Titans

by Niall Teasdale

  Titans

  A Titans Novel

  By Niall Teasdale

  Copyright 2021 Niall Teasdale

  Amazon Kindle Edition

  Contents

  Part One: Theia

  Part Two: The Broken World

  Part Three: The Coming Storm

  Part Four: War and Power

  Epilogue

  Part One: Theia

  Exploration Lander Pallas, Titan, 26th January 2103.

  The overwhelming impression you got when looking out at the surface of Titan was beige. The largest moon of Saturn had an atmosphere. It had an atmosphere almost fifty percent denser than that of Earth, in fact. Breathing it would be a mistake; it was ninety-seven percent nitrogen with most of the remainder made up of methane. Trace hydrocarbons produced a thick, orange fog, though you could barely tell thanks to the near total lack of light reaching the surface. So, everything looked dim and beige, even with the addition of light from your helmet.

  The crew of the Theia had spent four months getting there, travelling some one point three billion kilometres, but after five visits to the surface, leaving was something they rather looked forward to. It was not like this was going to be their last trip to the surface. There were seven more planned excursions before they departed in May.

  ‘Pallas to Theia,’ Laurent Janvier said.

  ‘Pallas, this is Theia. Go ahead.’ The response came from Daryn Philips aboard the much bigger vessel orbiting above them. He had been expecting the call.

  ‘Launch preparations concluded, Theia. Take-off in fifteen seconds.’

  ‘Understood, Joe. We’ll put the coffee on.’

  Janvier’s middle name was Joseph, so everyone called him Joe because they could not quite get Laurent the way he liked it. The tribulations of a multinational mission were many and varied. ‘Five,’ he said. ‘Four… three… two…’ The big, vectored engine that powered the lander throttled up with a roar which vibrated through the hull. ‘One… Confirming lift-off. Transitioning to normal flight… confirmed.’

  Pallas rocketed upward in the light gravity, clearing the atmosphere in a couple of minutes. Another couple and the engines were throttled back. ‘Orbital insertion confirmed,’ Joe said. ‘Approach is nominal. Docking in twelve, that’s one-two, minutes.’

  ‘Pallas, we have you on radar,’ Daryn replied. ‘Confirming approach vector is nominal.’

  It was not long before the spindly shape of Theia became visible, if dimly, ahead of the lander. Pallas was a spaceplane, a streamlined craft designed to travel in atmosphere with as much ease as it did in space. Theia would have fared badly in an atmosphere. It was one hundred and fifty-three metres in length with a forward drum-like section containing most of the crew facilities, a rear pod containing the reactor and nuclear-pulse engine, and a sort of armoured gantry between the two which contained the docking facilities for Pallas and a lot of fuel. It was about as aerodynamic as a hammer, but it was home, or what passed for home when you were about ten astronomical units from Earth.

  ‘Docking systems are ready, Pallas,’ Daryn reported. ‘I’ll see you in the dining room soon.’

  ‘Looking forward to it, Daryn,’ Joe replied. ‘Docking guidance engaged. See you soon.’

  Exploration Vessel Theia.

  A zero-gravity tube ran through Theia from the forward section to the engine pod, connecting to the docking module for Pallas on the way. Mercy Garner glided down it toward the forward section with the practised ease of someone used to microgravity. She had trained as a US Marine Corps pilot before transferring to the Outer-System Exploration Project. These days, every marine was trained in space combat as well as the more normal kind. She was, she thought, happier doing something which benefitted mankind rather than training to blow people up.

  She was the mission commander and the co-pilot on Theia. Or, to be more precise, she was the one who handled the command decisions when they were not on Theia. She was second-in-command to Daryn Philips when it came to things on the mothership. She had decided that she should be the last person off the lander when it returned to Theia – it gave her time for one last check to be sure everything was locked down – so the others were already up in the living area.

  The forward section was designed to provide the crew with limited gravity and some security against the inhospitality of space. So, the core of the module contained an auxiliary bridge and a bunk room surrounded by the ship’s main water tanks and a bunch of other shielding so that the ship could be operated during solar storms. Around it, and so providing yet more shielding, was the drum containing the main control room and habitat. The drum rotated, giving a little less gravity than the surface of the moon, about fifteen percent of Earth gravity, once you got used to the Coriolis effect such spin gravity produced. After this long, the crew were well used to that effect and could switch from microgravity to spin gravity without too much trouble. It was still unwise to turn your head too quickly in the drum though.

  Arriving at the cross-corridor which led out to the habitat drum, Mercy pushed down into one of the two tunnels, flipped around to go feet-first, and pushed herself down until the centrifugal force began to take over and she could slide down the ladder toward the deck. Going down this side took her to the communal area that linked the eight cabins, which was convenient because that was where everyone else was.

  ‘You made sure to lock the garage, Colonel?’ Daryn asked, a grin on his face. Of the eight crew, three had military rank. Mercy held the rank of colonel, and Daryn only used her rank when she first arrived back from a mission. Formality had been an early casualty of spending months with only the other seven crew members for company. Daryn was a handsome man in his early forties. He had something of a favourite uncle vibe about him, kept his dark hair cropped short, and his blue eyes were friendly, warm.

  ‘I have, Brigadier,’ Mercy replied, ‘and I hung the keys on the hook beside the door.’ Daryn was an Air Force brigadier general. Despite that, he was a pretty good guy to have as your boss.

  ‘Just make sure the capitaine doesn’t go joyriding again. We all know how that ends.’

  Joe rolled his eyes and raised his hands in mock resignation. ‘I take him out for one spin through the rings… Will I ever be allowed to live it down?’ Joe held the rank of capitaine in the French Air and Space Force, which completed the list of military personnel; everyone else was civilian, more or less. He was wiry more than muscular. Blue-eyed, blonde-haired, and good-looking. His hair was short, but hardly cropped, and it came to a fluffy peak over his forehead, a forehead which featured rather woolly eyebrows. His nose was triangular, his lips sensuous. He looked younger than his thirty-one years.

  ‘You dinged the fender,’ Valentin Novikov said. ‘I was hours beating it back out with a hammer. No living it down for you.’ Valentin was the senior engineer on the ship, and their token Russian. He sounded like he had grown up in Brooklyn when he spoke English, but he had been born in Vladivostok and become an engineer. He made looking Russian good. He was strong-jawed, and his shaved skull had the kind of shape to make that appealing. Muscle decorated his trim frame. He was the engineer on Theia because he had basically invented the high-efficiency pulse engine which allowed her to cover the distance to Saturn in a reasonable time. No one knew Theia’s main drive better than Valentin.

  ‘Joking aside,’ Daryn said, ‘how was the trip? Anything interesting?’

  ‘Plenty,’ Nick Harris replied, ‘though nothing especially novel. Yawen collected a lot of rocks she’s eager to get into the geology lab.’

  Yawen raised her plastic mug of coffee. ‘But not eager enough that it cannot wait until I’ve drunk this.’

  Nick and Yawen Yu were the two planetary scientists on the crew. He was an American biochemist, ho
ping to find signs of life on the moon below them. She was a Chinese planetary physicist, concerned with the geology and meteorology of Titan. Mercy knew them both quite well by this point: they were her charges on surface missions. She got on fairly well with Yawen, but Nick had always been a little cold to her. This was despite the fact that he had something of a reputation as a playboy and he had made a couple of plays for the other female crew members. Why he seemed to dislike Mercy, she was not sure.

  Maybe it was the height difference: at six foot, Mercy was two inches taller than Nick and he seemed to dislike looking up at her, avoiding it when possible. He was a handsome blonde, his hair carefully cut into something stylish and backswept. Intelligent, blue eyes looked out of a face with sculpted features, a narrow nose, and thin lips. For an academic, he kept himself fit and was, apparently, an accomplished boxer.

  Yawen was more of a typical academic. She was small and slim. Fit, because she had to be to be on the mission, but not in the least muscular. She wore long black hair in a tight bun and was generally rather unassuming.

  ‘Well, I’m sure you’ll be happy to know that Saturn is still where we left it,’ Marshall Hudson announced. Marsh was their astrophysicist, another American. He spent most of his time on the bridge at the sensor console, monitoring everything he could about Saturn, its moons, and its rings. The data he was gathering was, according to reports, going down really well back on Earth. Marsh was a nerd, but a good-looking one. Mid-brown hair and dark eyes which begged to have glasses over them. He exercised and kept himself neat, and that was more than Mercy expected of someone who could solve quadratic equations in his head.

  ‘How’s the ship?’ Mercy asked. ‘Get that communications problem sorted?’

  ‘Theia is fine,’ Valentin replied. ‘Engine is fine. Reactor is fine. Purring like a kitten.’

  ‘And the comms problem is resolved,’ Sophia Sauter added. She was the junior engineer, mostly responsible for the electronic systems. If Mercy had not mentioned a glitch in the laser comms system, she would likely have remained silent. Sophia was a quiet sort of girl who suffered a bit more of the sexual frustrations of the male crew than Mercy or Yawen did. She was a pretty, almost cute girl, and her nature gave her a hard time when fending off advances. In particular, Mercy had had to step in to tell Nick to back off. Maybe that was Nick’s problem with Mercy.

  Mercy could understand Nick’s feelings, even if she felt they were inappropriate. Sophia was a brunette, keeping her hair in a ponytail which ended just past her shoulder blades. She tried to keep it out of her eyes, but it refused to accept this treatment and there were always a few strands hanging down beside her right cheek. She had deep, dark eyes, a pert nose, and moderately full lips, all set into a vaguely heart-shaped face. She was fit, slim, and trim. She was gorgeous. If not for chain of command, Mercy might have made a pass at her herself.

  ‘We got messages through from Earth last night,’ Daryn said. ‘We figured we might as well wait for you to come back rather than sending them down.’

  Mercy nodded. ‘I doubt there’s anything particularly urgent. Joe probably has five different girlfriends telling him how much they miss him, but I doubt a few hours is going to be a problem when he replies.’

  ‘I make it a rule to have no more than three girlfriends at a time,’ Joe replied.

  ‘That’s a lie. There are three back on Earth and two here. Don’t tell me you aren’t in love with Theia and Pallas.’

  ‘Ah, but yes. You have me there. Even though I think of Pallas as a boy, I am in love.’ It was only half a joke. No woman could really compete for Joe’s affections when her opposition was his love of flying. Air or space, it made no difference. Give him a jet fighter and he would always find it more attractive than any girlfriend he might find. It was no wonder the man had never married.

  ‘I’ll go find out whether I have anything interesting to read,’ Mercy said, starting for her cabin. ‘I doubt it. No one waiting for me back home.’

  ‘That, Colonel Garner, is a crying shame.’ Joe was joking, Mercy was sure, but at least he took the time to flirt with her a little. It was not that she thought of herself as plain, but she did think her face was more handsome than it was beautiful. She was tall and solidly built. Her chest was not flat, but it was hardly expansive. She had more muscle than was generally considered attractive in a woman. Her jawline was strong, her nose a solid, straight triangle. She kept her dark-brown hair cut into a short bowl. She did have quite startling blue eyes and full lips, but overall she was not too surprised that the men favoured Sophia.

  ‘Tell me about it.’

  ~~~

  The song of Saturn pervaded the bridge of the Theia when Mercy arrived to run one of the periodic checks she and Daryn performed, mainly because someone back on Earth would get annoyed if they did not. She headed for the command console, grinning at Marsh as she did so. ‘Listening to Saturn again, Marsh?’

  The astrophysicist was at his console, fingers working over keys as he refined some analysis or other. It was a common sight. And then he said, ‘Nope.’

  ‘Really? My ears say–’

  ‘This isn’t from Saturn. That song you usually hear has to be compressed and frequency-shifted before you get what you recognise. This… This is something else. It’s coming from the wrong direction, for one thing. And the frequency range is broader.’

  The sound playing through the bridge’s speakers was a sort of modulated white noise, a rushing, swooping sound with patterns of clicks and the odd elongated whistle thrown in. Now Mercy really listened to it, it was not quite the same as the usual sound from Saturn’s plasma wave emissions. There was almost something unnatural about it, as though it were being produced by some form of electronics. Mercy was self-aware enough to know that that was just her brain trying to find patterns in random sounds.

  ‘So, what is it?’ she asked.

  ‘I have no idea. I’m trying to get a solid source location for it, but it seems to be coming from a very wide, very thin band of space. It’s really wide. I’m having trouble identifying the outer edges.’

  Mercy frowned. ‘That doesn’t sound especially good.’

  ‘Why do you think I’m trying so hard to figure out where it’s coming from?’

  ‘I’ll report it to Daryn. If you get anything else, let us know.’

  ‘Soon as I know, you will.’

  30th January.

  ‘I still don’t know what it is, but it’s getting closer.’

  Daryn looked across the break room table at Marsh and frowned. ‘You’re sure? It’s definitely coming this way?’

  ‘The amplitude of the radio signals has been rising at a steady rate. Electromagnetic waves diminish with the square of the distance from the source, so I can give an estimate that the source is getting closer at around one percent of the speed of light. Unfortunately, since I can’t see the source and I don’t know the strength of the original signal, I can’t really give much idea of when it might reach us.’

  ‘You’ve discovered an invisible source of radio waves that’s travelling through space at one percent of lightspeed,’ Nick said. ‘Congratulations.’

  ‘Thanks, I think.’

  ‘It’s not possible.’

  ‘I’m not disagreeing. Entirely. It’s there, however, and as confirmation, I’m starting to see higher-energy photons and charged particles coming from the same direction. If the amplitude of those signals goes up like the radio signals, we could be looking at a serious radiation hazard at some point in the near future.’

  ‘What does Earth say?’ Mercy asked.

  ‘Huh. “Send more data.”’

  ‘In case this needs saying,’ Daryn said, ‘this is your priority at the moment.’

  Marsh shook his head. ‘It didn’t need saying. It already was.’

  ~~~

  ‘What am I looking at?’ Daryn asked, peering at the image Marsh was displaying on the sensor console’s main display.

  ‘I thi
nk I see it,’ Mercy said. Reaching out, she pointed at a white blur among other blurs within a starfield. ‘This is distorted, smeared. A gravitational distortion.’

  ‘Mercy wins the no-prize,’ Marsh said. ‘There are several stars in this image which are smeared out into strips or just not where they should be. Something out there is causing gravitational lensing. A… string of distorted space is moving toward us.’

  ‘A string?’ Daryn asked. ‘Like a cosmic string?’

  ‘That’s why I didn’t want to use the word “string.” It can’t be a cosmic string. Can’t be. It’s huge. Making some assumptions about the way it’s moving, it has to be around ten astronomical units wide. A cosmic string that long would have truly incredible mass. A cosmic string a kilometre in length should weigh as much as Earth. Something this size… We’d have detected the gravitational waves as it moved. I think we’re seeing something else. And we’re going to get an up-close and personal view of it in… two days. Then it’ll continue on toward Earth, stopping by a few other planets on the way.’

  ‘Do you know when?’ Mercy asked. ‘When it’ll hit Earth?’

  ‘If my estimate for it hitting us is right, it’ll get to Earth around the sixth of February. It hits Mars and Mercury, and the Sun, before then. Earth and Venus get hit around the same time. I have no idea what might happen when it does.’

  ‘Or what happens when it hits us?’

  ‘I can make some educated guesses, but it depends a lot on exactly what’s out there and exactly how close it comes to us.’

  ‘It could rip the ship apart,’ Daryn stated flatly.

  ‘That is certainly one option that’s going to keep me awake for the next couple of nights.’

  ‘Even if it doesn’t,’ Mercy said, ‘it looks like we’re going to be swamped in hard radiation. We need to make preparations.’

  Daryn drew in a long breath through his nose and let it out slowly. ‘Yes, we do. We’ll get our heads together, talk to Earth, and come up with something to give us a fighting chance. Meanwhile, we gather all the data we can on that… wave, and we send it on to Earth. If you’re right, Marsh, they’ve got about a week to prepare themselves.’