Adam's Rings

by Matthew D. White

  “Opening transmission looks good,” Prescott announced. “I’ve got a clear shot of the surface, I’d say at sub-three-meter resolution.”

  Adam sighed deeply in relief, only then noticing he’d been holding his breath. His work was on point and with any luck, in a few orbits they’d find a decent landing site. “Copy that. Let me know if the returns degrade, and I’ll adjust as needed.”

  The pair of ships completed nine full orbits of the rocky moon, working outward from the equator in passes angled both to the north and south. Whatever conversation went on between the Hydra team members, Adam wasn’t included. Hours passed in stony silence as he drifted along, alone on the miniscule flight deck, as he watched Titan steadily rotate outside. The possibilities gnawed at his stomach with each passing minute, his mind inventing multitudes of priceless discoveries of which he was not a part.

  “The computer is coming up with five suitable landing sites near the oceans,” Prescott finally announced, breaking the tranquility. “Best score for flat terrain, plus nearby dormant features for study puts us at plus-forty-five-degrees latitude, aiming for Mayda Island. Discontinue imaging, prepare for descent.”

  “Copy all,” Adam replied, switching off the radar. “Lander Two holding steady.”

  He watched as the leading ship disconnected from its booster stage and began the trek through the moon’s shallow gravity well before it disappeared beyond his field of view. The extra stage remained in place and quietly drifting, waiting for the team’s eventual return, minus a landing array and equipment pod.

  Minutes passed before Martinez’s voice came through the channel. “Cap’n, I should have you back… Good, you’re going to experience intermittent communication blackouts when you pass to the far side of the moon. I’ve set up a live video feed that will pipe to you nonstop when in view so you can keep up with our progress.”

  “Thanks, I’ve been blind as a bat here. Bringing it up,” Adam said. The monitor to his left flickered to life, displaying a split-screen view from two separate cameras: one wide angle of the lander’s flight deck and a second mounted above the airlock, pointed outward and facing a rush of swirling clouds.

  “We’ve got eyes on a landing site. Mayda Island’s southern point passes visual inspection. Some flat space, plus easy reach to the ocean.”

  The mission specialist’s description was far rosier than the reality, Adam fully understood, although he didn’t have a reason to distrust the plan; there was simply no better way to put it. Titan was as brutally cold as the rest of space, and the liquid bodies of the moon weren’t water but liquid methane, which found a home in the negative-three-hundred-degree atmosphere. Even though the stated mission was in part to look for signs of life, Adam was at a loss as to what it would look like or if they would recognize it at all. For all they knew, the only building blocks present could be locked inside the rocks of frozen water which littered the tattered landscape.

  All five of the passengers stared intently at their personal workstations, with Prescott at the center managing the descent. For once, the cabin occupants were mute, save for the occasional status check.

  “Glide slope is within tolerance,” Prescott acknowledged as the ship continued through the thick atmosphere of the moon. “Coming up on the landing site, thirty seconds.”

  As Adam watched, the final layer of clouds gave way to a sprawling range of mountains in the distance and rolling hills closer in. The available light was tinted deep yellow at the edge of orange and refracted in wide beams through the churning atmosphere. As they moved, the exterior feed became distorted, as if they had picked up significant vibrations in the thickening air, lightening up only when the lander’s support engines engaged.

  “Braking. Coming in to deposit equipment pod,” Prescott said, bringing the ship to a hover and touching down lightly with the lower extremity of the support shelter. It disconnected and the lander jolted upward as he adjusted the engine output, letting it drift lightly to the side and come to a stop on the level ground. A sharp skip translated through the camera mount as the terrain beyond the windows came to a halt. “Landing complete,” he said, updating the crew as the whine of the engines dissipated to the inaudible. Prescott leaned back and flexed his fingers after keeping a death grip on the controls for some minutes. “Cap’n, over to you.”

  Cooper immediately took over as the mission’s commanding officer, seamlessly laying out the procedures to secure the site as they had been planning since the beginning of their assignment. Adam watched and listened to him through the monitor, taking the mannerisms as a lesson in his own development. Cooper effortlessly took to the front, easily switching between gathering information on the terminals and delivering orders to his team.

  Being apart from the activity did little to stabilize Adam’s faith in his own actions; part of him considered it below his abilities, and he wished again for the opportunity to do the job he had been constructed to perform. As he watched the exchange, filing away the confidence more than the mere words, the feed began to turn to snow as he escaped over the horizon of the moon and lost line of sight to their landing location. Initially, he jumped at the warning, but it only took a second for Adam’s consciousness to catch up and remind him that all was as expected. He settled back, again waiting for the orbit to progress.

  The capsule was silent for over an hour before the monitor came back to life. It instantly caught Adam’s attention, and he looked down to see the first mobility-suit-wearing astronaut pass through the airlock and stand at the edge of the lander’s access platform. He looked out across the landscape with what Adam could only imagine was the steely-eyed gaze of a great explorer planting a flag on a new continent before continuing on his way down to the ground.

  Either that, or Adam imagined the man issuing another sophomoric euphemism without regard to the immensity of their mission.

  “We’ve got a good landing,” Adam heard Hassan’ voice carry through the channel as he stepped out onto the surface of the moon. “Ground is stable. No immediate signs of fissures or weakness. Weather is clear at the moment. I can see a few good miles in every direction. Moving to equipment pod.”

  Hassan rounded the corner of the lander and carefully shuffled to the separate equipment pod that Prescott had dropped on their descent. “Seal is good on the package,” he added as he performed a cursory inspection. “Extending the slides.”

  The equipment pod was fitted with eight individual slides, which would extend out from the center upon landing and provide additional interior space for a small set of quarters, a pair of airlocks, and a handful of specialized facilities. The setup would leave a significant open space at the center to be utilized by the crew as they saw fit. After the deployment of the power generators and a handful of the support systems, the team would have the beginnings of the first real settlement on the surface of Titan.

  Following Hassan down the ramp was Cooper, his swaying footsteps significantly different from the rest of the team and easy to make out on the monitor. Like Hassan, he paused in the shadow of the lander, taking in the wide horizon from the minimal protection of his mobility unit’s visor. “Lieutenant P, you picked a prime location. I’ve got quite the view down here.” He followed in Hassan’s footsteps and assisted with the manual components of the pod deployment before continuing onward to setting up a series of environmental sensors across the roofline. “Hassan, what’s the status on the air supply?”

  “Life support in the shelter started on the first attempt. Supply is at forty percent and rising. Give it another ten minutes to clean up the full volume.”

  Through the exchange and the real-time reporting of the status on the ground, Adam remained in place, floating in the spare capsule, silent, and as usual, alone. He still appreciated the respite from the mentally draining interaction with the crew, but he continually sensed as if he was pushed off and shuffled aside in favor of their more alluring discovery. Again it dug at him, as there wasn’t a single movement requi
red by the Hydra crew that he saw which he couldn’t perform equally well, if not better.

  Adam had been the only one who made landfall before that day and was arguably the most experienced lander pilot in the fleet. For all the banter and nitpicking of the Hydra’ crew, they had been unable to find fault with his skills in mission planning or execution, which further ground into his heart.

  He detested the sensation of jealousy at the present, where he was party to an assignment he hadn’t previously wanted nor had planned to make. It was childish, Adam knew, to simply want more than what the others had given to him, but he couldn’t come to force his mind to table the argument. He disconnected from the environment and told himself to accept the way that things had transpired, his position in the mission, and the immensity of the action.

  There would be more, Adam reminded his nagging mind. He was alone for the moment, but it wouldn’t last. They’d leverage the additional manpower to scout the local area, bring more material to the station, and then the Hydra would be off for its next adventure, leaving him on Draco to do as he willed. Nothing stopped him from returning to Titan on his own the next time, continuing to expand the base and going beyond what was already thought to be at the limits of human engineering.

  Adam’s mind corrected itself and continued to feed him hopeful scenarios of the future as he again drifted out of sight of the lander and into the grim isolation on the dark side of Titan. Little changed on the following orbit as the team began to peruse the local area, mapping out landmarks and continuing their exploration. On the third, they deployed a tiny rover from a hold on the shelter, which looked to be scarcely larger than a quad bike, and loaded its tiny cargo area down with a stack of the exploratory pods he had seen earlier in the equipment bay.

  The Hydra crew continued in much the same way over the proceeding hours, steadily mapping and sampling the area between longer drives out to the foothills of the nearest mountains. Adam maintained his watch via the monitors, switching on a regular schedule between the shot from the flight deck, the external feed by the primary airlock, and a camera mounted to the vehicle as it ventured around the plain.

  Stevenson stayed behind and used a pick to test the ground in their vicinity before deploying a coring rig and beginning the task of digging deeper into the terrain. It was evidently far slower going than the task had been on Janus, Adam realized, as Stevenson didn’t babysit the individual tubes and simply busied himself elsewhere while the rig slowly churned into the frozen soil.

  Their immediate surrounding area seemed fairly stable, despite being sandwiched between a pair of methane lakes. Adam still wished to have seen it in person and not via the tiny screen, but he resolved to bring the topic up on the next orbit once their survey had been completed. Static grew in the monitor as he descended out of view of the site and began the long trek across the dark side of Titan.

  Hours later, as the signal’s connection became restored, Adam casually glanced across the returns. His heart froze at the sight.

  The lander was gone.

  ***

  “I’m reading eighty-seven percent on the fuel cell; range just cleared ten miles. You still tracking on me?”

  “Loud and clear,” Martinez replied to Hassan’s transmission from his seat in the lander. “Continue with the survey. How’s the terrain?”

  “The plain is stable with a gentle slope. We’ll be making the turn to follow it soon,” Hassan said.

  Stevenson broke in on the transmission. “There are more thin fissures across the ground filled with sediment, so we can assume there is some geological activity, at least in the distant past.” He stopped. “It’s still hazy, but I can get some reflection from the ocean to the south.”

  “Copy all,” Martinez said and flipped off his radio. The mission’s protocol dictated strict assignments whenever a team became geographically separated. Two would pilot the rover on every mission, and a third would always be standing by on the lander’s flight deck to respond in case of emergency.

  Prescott and Cooper were still outside, busying themselves with the last of the shelter’s assembly, although they were all waiting on the results of Stevenson’s data. Not only the cores from near the landing site, but he had also collected surface samples all the way down the plain to identify any other mineral changes.

  It all served to leave Martinez in the quiet comfort of the lander, alert to emergencies, but otherwise idle while on call. Isolation training had prepared them well for the experience of being outside of communication with anyone else and having a duty cycle of ninety-nine percent boredom and one percent complete and total panic.

  Outside, Stevenson brought the rover to a halt and collected another glass bottle of grit from the surface, carefully marking its location and adding it to the collection. “Ready for the ocean?” he asked Hassan rhetorically before turning the vehicle toward the shimmering object in the distance.

  Hassan felt odd about calling Kraken Mare an ocean, as such a word conveyed it to be a body of water. The truth, being more deadly and interesting in the outer solar system, was that it was comprised of liquid methane and other trace minerals, condensed in the frigid atmosphere.

  Chemical interactions would be far different in the frozen bath than any primordial seas on Earth, he knew, and although he was looking forward to the probe’s data, he wondered whether they’d recognize life, even if it was right in front of them.

  The plain turned to an incline as they slid closer to the hydrocarbon ocean’s edge, but Stevenson stopped once again at an overlook. The pitch began to increase dramatically ahead of them, causing him to rightly worry about the rover’s ability to traverse it.

  “How much farther?” Hassan asked.

  “Maybe two or three hundred yards. We can walk a probe down.”

  “You think?”

  “We’ll have to. If the soil collapses, it’ll take hours to get the rover up this again,” Stevenson said and got to his feet. He released one of the probes and rested it across his shoulders for the hike down. “Bring the controls so we can have a look around.”

  Hassan nodded and complied, activating one of the signal relays next to the rover and bringing the control pad as he followed the astronaut down the slope. Despite the terrain, they ate the distance relatively quickly and soon stood at the edge of the sea of liquid methane.

  The surface was perfectly still, resembling more closely an endless mirror which reflected the thin trails of clouds far above. At its edge, the liquid was clear, allowing them to see through the surface all the way to the ground below, without a single bit of sediment obscuring their sight. There it had rested for eons, perfectly preserved for the moment when a sentient being would wander to its surface. Stevenson unloaded the probe from his shoulders and tossed it in the surf, the sudden splash making Hassan jump.

  “The hell was that?” he demanded.

  Stevenson laughed. “Keeping this party moving. Stand back or get wet.”

  Hassan shook his head but went for the controls. The main screen lit up, surrounded by an array of softkeys, and showed a generalized output as it attempted to connect to and then stabilize the probe.

  The probe’s visual output was provided from an array of pinhole cameras which ringed the body, each one being set deep into the skin and small enough to maintain the surface tension and keep the liquid at bay. The picture coalesced as a wide-screen image of the sea floor below, lacking in detail aside from the shadowy ripples of the splash. “Good connection,” Hassan announced as he spun the unit and brought it to the surface a few yards away.

  “Copy. Let’s get moving so we can watch it from the good screen,” Stevenson said and turned away to trudge back up the embankment. He dropped into the driver’s seat and waited for Hassan, whose eyes were caged on the probe’s controls, to do the same.

  “The ground drops off fast under the surface,” Hassan remarked as his driver turned the rover about. A distinct rumble echoed beneath their seats. He dropped the contro
ls as his head snapped up with Stevenson’s doing the same. “What the hell was that?”

  “That’s… that’s the fissure,” Stevenson mumbled and dropped the throttle. “Hold on!” he yelled, spinning the vehicle about and gunning it up the hill.

  “What’s wrong?” Hassan asked again.

  “We disturbed the ground enough to split it. Must be a weak point by the shelf.” He cursed as the landscape ahead turned white. The ground broke, spewing a wall of pressurize water up before them, released from its tomb below the surface. Stevenson swerved to miss the plume but caught the edge. The rover lifted up and flipped aside as if it were hit by a mine, tumbling back down the embankment.

  The equipment racks to the rear provided just enough clearance to keep them from going face-first into the ground, but did nothing to contain Stevenson, who went flying without his restraints attached. He rolled to a stop, cursing again and forcing himself to concentrate on the rover’s spiraling form. The remaining probes and relays went flying and rolled about the hillside, but he saw no sign of Hassan.

  “Dammitall, we’re gonna have a problem out here!” he shouted through the radio, getting to his feet and stumbling toward the overturned vehicle. “Hass, where you at?” he called out, nearly tripping as his balance struggled to keep up with the swirling terrain.

  A groan permeated the crash and Stevenson rounded the site. Hassan was sprawled on the ground, the leading fender of the rover stabbed cleanly through his suit and deep into his lower leg. Stevenson cursed again, trying to make out the extent of the injury amidst the jet of escaping breathable oxygen and thrashing of his companion.

  “Base, Hassan’s pinned under the rover with a compromised suit, probably broken leg,” he announced over the radio. “I’m gonna need a hand out here.”