SPACE IS A DEADLY SISTER: IV

by Gil James Bavel

Mission Day 648: 02:40 hours
Ganymede Base mining station
First Shift

After loading in the cargo and putting it away, the crew refueled their shuttle from the hydrogen tanks and brought the waste out to the loading bay. Space Corps regulations were very strict: you leave nothing but footprints and shoot the waste into the sun on your way back to Earth. Space junk got so thick in the mid-22nd century that after an expensive and monumental effort to collect it from Earth orbit, it was decided that any waste that couldn’t be recycled in space would be added to the mass of the sun. All future missions observed this protocol on pain of discharge from the Corps. Even radioactive waste had been disposed of this way.

The station and shuttle crews had long since had dinner, and retired to their small but cozy quarters for the night. It was quiet in Ganymede station. The only thing the crew could hear was the sound of the ventilation fans breathing fresh, warm atmosphere into their quarters. The walls inside the installation were unfortunately stark white. There weren’t a lot of décor options due to weight and radiation shielding considerations.

John Biggs and Sondra Lawton were shacked up together in his quarters. They were spartan, as all company quarters were; clean, confined and boring. Biggs was an athletic mulatto, medium tall with close-cropped hair and young looking for his age of thirty-six. He was undressed save for his boxers and was playing with her hair while she kissed him. His rack was a plastic bunk bed, with an identical empty copy stacked on top.

They were in the bottom rack, which he’d outfitted against regulation with an extra mattress from the top bunk, even though in this gravity he didn’t need it. In fact, to have sexual congress in one-seventh G, straps had to be engaged, like any other form of physical exercise. But they weren’t quite there yet. The covers had been kicked off onto the plain white plastic floor.

Lawton was on top of Biggs, placing small, familiar kisses on his neck. “Hey, girl, we’ve got all night,” Biggs said, lifting her up to get a look at her. “You in some kind of hurry?”

She smiled and gave him a little slap. “I do want to get some sleep tonight. I just spent thirty-six hours dragging your damn radio here and taking out the trash! Twenty-four hours crammed in that shuttle with the Captain and another twelve powering down after unloading cargo. Now, are you going to do me, or do I have to beg?” Lawton’s long, brown legs nestled around Biggs, trying to find purchase.

Biggs felt playful. “So we’re getting serious now, huh?” he said, sitting up. He was going to make her work for it. “Talk about a long distance relationship!” He laughed.

“Ugh,” Lawton replied, falling on top of him. One hand on his chest, she grabbed his wrist and said “This is just casual sex. I’m dating a miner on Ganymede? Who I see once a week? Hey, it’s my job. You’re just a fringe benefit, and don’t you forget it, mister.”

Biggs pretended to be hurt. “What, you got some other beau now?” He twisted his wrist out of her hand and grabbed hers. “And I’m a mining engineer, not a miner, don’t forget.”

“No, I just like to keep my options open,” she said, falling on him again and breaking his hold. She moved her free hand down to his waist and presented him with a pouty look. “You’re not angry with me...are you, Doctor?”

“Oh, a lot of options for a gal that runs supplies in the outer system...” Biggs let her remove his boxers. He was evidently quite ready for her. She pressed him into her, slowly, and with both hands, grabbed his butt and locked him in for a very long moment. She sighed and closed her eyes.

Biggs made a small sound of satisfaction, then whispered into her ear. “Look, I’d get you transferred out here if you were qualified. You know I want to see you more than once a week”.

Lawton slowly began to twirl, up and down, back and forth. In between passionate kisses, she said, “John, I’d never work out here. It’s far too dangerous.”

“What dangerous? You mean the micrometeoroids? We’ve never suffered any casualties because of them. Pieces get damaged, you bring us new ones. That’s the job.” Biggs pulled straps out from under the bed with both hands and prepared to hook them around the small of Lawton’s back. “God, you’re beautiful.” He could smell the sweat coming off her body tinged with the light essential-oil scent she was wearing.

She arched her tummy toward him and allowed him to cinch them together. “Look, I’m a flygirl, I’m in the Corps. This is as good as it’s going to get for us right now. I’m on a forty-two month commitment and on track to make officer, if I stay in for the long haul. This is a good career for me.” She continued slowly screwing him, one hand on each side of the rack. “Besides, I love flying”.

John Biggs was evidently lost in her. He had stopped talking and was enjoying the feeling of her breasts moving up and down against his well-defined chest. “Lights” he whispered, and the computer dutifully dimmed them out. The two continued making love much longer into the night than either of them had expected.

Click Here

for Part V

SPACE IS A DEADLY SISTER: III

by Gil James Bavel

Mission Day 722: 15:05 hours
Ganymede Base mining station
Second Shift

I walked over to the shuttle bay and surveyed the damage. Everything was blown to bits and the bay was almost completely cleaned out. Debris from the drums, lights, repair dock and most of the tools littered the floor. The refueling tanks had blown out one entire wall of the bay and the back into the lab. The only tool that still seemed to be functioning was a welding plasma torch, which I nabbed and clipped to my suit.

Aside from that, the only other thing that was intact was the new rover, which had been secured and covered with a tarp—which was still there, but had some tears in it. I unscrewed the tarp from its moorings, and uncovered the rover to see if it was serviceable. Checking it over, I saw that it was still brand new from the factory. My space suit’s computer beeped at me that power levels were critical. “Power levels ten percent.”

The tires were clean, and had good, strong treads on them. A brand new rover. It had been intended for survey work, and we were not supposed to take it out until after Biggs and I had had a chance to initialize it. No one to stop me now. The initialization routine was simple enough, even in a spacesuit. I powered the rover up, and it responded to my commands as it should. It was ready to go.

With its fully charged nickel/hydride batteries, it had far more run time in it than my suit did. This gave me some initial hope, but when I realized there was no way to couple the power supply from the rover to my suit, I backed it out of the bay, and on my way out, I made sure that the toolkit and emergency medikit were on board. I also grabbed a piece of rebar debris as a weapon—although it didn’t make sense, it made me feel more secure. I was alone on this rock now.

There was a bright flash from Jupiter. That clinched it. The gas giant had vacuumed up another comet. I watched the astronomical oddity for a bit, and away I went. Driving the rover felt mischievous, as it was such a smooth ride and it was off limits. Because the micro-gravity on Ganymede—slightly less even than that of Luna, and due to the long stretches of flat plains on this side of the moon—I was able to go at much faster speeds than I expected. I flipped on the navigation system, just for the hell of it.

There were no satellites orbiting Ganymede, so no GPS, but there was a tracking system for detecting the survey stations that we were in the process of setting up when the accident occurred. Again, my suit reminded me that power levels were reaching critical. “Power levels seven percent.”

I thought about the environmental conditions on Ganymede as I drove the rover. My mind was wandering as I was. The Jovian year is about 12 Earth years…so the terminator moves, albeit slowly. And Ganymede has a magnetic field of its own, which protects it from some of the raw cosmic and solar radiation, but not completely from all the still poorly-understood fire that giant Jupiter spat out at us. How can a planet produce more energy than it receives from the sun? This question has still not been answered in centuries of research.

While Ganymede has no real atmosphere to speak of, its exosphere has moderate amounts of oxygen and ozone, which was among the reasons that it was selected for terraforming. It was easy to mine ice from its surface, which gave us abundant water to drink, cook, wash and water the hydroponic gardens with—and some to store. When the sunlight hits Ganymede’s surface, ozone is generated, which helps protect its surface from radiation. This is a continuous process. The blowers that we set up shot oxygen atoms into the ozone, where they combined to form more oxygen, which falls back down to the surface—albeit slowly.

The blowers mined hydrogen for fuel and oxygen out of the surface, and the drills produced helium-3 and other raw materials for our work. One of the few things we had to continually bring from Earth was topsoil, as we needed it. This far deep in the system, vegetarianism was a convention. There just wasn’t room to keep live animals, much less what they would need to survive. What little meat we got came in dried form, or in tubes as a paste.

Suddenly, a blip showed up on the navigation system that shouldn’t have been there. It showed a large installation due Ganymedean East of my present location! This had to be a mistake… or… was it? An alien base, monitoring our installation? Perhaps the Company had another terraforming station set up separate from ours? But why would they keep it a secret? It made no sense. Whatever this thing was, it was not only within the range of the rover, but less than half an hour away—which gave me a chance to lay eyes on it before I died. I was determined to see what the hell it was. “Power levels five percent”. Damn, it was getting cold in the suit.

A long, hell-bent-for-leather drive across the plains of a Jovian moon made my heart race. Steering around a few craters, I took some big bounces along the way that would have been death-defying on Earth. Catching 100 feet of air on an airless moon pumps you full of adrenaline when you realize that each bounce could be your last. The feeling of vertigo I was used to just looking up at Jupiter—which always seemed somehow like looking down—was intensified at the apex of these long, careening bounces. Presently I arrived at the location that the navigation system said should be there, but saw nothing. I drove around a bit, looking at the ground, and then I saw it. A dark, inconsistent obelisk jutted up from the surface. The heads-up display in my helmet dimmed, and went nearly dark. “Power levels critically low in suit,” the computer voice said. I ignored it, focused on the obelisk. I couldn’t believe my eyes.

No, wait, there was the top of an elevator shaft poking out of the ground, just big enough for a human to enter. It wasn’t supposed to be there. It couldn’t be there. I drove up to it and parked the rover. The shaft looked brand new, of gleaming metal. There was a keypad on the right side of two doors. And I didn’t know the code.

I grabbed the piece of rebar I’d brought, and banged on the doors—maybe someone would hear. I couldn’t believe my luck. There’s got to be somebody in there. I looked at the power gauge—down to 3%. I had to get in; it was now or never. I had five minutes or less before my suit’s power pack failed and then it would get real cold in here real fast.

Think. How to open secured mag-locked doors without a code? I remembered from the Space Corps training that Io's volcanoes give off particles of sulfur and sodium that are ionized by Jupiter's magnetic field, and the Io plasma torus around its orbit is so radioactive that any unprotected human there would almost immediately be exposed to a lethal dose of radiation. These particles make it over to Ganymede, not only through the natural migration of the Jovian system, but also clinging on to the ships that occasionally go back and forth. We had to scrub down in the airlocks before going in or out of a ship. Mostly these days, robots automatically handled the cargo.

So these doors must be radiation shielded as well as code-locked. Four minutes. Necessity really is the mother of invention. I wasn’t going to be using the rover again—not anytime soon, anyway—so I grabbed the repair kit and flung it open to see what I could use to get that damn keypad to open the doors. Tape, battery acid, various metals, lengths of wire… and then it hit me. Brute force.

I went to the keypad and put the rebar up against it. I couldn’t fit either end in, so I gave it a good whack and nothing happened. Whack. Whack. Each time, it lifted me off the surface a little, and I landed again. This was getting me nowhere. I wasn’t even making a scratch in the chrome of the keypad. Three minutes.

The jack. Even on Ganymede, the rover would occasionally need to have its tires changed. I flounced to the repair kit and pulled out the jack. It had a tire tool, much like the ones used on Earth, with a wedge end. I’d be able to fit it in between the control pad and its housing. I flounced back over to the elevator and tried the tire tool’s flat end inbetween the two. It fit as if it were made for the task. Gripping it near the bottom in case I struck my suit, I braced myself and smacked the rebar against the top end of the tire tool. It made no sound, but I could feel the tire tool give a bit. Two minutes.

Again. This time, the pad came off and floated away, spinning wildly like a playing card thrown at a wastebasket. Exposed, the inner control mechanism of the pad looked like a fishnet stocking made out of gold, platinum and extruded copper. Electronic leads were sticking out that looked like they might control the doors and the radiation shielding. One minute.

Assuming this radiation shielding was of the ALARP variety (As Low As Reasonably Practicable), I guessed that the doors were protected not only by sheet lead, various levels of Mylar mesh and other neutron-repelling materials, but also by a strong EMF, likely a plasma. I had to short out the system long enough to get in without damaging it, if at all possible. I’d have to drain the rover’s battery to get in. But it was life or death. It didn’t matter.

Using the tire tool, I unhooked the one of the rover’s batteries and pulled it away from the bracket. Using the lengths of wire from the repair kit, I wrapped them around the terminals and attached one pole to the longer of the two leads in the exposed keypad housing. I set the battery on the ground, being careful not to lose the connection, and wrapped another length of wire around the other pole’s terminal. I realized that what I was about to do could very well kill me—but I was a dead man anyway.

“Power levels in this suit have reached critical. Shutting down.” The rest of my suit’s lights dimmed out, and turned off. The whir of the heating fan slowed, and stopped. This was it. Body heat wouldn’t last long now. I had never been this cold. I grabbed the other length of wire and touched it to the only other obvious lead in the keypad’s exposed socket. A massive spark came not from the socket, but from the doors of the elevator, which opened a few inches. I could see the sputtering plasma field trying to kick in. I probably only had seconds to get inside, and I was already feeling arctic cold setting in.

Grabbing the tire tool, I flounced to the doors and wedged one foot between them. Using both hands, I pushed against the doors in an effort to get them to open wider. They were trying to close. I was in a panic. Turning, I put my back against one door and used the tire tool to push against the other as hard as I could. In one-seventh gravity, this is a tricky feat at best. With one last Herculean effort, I fell into the elevator, the plasma field sputtered back into life, the doors closed and I suddenly felt myself going down. I was enveloped in a new kind of darkness.

I could already feel it getting warmer. Someone was here. There would be power. Oxygen. Safety. I was going to live. Even without food, there was enough recyclable water in my suit to last until Friday. Surely I’d be able to survive until then. Down, in complete blackness, I rode the elevator car. I cracked a smile inside my suit. I was going to make it.

Click Here

for Part IV

SPACE IS A DEADLY SISTER: II

by Gil James Bavel

Mission Day 647: 19:22 hours
Ganymede Base mining station
Third Shift

Dr. Devon Berkshire was out on the plains of Ganymede, performing routine survey work with Dr. Marquis Williams and Dr. Lisa Obermeyer, when the Friday Run ship came into view. They looked up, and waved, as the shuttle came in toward the bay of the installation. A small mining base, the only social interaction that the miners and terraformmers got other than each other was when the Friday Run ships came to deliver replenishables and take away waste. The crew continued their work; they knew they’d be able to interact with the pilot and navigator from Earth when they got back from their shift. They’d be done in a couple of hours.

The ship kicked up very little in the way of grit coming into the landing bay. As the sleek, white shuttle cruised in and came to a smooth, skidding stop, the radio inside the cockpit came on.

“Hey, you guys, welcome back!” said John Biggs, the installation’s radio operator. “Gave me a heart attack; why didn’t you radio ahead?” he asked. “Over”.

Sondra Lawton, Navigator on board the Company shuttle came over the squelching radio in the control room. “We thought we’d surprise you today. Not like you didn’t know we were coming. Over.” Sondra looked over at her pilot and commanding officer, Jim Stanton, with a smile. “Think we should tell him about the new radio?”

Stanton eased out of the controls and shut the ship down, clicking off switches and making last minute checks. “Nah, he’ll find out about it soon enough. He’ll be like a kid on Christmas morning”. Back to work. Stanton queued up the mic. “Ganymede Base, this is shuttle Alpha, we’re in and down, hit the garage door and power up your life support so we can disembark this bird, willya? Over.”

“Already on top of it, Jim, over,” said Biggs, and indeed, the bay door began closing and the atmospheric distribution tanks powered up. Within thirty seconds, the door was down, the bay was filling up with atmosphere and the heaters had it warming to a balmy 75 degrees Fahrenheit. Sondra Lawton unstrapped from the safety harness and began her post-landing checks. Everything seemed to be in order.

Pilot Jim Stanton handed her a checklist, still on paper after a hundred and sixty years in human spaceflight. “Why don’t you tag ‘em and I’ll bag ‘em?” said the handsome, swarthy, fortysomething pilot, his helmet already off and flight suit unzipped to the waist.

“You got it, Cap’n,” the navigator replied, accepted the small pad from him, tossed it in her lap and removed her own helmet, letting down a long shock of brown hair. Co-pilot Second Class Sondra Lawton was about medium size, with bronzed skin and sharp features, which she downplayed. A few years in the Space Corps will teach a good-looking, twenty-six year-old girl to be as dowdy as possible. She wore no makeup and usually kept her shoulder-length hair in a regulation ponytail when she wasn’t in a spacesuit.

Lawton stowed her helmet at her feet, and took down the pertinent after-action data on the pad with a number two pencil.

“Pressure check,” Stanton said.

“Roger that,” Lawton came back, finished her checks and tossed the completed checklist into her helmet.

Checking a dial, the pilot cracked the seal on the shuttle’s door, and unlatched up the canopy, which raised up, looking like a huge metal bird yawning.

“Okay, we’ve got air, you ready?” Captain Stanton asked.

“Am I ever! Let’s ditch this bitch!” Lawton replied, putting one arm to the fuselage and getting ready to make the jump to the deck. It was a big drop, but in one-seventh gravity, they were used to it. Both of them hopped down, their magnetic boots making loud CLICKs on the metal floor, and stretched their legs. The flight from the Company Mars base took most of a solar day, and from Moonbase, an entire one if made in one shot. They were ready for some R and R. But first, the shuttle needed unloading and refueling.

The shuttle bay was nearly as long as it was wide, and housed fuel storage space for the shuttle’s return trip. The bay was a little greyer than the rest of the base, from the regolith of Ganymede’s surface that came in each time a shuttle did. Even with regular cleanings and electrostatics, small particles of grit managed to stick to the inside of the hangar. Repair tools, drums of hydrogen fuel and the base’s rover were stored inside.

The outer airlock door from opposite the bay door breathed out with an audible hiss and in popped John Biggs, the station’s primary engineer and radio operator, and Will Jensen, computer systems analyst and communications/mechanical engineer.

Biggs and Jensen wore white jumpsuits, flagged and stitched with smart-looking Company insignia. A well-built, M.I.T.-educated black man, Biggs was genuinely happy to see the shuttle crew. Jensen, of Danish extraction, was about the same age as John Biggs, in his late twenties, and was likewise enthused about seeing their friends.

“Long time no see, Kemosabee!” said Biggs, walking over to the pair. He gave Sondra Lawton a big hug, lifting her off the ground with a double CLICK. She squealed.

“Cap’n.” Jensen said with a smile, and offered a firm handshake to the pilot. “What have you got on the bird for us this week?”

Lawton turned from Biggs and gave Jensen a terse look. “You’ll have to wait like everyone else. But I will say this—you’re gonna be surprised!” She ended this by looking back and forth at both Biggs and Jensen, pointing at them with her mouth open, taunting them.

“Okay, kids, let’s get this show on the road. We’ve got to unload this cargo and get inside. While aerobraking through Jupiter, we discovered some micrometeoroids coming in about an hour out, and I want to get in and have a lie down for a while. And the Director wants Devon to send in his status report as soon as we’re done here.”

“Aw, the old man’s got a backache again,” said Biggs, and slapped “Big” Jim Stanton on the back. At over six feet, Captain Stanton was lucky to still be flying in the corps, even outer system missions. Although he wasn’t yet middle-aged, he was too tall to be a pilot but had enough influence back home to have had strings pulled. It was understandable that he’d be cramped in a cockpit made for shorter men.

“Okay, let’s git ‘er done,” he intoned with a false drawl. The crew proceeded to the cargo bays of the shuttle and began fetching the cargo containers from the ship. In one-seventh Earth gravity, hand trucks were hardly ever necessary. If you couldn’t lift 700 pounds on Ganymede, you couldn’t cut the muster.

“Be careful with this one,” Lawton said to Biggs, handing him a specially marked box. “This is your surprise this trip. Wouldn’t want you to drop that.”

John Biggs sized up the box he was holding. “Okay, Sondra, I’ll be careful.” He smiled, and moved over toward the airlock where he set the box down. “Kinda feels like a radio set,” he guessed.

“Dammit!” said Stanton, genuinely frustrated.

“Oh, cool,” said Will Jensen as he moved freight. “It’s the new backup, right?”

Lawton laughed at her commanding officer and shoved him. “Hey, I didn’t say anything”.

Captain Stanton wrinkled his nose at her. “No, you just gave it completely away.”

The crew of the shuttle and the two of the base moved the rest of the cargo inside, and sealed up.

Outside, on the icy, pebble-strewn surface, the survey crew flounced along to their new positions. Flouncing was what they called their movements outside, a cross between floating and bouncing. In the partial shadow of vast Jupiter, Drs. Berkshire, Williams and Obermeyer were now just beginning the final survey for the day. “Okay, give me a reading on this conditional line from the first station”, Berkshire called out.

Marquis Williams peered through his optical instrument at the designated merestone. “It’s off true, isn’t it?”

“Yeah,” Williams agreed, “by a declination of ten degrees, almost exactly.”

Obermeyer piped up. “Marquis, is it almost exactly ten degrees, or exactly ten degrees?”

“It’s exactly ten degrees off. Christ, you’d think it mattered. We’re not putting a drilling station here and you both know it.”

Dr. Devon Berkshire put his gloved hands on suited hips. “Actually, that’s my call, if you don’t mind, Marquis. But you’re probably right. Let’s—“

“Perimeter alarm sounding. Micrometeoroid storm approaching,” droned the automatic computer in their helmets. The Jovian Deep Space Array was never wrong.

“Okay, let’s wrap it up, people. It’s a moot point now. Time to get back.”

Lisa Obermeyer made for the beat-up rover nearby, flouncing over to it. “You’ll get no argument from me”, she said, stowing her gear in the rear compartment and sitting in the front passenger seat. The power gauge on her suit read 26%, and that was enough margin for error, but she’d rather not take any chances. If something should happen to the rover on the way back to the station, they could have problems. It wasn’t the first time the rover had served as cover during a micrometeor storm; it was evident from all the dings and pock marks on it.

Williams got into the shotgun backseat and Berkshire into the driver’s seat. They made good time on the way back, in relative quiet. Micrometeor Storms were serious business; a speck the size of a grain of sand could end your career out here, if it were traveling fast enough, and even your life if you weren’t careful. So far they’d been lucky.

The team of planetary geologist, mining specialist and medical doctor/planetary surveyor made tracks back to Ganymede Base station the rest of the way in nervous silence.

Click Here

for Part III

SPACE IS A DEADLY SISTER: I

by Gil James Bavel

Mission Day 722: 14:55 hours
Ganymede Base mining station
Second Shift

I realized as I was freezing to death how beautiful Jupiter is from Ganymede's surface. Beautiful like a huge spider watching me with one powerful, raging mutant eye. Hanging there in its web, space. Coldly staring me down. Which only added to the growing chill I felt from my failing spacesuit. The fuel supply was nearly extinguished. I found myself doing the most ridiculous things in an attempt to stay warm. Rubbing my gloved hands together. Going for low-gravity jogs. Even if I could reach Ganymede's terminator in time, it didn’t provide enough ambient heat to be of any help. I was doomed.

Jupiter's natural beauty was as little a comfort as it was undeniable. When the Great Red Spot was facing Ganymede, it was all you could focus on. The bands of gravity-fed gas storms were stunning from my vantage point, and glowed brilliantly in their ever-churning incandescent rainbow of colors. What you see on the telescreens back home just doesn’t do it justice. Still, my suit's heads-up display read 12% on the power gauge, which meant I had maybe an hour or so before I would succumb to the stark cold of open space. It seemed ironic that the one thing that I had an enormous supply of was oxygen, and it was a highly combustible resource. Of course, I'd have to remove my breathing apparatus if I wanted to ignite it. I had already run over every possible scenario countless times in my mind, and I was stumped.

Io came into view from one side of massive Jupiter, a small speck brilliantly lit by the sun, 483,780,000 miles away. Why couldn't I be on one of Jupiter's other moons? I knew, of course, that we hadn't settled Io because Ganymede was so much bigger, because of its magnetosphere, relative stability and raw materials, but we did have mining stations over there. There was power there. Io had more internal heat than Ganymede, but that was because of the tidal flexing, which made Io more unstable.

I'd made the Ganymede-Io run a few times. Now there's an interesting feeling of vertigo, hanging between two tiny pebbles while racing past the gaping maw of the largest planetary body in the solar system. From here, it seemed even bigger than the sun could possibly be. From here, Jupiter looked like the biggest object in the universe. It was all you could see from such a low orbit.

It seemed like much longer than ten years since humanity had settled Ganymede. It had been discussed, budgeted, shelved, reopened, mothballed, reconsidered, shitcanned again, and finally implemented. Whoever figured out that terraforming Ganymede would be much cheaper and much faster than Venus or Mars was a genius. And by now quite rich, I should think. The Helium-3 on Ganymede was so much richer and easier to access than on Luna, and the advances in radiation protection in the last twenty-five years had allowed us to make semi-permanent habitation here a reality. To us, Jupiter was no longer the hot, spitting dragon she had been a century before. That, and the moon-huggers had a fit after we started mining on Luna. But it was okay with them if they couldn’t see it.

We were doing important work out here. Environmentalists never see the bigger picture. Without the Helium-3 from our installation, Earth would have to return to reliance on the dirty fossil fuels and radioactive fissile ones that had nearly destroyed the planet’s economy and biosphere in the early 21st century.

Too bad there still wasn't any atmosphere to lock in heat. Early on, they had proposed a low-orbit dusting of carbon to attract light and maintain some temperature. It wouldn't work because of radio and other early technological considerations; keeping the radio-link with Earth and Moonbase was the top priority, in case something like what did happen happened.

The accident wasn't the Company's fault, nor was there any mechanical malfunction or human error. It must have been a rogue comet. Jupiter vacuums up a hell of a lot more of them than previously thought. I’m surprised the Jovian Deep Space Array didn’t pick it up. When the tidal forces nearby Jupiter’s massive gravity-well changed, there was a massive moonquake that, by itself, we could have weathered.

There would have been some damage, but not the wholesale devastation to the installation that occurred when one of the fuel storage tanks ruptured in the shuttle bay. It lifted me off my feet and threw me on my ass, onto Ganymede’s surface, which shook with a rage like a giant teething child. I struggled like a tortoise on its back for a few minutes just to get back on my feet.

We stored raw hydrogen off-base for our fusion reactors, but some was used to refuel the shuttles. The shuttles’ main job, aside from replenishing our supplies, was ferrying the H-3 back to Earth for use planetwide. The chain reaction took out half of the lab—the main building—and explosive decompression took care of the rest. I was finishing up my fieldwork for the week, manually adjusting the antennae outside on the radio shack when it happened.

I saw Biggs and Williams tumble past, dead before they hit Ganymede's rocky, icy surface. I discovered that Lisa had lived for long enough that I regretted it; she'd recorded a few words into her suit’s com system before dying, "I love you Will." Hearing that when I got to her body was especially heartbreaking, because she really did. And I had loved her.

At first, when we started serving together, I thought she was into women. Maybe that was just a front she put up, serving with so many men. Over time, we had fallen for each other hard. Her face was so serene in death, her beautiful, long white neck looked so strange with her comparatively Day-Glo orange blood frozen to it. Her nose and ears had leaked blood onto the visor of her helmet, which I removed. She would have been proud that her short, spiky blonde hair still had unbelievable hold. Tears streamed down my face inside my suit, and I moved on.

I found my commanding officer, Devon, still alive behind the glass of the multipurpose building we used as radio shack, supply storage, and occasional hideaway when we needed privacy. Devon and I had conversations with my helmet up against the glass about the proximity of ships in the area, how we could restore the radio transmitter, if there were any way to get part of my oxygen supply to him, things like that. It didn't seem fair that I was out here and had plenty of air, but eventually Devon opened the airlock and choked on nothing at all instead of his own waste Co2 so that I could get in.

It wasn't the first time I'd had to put the glass of my helmet up to the bay window of the building to talk with whoever might be in there; the radio in the building was the original one they'd brought to Ganymede, now a secondary transmitter since they'd had the new one in the lab. Actually, there was a backup in the lab that was better, but we were only supposed to turn it on during a radio emergency. The multipurpose building's old radio had been screwed up for months, and we'd put in for another last Wednesday. I know, because I'm the one that requested it.

The Company said it was just a luxury though, and denied the request. I think it must have gotten back to them that off-duty I used to walk the underground tunnel into the building, close the airlock and communicate with radio operators back home. Because of our proximity to Jupiter, I only had a 2-hour window to send and receive one-way messages, and since it takes 44 minutes for messages to go each way, carrying on one conversation often took days. I'd periodically come in and check the computer to see if anything had come in during the week-long Ganymedean day. Of course, I don't really think the Company cared a whole lot. They never mentioned it to me.

I'd gone into the lab, and tried to leave a message on the computer for whoever might find us. The Company would be sure to investigate on next Friday's Run when they didn't hear from us. Today was Sunday. The power was out in the lab, and Devon finally came out into the underground hallway, his oxygen spent. His death was as instantaneous as it was grisly. Without an atmosphere, open liquid is not possible; where there is no air pressure, all materials sublimate immediately.

An unprotected human body, being comprised of mostly water and other liquids, shrivels up like a tin can in a vacuum. I went in to the radio shack to see about leaving some kind of message, but if you've ever tried to use a keyboard from inside a spacesuit, it's pretty goddamn difficult. Communications were offline. I eventually opened up a long-obsolete paint program and drew letters with a gloved finger on the hands-on pad.

"Installation compromised massive moonquake," I'd scribbled, "Technician William Jensen only survivor of initial damage, and I haven’t got long." It felt funny leaving a message for someone to read after you'd died. "Mortician:" I'd almost added as an afterthought, "allergic to formaldehyde." When I was done, I saved it and shut the computer down to save energy in case I could figure out how to jury-rig a link to my spacesuit's system in the next several minutes. It came down to tools. If I'd had the right tools, I think I could have tapped power from the multipurpose building's generator for long enough to survive until the Friday Run showed up. Of course, by that time, my suit would have been full to the knees with my own organic waste product (I'd always hated that Company euphemism). It wouldn't have been very comfortable, but I could've made it. The tools I required, if they hadn't been melted or disintegrated in the lab blast, were probably halfway to the other side of Ganymede by now. If I had long enough, I'm sure they'd have floated past. They'll find them someday and know that they're proof of previous life on Jupiter's moons. "Spanners of the Gods;" I could see the headline now.

As it was, I had fifty or so minutes, and I had run out of options.

I wondered if I should stay close to the installation, so it would be easier for them to find my body, or maybe go for a walk. The temptation to go on a final, last visionquest was irresistible. During the two and a half years I'd been here, I'd only ever seen Ganymede from the installation, the Io shuttle, or the Friday Run ships. We're not supposed to take walks. On Ganymede, we were exposed to about 8 rem of radiation a day from Jupiter without protection. 75 rems over a period of a few days is enough to cause radiation poisoning, and about 500 rems over a few days is fatal. My suit couldn’t protect me for more than a few hours—but I didn’t have that long. Nothing to stop me now. Walkabout. I might even find one of those alien spanners.

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for Part II

OINK! ISSUE

~ PROUDLY PRESENTS ~




EVERYTHING BUT THE OINK
by Keith P. Graham

© by keith p. graham
+ Click Images Below To Begin Reading +





BLOOD ECHO SYMPHONIES
by John Claude Smith

© by john claude smith





TRAP
by Vincent Daemon
© by vincent daemon




The JULY, 2011 issue of the FREEZINE is a wrap. It will remain archived throughout the rest of August, as well as for the rest of time. That is, insofar as our recently built-up technological empire survives. There are those among us who seem convinced this gleaming technopolis has an extremely limited expiration date; the editors here at the FREEZINE have been informed otherwise. In the future, The Grid will be all that remains of life-sustainable nature on Earth. All those unfortunate enough (depending on how you look at it) to find themselves off The Grid during these formative years will perish. Millions will be veritably shoved off The Grid; the poor and the dispossessed. Hundreds of thousands who elect to live off the grid will suffer untimely demises, as well. The reason for this is that the Empire Which Never Ended will have effectively mortally wounded Mother Nature herself—she will simply no longer be around to sustain anyone.

The nanoswarm responsible for possessing me to establish the FREEZINE has reported that the only human survivors will be those who have managed to keep a place officially on the Grid: those accountable human beings with government IDs scanned- and logged- into the database will constitute the only known survivors of the human race.

Eventually, there will be pockets of clans who consider themselves "off-Grid", but they will effectively be living on The Grid nonetheless, by means of having made themselves, in one fashion or another, "invisible" to The Establishment's roving camera-eyes and microphones. The old paradigm of Nature (wild land with sustainable soil to grow plants and support fauna—the great, old-fashioned "outdoors", if you will) shall become an extinct novelty of the past.

Few people alive today are willing to accept this to be true, yet like it or not, 100% of all future vegetation will eventually be horticulturally cultivated and kept up exclusively by virtue of the technology human beings built up to support it. Over ninety-nine percent of the former animal kingdom will become extinct (with the exception of a few species maintained and cultivated by humans to suit our various purposes).

In other words, Technology itself is destined to become the new "bedrock" of Father Nature; (there's a messy divorce ongoing with "Mother Nature" if you haven't noticed, and no one will see hide nor hair from her for thousands of years on this planet—if ever again). The Patriarchal overthrow of the Primeval Order has been underway for generations, and will soon complete its incidental pogrom of the old flora/fauna paradigm.

The Bloodhost here has reported that this developing trend is not "cautionary" in the least; on the contrary. It is but a reminder that Nature itself undergoes a constant process of transmutation and natural selection, which continues to evolve well unto this day, of course. The fact that nature's old paradigm might eventually become exctinct via its own transmutation is not only perfectly normal, but it also goes to show that it's merely our perception of the past and present that distorts our view of the future. The gleaming iconography of technology itself has already stepped in to begin replacing the older natural tones and textures; and so it goes. Plastic will become the new wood. Everything is proceeding and evolving as it should. Work will be the new play. And the human race is here to stay.

JULY, 2011:

Three Little Tales

A thousand thanks go out to our three returning authors for submitting their stories here to be shared with the world.

We begin this issue with the highly anticipated return of Keith Graham, one of the four original "Horsemen of the Freezine". His story EVERYTHING BUT THE OINK kicks off the JULY issue with a prescient tale of genetic hybrids—chimaeras—kept imprisoned by the government to be harvested for organ transplants. Keith's tale is a warm, funny, shocking story sure to please our growing legion of devoted readers. If you haven't already read Keith's first story in the Freezine, check the side margin under the ARCHIVE OF STORIES AND BIOS—scrolling down will take you to Keith's archived sector.

Next up, we have another story from John Claude Smith, who returns with his second tale for the Freezine, BLOOD ECHO SYMPHONIES. After reading his submission, I realized that the appropriate artwork for it had already been created last year, during the production of Vincent Daemon's apocalyptic splatterpunk novella, WAITING FOR THE END. An abstract watercolor of a rock'n'roller onstage at the microphone that I painted never found its proper scene in the serialization of Vince's story. Even back then, I knew it would only be a matter of time until this image found its narrative match. That time is here, now, and the nanoeditors at the Freezine are quite pleased with the merger of this art with J.C. Smith's surreal and cosmic vision of a transcendent experience during a live concert.

The final installment of JULY's trilogy of stories went up early on July 30, intended to fill a newly prepared "Saturday Morning Flash Fiction" slot. Veteran Freezine author Vince Daemon provides a lighthearted glimpse into the darker corner of our wild empire of predatory selection with TRAP. Another abstract watercolor was commissioned, intended to capture the confused viewpoint of the hapless protagonist in the story. The nanoswarm is pleased to have another successful merger of narrative text and visual art for the Freezine's archives, and we here hope our dear readers are briefly entertained by it, as well.

FREE ZINE ZONE

Click For the ART
of the Freezine

Stay tuned until the next, SEPTEMBER ISSUE, of the Freezine of Fantasy & Science Fiction, available the world over, free of charge, hosted by the globally assimilating internet via blogger, and brought to you by the mysterious benefactors known as the Bloodhost, or nanohorde, sometimes referred to as the nanoswarm, which have somehow infected my nervous system, and possessed me to put this webzine together.

The FREEZINE is maximized to assist both aspiring and established authors integrate themselves into the newly burgeoning eReader revolution. This online fanzine (or "webzine" as I prefer to call it) is a labor of love. All writers of genre fiction are encouraged to submit stories to be serialized by daily installments in a future issue, or (for shorter stories) to be put up as a single posting on a Friday or Saturday. We are dedicated here to promoting the works of writers and to hyperlink directly to their websites and books for sale online. So don't be shy! Why not take a chance with us, and email your story and see what happens? Writers should be concerned about building up a personal fanbase, and the FREEZINE is primed to help do just that. *Click FREEZINE SEEKS STORIES! below for more guidelines.


More surprises are in store, so make sure to bookmark this site and tell your friends and family about it. Thanks again, and see you all in SEPTEMBER.

FREEZINE SEEKS STORIES!

:message from the editors: