13

You sit in on planning meetings and take notes as they work with their team laying out power lines and webs of tunnels on the plan. It's all things you had some familiarity with before from the many preparatory sessions prior to launch, but it does satisfy some of your curiosity by getting a more systematic picture of how all the different parts will fit together.

In one of the last sessions before landing, Sungura takes you aside. "It is most important," they say, "that we leave ourselves plenty of open spaces. It is hard to make space in a closed system once it is already filled in…."

Next

And so splitting your time with Rheita and Sungura, the eighteen months aboard the Asterion pass. With no windows, you have only the screens to tell you that you are floating in the endless void. You come to properly know the names and faces of hundreds of the other colonists as you all hurtle together towards your final home beneath the ice of Europa.

Next Chapter

Chapter Two: The Founding

Here you are now, deep beneath the ice of Europa. Your time in transit has ended and now the colony begins.

"Do you want the bad news or the worse news first?" asks Evgeniy Cardoso, cryo-engineer and miserabilist.

"The—"

"Our comms antenna is stuck, useless, in about two meters of ice below the surface," Evgeniy continues. "It was trailing behind like the plan, but got buried on arrival."

"Is that the bad news or—"

"And the fabricator to print a new antenna needs the workshop to be built!"

"So—"

"We can't use the tunneling drills unsupported because it's straight up above the ship."

"In that case—"

"Unless we want to commit the resources to digging out and laying the supports for an observatory before we even have dormitories."

"Then—"

"But we can send a hot bullet drone." The tiny bullet-shaped robots are used to burrow through ice. They're designed to be sent ahead of major tunneling to check for cracks.

"Well—"

"But the estúpido thing needs fine guidance. They don't have much battery power and so, knowing our luck, we'll get it stuck in the ice too."

You did the bullet drone training a few years back in the run-up to the mission, but you were never that great at it. Evgeniy isn't going to risk doing it himself, and no one else around has any confidence in recovering the antenna this way.

Let's send the bullet-drone to the surface to bounce a message off the Talos satellite to let Earth know we're safe.

I've got to learn how to control these drones eventually: despite the poor odds I'll attempt to recover the antenna myself.

I want to preserve equipment: I'll get a team to work on this slowly and steadily.

We'll build the observatory first.

Next

You stand before the controls of the bullet-drone. It needs to keep in constant motion to avoid getting frozen in. The intense heat needed to melt the ice around it requires a lot of power, so the bot has a very short runtime. You've got one chance to send it up the antenna, where it'll be overheated to melt the antenna free.

"This better work," says Evgeniy. "If I wanted to blow up drones for no reason I'd have stayed back in São Carlos."

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