Erebus by Ralph Kern

toward the hopper. “Okay, just lift as soon as you’re onboard. I’ll be fine.”
    “I hate to leave you, man…We can try a site-to-site bounce in the shuttle to get to you?”
    “And risk landing in a drift and getting stuck? No, just go,” Henning called as he finally got to the hopper and, in a single leap, reached the cabin hatch of the spiderlike vehicle and opened it. He shortchanged the pressurization of the cabin and, moving as fast as he could in his bulky suit, entered the control blister. Climbing into the chair, Henning activated the hopper with his awkward, gauntleted fingers. By the chronometer on his HUD, he had less than fifteen minutes left before the strike.
    The tiny, vulnerable hopper began its lumbering, bouncing motion that was the safest way of getting around on the surface of Io. Henning turned it toward the distant lights of the habitat that he had called home for the last year.
    “Henning, we’re ready to go. Good luck, man.”
    “You too. Get going.”
    Through the hopper’s thick clear canopy, Henning watched as a column of fire began to lift straight up from the surface—his colleagues and friends striving to reach safety.
    The hopper wasn’t particularly fast, and it was crystal clear that it would get nowhere near the base before the time elapsed. Henning kept glancing at the chronometer. It ticked down far faster than was right or fair. Well before he got anywhere near the base, it ticked down to zero.
    To his left, a strange, bright illumination bloomed over the horizon, almost like an aurora. It faded quickly. Then he felt it. The whole surface shifted. It was small, a matter of a few feet, but still, he clutched onto the safety handles in the control blister.
    Panicked, Henning glanced around, trying to see what was going on—then he saw it. Off the right side of the blister, a huge cloud of fire swelled from below the horizon, roiling, tumultuous. Mixed in the cloud, he could see vast chunks of crustal material. The whole surface of the moon was lifting off. Then the shaking started.
    Moonquakes were one thing, this was another. The whole hopper felt like it was being shaken into little pieces by the sheer violence of it. Henning gripped the handles as tightly as he could. Huge chasms began to open. Massive rocks smashed their way up into the sky. All around him, vast mountain ranges were forming or being destroyed in seconds, and lava was shooting into the sky in geysers of fire.
    With what must have been near superhuman effort, Henning manipulated his HUD, finding the controls to send a total dump from his sensory implants in a burst transmission, including the cache that automatically stored the last few minutes. Everything Henning saw and heard was packaged up and sent to the fleeing shuttle, including a live feed.
    Crying out in pain from the sheer ferocity of the vibrations, the last thing Henning saw was a chasm opening beneath the hopper as it plummeted nose first toward an upward surge of lava.
    ***
    I came out of the VR recording and pinched the bridge of my nose, giving myself a moment. It was never pleasant to replay someone’s last moments, especially when it was a full immersion of their final experiences. I was just thankful that Henning hadn’t set his HUD to record his impressions, something I did as a matter of course.
    I’m a fairly cynical soul at heart. I’d seen some very nasty people do some very bad things in my time, but Henning’s last moments touched me. He’d not begged his companions to try some vain rescue attempt. He’d faced things with a certain stoicism. His last thoughts were to send what he was seeing in the hope someone could use it to figure out what had happened to him, to help them find out who had murdered him…
    The same person responsible for my partner’s death.
    I leaned back and gazed out of the window, losing myself in thought as the car raced ever up to Haven.

Interlude
    The HUD replay shut down. Outside, the