Starlit Nights, Moonlit Days

Nobody can hear a scream in the vacuum of space, or so they say.

HAH. “Or so they say,” I muttered to myself. Which idiot wrote that? Nobody had been to space in ages, but even children knew the principles of sound waves and space and the resulting lack of noise. The first person who said that unnecessarily haunting statement must be long incinerated. How outdated of them to wonder.

I snorted more as I scrolled through the digital archives at the Library, pausing to chuckle at some of the spellings of these old words before settling in to read more ancient texts of these myths that spoke of space and other races spread throughout the far-flung edges of the universe.

Our ancestors were silly creatures it seemed.

A glance at the large circular skylight revealed shimmering shafts of light trickling in to pool into the cavernous main room of the Library. Finally, it was day. I tapped the metal tabletop three times and the Archives vanished with a quiet beep, the files automatically saving themselves for later.

To be fair, day and night were not so different here. Everyone was born, everyone was raised, and everyone died within these thick metal walls; life simply continued on in relative stasis as it had from the very beginning of remembered time. But I was partial to the natural light that flitted in through the 10-ft thick windows, and I was not picky of the source, whether it be from the small and distant sun, or the giant planet that floated just beyond us, reflecting the starlight onto the ice-covered surface of our home.

Though the Aurora lights kept the facility warm and the inhabitants well supplied with the all-important vitamin D during stretches of darkness, and the darkness of living in a submerged vessel beneath the ocean, there was something so charming about the delicate watery rays that found their way to me.

I wandered out of the Library into the maze of hallways and common areas, nodding absently to the people I’ve known all my life as I passed. This place I called home was a work of art, a metal marvel of science and geometry, fueled by the energy of the tidal currents. Beautiful, brutal, stark, stoic, it protected us from the radiation of the surface and funneled the oxygen in the too-thin atmosphere above into something our human bodies could breathe. It had everything I could ever need.

But as much as I laughed at those ancient stories, I, too, found myself gazing outwards. And as much as I tried to see what lay beyond, only the rushing water and my distorted reflection gazed back.

I had just reached out my hand to push open the door that led to my family’s quarters, about to sneak in while my parents and baby brother were doubtlessly still fast asleep, when the floor trembled beneath my feet.

When you live somewhere all your life, you become intimately familiar with the rhythm of the world around you. It’s like your own heartbeat: something you barely register, but when disrupted throws your entire being off balance. Ice quakes were nothing new, powerful geysers rock the vessel constantly, but this… this felt different, strange.

The vibrating hum grew, discordant and chaotic. And then, a terrifying, grating screech that shuddered along the entire length of the vessel.

It ground to a stop, throwing me forward, skull crashing through the door. I could barely hear my family scream through the ringing in my head.

“Are you all right? Are you ok?” I heard my father ask in the dark, his face dimly outlined by the small round window on the side of the room.

The words barely left his mouth when the walls around us shuddered and groaned, and we fell into the floor like dominos as the vessel tipped up, up, up, one end of the vessel forced up through the ice and out of the water by a powerful geyser.

Our window cleared the frozen surface of the water, and for a fraction of a heartbeat I glimpsed the impossibly large swirling red surface of Jupiter against blackest night, and pinpricks of light scattered into the void before we crashed back into the icy water below, and fell into complete stillness.

The vessel that was said to run for eternity had stopped for the first time in hundreds of years.

We were now stranded in the middle of Europa’s ice-bound ocean, and all the lights were going out.