The first three probes had mysteriously been lost. There was a steady signal, then suddenly nothing. And it had been that way with all of them, the exact same pattern. That was why we were out here. It was time to know what was going on with the giant moon of Jupiter, Europa.
As our ship finally swung into orbit around the frozen moon the first things to draw our attention were the large scar marks and lines on the surface. These were the things that most scientists believed to be canals and tunnels running all over the planet. Since it was mostly ice on the surface, it was commonly believed that these were breaks in the ice, possibly covering an ocean below. A few even believed that they ran from surface to ocean, but this idea was not very credible.
I was still contemplating these strange markings when the ship suddenly lurched as it was definitely not designed to do. Our German navigator, Gustav Ozwald, was the first to speak.
"Captain, we've just lost the main computer."
"What was that?" shouted the captain as alarms went off everywhere. "And shut off that noise. Who designed that part of the ship anyway?"
The sirens cut out as Anna Heath, our pilot, interjected the next comment. "Captain, I've lost all helm control. We're losing our orbital stability."
"I may be able to restart enough of the engines to allow us to land," I said.
"Dammit," exclaimed the captain. "This is exactly what happened to the probes. Get into orbit, lose engines. Fine, let's at least see if we can stay alive. Get on those engines, Susan."
"Yes, sir," I said before sprinting off down the main corridor, past Kisandra Ivanova, our weapons specialist. The main engine core was in the back of our phalic looking ship (which was a running joke among the whole crew, especially Anna and the captain) and was a very simple fusion reactor. Being the only real scientist on board, I was the best trained to fix the engine core. It obviously would have helped to know what has just happened, but I saw the readings as clearly as Anna. We were about to go hurtling towards the planet and in the few minutes we had to spare, I'd have to work quickly.
As it turned out, the main circuits had been fried. Looked like the work of some kind of strong electromagnetic disturbance. But around Europa? That didn't make sense. Nothing natural could have done this. With the main control circuits burned out the reactor didn't know how to control itself and as a safety default had shut down. It was getting cold fast and every second I waited made it that much more unlikely that the engine would be able to restart.
There was an old trick I had learned my second year in college. We had been working with computer control systems and our instructor had told us that at times the complex systems we used for many devices were not entirely necessary. Many things could run with only a basic power and control grid. They would not be able to function for long as the stress on the system would cause it to burn out in a few minutes, but in a crunch......