mara knew these were ancient liquids that hadn’t seen the surface of the moon in millions of years. Now it felt like they were rising through the drill cavity to escape a long-held prison. It felt like they had let a genie out of a bottle.

  The miners stopped climbing the machinery, already as high as they could get. They watched from their vantage above as the fluid continued. The room remained silent except for the liquid. The only living entity in the chamber was their watery intruder.

  In the reduced gravity the fluid didn’t flow correctly. It moved slowly over the floor and appeared oddly alive. It formed slow-motion waves that traveled lazily from one side of the room to the other, sloshing around with a curious motion at the miner’s feet. It was sizing up the room, searching it, taking stock of its visitors, and sensing their fear.

  A great disturbance gipped the room. Like a promise that had been broken between worlds. A hidden realm of forbidden knowledge had been released upon the crew, as if the secrets of this moon had been a long-hidden entity that would change the lives of everyone involved.

  Uncertain of what the presence of this fluid could mean, to have broken through to the suspected ocean below, the miners watched carefully for any sign of trouble. They had been used to dealing with solid ores, tangible materials that could be contained and transported. But this fluid, and the foreboding ice, was oddly alien and alive to them. Some of the crew turned to Hanson, wondering like children if they should panic, and Hanson, to his credit, stood and watched the spectacle as calm and steady as a marksman.

  The fluid began to slow and then reversed. Most of it went slowly back down into the hole, like a giant drain, falling the long distance to whatever ocean it belonged to. Some of it remained trapped on the floor behind the equipment or formed small puddles on the floor.

  The sound of air being sucked into the drill hole suddenly overtook the room. The crew could feel the loss of pressure as the air was slowly being sucked into the cavity. They had the good fortune to have their bio-suits on, thanks to the agreed-upon rules. That agreement had momentarily saved them as the room depressurized at the mercy of the escaping fluid.

  The drill hole gulped for more air as the pressure stabilized, sputtering gases and droplets out of its mouth, and then the first of several creatures washed up on the floor. They were small, only a couple of inches long, and superficially like fish. They had fins and a mouth, but no eyes. A dozen or so of them washed up on the floor, and they had just enough fluid to splash around as they floundered. They behaved remarkably as any fish on Earth would have if taken from the water.

  The room remained silent and still as the creatures splashed about. Mara gazed upon them as only a scientist with her training could; a scientist that had finally seen the object of her life’s pursuits. In a split second she knew what this discovery would mean.

  The rest of the drill crew stood in bewilderment as they had before. They were helplessly frozen in place as the tiny creatures f
lopped on the floor before them.

  Mara watched one of the creatures near her foot for several seconds. Never did she think they would find life this easily. She was breathless, unable to take the magnitude of the discovery in. It took several seconds for her to realize that she needed to collect as many of them as she could. She had been wasting time.

  She picked one up carefully with her glove and placed it in a container. Several of the miners then jumped to help her, instinctively knowing this would be important to her. Some wanted nothing to do with the creatures. One miner stood on Mara’s desk, so afraid he would not come down.

  Mara broke the stunned silence as some of the miners helped collect samples. “Help me get them in the specimen containers! Over here,” she shouted.

  The miners continued to help. Some of them managed to catch several of the specimens for her, even checking under equipment to make sure they had caught all of them.

  Mara noticed that Hanson was staying out of the commotion, watching his men attempt to catch the creatures.

  “Shut off that drill,” he called, interrupting one of his men as he was about to catch one of the animals.

  The miner stopped and turned to his side to shut down the large mechanism that operated the drill. The room suddenly fell silent as the machinery wound down. Mara looked in Hanson’s direction, curious at the reason for the order.

  “We’ll turn that back on when we get this fluid out of here,” he said to her, beating her to the argument. “It’s not safe to run that while there is water or any liquid in here.”

  Mara turned away, conceding his point, her attention focused on the newly discovered creatures. She had several creatures in her sample box, at least a half a dozen, with several more still flopping on the floor of the chamber. This would be enough to do her research, and so many questions were already forming in her head. “What was their chemical make-up? Did they have DNA? What did they eat, or did they eat at all? What was their ecosystem like miles below the surface? There would have to be a food-chain, something sustainable to have life like this.” The possibilities swirled in her head and made her that much more anxious to get the submersible they had brought with them below the ice to finally see what was on the ocean floor.