On the Shores of Titan's Farthest Sea

by Michael Carroll

  “Yeah, one of those touchy political situations we don’t want to stir up.”

  “So what do we do?”

  “I’ve got someone following her. Them. Whoever they are. Problem is, she could actually be on one or two others. We need to narrow it all down.”

  “Just how fast can those idiots at TBI do that, Sanjay?”

  “Keep your shirt on. They’re working on it. Remember that you used to be one of those idiots. You just go do whatever it is you were doing. Find Sable. Fight crime. Do some knitting.”

  “Right.” Belton severed the connection. He had given up knitting years ago. His fingers were too large. Fighting crime? That sounded too comic book. But finding Sable? That was the ticket.

  © Springer International Publishing Switzerland 2015

  Michael CarrollOn the Shores of Titan's Farthest SeaScience and Fiction10.1007/978-3-319-17759-5_25

  25. Disappearances and Appearances

  Michael Carroll1

  (1)Littleton, CO, USA

  Troy couldn’t believe the audacity of that little bitch. Telling him where to take his ship. Sticking her nose in other people’s business. If he didn’t feel so lousy, he’d take a side trip to Abby’s quarters and tell her what he thought of her. But for now, he needed to get back to the submersible and figure out that stinking engine so he could get going. Of course, the engine hadn’t been as much of a problem as he had made out, but it served as a great excuse. It got him out of an embarrassing and uncomfortable trip to the north shore.

  Racing past Kevin Nordsmitt’s quarters, he noticed a smudge on the wall. It looked, for all the world, like the outline of a hand. He continued on to the warehouse hatch. It opened hard. He slammed it shut. Why was everything fighting him?

  Troy threw the light switches. Frost glistened across the surface of his slick new submersible. It was cool. It was hot, in the best way. He felt like a teenager with his first car. He blew his breath out in little smoke rings as he placed a bundle on the workbench, put on gloves and flicked the switch on the little heater next to his toolbox. Grabbing a diagnostic unit, he sat next to the unruly starboard engine and plugged the instrument into a small aperture in the skin of the craft. As he watched numbers scroll down the screen, he heard a shuffling sound behind him.

  “It won’t do, you know.”

  He recognized the voice of Kevin Nordstmitt. He couldn’t make himself turn around. Instead, he replied unemotionally, “What do you mean?”

  “I mean all this drug stuff. It just won’t do. You know it’s not like me. You know she’s right about that part, at least.”

  A chill had come over the room that wasn’t there before. It had a different quality to it. It wasn’t the chill of cryogenic methane or orange mist. Rather, it was the kind of cold one feels at the sight of a plane crash or a dead animal or a wound one finds that wasn’t there before.

  “Well, yes, I really didn’t think so. But you were obviously covering something up.”

  “As if you aren’t?” There was accusation in the dead man’s voice.

  “That’s just business.” Troy continued to stare at the diagnostic unit in his hand. Its lights blinked away, keeping time with the throbbing of his headache.

  “Everybody has some kind of business, don’t they?” Kevin seemed to be toying with him, and Troy didn’t like it one bit.

  “What kind of business did you have, anyway?” Troy said with as much force as he could muster.

  “Don’t change the subject. You aren’t being a very good friend to her. She should be able to trust you.”

  “She doesn’t trust anybody.”

  “Would you, if you had been through what she has?”

  “You’re dead. What do you know? Why don’t you get out of here?” He turned around. He was alone. And very, very cold.

  (*)

  “Sir,” Sommers called through the partially open hatch. “The cargo ship is in Titan orbit and Montenegro is on final approach.”

  “We gave them one ping?”

  “Standard procedure.”

  “That’s all?”

  “Yessir. One ping.”

  “These days I feel like I need to check. All right. When you detect final descent radar, give them a narrow beam and bring them in.”

  Few members of the “Family” saw the actual landing. The landing area was beyond a distant rise in a secluded natural hollow. The Commodore dispatched two of the big industrial rovers to pick up the crew. The cargo ship was not equipped for landfall, so it would need to be offloaded on orbit. That would take more care and timing, but soon even this type of operation could be done without secrecy. When the chains of the solar establishment had been broken, the Commodore supposed, the Family would rule Titan independently, with the freedom to come and go as they liked. Piracy would give way to accepted political power, and Titan’s new, wealthy rulers might even dispatch diplomats to Ganymede, Mars and Earth to negotiate sweet trade deals. And undoubtedly, his name, Commodore Clark, would become synonymous with founding fathers, early statesmen of the new empire. It was a bright future.

  Montenegro’s crew arrived amidst pomp and festivity. The Admiral was, after all, a celebrity and a hero. The leader made a beeline for the Commodore’s den, trailing an entourage behind him like the train of a bridal gown. The Commodore was already standing when Sommers ushered Montenegro and several of his adjutants in.

  “Clark, I have been looking forward to this.”

  “As have I, Admiral,” the Commodore said. As he spoke the words, Montenegro raised a sort of wand, pointing it toward a desk in the corner.

  “Stiles, you can station yourself over there. Commodore, may I?”

  Clark stood with his mouth open as Montenegro’s second in command began clearing the Commodore’s desk. Another of Montenegro’s minions stepped through the door with a computer console and placed it at the center of what used to be the Commodore’s province.

  “We’ll only need to be here until I move into Mayda Station, of course.”

  Clark stared at the pile of his belongings on the floor. He looked up at Montenegro, who was looking back at him expectantly. Locking into focus, he finally responded, “Oh, of course.”

  “I’ll want to speak to everyone here at Northern Quadrant very soon. Can we set something up for the morning? Say, during breakfast?”

  “Certainly, Admiral.” He jerked slightly as he said the word. “I’ll have Sommers take care of it right away.”

  “Fine, fine. Now, I want a tour. I want to see command and control. I want to see your security center—I assume you have a security center? And I want to see your storage areas. We may need to do some modifying of things to accommodate the supplies we’ve brought.”

  “Supplies?” The Commodore was suddenly intrigued.

  Montenegro smiled at Stiles, then turned back to Clark. “Oh, yes. Lots and lots of them.”

  “Enough for a nice little war,” Stiles put in quietly, peering over his monitor. Montenegro shot him a vicious glance. The man shrugged awkwardly.

  “Clark, we’re burning daylight, what little of it there is here. Let’s get on with it.”

  “Sure. Welcome to my little dominion.” The Commodore said it with enthusiasm, but he wondered just how long he could make it stick.

  © Springer International Publishing Switzerland 2015

  Michael CarrollOn the Shores of Titan's Farthest SeaScience and Fiction10.1007/978-3-319-17759-5_26

  26. Reunion

  Michael Carroll1

  (1)Littleton, CO, USA

  Smooth, desolate mounds stood against the stark black of the sky. Piles of debris, shattered rock and fractured boulder rested uncomfortably on crater rims, leftovers from a more violent past. Stones baked in the blazing sunlight and shimmered with a patina of frozen gases in the shadows. The only sign of life was a metallic framework protruding from a heap of discarded talus. It was good to be home.

  Horf had not yet visited the inhabited interior of asteroid
Vesta. There was no time; he was on a mission. He went straight from the staging sector to the Topside Bar on the comm center level where his friends awaited. It was a party, wasn’t it? Welcome home for the wayward son? Celebration for the traveling friend? He hated to take advantage, but this was important business.

  Horf was well into his third tube of margarita, and his tenth glance at his watch, when she appeared. He hadn’t prepared for this kind of reunion. He had the equipment he needed, and he had the contacts and the strategies and all his ducks in a row. But he was unprepared psychologically for the tsunami that was Charlene Swenson. And her tidal wave broke upon the scene at the most inopportune time.

  “Hey, baby. You’re late,” she cooed.

  “I’ve been here for an hour,” Horf said defensively, letting her scoot in beside him on the low-g couch. Lord, she had long legs. Although he told her he was coming, he hadn’t planned on seeing her this soon. Not before he finished the business at hand. But Vesta was too close a community to keep secrets for long.

  “I mean you’re a coupla years late. I missed you.” She draped an arm over his shoulder and planted her formidable lips on his.

  “Charlene, you really know how to make a guy feel welcomed.”

  “There’s more ‘welcome’ where that came from, kiddo.”

  Reluctantly, he reached up and gently removed her arm from his shoulder. “I’m quite interested in looking into that, but right now, I need to get rid of these three Margaritas I’ve had. Excuse me, sweets?”

  “You get right back here soon, babe.”

  He winked at her and headed for the men’s room. It was just out of sight around a corner. Once there, he continued on past, toward the maintenance section. Fire control was to the left. He pulled a pair of good old fashioned micropliers from his pocket—why not use brute force?—and found the correct subassembly. Once it was disabled, he made his way back to the bar, carefully working around the back of the room out of Charlene’s field of view. He made it to his target, his old buddy Denise.

  “Yo,” he called over the blaring music. “How about that tour. I wanna see the new comm system.”

  “Now?”

  “Carpe tour-um.”

  “Follow me,” she said, her hair swimming around her head like a mermaid’s. Horf had missed the gentle move and sway and slow pace of the low g environment. Mars had been harsh, with its brutal ¼ standard gravity. He was feeling better each day. And after today, if all went well, he would feel great.

  Denise was sharp; she thought about things, why they were the way they were and how they should be different. She was deep. He had to tread carefully with her. Denise was attractive in her own way, though less so than Charlene, but Horf had no time for such distractions. He watched and listened as she introduced him to the crew. “Horf used to do your job, Kenny. And he was a lot better at it.”

  Laughs all around.

  She guided him through several secure areas, although she really shouldn’t, but he was Horf, good ol’ boy, after all. In one corner, under the coolant system for the bank of high gain antenna mains, he placed the little smoke generator. He flipped the switch. It was armed and ready to do his bidding.

  When they got back to the bar, he hit several buttons on his watch in succession. Then he bought Denise a drink, which did not please Charlene, who apparently had decided to become omnipresent. They were just beginning to discuss this terrible social infraction when the fire alarm went off. Bedlam ensued within the nightclub. The entire crew streamed from the communications center. If his colleagues had done their job, the secondary comm center should be fully disabled by now.

  As the mass of humanity made its way toward the emergency exits, Horf moved in the opposite direction, picking up several heavily armed men and women at the door. Two of them had recently played the part of newlywed tourists. He escorted his team to the comm center. Vesta, and navigation command access to the entire outer Solar System, was theirs.

  © Springer International Publishing Switzerland 2015

  Michael CarrollOn the Shores of Titan's Farthest SeaScience and Fiction10.1007/978-3-319-17759-5_27

  27. The Lair

  Michael Carroll1

  (1)Littleton, CO, USA

  Tanya stood on the shore, cradling a new set of samples, her Zodiac staked to the beach. She could hardly wait to get back to her gas chromatograph/mass spectrometer and microprobes. What wonders awaited her from those depths? She took a last glance back.

  Somewhere out beyond the orange smog, the sky above was fading from gray-green to purple as twilight arrived. The dull rust of the landscape would bleed into a ruby red before it faded to black. The drill, nearly a silhouette now, rose above a layer of sickly yellow fog, still pounding away, plunging deep into the viscera of Saturn’s largest moon. The ocean it explored had never seen the light of the feeble Sun, never tasted the bitter methane rains or felt the acrid hydrocarbon dust of a million years’ flurries. What could be down there?

  For decades, her colleagues in astrobiology doubted that the alien ocean held anything but sterile chemistries, intriguing but inert. Tanya ruminated on those dark waters of Titan, cut off above by a hundred miles of ice, and barred below by another hundred from any life-encouraging minerals in that stony core. But she knew the ice was not stable. It billowed and migrated and carried with it impurities from beneath, a slow motion dance akin to the atmosphere’s currents above. Perhaps volcanoes from the core pushed minerals upward, toward that primordial sea. Perhaps, just perhaps, the right combination of things came together there as it had on Earth, Saturn’s Enceladus and, briefly, Mars long ago. The spark of life…was it only for Earth, Enceladus and Mars? Perhaps Tanya would be the one to find out.

  She was just turning from the languorous waves when she saw a shape break the surface. She couldn’t quite make it out in the fading light. It seemed the wrong profile for an errant wave. It sank back quickly, but it left a wake. Waves do not leave a wake, she thought. It was moving. What could it have been? Troy’s submersible? But there was no top tower. The color seemed too dark, even in this light.

  She began to shiver. For some reason, Tanya felt as though it was no longer safe to be out on the shores of Kraken Mare.

  (*)

  The rumor mill was in full swing. Admiral Montenegro planned to blow up Mayda Station. Montenegro was staging a coup soon on Mars, with Iapetus as his base. The Admiral had escaped an insane asylum and was on his way to the Pluto/Charon space elevator with sabotage on the agenda. Montenegro’s captured cargo ship had the Chancellor of Venus aboard. The conjecture went downhill from there.

  The warrens and catacombs of Northern Quadrant Base emptied into the largest central area, a set of three chambers that included the mess hall and a storage warehouse that somebody cleared out just for the occasion. Sixty men and women assembled to hear what the legendary Admiral had to say. Montenegro cut an imposing figure. He wore a robe of ultrafiber that glistened in the floodlights of the warehouse ceiling. In the low gravity, it swung around him like a whirlpool. In his left hand, he carried a baton. It was black and green, with a long black tassel at the top.

  Commodore Clark started waving his hands ineffectively for quiet. Montenegro held one arm aloft. Silence settled upon the room almost immediately. The Commodore stood to the side. He noticed that the Admiral was looking at him expectantly. He obviously wanted an introduction, and Clark knew it had better be good.

  “Ladies and gentlemen, members of the Family, we have the great honor of hosting a man who has helped to build an empire of supply routes and economic trade unmatched in the Solar System today. While the so-called legitimate vessels carry goods from the asteroids and smaller moons to the inner and outer system, our own ships navigate essentially at will, outside of any borders, offering profits far outshining those skimmed off the top by the corporate types on those more civilized worlds.” Here, Clark emphasized the word civilized. He knew it was a hot button. The crowd grumbled in agreement, thumping
their feet, nodding assenting heads and clapping enthusiastic hands. “It is my pleasure to introduce one of the best, a man who began as navigator on a small freighter and worked his way up to become a myth among entrepreneurs and law enforcement alike.” The last triggered laughter and applause. “Fellow sailors of the void, I give you our own Admiral Montenegro.”

  Clark turned and held out his hand to Montenegro, but the man didn’t see it—or ignored it; he had already passed in front to enjoy the accolades. This was going to get old fast, Clark thought.

  Montenegro made a show of speaking before the ovation died down, cutting off the audience before they had time to stop themselves. “I’ve heard some interesting rumors. Have you?”

  To the sound of scattered laughter, a few voices added, “Yeah.” “Oh, yes.”

  “I’m sure you’ve all seen the weapons we’re bringing down, and the armored vehicles and the tactical high-altitude fighters. Believe me, there is more to come. And you know, I heard someone say that Montenegro was taking over Iapetus. Anybody hear that?”

  The crowd was with him now, hooting and agreeing.

  “I also heard someone say, ‘Montenegro is going to create an empire right here on Titan, take Novum Baikonur and Port Antillia. Maybe throw in the Bacab colony for good measure?’”

  The three interlocked rooms erupted with applause, but Montenegro held them at bay. “Why not take the entire Saturn system while we’re at it?”

  Jessie Flannigan leaned toward Marv Holliman and Kinto. “Doesn’t sound like he really wants to stop there, does it?” Kinto shook his head in disbelief.

  As if a favorite team had scored a goal, the crowd exploded into controlled bedlam until the Admiral held up his hands for silence once again. He took a long, cool drink of water and handed the glass back to Stiles, who always seemed to be nearby. Montenegro swung his baton expansively. “The Saturn system, with all its wonders, is far too small a goal for us. Our march begins here, but it is a march. It will move from Titan across the entire Saturn system, from Iapetus to the outposts on Pan and Helene and Phoebe and Enceladus. No stone—not even an icy one—can remain unturned. There can be no infrastructure from which the enemy can take a foothold.