Written circa 2002
Jupiter’s magnetosphere was messing with the radios. The wide band of highly charged particles that collects at the equatorial region of the huge gas giant threw out invisible cloaks of distorting energy.
The computers were okay though. The housing for each terminal was made of a thick polaxyl shielding; enabling the electronics to work just as well here as they would back on Earth.
The ground team landed on Europa six hours ago. The landing-zone was off by six kilometres, so they had to pick their way across the frozen tundra. They were making good time. The terra-tanks had huge caterpillar tracks.
From the orbiter above, the team would be able to see the tank slowly edging its way towards the horizon.
Back at the design stage, no one really knew how long it would take for them to negotiate those high walls of ice and glacial slopes. The practicalities of such a journey would always break the boundaries of any theory that attempted to quantify it. If something could go wrong, it would go wrong, and that was the law in space.
A rough estimation put the drill site approximately fifty minutes away from the landing zone.
Because of Jupiter, it was impossible for them to contact the orbiter.
In the terra-tank’s cockpit, the team spent most of that time speculating about the mission. Had there been alcohol on board they probably would have been drunk. They had come a long way to find oil here, and a lot of reputations were at stake. Careers would be ruined if the place turned out to be dry, or the oil too heavy to extract. The tension this uncertainty had created was fully evident in the false macho banter that was exchanged between the three crew-members, and as Jupiter eased slowly past the windows, a commanding and powerful centre of this little system of moons, the chatter continued.
‘This project is costing the Space Foundation a million dollars an hour,’ said Conrad Drawe. the Texan drilling manager as he reclined in the navigation seat, ‘Do you know what that means? It means that the pressure in the reservoir has to be pretty darn high if we’re gonna make anything back on this. I’m hoping for ten-thousand barrels a day at least.’
‘Is that a Europan day or an Earth day? The way I see it all bets are off Conrad,’ said Jason, the geologist. He was bracing himself against the wall staring out of the side view-port at the Europan valley they were driving through. ‘I know we all like the pioneering side of oil exploration but we don’t know what kind of problems we’ll encounter.’
‘Well I guess it ain’t really my problem Jason,’ said Conrad in a voice that was always louder than necessary. ‘I’m just the drilling manager. It’s you geologists who take the fall. You just tell me where to stick my drill and that’s where I’ll damn well stick it.’
Jason groaned inwardly. Conrad was apt to launch into one of his “if it all goes wrong it won’t be my fault” speeches. Who he was trying to impress it was unclear. Jason thought it was probably rooted in some childhood inadequacy. Whatever the cause, Conrad always made sure everyone could hear him.
The terra-tank came to a stop. Jason looked across at Behrouz, the captain, who hailed from Iran, ‘What’s the deal?’
In the control seat, Behrouz was tapping some commands into a keyboard. A three-dimensional wire-frame model of the terra-tank was rotating on his screen. ‘Hold on, I’m anchoring down.’
He pressed ENTER and a thud sounded somewhere beneath them, followed by a long mechanical drone. The tank bucked slightly, and Jason held fast onto a bar on the wall. The tank had stopped at a slight angle off the horizontal, and Jason could hear the crunching of ice as the terra-tank steadied its grip on the cold moon.
Behrouz looked up. ‘All done.’
Jason looked out of the view-port, ‘Really? It looks to me like we stopped short?’
‘That’s because we did,’ Behrouz gestured out of the forward cockpit window. ‘We can’t go any further down this gradient. The proposed drill site is twenty metres away, but if we try and get closer to it, there’s a good chance we’ll slip straight past it and end up five-hundred metres down the glacier. Better to be twenty short on this side than half a kilometre on the other.’
Conrad said, ‘Well Jason, if your drill site predictions were correct, the reservoir is big enough for us to hit it from twenty metres off anyways.’
Jason nodded.
‘So what are we waiting for?’ added Conrad. ‘Let’s get a taste of that oil.’ He started rubbing his hands, then levered himself out of his chair and bounded out through the door towards the operations room.
Behrouz and Jason shared a knowing glance. A “why do we have to put up with this guy?” kind of glance. But the answer to that question was frustratingly evident in something as simple as Conrad’s surname. The Texan’s uncle was none other than William Drawe, the Tech Leader on the Tundrabot Project that sent the original ice drill to this frozen satellite five years before.
Jason rubbed his temples. Whenever Conrad spoke it was time for paracetamol.
‘There!’ said Behrouz tapping one of the screens in the Operations Room. On it, a 4D seismic section was rotating slowly, a multitude of vibrant colours and lines highlighted the strata of the ice that had been broken and shifted by Europa’s flexing core.
Jason could see what Behrouz had spotted. A huge rock in the ice. A fifty-six kilometre thick piece of what could only be described in Earth terms as glacial scree. The rock was hollow. It was the reservoir.
‘You beautiful thing!’ said Conrad. Jason glanced at him. Conrad’s tongue was traversing his upper lip.
Jason began tapping commands into the seismic software, a readout displayed the depth of the hollow.
‘Two hundred and fifteen kilometres down.’
‘That’s a little less than the first Tundrabot reported,’ said Behrouz.
‘Yes,’ said Jason, ‘seems the reservoir has risen a few kilometres in the last five years. Good to see the trap is the same size, though there may be some additional seep into the surrounding ice since Tundrabot looked. Regardless, it certainly makes our job a lot easier.’
‘How much time will the drill take to get there now?’
‘About two hours less. It’ll be fifteen hours instead of the seventeen projected originally.’
‘Awesome!’ said Conrad. ‘I love it when my operations come in ahead of time.’
Tundrabot Two descended into the dark dirty ice that stretched for three-hundred kilometres beneath the terra-tank. As it carved its way down by means of a superheated drill-bit, fuelled by radiation from the gas giant that dominated this place, Conrad kept an eye on the device as it transmitted telemetry information back through its tether to the computers in the operations room.
With Conrad at the helm, Behrouz and Jason could get some sleep. They lay in their bunks in the darkened cabin listening to the eerie rumble of distant cracking ice.
‘Do you think it’s dangerous? Us being here, with those sounds.’ said Behrouz.
‘It’s difficult to say without shooting some local seismic.’
‘Is that a geologists way of saying ‘Yes’?’
‘I suppose so.’
‘Perhaps we should shoot some.’
Jason thought for a moment. ‘No, there’s no point. There’s nothing we can do about it anyway. If we relocate then we’ll mess up Tundrabot Two’s descent. Anything could happen to the tether. We both know it was specifically designed to be unwinched from a stationary terra-tank. We can’t go changing the rules at this stage. Not without adequate testing.’
They were silent a moment. Jason folded his arm under his pillow, trying to get comfortable. Unfortunately, his excitement about the whole project was preventing him from finding the necessary stillness required for sleep.
Behrouz spoke again, ‘Jason, are you still awake?’
‘No, I’m not.’
‘Is it true what they say about Conrad?’
‘I don’t know. What do they say about Conrad?’
‘They say that he can tell whether the oil is good just by tasting it.’
Jason smiled, ‘Yes Behrouz. It’s true. Every operation I’ve ever been on with him that wasn’t a dry hole, he’s tasted the damn stuff. And he’s been able to tell when we’ve taken samples that weren’t of a commercial quantity. It’s a bizarre method, but he’s never been wrong. Some say Conrad’s taste-buds have kept the oil price below two-hundred dollars a barrel for the last seven years.’
‘So he’s good then. I mean, he’s good at what he does? He knows his stuff?’
‘Well, I can think of a good few people who deserve to be here more than he does, but he’s good enough – maverick enough – to get the results we need. If the results are there to be got, that is. But he can get very territorial about his oil. Be careful that doesn’t create a problem.’
Jason let out a deep sigh. Then he added, ‘He won’t be getting his damn talkative Texan tongue on this stuff though. Not if I have anything to do with it.’
Jason timed the sleep shifts so that the Tundrabot arrived at the reservoir while he was on watch.
That moment had come, and Jason was sitting too close to the screen in the operations room. His eyes were watering but he didn’t care a bit. The ice-drill was uploading the first batch of well-test data.
The reservoir was huge.
‘I’ve initiated the haul,’ Jason reported to the others when they came into the galley for dinner. ‘Conrad I followed your procedures for programming the well-test software and I’ve copied the log files to your Personal Drive.’
Conrad’s face displayed a sour smirk. ‘Ah to hell with that well-test software. It don’t tell you jack.’
Jason looked at Behrouz, who was looking right back at him. They were clearly thinking the same thing. That Conrad had other plans for testing the quality of that oil.
Six hours later, after a hard sleep, Jason woke to the sound of a Class-One Emergency Tone buzzing in the cockpit. It pulled him out of a sweet dream backwards and for a moment he thought he was going to be sick.
For a moment he considered the possibility that Conrad has tasted some of the oil and now needed medical attention. But this thought was banished when Conrad appeared at the door to the cabin. ‘It’s Behrouz. He’s trying to stop the well test.’
Jason followed the Texan to the Operations Room. Conrad reached Behrouz first and pulled his seat back, wrenching it from it’s floor mounting and spilling the smaller man onto the steel deck. The computer screen he was working at flashed red with the words PUMPS 10%.
‘What the hells going on?’ said Jason.
Behrouz pulled himself to his feet and straightened the arms on his suit. He pointed at Conrad, almost jabbing him. ‘He wants to continue the well-test. Jason turn off that damn alarm.’
Jason reached for the cockpit emulation console and typed the cancellation code. Silence returned to the tank and only the punches of strecthing tundra could be heard beyond the frighteningly thin walls of the tank.
Conrad said, ‘There’s nothing wrong with continuing the well test. It’s what we’re here for.’
Jason, irritated with both of them, quested for clarity. ‘Behrouz, why would you want to stop it?’
Looking accusingly at his new assailant, Behrouz said, ‘Tell him Conrad. Go on.’
Conrad sighed and relaxed his shoulders. ‘There’s sort of an anomaly.’
Jason squared on to Conrad and folded his arms. ‘What kind of anomaly?’
Conrad reached for the computer keyboard that Behrouz was previously working at. He pressed a few keys and brought up a screen which showed a graph of time against reservoir capacity. There were two descending lines on the graph. They diverged with time. ‘See?’ he said in his southern lilt. He stepped back from the screen and stood erect, as though triumphant.
‘What am I looking at?’
Behrouz pointed at the screen. ‘The divergence. This top line is the expected capacity as we extract oil from the reservoir.’
Jason nodded, ‘So what’s the other line?’
‘The actual reservoir readings,’ said the captain.
Conrad said. ‘He wants to stop the test because the reservoir is depleting faster than we are taking it.’
Jason thought for a moment, ‘So there’s seepage in the rock.’
Both men shook their heads. Jason was still confused as to why these men were fighting, when so far they had agreed on everything.
Behrouz pointed at the point of divergence on the screen. ‘There was no seepage until ten minutes after we started testing.’
Nobody said anything, and Jason contemplated what the captain had disclosed. He shook his head. ‘Help me out here.’
‘I’m saying,’ said Behrouz, ‘that something else is extracting oil down there.’
Conrad tapped the keyboard on the screen and the display reported the pumps had returned to 100%. ‘We have to be quicker.’
Behrouz threw his arm up at the taller man and smacked him with a half fist in the side of the face. Conrad recoiled and brought a hand to his cheek.
‘Turn it off, right now!’ shouted the Iranian. ‘Hasn’t it occured to you that we might be stealing this oil?’
The others said nothing. Jason searched for words but the captain continued. ‘Who the hell are we to bounce in here and claim it for ourselves?’
‘That’s a pile of horse crap,’ shouted the Texan. ‘There’s nothing down there taking it from us. And besides. Who’s to say who the hell it belongs to anyway. Nothing has anyone’s goddam name on it!’
Jason interrupted, ‘Conrad, whatever you might think. We still have to stop taking samples until we can be sure of exactly what’s going on here. We need to run more tests on the res…’
‘We don’t have time. Do you have any idea how much this mission is costing us. My uncle was the…’
‘I know exactly who your uncle was Conrad, and don’t patronise me about the cost of this project. I’m the geologist on this mission and I’m the one who decides whether we drill or not. Conrad, stop the well test. We need to decide whether to retreat to the Orbiter. We can’t contact them from here and frankly there’s a decision to be made which is above me and you, or any one of….’
He stopped speaking. And now they could all hear the sound of something deep below them in the cold grey ice. It was a distant hum at first, surrounded by an increased intensity of the distant cracking of ice. As they listened the hum grew in intensity and volume until it was shaking the tank. Louder it became until Jason’s eyes met Behrouz’s in dark realisation. They were listening to the sound of a drill machine rising to meet them.
Behrouz’s’ face was white and his eyes were wide. ‘They’re coming…’