Angry Jasper: Fifty-four

“Hey, kids, we’re home,” Jazz announced, more to himself than to anyone else. It felt sort of homey seeing everyone that way. The others stirred reluctantly. Kate pulled herself from the tangle of arms and legs. Skull boy groaned and turned over in the hammock. Buzz was content with a moment’s peace and quiet. Kate pulled underwear from the crack of her ass and came up behind Jazz. She looked out at the growing moon before them. It filled the ship with a heavenly golden light. She ran her hands across Jasper’s shoulders and kissed the top of his head.

“Sleep well?” he asked.

“Died,” she said with a groan and stretched out her sore back. In fact her whole body had taken one hell of a beating, and she was feeling it now.

“Miss anything?”

“Naw,” he replied. “Pretty smooth. You guys were sacked out.”

“First real sleep in some time.”

“Wanna wake ‘em?”

“Naw. Let ‘em go.”

Jazz nodded and smiled to himself. “Gotta say, it’s kind of nice, havin’ a full house, so to speak.”

Kate looked back and mused, almost lamented. “About the closest we ever had to a real family.”
There was more traffic now. Freighters and supply ships came and went from the huge methane harvesters floating among Jupiter’s tumultuous cloud layers. They were closer to Europa than to the great gas giant, but still it dominated the view with it’s terrific size. They were already passing around to the dark side of the planet. Stunning aurora patterns were replaced my monumental flashes of bright blue-white lightening. Jupiter never failed to amaze Jazz.

“What about the kid?” asked Kate..” Got no home, no parents anymore.”

“Shame,” he joked. “Well, reckon I’ll have to kill him then.”

Kate smacked the back of his head for such an awful remark. She didn’t let him see the smile on her face. After all, it was a jerk thing to say, but it was funny.

On one of the console screens was a small schematic of the solar system that showed their trajectory from Earth. The planets were completely out of scale of course, but where the Earth once was there was merely a number dots. A single disk, an orphaned moon, drifted among the debris of the world. Katy touched the screen as though she could feel them. The word left her lips like a sudden horrible realization.

“All those millions of souls,” she lamented, “snuffed out in an instant.”

Jazz hadn’t cared much for the place, and thought the end of that crap-heap of a planet was long overdue. He didn’t though sat it, knowing full well that Katy had left a part of herself there. He was a space kid, and never felt anything in particular for Earth, but for Kate it would always be home. For once he didn’t cram his foot in his mouth and suck hard on it.

“Sure sucks,” he said.

Katy frowned, though Jazz couldn’t see. It was a dumb remark, but she wouldn’t bust his chops over it. At least he was trying. In fact, except for remarks about her physical attributes and certain sexual talents over the years, it was one of the nicest things he’d ever said to her. She rubbed the back of his head.

“Yeah, Jazz, it sure does.”

Racing around the planet at close to 20,000 miles per hour jazz had to speed up a little to catch the icy little moon. Europa was a stark and inhospitable world, at least on the surface. Deep ridges cut across a broken landscape of frozen ice flows, scarred by craters being slowly reclaimed by Europa’s ever-changing surface. With the same face blasted continuously by Jupiter’s lethal radiation, all the portals through the Icy crust lay on the dark side of the moon. They were large steel and concrete tubes and channels cutting through miles of dust and pulverized space debris. Each opened into a subterranean ocean fifty miles deep. Clustered around each portal, like grapes on a dark and watery vine, were dozens of little colonies. It was the perfect place to hide.