Destination Europa: Chapter 1

A new psychological sci-fi thriller.

This is Destination Europa, a psychological sci-fi thriller set aboard the R. G. Leifr, a colony ship headed towards Jupiter to establish a settlement on the ice moon Europa.

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Phobos crawled over the treeline, hanging in the pale sky like a long-dead skull. Quill watched it as he folded into a set of squats, tiny puffs of dust kicking up from beneath his heels. It felt strange to be outside Ransom without a mask, and more than once he turned to check that the city was really there behind him. It was warm, too, warm as summer, warmer than he was used to out there.

I can do this. Quill took a deep breath and began to jog along the track towards the oxygenation grove. It was nearly two years since he had taken this road. I can do this. His heart rate rose as he picked up speed. He watched his shadow sharp and small beneath him, the sun almost directly overhead. The road turned as it climbed the low hill, and he saw Ransom City stretched below, a patchwork of poly-C and airlocks and insulated pipes, shining in the sunlight like the half-buried carapace of a huge and many-jointed insect. Yellow lichens mapped the surfaces of the rocks at the side of the road, and here and there Quill saw hard tufts of horsetails with their segmented stalks like antennae. He felt his heart swell with a surge of homesickness. Keep it together. I can do this.

The road crested the ridge and turned down among the willows of the oxygenation grove. He saw a hundred thousand lancets of leaves, silver scalpels in the sunlight. He heard them whispering in the breeze. His heart hammered harder. He knew what was around the corner, and forced his legs to keep pumping. Have to face it eventually. The irrigation pipe twisted among the roots like a black snake, and he followed it through the trees.

He turned the corner towards the shelter and his legs failed him. She was sitting on the steps, a dark figure turning a chunk of rock over and over in her hands. The way she had been on that last day. Waiting for him.

Quill blinked hard. The whispering leaves of the grove faded, and he saw instead the faded black of the treadmill. It had stopped in response to his distress. His chest heaved, and as he stifled the sob, tears trailed silently down his face. Breathe. Get it together. He looked stealthily to his right, where Alex from Navigation was running hard, eyes in the middle distance. He was deep in his own sim. Good. With any luck, Quill could get himself under control before the end of his session. Shakily, he selected the “West Sands, St Andrews” sim he usually chose to run in, and ran until the salt spray and the cries of the herring gulls calmed his heart and dried his tears.

She can’t have been there. Not really. Dressed in a fresh uniform, Quill paced the tiny floor of his cabin, three steps one way and three steps the other. He had recorded that sim after they had broken up. Priska couldn’t possibly have been in it. His subconscious, or his broken conscience, was playing tricks on him. He stopped himself. No good going down that rabbit hole again. He thought about the bottle of pills in his underwear drawer, hidden from himself more than anyone else. No. Not now. I should write that letter.

He cleared some space on the tiny desk, moving the half-painted Luna Wolf figurine he’d been working on, and the brushes and tiny tubes of paint. He’d got into the bad habit of leaving things out rather than stowing them down in case of rotational failure. Yet after opening a terminal and running his private encrypted shell, and picking up his second stylus, the one untainted by FSS spyware, he could think of nothing to say. He got as far as Dear friends, then set the stylus down again. The Alliance wanted him to write a letter every month, but every month felt the same. Nothing significant to report. He picked up the Luna Wolf and examined the paintwork with a critical eye. Priska had always disliked this particular hobby — “colonialist-adjacent”, she had called it in one of their early arguments — and Quill wondered whether his taking it up again, to the extent of using part of his precious personal luggage allowance for materials, was a small spike of revenge.

A ping from Demas: Lunch? Quill was glad rather than otherwise at the interruption. He logged out of the private shell, closed the terminal, and hid the stylus in its usual place, in the narrow gap between his mattress and the backboard of his bunk.

Quill’s cabin, like most of the rest of the Martian contingent, was on Deck Eight of the R.G. Leifr, in the Green Ring. The mess was two decks forward on Six, right in the centre of the habitable section of the ship, and took up most of the Blue Ring on that deck. Leaving his cabin, Quill climbed the ladder down to the Blue Ring and pulled out into the corridor with a practiced swing. The Blue Ring was outermost in the Leifr’s concentric design, so it had both the highest rotational gravity, and large portholes on three out of the twelve decks. They made the engineering more complicated, but nearly two centuries of space psychology had shown it was a bad idea to leave them out.

Gravity in the Blue Ring, 0.5 g₀ at floor level, was more than comfortably heavy for a born-and-bred Martian. Even so, as Quill bounced along the gentle curve of corridor towards Deck Six, he kept his pace slow. There had been an incident earlier in the voyage, a head-on collision between a first-time Earther who still hadn’t got their space legs and a Martian terraform engineer taking a corner too fast. Quill didn’t want to be the cause of more tension aboard.

He saw Tark, one of the students from his Habitat Engineering class, leaving the mess as he approached. She waved vaguely in his direction, but he could tell she was simming. In whatever world she had chosen to walk in, she probably just saw his aikon, with his name hovering next to it. A lot of people did that, trying to exchange the cramped confines of the ship for a flower-starred meadow or an Alpine vista or one of the handful of other stock sims the ai could generate. Quill was one of the minority who chose not to use simming as a matter of course, unless he was in the gym or gaming. The Alliance discouraged it.

At Deck 6, Quill walked slowly through the mess towards their usual table. The others were already there. He waved and joined the queue at the nearest serving hatch. He was trying to decide between locust curry and salad of the day when his countdown timer flashed. 1917. He blinked to clear it. One thousand, nine hundred and seventeen days to go. Five years and three months. More or less. He now regretted setting the countdown when they launched from Earth orbit twenty-one months ago, but there was some kind of bug in his visual display settings and he hadn’t been able to turn it off. The reminder came every day at noon: this many days until you walk the streets of Ransom City again. This many days until you’re home.

“Hey guys.” Quill plunked his tray onto the table with a metallic click as the magnetic strips attached.

“Hey,” said Safira. Bowen nodded and made a noise that might have been hi if his mouth hadn’t been full. Demas gave a curt nod and carried on with what he had been saying before Quill arrived. The topic was a familiar one.

“The thing is, right, these • SOBs are screwing us over with these • contracts, right? • me if I’m going to let these Earther • get free money out of us.”

Quill let the words wash over him. As usual when Demas spoke, his words were peppered with tiny pauses where Quill’s aural filter snipped out the expletives. He slid his tray open and began to eat. The curry was gloopier than usual, and he wished he had chosen the salad.

“So what do you say, guys?” asked Demas, with a conclusive air. “Are you in?”

Safira cleared her throat, and Bowen suddenly seemed very interested in his salad.

“Are we in what?” asked Quill.

“•, Quill, don’t you ever pay attention?”

“I just got here,” said Quill, as mildly as possible. Demas seemed in a grumpier mood than usual.

“We’re writing an official complaint about how they’re • us over with the salaries. We’ll go on strike if we have to.”

“We don’t really have any work to strike from, at least not until we reach Europa,” said Safira.

“Don’t look at me,” said Bowen. “I don’t really have any skin in this, you know?” Bowen was one of the few Martians employed directly by the FSS, the Federation of Scandinavian States, the official owners of the Leifr and sponsors of the Europa colony. Quill and the others were employed by the state-owned SymbioNor Corporation, contracted by the FSS for habitat construction and initial terraforming.

“What about solidarity, bro?” snapped Demas. He pointed his fork at them forcefully. “You guys are • short-sighted idiots. Anyway, a strike would be way down the line. What I’m talking about now is just this letter to the SymbioNor •. Are you in?”

“I guess so,” said Safira after an uncomfortable pause. “Yeah, sure.”

“I dunno,” said Bowen. “It’s different for you guys. You get off at Europa, you get started with the base there, all good. I’ll be on this ship there and all the way back to Earth, and wherever is next. I got to think about my future.”

“What about you?” Demas asked Quill. “You in?”

“I, uh.. Let me think about it,” said Quill evasively. He knew his answer was no — Alliance policy strictly forbade political action of any sort — but he didn’t want to antagonise Demas.

Demas gave him a disgusted look. “•, Aquilla, why do you always have to • think about • everything? What are you, that • statue by • Rodin?”

Quill shrugged and tried to focus on his food. He was used to Demas’ tirades, but he always found them uncomfortable.

“Leave him alone, Dem,” said Safira. “Change of subject. Vampyre Hunter tonight? Bit of practice for the tourney?”

Demas snorted. “Rodin is probably going to have to think about it. But yeah, alright, let’s do it.”

“I got some good stuff this time,” said Bowen in a low voice. “Knock your socks off.”

Quill hesitated.

“Come on, Rodin!”

“OK. Sure.” He took another forkful of the gloopy yellow curry. “But I dibs Hunter this time.”

A thin mist curled up from the valley below, chilling the dark air and beading Quill’s face as he crouched behind the old stone wall. He crept a little further and nearly screamed when a many-fingered frond of grey lichen brushed his face. Nearly at the gate. He was pretty sure the others were in the forest just beyond. He clutched his pistol tighter in his left hand, while his right ran over the comforting hard edges of the silver cross hanging on a chain round his neck. I should be writing that letter. I wonder what the Alliance folk would think if they saw me now. He felt a twinge of guilt, then a counter-reaction of resentment that had become increasingly familiar. Sod it. After fifteen years with the Alliance, I deserve to have some fun now and again.

A screech pierced the mist, which had curdled into an unnatural fog in the few minutes it had taken Quill to get to the gate. He froze. That was Safira, his partner in tonight’s game. Enough thinking. Pistol in hand, he charged into the trees. The smell of pine filled his nostrils, along with a faint tinge of gunpowder. He spun round, trying to locate the source of the scream, but when he stepped forward, a dark shadow filled his path. Bowen’s character, Xixuegui, one of the highest-ranked vampires on their server. Quill held out the cross and began to draw a bead on Xixuegui’s chest with his pistol. He didn’t see Safira’s character, Delilah DeCourcey, newly vampirised, until she kicked a leg out from under him then straddled him as he lay prone on the mossy floor. Xixuegui held his legs down while Delilah leaned over and sank her teeth into his neck. Game over.

The mist and the dark forest faded, and Quill found himself staring at the pale green ceiling of the Deck 9 Rec Room. He ran his tongue over his teeth, almost expecting them to be cruel fangs, and felt a lurch of shame. Safira was still on top of him. She got up slower than Quill found comfortable, and when he rolled over and sat up, Bowen was glaring at him with an unmistakeable jealousy. He tried to give his friend a reassuring look, but Bowen turned with a scowl and went to the corner where he had left his bag.

Quill slumped into an armchair. Maybe I should give up this game. Maybe it’s not good for me. Maybe these guys aren’t good for me. But they’re all I’ve got out here. My community. My family, for better or worse.

“Better luck next time,” said Demas, holding out his hand and looking smug. Quill shook it weakly and sank back into the chair.

“What was up with you, Aquilla?” asked Safira. “With our stats, we should have been able to do a lot better. We will have to do • better next week.”

Quill nodded. “Yeah. Dunno. Sorry. Not my day I guess.”

“Saf’s got a good point,” said Demas. “I got a solid five hundred riding on the tournament, Quill. We can’t let those Earther • get the better of us.”

“Yeah. I know.”

“Alright, let’s go,” said Bowen, rejoining them. “Obs Lounge is clear.”

“How deep you want to go, bro?”

Bowen was mixing the powder with a deft hand. The shrooms were not part of the official manifest for the Leifr’s farm, but Bowen’s role as Chief Botanist had certain advantages.

“Not deep, not long,” replied Quill. “I just want to chill a little bit, you know?” He thought Bowen still seemed upset, and tried to keep his tone light. Bowen handed him the little cup of dark liquid.

He downed the cup with an ache of relief, but as he felt the edges of body and mind soften and blur, his own neurons and neutrons spill and merge with the air and the floor and the spinning stars beyond, he knew the dose was horribly wrong.

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Cover image of Jupiter © National Astronomical Observatory of Japan, colour modification by SDGL.

Divider image: NASA, ESA, A. Simon (Goddard Space Flight Center), and M. H. Wong (University of California, Berkeley) and the OPAL team, adapted by SDGL.