Europa Mon Amour

Ryan Taylor is a seventeen year old on a mission to Europa, a moon of Jupiter that supposedly has an ocean under its ice crust. He is teamed with a girl his age that has a mysterious past. Their mission is boring at the start but when they penetrate into the moon’s vast ocean they’re in for the adventure of their lives, and it doesn’t end there.

Ryan has blond hair and good muscular definition. His good looks are obvious but he’s shy and reserving.

All rights reserved, 2014. Names and references are fictional. No offense to anyone or anything is intended.

Chapter 1

I can’t believe that I’m being sent on a deep space mission. I’m only seventeen and a Junior Astronaut. Junior Astronauts spend time repairing equipment, attending boring space science classes and kissing ass, not going on important missions. What’s even more unbelievable is the fact that they’ve teamed me up with a girl my age. That’s plain crazy or a stroke of genius, depending on one’s situation.

They told me that the reason they’re sending me is because the mission involves a long journey and that they think I would be ideal for handling the boredom. I find that hard to believe. I think they picked me because I’m expendable, and I’d bet the house that the girl they’ve paired me with is also in that category. It seems strange to me that they would risk trusting two teens with a ten billion dollar spacecraft, especially since neither of us has ever been on a space mission before. We’ve been trained on simulators and have practiced working in spacesuits underwater, but that’s only a simulation, not the real thing.

Delta-1, the Europa mission’s space ship is in orbit around the Earth near the space station Hero-1. It’s too large to be parked anywhere else. A thousand meters long, the advanced spacecraft has a rotating crew section to create artificial gravity by centripetal force. The front section or bay, which does not rotate, is where the landing shuttle is located. A deep diving submersible is stowed on board the shuttle, and it’ll be used to penetrate Europa’s ice crust layer and explore the supposed ocean that lies below the Jovian moon’s icy surface. At least that’s the plan.

I have to admit that this mission excites me. It could become the first mission to locate extraterrestrial life. Scientists believe that Europa may be the most likely place for life because of the liquid water below its layer of ice. Heated by tidal forces as it orbits Jupiter, Europa is continually squeezed and expanded by the powerful gravitational force of Jupiter, the largest planet in the solar system. Heat is generated by this action much like a rubber ball heats up when one squeezes it many times.

I met Marie Gonzalez, the person I would be traveling to Europa with, in the staging area of Space Station Hero-1. She’s a Mexican girl with a pretty face framed with dark curly black hair that seems to drape more on the left side. I also noticed that she turns her head as if she were trying to avoid me looking at her left side.

What is she hiding?

What I really wanted to know is why I wasn’t aware of her being a Junior astronaut. I know all of the Junior Astronauts and no one ever mentioned her. That made her addition to this mission a mystery.

“Hi,” I said, trying to add a coy smile.

“Hi,” she replied with no smile. Her luscious lips twisted slightly as if to say that she was unsure of me, and her pretty eyes were averted, only briefly glancing at me.

Like me, she was suited up with the latest NASA space suit technology. This was necessary because we had to travel over to Delta-1 from the space station on a cable transport, essentially two taunt cables stretched between the space station and the ship. The cables support a motorized rig that carries us to the ship.

“It’s time,” Adam Kensington said. Kensington is the mission coordinator. He’s in his fifties and has a reputation for being a stickler for details. To us he’s like a grandfather.

“Yes, sir,” I replied with a halfhearted salute.

Kensington shook my hand and hugged Marie, which was awkward because she was wearing a spacesuit.

After putting our gloves and helmets back on, we entered an airlock and waited while a pump emptied it of air. An outer door slowly slid open to reveal the massive Delta-1 spaceship. It glistened in bright sunlight unhindered by atmosphere and hung suspended in space over a magnificent view of Earth. Actually, it was traveling at over seventeen thousand miles an hour, but since we were too that didn’t matter.

I went first, stepping onto a bar and grabbing onto two vertical rods. After attaching a safety cable to a vertical rod, I stood in place on the rig while the motors moved me out of the airlock and carried me slowly over to the spaceship. I looked down to watch the Earth below. Africa peaked out from clouds drifting over the Congo and deep blue waters of the Atlantic and the Mediterranean surrounded the great continent below. When I arrived at the ship, I stepped off of the rig and entered the spaceship’s airlock. Then, I watched the rig move back over so that Marie could make the trip.

Once we were both in the spaceship’s airlock, the cable system retracted and the outer door slid closed. I activated the pump system to fill up the airlock with air. When the green light lit indicating that the pressure had normalized, I turned a collar lock to allow me to remove my helmet.

Marie did the same.

I hooked my helmet to my utility belt. Marie did the same.

“That was fun,” I said.

She just stared at me with an expression that hinted of concern.

We floated over to a hatch that allowed us to enter the ship via a central tunnel. A central tubular tunnel connected the crew section to both the aft storage section and the shuttle hanger. Using handholds, we pulled ourselves through the tube to the crew compartment and entered it through a round hatch. We had to climb down a ladder from the round hatch to the crew compartment wheel’s floor, and when we were on the bottom, we experienced welcomed artificial gravity at 0.7 G’s.

“Let’s get to the command station,” I said. “We only have twenty minutes before departure.”

We walked along the wheel’s corridor to the command station, which was tucked into an indentation in the wall. The seats automatically adjusted to our butts.

A screen activated and displayed a large COMA symbol, which stood for Collective Operational Memory Assistant. Despite the ship’s advanced technology, the vocal system for COMA was still under development so one had to type queries and commands on a keyboard. That meant that I had to remove my glove.

I typed: DISPLAY SYSTEM STATUS, COMA.

COMA replied: ALL SYSTEMS SHOW READY, RYAN. ENGINE IGNITION IS IN 1O.29 MINUTES.

“We may as well relax,” I said. “This part of the operation is out of our hands.”

She looked at me for a brief moment before looking back at the main screen, which displayed a view from the spaceship’s front camera, with views from the back, bottom and both sides displayed in smaller windows around the front view.

“How come I’ve never seen you before?” I asked. “I’ve been here for over two years and no one ever mentioned your name.”

“I’ve been studying at UA,” she said. “This assignment came up just recently.”

“What were you studying?”

“Exo-biology.”

That made sense. Our mission is to find extraterrestrial life on Europa.

“Hopefully, we’ll find life on Europa,” I said, sounding like a fool.

“We will,” she said, in a matter of fact nonchalant tone of voice.

The plasma engines fired, sending a high-pitched vibration echo through the ship. We also felt a mild G-force increase. I put my glove back on and we both put our helmets on. This is a NASA regulation for all launches; although, if anything were to go wrong with this big bad boy of a ship, spacesuits would be superfluous.

The ship slowly moved out of orbit around Earth and began a slow journey to Jupiter, which is around 630 million miles away when Earth and Jupiter are closest. This happens when Earth is at aphelion and Jupiter is at perihelion relative to the sun. That would be the case at the end of five months.