LAST STAND AT EUROPA STATION A
Welcome, Settlers, to Europa Station A—brought to you by the Coca-Cola Corporation—the first nonterrestrial, human-occupied, underwater colony.
When the cost of producing drinkable water on Earth exceeded Coke’s profitability model, our multitrillion-dollar company sponsored exploration into the far reaches of the solar system to find more. You might not think water a necessity for soda, but if you’d pull up the ingredients, you’d see it right there…toward the bottom. Plus, even our executives still needed to drink something other than our product, so off to space we sent dozens of red-and-white-striped probes.
Europa’s water had previously been examined by Earth, Luna, and Mars, each hoping to claim the moon for their own, but before anyone could develop the colonization technology to make it feasible, we had planted our flag. Being an interplanetary company serving the entire Sol System, we claimed Europa as a neutral zone. Other parties would be allowed to build refineries on the moon, as long as they understood that Coke would take a percentage of all water harvested as our fee. No one complained as they considered the royalty share preferable to going to war with our beloved brand. The now defunct Pepsi, Coors, and McDonald’s corporations all learned that lesson.
Virgin Galactic’s magnetically shielded, toroidal-shaped transports—dubbed “wagon trains” by those who named things—shipped colonists to Jupiter, once the shortest route was negotiated through the Microsoft Asteroid Belt™. Before then, it took nearly three years to get from Earth to Jupiter via Ceres, but now your trip will only take you about a year.
The first habitat, bored into the ice nearest the North Pole, was assembled by robots before any humans could even attempt a landing, due to Jupiter’s radiation upon the surface, which made placing a frog in a microwave seem kind in comparison. Once the HAB had been sealed up, drained, and dried, wagons dropped down through thirty-two miles of ice into the docking bay.
Those initial plucky colonists had to figure out how to turn Europa’s salty ocean into safe, drinkable water. The station’s original Radio-Thermoelectric Generator, or RTG, was enough to get the colonists started; however, it didn’t have the raw output to power the filtration system of the refinery needed to quench our solar system’s thirst. Thus the latest fission reactor was printed out and brought online, doubling the refinery’s capacity.
But with Europa Stations B and C having been authorized, harvesting and refining had to be done smart—sustainably, as you will, so we wouldn’t cause the moon’s very delicate environment to collapse in upon itself.
We at Coca-Cola have learned our lessons from the past.
—From the Coca-Cola Corporation’s
Europa Station A Newcomer’s
Orientation Training Manual
Aldo “Brake” Bargman walked down the ramp from his wagon and breathed in deeply the manufactured air of Europa Station, noticing how much better it tasted than the manufactured air of his wagon or the manufactured air of Mars Station, or Lunar Station. And it certainly was cleaner than what passed for air back on Earth.
A drone delivered his personal bags to him and gave him a receipt for the containers of lab equipment it would take directly to his new medical examiner’s office.
In a dozen years, the only deaths on Europa had been clearly accidental, or so the reports had said, but as more colonists arrived and water refinement picked up, certainly the confined space would eventually lead to someone killing someone else. Thus, the local security force requested a medical examiner be assigned to the twelve-hundred-person colony.
Brake had no family to leave behind on Earth. No obligations, no outstanding warrants, and despite years exposed to Earth’s toxic air and water, his health was surprisingly within tolerances, making his application and approval process with the Coke Corporation go smoothly. He grabbed the last train out for Europa that week and, boom!, one year later, he stepped onto the alien moon. Well, onto polycarbonate plating in a HAB under the moon’s surface, but close enough.
During his layovers on Luna and Mars, he hadn’t gone “outside” either, so it had been no great disappointment. However, the wagon train’s pilot had brought them in on the night side of Europa, giving them full view of the moon’s legendary North Pole. The icy surface glowed soft blue with rust-colored linnea woven into it like yarn in a scarf. Jupiter’s intense radiation passed through the dayside ice shell to produce the most magnificent effect on the opposite side. It reminded him of those old cyberpunk movies where people ended up inside a computer.
Unfortunately, that effect also drove Europa Station down farther undersea, as it messed with their instruments. He couldn’t see anything but water from any of the portholes.
“Mr. Bargman?”
The question came from a woman wearing the red-and-white fatigues of a C.C. Ranger. The Rangers were the law on Europa, with their understood priorities being to protect the corporate assets first, then the people. Occasionally, the company realized its people were also assets, which was why they’d hired him.
“Yes, I’m Brake.”
The Ranger extended a hand. “I’m Lieutenant Thana Suvari, and I’ll be your guide as you acclimate to Europa Station and your responsibilities.”
“My shadow, you mean.”
She nodded. “Exactly, though I’ll be on your ass tighter than Peter Pan’s shadow was.”
Brake laughed. He liked her straightforward attitude immediately.
“Excellent!” He bent forward and spoke loudly to her ranking badge, as to if indicate he were talking into a hidden microphone. “I want to make sure my employers don’t ever doubt that sage decision to hire me. It’s a long way home.”
He leaned back, smiling at his joke, but then Thana pointed up to her beret, to the Rangers insignia. “It’s up here,” she said, a sly smirk gracing her full lips.
Thana had a touch of Middle Easterner to her skin tone, but these days, most people had some pigmentation that made anything but genetic identification impossible to tell what their true racial origins were. Only health care providers and MEs like himself cared, as sometimes genetic traits could lead to a cause of death. His own DNA contained a mix of the combined UK gene, along with some Ashkenazi and Dutch with just a touch South African. Once humans left Earth, it didn’t matter much where you started from, you became a citizen of Luna, or Mars, or now Europa. There wasn’t room for racial prejudices when you needed to count on everyone to have your back.
Brake straightened his shoulders and saluted Thana’s hat. “Lead on, MacDuff.”
* * *
The ME’s office had previously been occupied by a massage therapist. Brake deduced this by the stuff left behind: an eerie salt lamp, aromatherapy gel packs, and a display rack filled with flimbrochs on chakras, mindfulness, and getting enough sleep. Over the adjustable massage table hung a jerry-rigged step-therapy frame that might have once belonged in a medieval torture chamber. Stepping inside the room, he banged his head on the hatch’s lower clearance. Rubbing his forehead, he knew it wouldn’t be the last time he did that.
“Where is the Inquisitor now?”
“He was so popular the station commander approved a new space, complete with waiting room. He decided you probably wouldn’t have repeat business.”
“Unless I’m bad at my job.”
She raised an eyebrow. “Sorry?”
Brake began to unpack his supplies. “There’s an old joke among examiners. How can you tell a bad coroner from a good one?”
Thana, deciding to help out, picked up the salt lamp and unplugged it from the wall. “How?”
“A bad one is in the bar, drinking heavily, and complaining he ‘gained’ one on the table that day.”
It took her a moment, but then Thana chortled so suddenly, she nearly dropped the lamp.
As they emptied a container, they refilled it with the therapist’s leftover accoutrements.
“Why ‘Brake’?” Thana pulled down and rolled up a reflexology chart.
The new ME chuckled. “Well, my parents were on the way to the hospital for my impending arrival but got caught up in traffic. Dad had taken the car off self-drive, hoping to jump ahead into any openings he saw, but then he kept being distracted by my mother’s screams, as one would expect. He’d just turned back around in time to slam on the brakes before hitting a truck in front of them, and I sort of…popped out.”
Thana raised an eyebrow. “You what?”
Brake blushed. “I just slid right out, right there in the back seat. Landed on the floorboards and everything.”
“That’s…” Thana paused, gauging her words. “That’s quite a story.”
“Anyway, Dad often told his friends that I was his big Brake from that point forward, and it stuck.”
Once Brake had satisfactorily claimed the lab as his own, he yawned.
Thana tagged each container of the former occupant’s items for the drones to pick up and deliver to their new home. “Let’s get you to your apartment. While you got the short end of the stick here, you’ve been assigned private quarters, seeing that the nature of your work requires you not be mixed with any of the general worker bees.”
“Yeah, would suck to find out your bunkmate is a murderer.”
“Indeed.”
His place wasn’t far from his office, which was nice. He expected he’d often be working late. Any crime solving on Europa had to be done expeditiously to alleviate uncertainty in a small, confined space. Confining crew to quarters while an investigation was ongoing was a bad thing.
Along the way, they made a plan to tour the station, then meet the actual medical team and Thana’s superiors.
Thana showed him how to key his finger in the hatch’s lock, which would scrape a micro-particle of skin before opening.
Brake thanked her.
She nodded, which he realized was her answer to most things. “Will you be needing a massage or blow job before bed?”
His jaw hung loose. “Um, what? I mean, is that part of what—”
Thana cut him off, her expression indicating she knew where his mind had gone. “In your dreams. I’m not that type of escort,” she stated matter-of-factly. “In addition to the aforementioned therapist, we have licensed sexualists on staff—male, female, and nonbin. It cuts down on the awkward nature of unwanted advances on coworkers, and keeps the staff focused on the task at hand. I thought maybe after such a long journ—”
Embarrassed, it was Brake’s turn to cut her off. “I’m fine. For now, at least. I’d be too tired to enjoy it, anyway. Plus, I tend to, y’know, like to get to know someone beforehand.”
Thana titled her head slightly. “I hope I didn’t offend you. Corporate-sponsored sex services are pretty common on new colonies.”
Brake knew that. He wasn’t prudish or opposed to it, she’d had just caught him off guard. “No offense was taken. Now, if you’ll please. The sun will be up in twenty hours, if I understand that correctly, and I’ll need my shadow rested and ready, as well.”
Giving him one last nod in acknowledgment of her dismissal, Thana left.
He turned and, still distracted by their last conversation, smacked his forehead hard on the hatch.
After unpacking, having dinner delivered, watching some of the orientation streams on Europa again—this time with more context—showering, and then crawling into bed, he realized he still had fifteen hours before the new day started. Europa had an eighty-five-hour day, which meant that concept of day and night were set by the lighting in the station. But as he lay there in his new bed for hours, trying to sleep, he debated if he shouldn’t have gotten the nobber after all.
* * *
Over the next month, Brake wondered if the company had made a bad call. He’d only had one autopsy, which COD turned out to be from a previously unknown allergy to a sealant used specifically on Europa. The doctors on staff had already determined that, but he backed their findings. They, too, didn’t understand why he was there, as modern medical scanning technology took most of the guesswork out of cause of death. The team didn’t socialize with him, or invite him to gatherings, nor visit his office. Brake thought they were all pretentious dicks, anyway.
However, as simple as the worker’s death had been, he’d learned about “the Locker” because of it.
Thana piloted a submersible through the dark waters, the only lights at their depth coming from the Ubër-Manta submersible.
“Who came up with the idea of calling it Davy Jones’ Locker?”
“Leo Edwardson, the refinery’s super. He was the first to lose a worker under him. Pipe burst and the poor lady burned instantly.”
The temperature of the seawater was well below freezing, due to its chemical nature. Any exposure to the skin was like dipping toes into liquid nitrogen.
“So, since there’s no morgue, and no place to bury them, you just sink bodies to the ocean floor.” Brake wondered what the next of kin thought of this arrangement. He didn’t remember reading any clause of that sort in his contract.
“Until we come up with something better. Maybe cremation, but right now, the station can’t support any sort of open flame.”
Brake shrugged. He couldn’t think of anything better. He was sure there was an ethical reason not to turn them into mulch for the farm. He looked behind the Manta to where the bagged corpse trailed behind them. Sealed in a fiberweb coffin, a blinking locator tag had been attached should the body need to be recovered by drone. It reminded him of a trolling lure.
Thana slowed. “This is as deep as we go. The ocean floor isn’t as deep at the poles as it is closer to the equator. Normally, we’d just send an Alvin to do this, but I thought you might like to go walkabout.”
Brake agreed it was nice to get out of the station, and just as nice to be in the cramped submersible with Thana—who he’d grown fond of. He thought the feeling was mutual, but neither acted on it out of professionalism. Besides, as the Corp clearly sanctioned, why risk rejection when sex was not only available but paid for and covered under his insurance benefits?
“What now?” Brake asked.
“Funeral services were done back at the station. Now, we just cut her loose.”
When they stopped, the weights attached to the victim’s coffin pulled her down below the Manta. Thana hit the release button, and the victim began her descent.
“And the biology teams haven’t found life down here yet? Nothing that might nibble on the corpses?”
Thana nodded. “Yeah, disappointed a lot of scientists. Everything you’d need for spontaneous evolution is below the surface, save for carbon. Sure, you’ve got some meteor debris on the surface, but nothing can survive up there. Sadly, no carbon. No life.”
As they swung the Manta around, Brake followed the blinking locator tag on the coffin as the body sunk slowly into the darkness.
Then, out of the corner of his eye, Brake thought…
“Wait,” he said, and Thana put the submersible in hover.
“What?”
No, but that must be just a trick of the light. She just said, no life down here.
“Nothing. Let’s head back.”
By the time he was home, Brake had already forgotten about it.
* * *
Besides that one autopsy, Brake mostly toured Europa Station with Thana, whom he’d taken to calling “Shadow,” and learned everything he could about the inner workings of the colony.
All the better, he considered, to determine what might be used to kill someone someday.
Like him, security had little to do until something went horribly wrong. His shadow was the second-highest-ranking officer on the station with six guards under her command. She delegated much of her daily tasks to her subordinates, allowing her the freedom to teach Brake the ins and outs of the station. She told him she was “investing” in his future success. Brake worried that eventually those subordinates might grow resentful of doing all her mundane jobs.
The HAB itself consisted of the living quarters and social area, the farm, the power plant, and the water refinery. The first three were conjoined closely together like Cerberus, while the refinery hung farther back, like its spiked tail.
The plant brought in ocean water through feeder tubes and filtered out any contaminants, such as sulfates, nitrates, and sodium, some of which would be added back in for taste in drinking water. He heard that the lines often got clogged with the silicate sand that made up Europa’s mantle.
The more he learned about Thana, the more he grew to admire her. She’d served during the resource riots on Earth, protecting the corporation’s food and soda distribution centers as they handed out rations. Next, Thana pulled dozens of people from a Coke Café on Luna when the ALON window cracked due to a manufacturing flaw. The Corp awarded her with a promotion for reducing the number of survivor benefits they would’ve had to pay out.
“My ticket to Europa came,” she told him while playing Catan: Mars Uprising in his office, “was when I arrested a group of water pirates who’d attacked a supply ship. The execs said they needed someone like me on Europa. I came in with the fourth wave a year ago.”
The first colonists settled thirteen years ago. Now a new wagon arrived every other year or so. The Earth-Luna Conglomerate, backed with Microsoft money, landed their colony three years earlier, and Mars had just bored in less than a year ago.
“Have you been to B or C?”
She shook her head. “No, the ‘Es on B,’ as we call them, are very much Earth first and get angry at the Corp for not choosing to send water there exclusively. The Martians at station C are all right, but they also have this ‘we were the first off-world colony’ thing going on. Elitist dicks, if you ask me.”
Since Brake had encountered much the same thing on station A, he didn’t say anything, but thought it fascinating that each group felt they were owed something over the other.
And so his days went, with him researching the various aspects of underwater life, never seeing the sun save through vidscreens. It took him quite by surprise when Thana said she was coming in hot with a frozen corpse.
“What’s going on?” he asked.
“Refinery worker found a guy, frozen solid, in one of their feeder pipes. No one knows how he got in there, but it clearly doesn’t add up. I’m bringing the witness and Leo Edwardson, the refinery boss, with me.”
Brake prepped his autopsy table for frozen matter. “Do I need to drop the temperature in the lab and put on my PPE-0s?” The gear would allow him to handle a body exposed to subzero conditions.
“Doesn’t matter,” Leo said, cutting in. He snorted in a way both disgusting and dismissive. “He’s not melting anytime soon.”
Leo was right.
Even after the stretcher bots hoisted the body onto his table, and Brake turned on the warming lamps normally used for frostbite victims, the structure of the deceased didn’t change in the slightest. It defied everything he knew about cryo-death.
Brake bent over him. “What was his name?”
“Omar Chapman,” the coworker witness, Sophia, answered. She was an older woman of Hispanic decent. “He’d only arrived about a month ago.”
That put the man on the same train as he’d arrived on, Brake realized. He didn’t look familiar. Maybe their cars were at opposite ends? Most likely.
Omar was unlike any hypothermia victim he’d ever read about. He’d studied prehistoric bodies recovered after the glaciers receded. He’d reviewed the data that came out of the cryo-revivalist movement of the 2080s when cancer had been cured and a bunch of bodies from the 1980s had been thawed so they could be “revived.” None of them had been successfully, but the research went a long way toward understanding the long-term effects of cryostasis. Brake had viewed every type of aquatic death in full 3-D holo recreation, and nothing matched what lay before him.
The refinery worker had become solid ice down to the cellular level according to the lab’s scanner. He’d literally become an iceman.
Brake ran his reader glove over Omar’s body. “Tell me what happened.”
Sophia recited what seemed to be a preestablished accounting. Her voice didn’t carry with it the raw, unsure emotions that came with finding someone you knew dead. Brake wondered how long it’d been before the C.C. Rangers were notified of the discovery. “Omar and I were following up on a slowdown in the Number Three and Number Four feeder tubes. I took Three and he took Four. By the time I ran a diagnostic, my tube was running back up to normal, but Omar’s had plugged up completely. I called him on the comm, but he didn’t answer.”
Sophia looked up at Leo, who nodded. He was an intimidating, barrel-chested man of Scandinavian decent, and Sophia had waited for his confirmation to keep going. “When I got over to where Omar should have been, I found nothing but a patch of ice on the floor. I thought maybe he went to get some tools or something to unplug the line, but that’s what we have the crunchers for.”
“Crunchers?” Brake asked distractedly. His reader glove, which allowed for very specific subatomic scans, had picked up something he couldn’t rationalize. He reached over for a micro-laser to carve off a piece of Omar to place in his analyzer. It barely made a divot.
Thana answered. “Spinning blades that travel the feeder lines to break up ice. ALON-diamond composite, able to cut through anything, supposedly.”
ALON, or aluminium oxynitride, dubbed “transparent aluminum” after some old movie, was the hardest polycrystalline ceramic science had invented so far. It was the final piece for building colonies on other worlds. If they’d found a way to make it harder, that was news to Brake.
“There’s never a reason to open a live tube,” Leo added. “It would have to be shut down to the outside, boiling decontaminate run through it to clean off any residue, then drained and dried before anyone set even a finger inside.”
Thana nodded. “Opening a live tube would risk pumping thousands of gallons of cryoprotectant-level water into the plant.”
“And killing scores of people before it could be turned off,” Brake agreed.
Brake finally managed to cut a sliver of Omar away, and he dropped it into the subatomic analyzer unit.
“So, how’d you find out he was in the tube?”
Sophia looked down, embarrassed. “I turned on the cruncher…and it broke.”
“Broke?” Brake asked.
“Broke,” Leo echoed.
“Like broke broke?”
Thana nodded. “Stopped dead, teeth shattered.”
Brake whistled. He found several small nicks in Omar’s body, down near his legs, where the cruncher must’ve bit in.
Leo made his scoffing snort again. “There is no ice in the known galaxy a cruncher can’t chew through. Rock or metal, either. It’s what they’re designed to do. Well, when Sophia called me down, I authorized a drone sent into the line, and that’s when we found”—he indicated the corpse—“him.”
Thana, a slight tone of irritation in her voice, said, “They’d already drained the line and went through the procedure Mr. Edwardson described before calling the Rangers.”
Leo didn’t react to the admonishment. “We had to see for ourselves. I mean, it couldn’t be him, right? Thought it was sabotage by the Es on B, or a prank.”
The analyzer beeped and Brake checked the readout on his glove.
“Well, I know why the cruncher broke, now. That’s not ice he’s encased in. It’s a complex silicate composite that just looks and acts like ice. It’s part ocean water, part Omar, which is why the scanners didn’t see it at first. But the silicate material has bonded at the subatomic level. He’s…well, he’s no longer a carbon-based being.” Brake looked back and forth from Leo to Sophia. “Ever see anything like this on Europa before?”
Leo looked unsurprised at the news, though he tried to act like it. Sophia stared at the floor, uncomfortably, and the ME could tell she had more to tell him.
Brake subtly got his shadow’s attention, and then Thana got Leo’s.
“Mr. Edwardson, I’d like to review the security footage from the last forty-eight hours around feeder number four.”
“Can’t you access that remotely?” Leo didn’t want to move.
But the Ranger was equally undaunted. “For a potential murder investigation, I’ll need your authorization.”
The plant manager grew instantly agitated. “Murder? Who said anything about murder?”
“There’s no way he got in that tube by himself, not with it open. Someone had to have shut down the line, thrown him in there, and reopened it in just the short time Sophia was gone.”
Leo waved his hand dismissively. “Not possible. And there’s no data to support that.”
Brake chimed in. “But wasn’t that what Sophia and Omar were checking out? A slowdown or blockage?”
“Well, yes, but…”
Thana took Leo’s elbow. “Which is why I want to review the footage to see if that could’ve been done.”
Though he initially resisted, Leo gave in and let her lead him to the security office.
Once he was out of earshot, Brake asked Sophia, “So, what haven’t you told me—or more precisely, what doesn’t Leo want me to know?”
Sophia blushed. “Nothing, sir. I’ve told everything I know.”
Brake shook his head. “I don’t think so, and as you’re now the prime suspect in Omar’s murder…”
“I’m what?”
Shrugging, Brake told her, “According to your account, there was only the two of you. And if he didn’t drag himself into the tube…”
Sophia found her voice. “Oh, hell no! No way I’m going down for that idiot.”
And then she told Brake everything.
* * *
Thana piloted the Manta toward the Locker as fast as she could, following the locator tags of the nearly twenty souls that had been sent to Davy Jones’ Locker in the last thirteen years. The Manta creaked as the pressure and cold increased on its outer walls.
“How could this even be possible?” Thana asked.
Brake reviewed the data again. “It isn’t, not if we keep thinking of life as being carbon-based exclusively.”
“And we aren’t.”
“Not anymore. Whatever this is, it’s silicon-based, and when it bonds to carbon, it creates a new thing, like when heat and sand make glass.”
Thana shook her head. “And Leo knew about this for nearly three years?”
“According to Sophia, the first silicon symbiote—or silibiote—showed up about a year before I was hired.”
“And right before I was transferred, so the timing is suspect. I can’t believe he kept it a secret.”
“Apparently, the station’s dead would swim home and get stuck in the feeder tubes, their only way in. Leo would rebag them, and sent them back to the Locker with more weight and stronger coffins.” Brake checked the schematics. “No matter what sort of vent they put over the tubes, somehow the silibiotes found a way in.”
“And he never figured out how?” Thana shook her head, disgusted.
“Or why? What are they after?”
Thana shuddered at what they’d found on the raw security footage, the feed that Leo hadn’t scrubbed before he’d initially called in the Rangers. Luckily, the Corp had a secondary feed of all surveillance footage sent to the security office without the rest of the station knowing, just for that very reason.
Omar was at his station when the silicate life-form had leaked out of the feeder tube, masking itself as condensation frost. When Omar returned to the pipe, it leapt and encased him in a matter of seconds. It stopped the water in the line, climbed in, sealed the hatch behind it, and tried to swim back down the tube. Only, it found it could not fit anymore.
The silibiote Omar was now sealed behind an energy wall with several armed Rangers guarding it, in case he suddenly came back to life. It hadn’t reanimated since its discovery, and Brake wasn’t sure why. Leo Edwardson sat in the next cell over.
“Leo used threats of termination or bribes to keep the whole thing quiet.” Thana cursed that such a huge secret was kept right under her nose.
Behind them, the lights of two more Mantas blinked into view.
“Um, Shadow? Did you call for any of your Lost Boys to follow us?”
Thana swore. “I have a feeling that’s Hook and his pirates. Edwardson must have someone on retainer in the Rangers.”
“Safe bet. He couldn’t have kept this quiet for so long without one.”
“Can you pilot a Manta?”
“I can try.”
“Then take the wheel.”
They switched places, and Brake couldn’t help but notice the way she crossed over him: very, very close, her butt grazing his crotch ever so slightly. She made no outward indication that she did this intentionally, but he’d also known people to be turned on by danger in the past. Maybe it was a hint that she wanted him to risk rejection. Unfortunately, he couldn’t explore those thoughts at the moment.
Brake’s dad had taught him how to drive a car on manual, especially after the circumstances of his birth. Overall, the Manta didn’t handle much differently, save for the pressure of water forcing him to give it more power than the old beater back home he’d inherited.
Thana crawled to the back of the submersible and pulled down a targeting display.
“Um,” Brake said, looking over his shoulder, “I’ve never seen that as an option on any Ubër vehicle I bought.”
“The C.C. Rangers get a fleet discount, and we have special upgrades available to us. Circle the Locker, but don’t go down yet.”
Brake said he would.
Thana fired her first torpedo.
On the dash monitor, Brake watched the missile intentionally streak past the Mantas without hitting either of them, after which, Thana contacted Leo. “This won’t look good on my report if you come any closer.”
The refinery boss replied, “The only report you’ll be making is to Davy Jones. I’m sending you and this anomaly back to—”
Brake shouted into the comm, “You freed him from the containment unit? Don’t you understand yet?”
“Understand what? That Europa’s water somehow bonds with a dead body’s cells and reanimates them like a chicken with its head cut off?”
“Sophia was right. You are an idiot. Omar wasn’t dead, and that wasn’t water!”
But before Brake could explain further, a scream rattled the communicators. The second of the two pursuing Mantas veered sharply down. Then, the cabin suddenly compressed and it imploded. The duo had no doubt as to which Manta had been carrying Omar’s body.
“What the f—”
Brake interrupted. “The silibiote. It’s not just some chemical component bringing the dead back to life. It has a conscience and a goal.”
Leo stumbled over his words after that until Thana turned his feed off. This was bigger than the refinery boss could contain anymore. Thana would make sure of it.
Feeling that they were no longer in immediate danger, Brake took the Manta down into the Locker. The pressure outside increased, but they made it without imploding. Leo arrived right after them, and the twin Mantas’ searchlights illuminated an eerie scene.
All the coffins, including the one that Brake and Thana had just delivered weeks earlier, were empty, the shredded remains of the fiberweb wafting in the current like reeds in the wind.
* * *
As they raced back to the station, Leo frantically called to his people, but no one answered.
Thana also tried to reach the C.C. Rangers, connecting once and hearing only the sound of energy weapons before the comm disconnected.
“Those energy rifles won’t get through the silicate. My concentrated laser had a hard enough time.”
“What are we dealing with?” Thana asked. “Really.”
Brake shrugged. “I’m not a xenobiologist, just familiar enough with what happens to dead bodies after they die, but I’m guessing they’re parasitic microorganisms that have been waiting for carbon hosts to bond with for God knows how long.”
Thana tilted her head to stare at him. “You said ‘waiting.’ Like, they didn’t evolve here?”
Again, he couldn’t answer her. “I can’t say for sure, but a parasite needs something to attach to, right? Otherwise, how could it ever form in the first place?”
“Sure.”
Brake waved his hand around. “You said it yourself. Do you see anything for them to bond to here?”
“Well, we did miss these things.”
“No, I don’t think we did. I think whatever they are, they don’t activate until they have a suitable host, so we wouldn’t register them as life. Probably just looked like sand.”
Thana ground her teeth. “What activated them, then? Carbon?”
“They’ve been dropping bodies down in the Locker for years. The question is…why now? Why in just the last couple of years has this started happening?” He brought up a holo of the solar system. “I think it’s because Jupiter entered its ‘summer.’ For about four Earth years, Jupiter is the closest it gets to the sun. Add Sol’s radiation to its own, and the silicate heats up and searches for a life-form to possess.”
“Possess?”
“Yes.”
“Like a ghost.”
He nodded. “Yes.”
“Why?”
“It’s just a theory, but until we get back to the station, I can’t know for sure.”
Thana went white. “The other refineries. Are they in danger?”
“C is still using water that’s already been filtered by us, and they’re on the other side of the planet. B? I don’t know. This might be localized.”
“Regardless, I’ll send a message they should shut down their plants temporarily due to a recently discovered contaminant.”
It took all her security clearances to get through to the heads of each refinery, even conferencing Leo in before they all agreed to shut down. By that time, they were in the approach vector to Europa Station.
As they passed by the ALON windows of the refinery, they could all see hazard lights spinning and bodies strewn about.
* * *
“Ghosts?” Leo echoed, as he exhaled a cloud of cold air. The silibiotes had flooded the refinery HAB up to about an inch of the Europan ocean water they lived in. The refinery was as cold as fuck.
“Yes,” Brake said, exasperated. “But I need to talk to one to be sure.”
“Talk to one? Are you serious? Those things kill anything they touch!”
Once they got into the station, Thana brought up the Rangers’ security feed.
As water cascaded over the workers’ feet, silicate would rise up and form a cocoon, bonding solid for several minutes until the “ice” cracked and the newly formed silibiote walked free.
The C.C. Rangers fired on these walking dead with zero results. Then, one creative solider came out of the residuals room with three modified energy rifles slung over his back, and one in his hands. When he fired, it shattered the silibiote’s leg. It stumbled and fell to the floor, causing the silicate creature to slough off the body. The once-human corpse instantly freeze-dried and crumbled in the water. The parasites apparently had no use for a defective host.
“There goes your glass theory, Doc,” Thana had said.
That Ranger tossed the other rifles to his team, and together they were able to pull several survivors out of the area. They all backed out of the refinery, and sealed off the central hub behind an energy barrier.
Thana found the improvisational Ranger from the vidstream, and Brake asked him what he’d done to modify the rifles.
“I remembered that one of the residuals we pulled from the water was neodymium. My dad is a jeweler on Mars, and he uses a neodymium YAG laser to cut diamonds. I figured, what the hell? I swapped corundum for the neodymium and boo-yah!”
“Good work,” the ME said, “but let’s not kill any more of them than we have to.”
“Why in the eighty-three fucking moons of Jupiter not?” Leo said.
Brake held up his hands in mock protection. “I know. I know. But I think they might be sentient, so let’s not shoot them unless our lives are in danger.”
“What do you mean ‘unless’?” Leo scoffed. He grabbed one of the rifles from the Ranger. Thana held the young man back from retrieving it, with a hand across his chest. “You saw the feed. They killed a lot of my people.”
“What I saw a species doing what it was designed to do. I’m just not sure what that is.”
Leo stayed true. “You’re an Earth-pounding coroner, not some first-contact expert. What are you trying to do?”
Brake spun on him, ignoring the man’s size and armament. “First off, I’m a medical examiner, not a coroner. I went to school for this, you canned air–sucking moron, and I’ve dealt with the dead every day since. Every body I examine tells a story. That story then helps save other lives.”
Thana added, “There’re nearly a thousand people on Europa Station, plus the other stations, and we don’t have time to evacuate everyone off-world if this plant falls and they decide to attack. Don’t you think reasoning with them is better?”
Leo seemed unconvinced, but he didn’t object further.
Thana authorized letting Brake, Leo, and herself back into the refinery HAB. She and the boss each had a rifle, but Brake chose not to carry. “I’m about saving lives, not taking them.”
The trio moved cautiously along the strobe-lit passageway. The klaxons finally turned off. They stuck to the sides, avoiding the frigid water that ran down the center as much as possible.
Once they reached the central hub, they took a set of steps just on the other side of the entrance up to a mezzanine. Below, in addition to the twenty-plus reanimated corpses, fifty or so new silibiotes wandered around aimlessly.
Brake thought they looked…confused.
Ironically enough, Sophia, the woman who’d found Omar’s body, was the first silibiote that noticed them standing there. She stared up at them with a mix of distant recollection and concern on her frozen face.
Brake’s voice cracked, knowing that just hours ago she had helped him. Now, she was dead, or something akin to dead. “H-hello, Sophia. Remember me?”
The Sophia silibiote opened and closed its mouth, seemingly to mimic speech, but unable to create words. She looked behind Brake to Thana and Leo and took a step back cautiously.
Brake motioned the others to get farther behind him.
“I don’t know if you can understand me, but your vocal cords are frozen solid. Along with your lungs. I don’t know how much control you have over your host, but you’ll have to unthaw them or release them to speak to us.”
The silibiote seemed to understand his words, but just kept opening and closing her mouth.
Brake then placed his hands on his chest and mimed lungs expanding and contracting.
The Sophibiote, as Brake started to think of her, morphed. The area around its chest softened, but it still struggled to speak.
Next, the ME ran his hand up and down his throat to indicate that air came in and out of it.
When Sophibiote softened that part of its body, a low moan came from its lips that grew louder and louder as it drew in more air.
More moans came from elsewhere and fed Sophibiote’s.
“They’re a hive mind!” Brake shouted, covering his ears.
“Fuck this!” Leo said and aimed the energy gun at the silibiote, but before he could pull the trigger, Thana plowed into him, knocking his aim off. The blast hit the wall and traced up the ceiling, scorching a huge path.
“Asshole!” Thana said. “You’ll punch a hole through the HAB, and then we’re all fucked!”
Sophibiote and the other silibiotes moved to the opposite side of the HAB and huddled together scared.
“Dammit!” Brake moved behind Leo and pulled the leads from the pack. “She was just learning to how speak.”
Leo grabbed the smaller man by his envirosuit and slammed him against the wall. “It was calling for reinforcements! I’m not the asshole. You are!”
Thana grabbed Leo’s arm and twisted it behind his back. She let it go, though, when they spun around together to the sound of rushing water.
* * *
The water came from down the feeder access shafts and started to fill up the HAB.
Leo ran down the steps. “I’m out of here!”
Brake shouted for him to stop, moving to intercept him, But Thana held him fast. Maybe the refinery boss thought he could outrun the rising water and make it through the energy barrier in time.
The wave caught Leo’s heels as soon as he hit the floor, and he spilled forward. The silibiote-controlled tide washed over his immense body like the oceans of Earth once washed over a sand castle. Apparently, none of the silicates inside wanted him, and his body blackened in the frigid waters before crumpling away.
The silibiotes approached the mezzanine overhang and looked very angry, as a whole. Sophibiote moaned, but at a lower volume than before. “Mmmm. Mmmm. Nnnnah. Nnnnah.”
Thana, who had the energy weapon poised and ready to shoot, looked out of the corner of her eye at Brake.
He motioned for her to lower it. When she did, Brake noticed the “temperature” in the room dropped.
“Naaah. Naaaht. Mmmd. Naaaah mmdr.”
“What?” Brake asked.
“Naaht muddrar. Naht muddarar.”
Brake dropped to his haunches, staring down at Sophibiote through the guardrail. “Not murder?”
Sophibiote nodded. “Naht mmeen to muddar.”
“What was that, then?” Thana pointed at the rapidly dissolving body of Leo.
“Iddddeeaatt.”
Brake looked at Thana. “She’s not wrong.”
“Waaytt ffer ttyymm.”
Thana asked, “Wait for what time?”
Sophibiote addressed her. “Ttym auf ttelleeng.”
“Time of telling? Telling what?”
The water stopped rising, and one by one, the other silibiotes stepped up beside Sophibiote; each speaking in turn.
“Telleeng arrr ttayl.”
“Telliing oor tayl.”
“Telling our tayle.”
Sophibiote said, in nearly clear English, “T-telling our tale. H-how we lived. How w-we died. Are…Our m-memories. W-we were never m-meant to bond with y-your species, b-but our own.” She bowed her head. “Your re-refin-ary. Eras-sing our history.”
And over the next several hours, and for years to come, the silibiote ghosts told humanity the tale of how they were not alone in the universe.
One Year Later
Thana slid up along Brake’s body until her head poked out from the sheets.
“Okay, so that was still not part of the services the C.C. Rangers provide,” she said with a grin. “But, consider it a special bonus for saving Europa Station A.”
Brake pulled her into his arms, kissing her forehead. “As a bonus, I’ll need to report this on my taxes.” When Thana scowled at him, he scrambled, “Wait, let me rephrase—”
“Too late,” she said, making to get out of bed. “That was disresp—”
He pulled her back to him, both of them giggling. “I’ll choose my words more carefully in the future.”
Thana snuggled in. “Well, you do have a way with words.”
“And with dead people, apparently.”
She nodded. “It’s disappointing that they can only merge with living humans. I’m sure there are some families who would take even a bonded loved one, even if they have to share memories.”
“Yeah, I couldn’t get the reanimated dead to do more than moan. After conferring with some actual xenobiologists, who were overly excited to have actual data—and not just theoretical data to work from after all these centuries—they suggested that the Zicrei need living cells to bond with to access both genetic memories.”
“Which is what their species does.”
“Well, when they merge with their own kind, it’s a nonlethal process. Like accessing stored data, the Zicrei can link with their dead, ask questions of the possessed, and then disconnect like a vidstream. With us, it’s permanent.” He shrugged. “A shame really. Maybe we can someday leave genetic recordings of our lives the way the Zicrei can.”
“It’s baffled me how many people are willing to sign up for your bonding project.” Thana wiggled in a way that let Brake know it was his turn now.
Brake began kissing her neck while talking. “Elderly, mostly.” Kiss. “And some terminal patients who figure, ‘why not?’” Kiss.
She purred. “You never did tell me how you figured out the silicates were actually cells of an alien race.”
“Well…” Brake stopped for the moment to answer. He smirked, thinking himself quite clever. “They often say that a medical examiner is a speaker for the dead. That we tell the last story of a person’s life.”
“Yes?” Thana looked over to him impatiently, wanting him to continue where he left off, but then sighed resignedly because she had asked the question.
“Well, something didn’t make sense. If Leo hadn’t reported the Locker’s secret to headquarters, how had they known I was needed here?”
Thana got up to an elbow. “What do you mean? They hired you because of the increase in colonists coming to the station.”
He shook his head. “I don’t think so. The timing is suspect. Leo discovers reanimated corpses, and then I’m hired almost immediately after? And you, their best and brightest, getting transferred here? That’s too much of a coincidence. I think something greater is at play.”
“I like the ‘best and brightest’ part.” She poked his chest. “But, pray, continue.”
“Well, we know now that Europa’s north pole is near the aliens’ burial ground, or more accurately, their memory repository.”
The Zicrei dead existed nowhere else on the planet, which is why the Corp was able to plan on moving Station A and resuming production. The area around the Locker would be left as a protected habitat.
“Okay?” Thana still wasn’t following him yet, he could tell.
“Why did they pick the North Pole and not the south? Why bring in an ME when the onsite medical staff could essentially do the same thing? Why bring in a known loyalist instead of just letting the compromised Rangers continue covering up for Leo? And why time it so that all these things would happen during Jupiter’s summer?
“And the biggest question of all: Where are the rest of the Zicrei? Who abandons such a repository of knowledge?”
“They could have died out?” Thana suggested.
But Brake shook his head. “I think they’re closer than we suspect.”
Thana furrowed her brow. “You’re not suggesting…”
Brake looked over to where Thana’s pile of clothing lay.
“Is your beret turned off?”
She giggled and nodded.
Brake shrugged. “I’m not saying that the Coca-Cola Corporation is run by aliens, and they knew that Europa was a graveyard and wanted to see what would happen if alien DNA merged with our own to form a new species. I’m not saying that. I’m just saying that it’s just a theory.”
When Thana snuggled back in, she said, “Well, your theories do tend to pan out.”
“What can I say? Sometimes you catch a lucky Brake.”
And that’s when she punched him.
The End