Alien Impulses

"We can't stay long, I'm afraid, babe... The Americans probably think we're a nuclear missile, given how fast we left the surface, if they saw us that is..." That was a fairly major concern, actually. Getting into the atmosphere, accompanied by the burning fragments of a long-passed comet, was kid's play compared to getting off the Earth unseen. I had hoped no-one was looking for an ICBM launch from Wales. It did sound faintly ridiculous.

I prepared Phoenix for our next burn and chatted with the computer, checking systems and generally catching up. Gemma couldn't take her eyes off the Earth. We were over India now, progressing East towards east Asia and the Pacific. It was time to move on, I knew, hating the idea of depriving Gemma such a marvellous sight-seeing opportunity. "Don't worry, babe. We'll have other chances, and we're going somewhere just as cool. Ready for the burn?"

"OK. Just promise me I'll see this again."

"I promise. We have to come home on Sunday, anyway!", I chuckled, and warmed up the engines for our first burn. The computer reckons its about thirteen hours to our destination, so we'll have time to chill out after all this madness. How are you doing?"

She was fine, loving it, in fact. The strangeness was beginning to fall away, and wonderment was taking its place. This wasn't the time for freaking out, but for taking it all in, relaxing and enjoying the show. I gunned the engines and we rocketed out of orbit and up to 86% of the speed of light in a few minutes.

Gemma turned to watch the Earth and the Moon disappear behind us as the ship accelerated to our cruise speed. "So where are we going, exactly?", she asked.

"Don't worry about that for now. Unbuckle your straps and see what you think about zero-G." I let her float around the cabin for a while, checking systems and giving final instructions to the computer. "You OK back there?"

"Yeah! This is fun! What's this fridge for?"

She was pointing at the stasis chamber. "I went to sleep in that thing for forty years. It slows down your heart and all your bodily systems, so you don't age. Brilliant invention. Takes absolutely ages to wake up, and I was seriously thirsty and hungry, but I wouldn't spend four decades in deep space any other way." She admired the chamber with curiosity. "I'm about done setting up our cruise. Want some lunch?"

It was about midday by now anyway, and I was getting hungry. We had ten hours to kill, and food was only the first distraction I had planned. The replicator, to which Gemma was getting more and more accustomed, produced seafood salad and bread so fresh it must have come direct from the oven, commented Gemma.

"Amazing. Think what a difference these would make on Earth. Whatever food you wanted, anytime, made from just water and energy."

"Not just food", I reminded her. "Anything of which the ship's computer has an imprint. For more powerful computers like this one, that means virtually anything in the known Universe." I turned to call back to the computer, which was organising our stately cruise. "Computer, please produce two Class-J Takanli spacesuits based on our measurements."

The Forager hummed into life as we finished our salad and began to produce white fabric and metal fittings. Within an hour, the two suits were finished, in parts, and I began putting them together.

"Erm... why do we need these?", Gemma asked, perplexed. "We're not going out... there, are we?"

I smiled at her. "Relax. Nothing can go wrong, and this will be the coolest thing you've ever done." I turned once more. "Computer, time to arrival burn?"

"Five hours, eighteen minutes", was the reply.

"OK, I want you to begin a complex construction sequence with the Forager. I've had an idea", I winked at Gemma. "Computer, get me deep space versions of Forager and Brunel. Fill Forager with water and attach a large fuel pod containing as much water as is practicable. Seal both for Jovian orbital work."

"On the way", responded the Computer.

"What's the plan?", asked Gemma, clicking together some of the fittings of her suit.

I completed mine and clipped it to the wall next to the stasis chamber. "The biggest problem about space is that it doesn't contain very much. If you're a long-distance traveller or explorer, opportunities for refuelling or taking on more water are few and far between. That's why Hal and I decided to take every opportunity to put in place a deep space infrastructure. We're going to collect small amounts of hydrogen from Jupiter's upper atmosphere and store them in huge tanks which will orbit the planet. That way, if anyone is coming though here and needs some gas, it will be on tap."

Gemma thought for a second. "How is little Brunel going to manage all of that?"

I chuckled. "Well, the harvester machine will have as much water as Phoenix can spare, which means between them they can create machines of almost any size. Hal designed a huge scoop which has its own power source and thrusters, and just orbits Jupiter in an ellipse. On closest approach, the scoop passes through the upper layers of the atmosphere, collects a load of gas, takes it away on its long orbital loop and liquefies all the different gases through fractional distillation. You remember from high school chemistry?"

"Kind of", she admitted. "Sounds clever".

"It is", I beamed. "Hal tells me we can store up to 400 tonnes of hydrogen a year doing this, and that's just with one machine. The harvester units can produce anything from hydrogen too, so we can spend some of our profit making something else, like an orbiting telescope or whatever."

Gemma was stunned by the plan. Entirely automated, independent, crafting its own future, we would put in place a sentient manufacturing system to mine the clouds of Jupiter. And there was no way anyone would see it unless they were here.

"Anyway, if you're finished with lunch, I thought there was something else we might try." I must have had a lustful twinkle in my eye.

"Oh, really? What might that be?"

Gemma naked is a wonderful thing. Flowing black hair, gorgeously firm breasts, soft curls that hide her pussy, wonderful proportions. Gemma in zero-G is even better. Her hair floated around her, until she tied it back, and she seemed so free and relaxed, balancing herself between floor and ceiling to allow me to touch her. I caressed her ass, gently squeezed her breasts and tweaked her hardening nipples, and kissed her almost constantly.

Her first zero-G sex was terrific. I held her close and slid rhythmically in and out of her, enjoying the feeling of her pussy lubricating my shaft. We bounced gently off walls and ceiling, maintaining a rough equilibrium, entwined in a bundle of limbs, floating hair and naked skin. I told her about the dangers of my coming outside her body, particularly given the amount of cum I was producing at the moment, and she held me close, keeping me inside her, until I was ready. Our tongues mingled, carrying little erotic, electric shocks throughout our bodies. I held her ass, feeling the pressure of each thrust and reaching under to feel my hardness, moistened by her cunt, as I gave her strokes which filled her.

When I was ready to come, I had Gemma grasp two of the grab handles on the ceiling and held her ass with both hands, pounding into her with my full length. She came just before me, pulses of pleasure rippling through her soft, wet tunnel. I let it happen, building to a wonderful climax and then spurting jet after jet of warm, sticky cum into her juicy cunt. I had pushed very deeply into her, spurting directly into her cervix, so that the sperm wouldn't drip straight out and into the cabin. We held each other, kissed and stroked one another, until Gemma told me she had to go to the bathroom, lest the cabin become decorated with a new, rather sticky shade of white.

Three hours out, the computer made us aware of an object in our path. Gemma returned from the bathroom to find me half-dressed, sitting in the pilot's seat and looking slightly worried. "There's an asteroid, a medium-sized metallic one, smack in the middle of our flight path. We can turn to avoid it, but the Computer is sensing an opportunity and Hal agrees."

I showed Gemma a view of the rock from our onboard telescope camera. It was an egg-shaped, brown nodule of ancient stone, brimming with metals, spinning calmly through space in the system-wide ring of such objects known as the asteroid belt.

"Computer, is this asteroid known to Earth scientists?"

Three seconds while the machine checked its records. "Not according to the latest database", he answered. "I think we can call this one ours." I smiled and gave the Computer a series of instructions.

"What's going on?", Gemma asked, pulling her clothes back on.

"We've just found a way to really kick-start the Jupiter orbit manufacturing processes. This will really get things going. There's an asteroid up ahead, about an hour away, and Hal wants us to slow down, attach a foraging miner droid and a couple of construction robots. After a few months, they'll have built a set of thrusters which will perturb the asteroid's orbit around the sun and push it into a Jovian orbit. Gradually, once the orbit is made elliptical, the rock will become a resource node for the robots working on Jupiter's atmosphere. Billions of tonnes of raw material, just waiting to be used."

Gemma was amazed at this idea. "Hal reckons that, within three years, we'll be looking at 4000 tonnes of hydrogen a year, all tanked up and ready to use, as well as a host of other gases. Maybe even water, if we can safely get robots down to the surface of the ice moons and pipe up the meltwater into orbiting tanks."

It was audacious, somewhat brilliant, a real technical marvel. But Gemma couldn't hide a concern. "Who told you that you had unlimited access to the Solar System's resources? Who said you could start mining out here?"

I nodded, somewhat chagrined, and lost the zeal with which I had explained the plan. "I know. It is a dilemma. Here's how I think about it. Jupiter contains countless billions of tonnes of hydrogen. I'm talking about taking 4000 tonnes a year, if that. And that will furnish hundreds of ships a year, if ever that many even make it out here. The asteroid... well, there are hundreds of billions of those, all roughly the same, all floating around out here until they hit something, which they inevitably will. In exchange, we get free deep space travel for everyone. Not a bad trade, I think."

We threw around these ideas for a couple of hours while the Computer got ready to begin our deceleration burn sequence. Fundamentally, she was still opposed to simply grabbing the System's resources and utilising them, but she couldn't get really angry because, apart from anything else, this was a non-profit venture. We weren't filling tanks with Jovian hydrogen and sending them back to Earth to sell them. We weren't mining the ice moons to sell the water at exorbitant rates to passing spacecraft. This was all being made available gratis. And if that were the case, there would be little impetus for private concerns to come out here and do the same thing. Distance and radiation aside, the costs would have been cosmic, particularly given the limited opportunities for profit-making. This, we agreed, was the best way to begin human exploration of deep space. Make everything free. Make everyone equal. Keep big business out of it. Having agreed that, we grabbed some sleep, floating relaxed in the warm cabin.

The Computer controlled our approach to the asteroid, which had yet to be named, and we slowed sufficiently for a small robot cluster to be decelerated further by a thruster pack, and make a grapple-landing on the surface. We pushed the bundle of robots out of the airlock and watched on the cameras as it shot out a penetrator, hooked into the rock, and hauled itself down. Two years of work, toiling away to turn rock into fuel for the thrusters, and then another year of thruster firings, and he rock would be on its way into a Jovian ellipse.

We approached the King of the Solar System with a real sense of excitement. Few sights, from the early Voyager images to the more recent Galileo mosaics and videos, embodied such majesty and grace as the face of Jupiter, the Great Red Spot and the dozens of moons circling this giant ball of gas.

The Computer began the burn precisely on time and we used the ship's cameras to take a look at our target. The Forager had finished producing the various elements we had requested -- a small construction robot, a Forager with an added balloon tank of water, and a thruster pack which would help them achieve their ellipse around Jupiter. These were in a configuration which allowed me to clip them together in the cabin and float them into the airlock. As we finished our burn and Jupiter loomed ahead of us, the airlock emptied and the little package of technology floated out into Jovian space, engaged its thrusters, and set off on its mission.

"Welcome to Jupiter", I announced as we slid into orbit. The computer was reporting all systems green. "Depending on how long we wanted to stay, the Phoenix could use a little extra fuel. Our hydrogen-gathering system won't really have starting paying out yet, so we're going to do this a different way. Are you ready to put your suit on?"

It was 4am on a Sunday and humanity was about to take its first steps on an alien world. Well, that wasn't strictly true. I had personally walked on four different planets, one of them man-made, and twelve men had walked on the moon. But beyond out own Earth-Moon system, only I had so far trodden. I wondered if Gemma's achievement out here would ever make it into the history books, as it so richly deserved to do.

"Ready when you are", she answered. She had gotten used to all of this remarkably quickly, almost as if she had done it before. Zero-G wasn't a problem, the strange experiences in the submersible, being in orbit around her own planet, travelling at near light-speed, and now arriving in the family of Jupiter, none of it phased her. Like a duck to water. And now she was hauling on her suit like she'd done it a hundred times.

Within each of the suits was a rocket system, very much like that employed by Bruce McCandless in the famous photo of him floating away from Columbia back in the 1980s, but a good deal more efficient. So much so, in fact, that with the assistance of the Computer, we could use these suits to slow down from orbital velocity to a safe landing speed. I had selected our landing site for three reasons, I explained to Gemma as we checked each other's gear, like scuba divers.

"Europa is completely gorgeous, according to all the photos I've ever seen of the place. Also, the water ice on the surface is fairly much pure, without contaminants that are found elsewhere. And thirdly, there's the theory that, given sufficient heat from Europa's core, there could be a large, fresh water ocean under the ice crust. We're here for a jolly, sure, but we absolutely must check this out."

Attached to the back of my suit, freshly produced by our tireless Forager, was a small robot package. Once on the surface, the robots would use a tiny onboard fusion reactor to generate power, melt water to provide longer-term resources, and then build a drilling robot which would bore down through the ice, forming a tunnel which would extend from the surface down until the drill met water. Well, we assumed it would. Probes could then be manufactured in situ, dropped down the hole in the ice, and used to explore the liquid ocean beneath. That there was the slightest possibility of finding life there made the whole exercise more than worthwhile. And that Gemma and I would get to walk on Europa made it far more valuable.

"One small step, eh?", Gemma quipped as we got ready to enter the airlock. She was beaming through her suit's visor, clearly loving this experience. We closed the inner hatch, ejected the air from the lock and opened the outer door. Below us, the icy moon Europa rotated majestically. Her surface was a compelling mix of glassy smooth plains of blue ice, and strange, fractured terrain which resembled canyons or deep river valleys on Earth. We were aiming for one of the plains, and gently stepped out into space, moving steadily away from the Phoenix and trying out our suit thrusters. Readouts on our wrist pads gave us our speed, altitude and various suit statistics. Despite floating through the emptiness of space, the radiation level was almost off the charts. This was the fault of the massive, angry ball of gas off to our left, which was pumping out brain-cooking levels of radiation. Our suits, crafted from advanced plastics only recently made available on Holdrian, could absorb many hours of this punishment, but we could not stay indefinitely.

"OK, let's starting losing some altitude. We're at 376,000ft -- are you seeing the same?", I asked over the suit microphone.

"Yes. God, it's beautiful out here. Ready to descend when you are." We pushed forward the small joystick which controlled the suit's thrusters and immediately began to tip forward, facing directly down at the surface, and to lose altitude quite quickly. "Down to 350, looking good", I said, doing my best impression of one of the Apollo guys talking the Commander down to the surface in the Lunar Module. "Check your temperatures, make sure you're comfortable. Overheating is a risk in these conditions", I warned, checking that my own suit was within limits. All seemed fine. We were good to go.

We dropped down closer to Europa every minute, increasingly able to pick out details on the surface. We passed over a large swathe of surface which seemed to have been smashed and pulverised by upwellings from beneath. "Looks like we have a hot core... look at all that ejecta", I said to Gemma, flying over the chaotic, icy terrain. We were about half a mile apart, which was further than I had in mind, but we needn't worry about latitudinal corrections until we were much lower.

"Hey, there's Phoenix!", Gemma cried, and above us, the sleek, silver spacecraft was in its own orbit, circling Europa silently. "Beautiful!"

"140 thousand, about six minutes until touchdown. Want to stay there while I slide over towards you?" Gemma agreed, and I tweaked the joystick to give me a little rightward drift. Within seconds I was right by her, and killed the drift with a quick squirt of the thrusters. "Down past 100,000 feet", I announced.

We could now begin to consider our landing site, or at least avoid the larger patches of chaotic ice blocks. The moon revolved beneath us slowly enough now that we could see, on the very horizon, where we would ultimately be landing, and walking in this strange place. "You ever read 2010 by Arthur C Clarke?", I asked Gemma as we progressed down.

"No. Is it any good?"

I chuckled. "Part of it is about Europa. A Chinese team land here and get swamped by a green, slimy thing which is the first indigenous life ever found off the Earth."

"Not a very nice welcome", she thought.

"One of the Chinese guys survives and makes a transmission which he sets on repeat, claiming to have found life, but that the life in question trashed his ship!" I looked down at the surface, subconsciously scanning it for patches of green.

"Do you think there is life down here?"

I had been wanting to do this for ages. Quoting the famous Jack Burton from Big Trouble in Little China, with the same slangy accent... 'This is a pretty amazing planet we live on here, and a man would have to be some kind of fool to think we're all alone in this Universe...'

"46,000 feet", Gemma reminded me. "Where do you want to put down?"

I scanned the view and found a nice, clean patch of flat ice, two thirds of the way to the horizon. "Perfect. See that little crater to the left of the flat plain?"