On the Shores of Titan's Farthest Sea

by Michael Carroll

  “Once established here, we will be in a good bargaining position. Where governments are not willing to negotiate, we will be equipped to use force, but this will not be our first option. It’s just too expensive. We go from here to the Jovian system, solidify the asteroids, and finally worry about the outer ice giants, Uranus and Neptune. Kuiper Belt objects like Pluto and Sedna can wait for a while, as they are not as strategically important. What we want is to control the entire outer Solar System. This will present us with riches beyond what the old players of the inner system have been wallowing in for the past century. Our plan offers a new order, a new economy to the Solar System, and it offers the brave ones in this room, the ones willing to come along, not only monetary wealth but power and influence. Isn’t that better than owning a few science outposts and frontier towns on an orange ball of ice?”

  Montenegro’s soliloquy was met with stunned silence. Kinto turned to Jessie and whispered, “Is the man batty?”

  “Delusional, I think,” Jessie said.

  A few people began to clap in the back of the room, uncertain of whether Montenegro was completely serious or not. He certainly looked that way. As soon as they did, Clark took up the lead, clapping energetically. The room filled with affirmation of its leader’s new vision for the outer Solar System.

  “You guys have something against wealth and influence and power?” Marv Holliman scolded over the noise. “What’s wrong with you?” He joined in the applause.

  © Springer International Publishing Switzerland 2015

  Michael CarrollOn the Shores of Titan's Farthest SeaScience and Fiction10.1007/978-3-319-17759-5_28

  28. Slithering Things

  Michael Carroll1

  (1)Littleton, CO, USA

  Tanya couldn’t count the times she had rubbed her eyes. Her neck hurt. Her shoulders felt like they had fossilized. Several of the electron microscope’s delicate instruments were on the fritz. She had imaged all kinds of mysterious micro-structures in the benthic seawater of Titan, but nothing definitively left over from life processes. And she was tired. She looked at her chronometer.

  “How can it only be two?” she moaned to her silent monitor. “Time for a break.”

  She stood, arched her back, wiggled her hips from side to side, and closed her eyes as she rubbed her shoulder. Tanya made her way from the lab down the corridor and into the main galley. She took a yogurt and a hot tea and made her way to a remote table out of the way.

  She closed her eyes again. Her lids felt like sandpaper. She let the sounds of the kitchen lull her—the gentle clanking of utensils, the bubbling water, the sizzle of something frying.

  “We obviously can’t serve them this,” said one of the cooks. “Just look at those.”

  “Keep your voice down,” said another. Tanya sat forward and strained to hear. The first voice belonged to a man who didn’t seem interested in keeping his volume down in the least.

  “But what are those? How did they get in there? They’re so…slimy!”

  The voice of a woman, the voice that had encouraged him to be more discreet, spoke in a calming tone, “I don’t see anything in there. You need to sit down.”

  “Ew!” came yet a third voice, another woman’s. “I think he’s right. Hey, there is something in there. It’s long. It’s like—”

  “An eel?” the man’s voice said. “A red eel?”

  “Grab the lid—it’s going to get out!”

  “You two are crazy. It’s just vegetable soup.”

  “Yeah, with a side of serpents.”

  “Maybe we just need to cook it some more. Never saw a pink eel before. Disgusting.”

  “Oh, God! It’s big! It’s slithering around! I’m leaving!”

  “Joan—your shift’s not over!”

  Tanya saw the woman burst through the kitchen door and out into the hallway. She stopped out by the porthole. Tanya went out to her. She was breathing hard.

  “Are you okay?” she asked. “Can I help?”

  The woman reeled. She leaned over, hands on her knees, and shook her head. “We are so careful. Keep everything sterile, clean, you know? But that was disgusting.” She shivered.

  “Something in your soup?” Tanya encouraged. The scientist in her wanted to hear firsthand.

  “Vegetable soup a la sea snake or something.”

  The woman was sweating, her eyes wild with horror. Her expression was not commensurate with what she thought she had seen. She was on the verge of losing control. “How about if we go to the Medlab?” Tanya said in a soothing tone.

  The woman let Tanya guide her down the hall. “They really were pretty, though. Pink and sort of fluffy. They had these little sparkles. Almost like sequins.”

  Tanya stopped walking. She looked at the woman. What was so familiar about that description? The cold had returned to her.

  They set out toward the Medlab again. As the women turned the last corridor, Troy nearly collided with them.

  “Watch it!” he yelled, careening around them. He paused and looked back. “Sorry, Tanya. Gotta set sail. I’ll be back.”

  He carried a bundled object about the size of a microwave food synthesizer. Whatever it was, it was weighing him down hard as he rammed through the hatch toward the storage areas. It seemed that nobody was on their game today.

  (*)

  “My friends, we first need to take Mayda Station.” The Admiral carried himself like a matador in a bullring, self-assured and equipped to be completely deadly at a moment’s notice. He spread his hands before him. “What you have done here is wonderful, if one likes caves, but Mayda will become our base of operations. It will be abandoned soon enough, either voluntarily or by force. We have a plan to disable the station’s nuclear power plant without any explosives or violence.”

  Marv scowled across the room at Clark in disbelief. “We?,” he grumbled under his breath.

  “Did the good Commodore steal something of yours? Like an idea?” Kinto asked in a whisper. “That’s just the beginning if Montenegro has his way.”

  “This project is already in progress at Mayda, as are other parts of our strategy,” Montenegro continued. “I have dispatched a team to confiscate the satellite communications assembly from the mesa to the east of the outpost, which will effectively cut their backup communication to the outside world. Mayda Research Station will suffer a rather quick demise unless the scientists and support staff there seek help, and we, of course, will be here to lend it, as their communications equipment will be sadly too underpowered to seek outside aid. By the time they learn of our existence here, they will not see us as a threat, but rather as their saviors. Additionally, the main center of command and control for outer planets operations on Vesta is now ours.” Excitement rolled through the room on a tsunami of amazement.

  “He’s done his homework,” Jessie said over the cacophony of the audience.

  “Still have doubts?” Marv asked Kinto.

  “More than ever.” He didn’t stay for the end of the speech.

  (*)

  Tanya spotted Abby outside of “Pepe’s Watering Hole” bar, the most northern south-of-the-border drinking establishment on Titan. “Abby, come join me for cold ones.”

  Abby seemed to be rushing off somewhere, but she hesitated and examined Tanya’s eyes. “Hey, you look exhausted.”

  “Got a headache.”

  “Your eyes look like the Martian canyon system. Looks like you’re empty. I’m buying. What’ll you have?”

  Abby sat down next to Tanya on a cherry-red bar stool, its chrome rim shining like it had been polished moments before.

  “Smith and Kearns. Where were you headed?” Tanya asked, massaging the back of her neck.

  Abby ordered the drinks. “Piers wanted to see me at four, but I’ve still got some time.”

  “I miss him, Anya. I miss Kevin.”

  “Me, too.”

  Tanya was tired of fighting the tears. She let them flow. “Kevin was special. Do you know what I mean?”


  “Yes, he was.”

  “No, I mean, special to me. For me.”

  Abby’s mouth opened into a little circle as her eyebrows rose. “You and Kevin—”

  Tanya swallowed hard. “I don’t think peoples knew.”

  “I don’t think peoples knew either,” Abby said absently. “It was him you were talking about, wasn’t it? How close were you?”

  “I was going to have baby.”

  That’s pretty close, Abby thought. But she said nothing. She leaned over and gave Tanya a hug. “I’m so sorry.”

  Tanya sniffled. “Da. Me, too. But we move off.”

  “Move on.”

  “Thank you. We move on. See, I am learning. You are only one to help me. Other people are afraid or something.”

  “I’m happy to, sweetie. We female scientists gotta stick together, right?”

  “Affirmatif.”

  “But a loss like that…you don’t just move on. You work to keep going, day by day, but you don’t just go to the next thing. You let yourself be sad, have lonely times, hurt. Otherwise you don’t heal.”

  Abby wondered how much of that she had done over the years. Jeremy told her she hadn’t done enough, that she had substituted work for grief, making up for what her parents could not accomplish in their lives cut short. But where did one draw the line? She was an independent woman, a top researcher in her field. She’d gone on lecture circuits, written professional articles and popular books. Didn’t all that help? Or did she do it to keep the shadows of her past at bay?

  Tanya broke in. “Oh, I am doing sad and lonely and hurt. No problem there.”

  “Tanya, I loved Kevin as a friend. Not in the way you did, certainly. But we will do this together.” She squeezed Tanya around her shoulders.

  “Yes, you and me, gluing together.”

  “Speaking of sticking together, have you seen Troy?”

  “Last time I saw him he was headed for little cruise, so he said.”

  Abby looked alarmed. “In the sub?”

  Tanya buried her face in her hands and leaned against the counter. “I’m not knowing.”

  Abby let it go. The drinks came. She nursed her margarita for a few moments. Where could Troy be going in the sub? Surely not off to do research. He wanted her with him to help out. Maybe he was recalibrating some equipment. But that didn’t make sense either. No, something was up, and she was going to find out just what that was. Whatever he was up to, it had certainly been a revelatory happy hour.

  © Springer International Publishing Switzerland 2015

  Michael CarrollOn the Shores of Titan's Farthest SeaScience and Fiction10.1007/978-3-319-17759-5_29

  29. A Ping of a Different Frequency

  Michael Carroll1

  (1)Littleton, CO, USA

  Troy had chosen this particular model of submersible because it was designed specifically for deployment by one person. It wasn’t that difficult. He was in the sub, under the surface of Kraken Mare, and under way in no time at all. He left the boat trailer conspicuously by the shore, but he wasn’t worried. Soon everyone at Mayda would be far too preoccupied with other things to notice his little trailer.

  Troy gave the drill a wide berth. He felt its pounding in his ears, felt its deep throb in his chest, even tasted its acid in his mouth and smelled its pungent metals and lubricants in his nostrils. It was a beast, towering into the sky. He decided to take a look from a distance.

  The top of the boat was a good 2 m beneath the waves, but within periscope depth. He sent the little mast upward until it broke into clear air. There it was, atop the rugged promontory of ice, rocking back and forth like a lumbering troll. And something was up on its tubing, above the cab. Not something. Someone. It looked like that burly engineer guy who Tanya worked with. What was he doing out there? He seemed to be crawling upward, and he was looking down at the water. His body language communicated one thing: fear.

  The sub continued to move away. The drill and its tiny mountaineer slid from view, dissolving into the auburn miasma. Troy walked back to the prow of the little ship and strapped in for the duration of the voyage. The base on the north coast would be a short trip. He knew; he had done it several times before. The sea was rough today, so he dropped the sub to a greater depth. The craft had a nice feel to it, like a kayak on a calm lake. He could sense the currents in the joystick, play with them as an eagle plays with the updrafts of a canyon wall.

  The smooth, quiet ride was interrupted by a ping. It came from the sonar. One ping. Troy squinted into his monitor. A second echo rang ominously, and then a third more rapidly after. Something was there. What was it?

  The pings came more often now, but they took on a random nature, an irregularity. Out the window, in the distant twilight of the beam, he could see it coming. Serpent-like, undulating, it came slowly, gracefully. The long neck moving in an almost perfect sine wave, the bulbous head scarcely bobbing, steadily lancing through the methane bath. Then came the whale-like body, the pinniped flippers, the humps along the back. The creature turned away from the ship and the light, but the echoes continued. Another was somewhere ahead, and another. An entire school of them awaited him out there in the murky sea. School? Or would they be called a pod? He wondered.

  The sonar had taken on a strange frequency, no longer random, but not the metronomic heartbeat of a mechanical device, either. Rather, the sounds had morphed into chime-like rhythms, and then whispers, like gentle woodwinds or panpipes.

  And then they arrived. Two. Three. Half a dozen of the leviathans. Several must have been 20 m long, Troy guessed. As they passed, the ship shuddered. They seemed an awful lot like his aunt’s description of Nessie, except for their color. In the white beam of the sub’s floodlights, the creatures took on the appearance of a nice Cabernet Blush. Wine sounded good about now, come to think of it. Soft, rippling curtains of lavender flesh—perhaps gills?—trailed from the backs of their necks and sparkled in the light. There was a grace about them. If they hadn’t been so large, so terrifyingly powerful, the primordial monsters would have reminded him more of children’s toys.

  (*)

  “Let me show you something,” Piers told Abby as he pulled a chair away from his work station. She sat and looked over his shoulder at his monitor. Green sheets of light undulated across the screen, overlapping like the aurorae in a Montana sky. “These lovely waves come from all kinds of sources. The tall ones, here and here, are from Saturn’s magnetosphere. These little spikes are from several of the outposts to the south. And these nice big roller coasters are from us, from Mayda Station itself. It’s like an electromagnetic symphony, and on this screen, a visual symphony, always going on around us. It’s beautiful in its own way. Do you see the balance, the overlapping textures and patterns?”

  Abby nodded quickly. “You’ve just proven what you said earlier: a person can find beauty in the strangest places.”

  “Not so strange when you think about it. Water bottle?” He waved one at her.

  “No thanks.”

  “Now, I scroll down the timeline a little, and…there. See that little peak?”

  Abby squinted. “Looks like something punched through your beautiful little symphony.”

  “Something did. A ping. Just a single one. All your talk about things going on around the north shore got me interested. This little ping is subtle, but it’s there. It’s distinctive. Someone settled into Titan orbit two days ago. Someone who didn’t want to be seen or heard. Whoever these people are, they’re employing a frequency that used to be employed as a carrier signal on old robotic cargo ships. Pretty clever. Really hard to find.”

  “Ah, but you found it,” Abby nudged him with admiration.

  “Yes, I suppose I did.”

  There was worry on his face. She said, “There’s something you’re not telling me.”

  “The reason I found it was because I was looking for it. Specifically. I read that this communications trick was one used back in the days of asteroid mining
by the pirates.”

  “The Martian emirates? Guys like that?”

  “Exactly.”

  “You think that’s the kind of thing we’re dealing with? I knew it. I tried to tell Troy.”

  “Yeah, well Troy’s another thing. I’m wondering if—that’s odd.” He frowned, leaning toward the screen.

  “What?”

  “I have a low power reading on my—oh, there’s another one.”

  The lights flickered.

  Abby leaned over to Piers with an urgent look. “What kind of reading?”

  The screen blanked. Suddenly, the only light in the room was the orange glow from the tiny porthole in Piers’ wall.

  “That can’t be good,” Abby whispered.

  “And where’s our backup juice?”

  Red lights faded on. One small screen popped to life on Piers’ console.

  “There,” Abby said. “Your screens seem to be coming back.”

  “No, just this one, and it’s bad news. This is an emergency monitor, very low energy. It only comes on when the others will be down for a while.”

  “Looks like we have a big problem somewhere,” Abby said.

  “And will for some time. I don’t know why we aren’t on our main backup power. I’m going to try to get a message out on what we’ve got left, but this station is about to be officially off line and in the dark.”

  © Springer International Publishing Switzerland 2015

  Michael CarrollOn the Shores of Titan's Farthest SeaScience and Fiction10.1007/978-3-319-17759-5_30