14

You take a deep breath and guide the tiny robot out of an aperture of the ship, up into the ice. It appears as a red blip on a projected screen, the trailing wire from the antenna a blue line leading up.

At every step, the drone threatens to spiral off course. Keeping it heading straight up is a challenge. It gets halfway through the ice before veering off-course. You over-correct the course, sending it hurtling back down through the ice. Try as you might, the bullet-drone is lost irrevocably as its signal vanishes.

"That went as well as I thought it was going to," Evgeniy says.

With the colony cut off from Earth for at least a month, aid will be slower to come when contact is eventually re-established.

Next

Soon it is the first night of the colony. Europa's days last 3.5 Earth days, but as you cannot see the sun under the ice and humans need more regular sleep, time is synced to Earth. The colonists are still working on three different time zones between them, but by convention you choose the moment of landing as 12 a.m. of Day 1.

In days to come the tunneling work will begin in earnest, but tonight you celebrate!

In the cargo hold, everyone squeezes around. It falls to you now to give the speech that names the colony.

"Here we are in…"

We have come to study the native lifeforms of Europa and expand humanity's reach into the outer solar system."

Everyone claps (some more enthusiastically than others). Marcel Temaru comes over with an improbably large jug that he must have fabricated specially for the occasion.

"My President, would you like to try this fine cocktail? A mix of the best reconstituted fruit juices I could find and my own special kelp gin. The gin is a Libertalian classic, but I'm going to call this particular concoction the Callanish-Twist. To be drunk with ice, of course!"

Fortunately, you are rescued from Marcel's bizarre cocktail by Kosmo.

"We all got to bring something special from home. I've been saving this bottle of scotch. It was distilled in 2018 and cost an eye and a leg," says Kosmo. It's impossible to tell from his autotuned voice whether he's joking or serious as he keeps a straight face.

He pours out a generous glass and you take the time to savor the smoky tones. This is a taste you will probably never have again, as barley was not a priority grain for the expedition.

Music is played throughout the ship. The people dance and drink and relax as the tension of being in transit is finally over.

"Beautiful to see people from all over the old world come together and make something new," Marcel opines.

"We've been here less than a day and he's already saying 'old world'!" Kosmo chirps. "But he's right, in a few generations our descendants are going to be a new kind of people."

Next

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