On the Shores of Titan's Farthest Sea

by Michael Carroll

  Getting a massive army through a small airlock would not be easy, so they stood by with grenades to blow the wall out if they needed to. Thanks to Titan’s air pressure, there would not be an explosive decompression if they needed to enter by force. As a precautionary measure, the first group burst through the door without cycling the air, using an emergency decompression procedure. No one was directly on the other side. The corridor was dark. They resealed the lock for the next group and secured the area. As soon as the second group was through, Jeremy found the nearest access monitor and keyed through views of the interiors of North Quadrant. Most of the hallways were dark. Why were all the lights off? Where was everybody?

  He clocked through several more screens. Empty halls. Darkened corridors. Abandoned rooms. Finally, the screen flared with light. The monitor read “galley.” People crammed the chamber cheek to jowl, all stationed at the ends of each other’s guns. They appeared to be holding a massive standoff.

  The Marines had reached a critical mass of several dozen on this side, and another fifty on the far side would converge on the galley area in moments. “Time to move,” Orin said.

  As they made their way quickly down the hall, he noticed a brightly lit hallway to the left, and heard voices. The Sargent Major held the group up, took five with him, and accompanied Jeremy down the corridor. At the end, in a cramped, brightly lit anteroom, Demian Sable slumped on a small metal chair, looking dejected and holding a black and green stick. Surrounding him, and heavily armed, stood Kinto, Marv and Jessie, who introduced themselves as friends of Abigail Marco. By the hangdog expression on Sable’s face, it certainly appeared so.

  “Abby called us as soon as she blew off the control panel on the Admiral’s chair,” Jessie explained, putting her hands up.

  “We were already having some problems with his management style,” Kinto added, setting his weapon on the floor.

  “To put it mildly,” Marv said. “Who are you guys, anyway?”

  Jeremy said, “These are Tri-Planet Marines, recently arrived from Iapetus. Did you not notice the uniforms?”

  “It’s a bit hard to tell in this dim light,” Kinto squinted.

  The Marines looked at each other, mystified.

  “We’ve had a massive power failure,” Kinto explained. “Nothing works.”

  “Yeah,” Marv added. “You guys have built-in night vision goggles or something? I can’t see anything in this light.”

  The puzzled Marines escorted the trio back down the bright corridor. Jeremy followed a few paces behind. As Orin entered the shadowy hallway, a blast of light filled the corridor. Jeremy grabbed his sidearm and rushed toward the hatch, but Orin gestured him to wait. Orin swiveled out, set, and fired twice. A pulse hit him in the shoulder and he went down. Two pirates dashed by the doorway, trailing the smell of ozone. Jeremy heard more firing. He jumped to the door, peered around the corner, and saw one of the two turning back toward Orin. The pirate leveled his weapon. Orin was a sitting duck. Jeremy fired, hitting the marauder in the chest. Jeremy turned to see half a dozen more armed men bearing down on him from behind. He ducked back into the hallway and aimed his weapon, but he never had to fire. A flood of Marines washed into the hallway from behind the pirates. Now surrounded, the attackers lay down their weapons. Jeremy squatted next to Orin and helped him to sit up.

  “I’d love to say something dashing like, ‘It’s just a flesh wound,’ but it hurts like hell.” Orin began to slide over again.

  “Medic!” Jeremy called.

  Jeremy glanced at the motley crew, now surrounded by the Marines. He leaned in urgently. “Sargent Orin, where is Sable?”

  The airlock at the end of the corridor was cycling. Someone was headed out.

  (*)

  Abby, Tanya and Doc Mason watched in horror as the armed yacht turned to, bringing to bear a large cannon extending from its prow. Spotlights scattered diamonds across the lake surface, crossing the submersible from side to side. Whoever they were, they didn’t bother using a radio transmission. A voice boomed from an external loudspeaker.

  “Surface immediately and prepare to be boarded.”

  “A bit dramatic, don’t you think?” Doc Mason said in the near-darkness.

  “They even sound like pirates. Not much choice,” Abby said. She punched a lever for a manual surfacing. The sounds of fizzing bubbles filled the cabin. Feeble light filtered through the windows. Then the floodlights from the green boat poured in, creating ghoulish caricatures of their faces.

  Suddenly, another voice boomed from above, this one from somewhere higher.

  “Surface craft, stand down or we will sink you. I repeat, stand down or we will sink you.”

  Now, the spotlights were beaming from above, converging on the ugly green ship. Overhead, beyond the green pirate boat, floated one of the whale-like Marine cruisers.

  “There’s a nice sight,” Doc said.

  “Da, da. Good guys,” Tanya said.

  The bobbing avocado remained where it was, pointing its prow cannon in the submersible’s direction, but didn’t make a move. The immense Marine ship drifted slowly over it. An inflatable raft dropped into the water, then another and a third. Each had some type of pulse weapon mounted on its prow, and the small craft were surprisingly maneuverable. The flotilla surrounded the boat, and its crews boarded it efficiently. A fourth craft, larger than the others, lowered from the belly of the floating Marine ship on cables and came alongside the sub. Abby’s radio crackled.

  “Mayda submersible, this is Marine Three. You all okay in there?”

  “Yessir,” Abby radioed back. “We have just enough backup power for emergency radio and life support, though.”

  “Need a tow back?”

  “We’d appreciate it.”

  As Marines scampered across the deck of the submersible attaching lines, Jeremy’s voice came across the comm. “Abby, do you read?”

  “Hey, Jeremy, you okay?”

  “Great, actually. The girls and boys in blue are now embarking on what they refer to as ‘mopping up operations,’ which in this case is fairly literal, as some of this place seems to be melting. I don’t know how to tell you this, but your former boyfriend is in custody.”

  Abby winced. “Wish he wouldn’t call him that.” Into the radio, she said, “Where he belongs.”

  “Yeah, I thought you might feel that way. Tell Dr. Mason she did a great job. They took the entire place pretty much without firing a shot. These guys in here were so disorganized that the good guys just marched right in and took away their toys. And they had enough heavy armaments for a planetary invasion. Literally. Are you guys all set?”

  “We had some adventures. Tell you when we’re all back at the ranch.”

  “Roger that. See you soon, kiddo.”

  “Jeremy, what about Demian Sable? Jeremy?” But Jeremy had already signed off.

  The sub lurched as the Marines began to tow it home. The corners of the doctor’s mouth turned up slightly.

  Abby raised an eyebrow. “Out with it.”

  “Da, What are you not telling us?”

  Doc Mason smirked. “From what Abby said, I just had the sense that they were suffering a bit of, shall we say, disunity? So I encouraged it. I figured a little civil war would come in handy for us.”

  “You got that right. Looks like you made things a lot easier for the forces of light.” Abby’s eyes met the doctor’s. “Doc, what was the deal with MECTRODEX, anyway? I just can’t figure out how much they knew.”

  “Jasmine Major was pretty appalled at what was going on here. Said she wanted nothing to do with something that could turn people into zombies. Her word. She spilled her guts about it, once she was feeling better. Apparently, MECTRODEX knew of an alleged fossil find by a CoAz grad student here nearly a decade ago, and covered it up. They concluded there might be something in that ocean down there worth using for their research. At that point, it was pure guesswork, but those kind of microbial studies often lead to profits in pharm
aceuticals, so they bided their time until someone would have the wherewithal to gain access to the subsurface sea.”

  “So, Kevin?” Tanya looked as though she was afraid to ask.

  Mason didn’t answer right away. Abby let out a long breath. “Troy was right about that part, sadly. Kevin must have been working for MECTRODEX on the side. Not hydrology, but Titan microbes. New beasties, like the sketches we found in his sketchbook.”

  “Bugs that could mean a fortune on the pharmaceutical market if they had the right laboratory spin,” Mason said. “Although I’m still not sure all this has a biological source. Those microscopic blobs may be just that. Flotsam. Bubbles of hydrocarbon sludge. But something is interacting with human metabolisms. And the dark side, of course, was how powerful a tool this mass hallucinogen could be in the wrong hands.”

  The beach appeared through the fog. Along the shoreline, a team of Marines waded through the methane, taking samples. “Undoubtedly, elements of the worlds’ defense departments will be interested in its applications. Certainly there’s no way around that, unfortunately.”

  “Why?” Abby asked, her head reeling.

  “You mean, why unfortunately?”

  “Why defense departments?”

  Doc Mason reached over and squeezed Abby’s hand. “I love that about you—your innocent optimism. You’re still thinking drug corporations, and we’ve already used it as a tactical weapon against the thugs on the north shore. I gave them power failures and civil war with a mere long-distance suggestion. Who knows what’s ahead? But maybe we scientists can reign in that onslaught, control that process, don’t you think? After all, you’re the optimist.”

  As the submersible beached firmly, the lights of the habs in Mayda flared to full power. Apparently, the Marines had brought the science outpost a present.

  © Springer International Publishing Switzerland 2015

  Michael CarrollOn the Shores of Titan's Farthest SeaScience and Fiction10.1007/978-3-319-17759-5_59

  59. Imminent Departures

  Michael Carroll1

  (1)Littleton, CO, USA

  Over the ages, methane erosion had peppered the northern shore with potholes and basins. Hydrocarbon powders had sifted down, mixing with the ground methane emerging at shoreline, to form a sort of deadly pudding, filling the hollows and sinkholes in so that they looked like simple flat spots on the rugged icy landscape. Jeremy Belton knew this. He knew to be cautious. But not everyone did.

  Jeremy walked along the cliff line, watching the huge Marine hovercraft as they dissolved into the orange haze. Here and there, uniform straps, backpacks or pieces of equipment lay strewn across the hills. A short distance away, toward the shoreline to the south, something caught his eye. It was black and green, and lay next to a smooth spot. He approached carefully. Footprints led to the oblong area, a perfectly level, textureless pond. They were desperate footprints, made by someone running, darting, not sure where they were going. At the pond’s edge, the prints disappeared. Next to its border lay a strange object, something artificial. Jeremy looked more closely. It was a war scepter, a baton of the Black Watch.

  (*)

  Abby and Tanya sat on a tabletop at the coffee station near the western airlock, their legs swinging into empty air above the chairs. It was a fairly secluded place to chat, a nice place now that there weren’t any dancing petroglyphs to distract or music to interrupt their conversation. Abby handed Tanya a tissue as her friend sniffed.

  “Good to have hot chocolate for change,” Tanya said. She blew her nose.

  “I talked to that hunk of a marine engineer. He called it a power band aid, but he said it should last until the replacement reactor arrives next month.” Abby knew that Mayda’s power output wasn’t the primary thing on Tanya’s mind. She set her cup on the table and put her arm around Tanya’s shoulders. “I miss him, too. A lot. It seems like this is the kind of place where you say goodbye too often. We just had to say it to Kevin before we should have.”

  Tanya nodded, burying her nose in another tissue.

  Abby glanced in the direction of the Comm Center, several habs away. “Guess I’ll be missing Jeremy soon, too. He’s headed back to Mars in the morning.”

  “You should go be with your friend.”

  “I will soon. He’s doing something official with that big Nordic Marine guy. Said he’d be this way when he’s done.”

  “And Jasmine Major, she is leaving also. She is nice lady. We talked last night at dinner.”

  “Yeah, she is.”

  “And now Demian Sable is gone.”

  “Demian Sable is gone.” Abby said it with finality. There was a freedom in the statement, a period at the end of a twelve-year-long sentence she had been serving. It was melancholy, but it felt good.

  “And we say goodbye to Troy.”

  “I said goodbye to him a long time ago. There’s one I won’t be missing. He was so baffling in the end. He even gave me a rose, right before he essentially kidnapped me.”

  “Real rose? Where he get that?”

  “No idea.”

  “So we miss Kevin and Jasmine, don’t miss Troy, and do miss Jeremy.”

  And I’ll miss Piers, Abby thought.

  “You leave soon, too, my Anya. I have another two-year grant here. I will be missing you.”

  “You, too, girl. You are a good egg.”

  “You are the one who taught me that, what that means.”

  They hugged again and sat peacefully, comfortable in each other’s company.

  Behind them, someone stepped through the hatch at the end of the compartment.

  “Oh, there you two are. Hey, Tanya.” Doc Mason came to a stop before her long hair did. It swirled around her face as she came to stand beside the table.

  “Look at you,” Abby said. “With those fine tresses waving around your face, how can you see out?”

  “I let it down in celebration of the station’s new lease on life. It does tend to get in the way, though. Takes it a while to settle down. I’ll probably have it pulled back up by tonight. Abby, I wanted to thank you again for getting this sketchbook to me. Really helpful. It’s perplexing, this whole alleged Titan microbe thing. Kevin’s sketches show these amorphous shapes, and I’ve seen the real thing now, under the microscope. If they’re cells, they have no nuclei, but rather a network of organization within the outer membrane. A bit like prokaryotic cells, I suppose.” She jabbed her finger on the page and held it up. “Those structures, both fossil and in the water, don’t have any defined villi or specific organelles or familiar items like flagella or even lysosomes. It will take some study to see just what those globules are.”

  Abby was trying to reel herself back from the quietude of the moment, the list of farewells she would soon have to endure.

  “But they are organic, yes?” Tanya said.

  The doctor waved her hands around. “That doesn’t mean they are life. Maybe they are. I don’t know. Maybe they metabolize some water/methane/ammonia mix. But why would they remain active at body temperature and not at the boiling point? Abby’s tea and coffee prove that. That little tidbit implies a non-biological cause to me, chemical rather than microbial.”

  “I’m sure the biochemists are going to have a field day with our shared deliriums for years to come,” Abby said.

  “The communal hallucinogenic aspect is one of the things that most intrigues me. Who knows? I may even take on Titan’s grand enigma as my life’s work!”

  Mason turned and made her way through the hatch at the far end of the hab. Abby told Tanya, “She’s another character I’ll miss. Crazy lady.”

  (*)

  “Piers, you’re not making any sense. Out with it.”

  Abby stood in front of Piers’ desk, in the only square meter of clear floor. She wasn’t used to being summoned to somebody’s office, but that’s what Piers’ call had felt like. Piers sat uncomfortably behind his desk, the cramped Comm Center cocooning around him.

  “It’s just that
, you see, Abigail, when you—that is, when Troy, well, not really Troy, but—”

  “You know, for a communications officer, you’re just not very communicative”

  “I’m sorry.” Piers took in a deep breath. “As a picture is worth a thousand words, would you mind coming this way?” He gestured toward the closet door in the corner of the room.

  “The last storage closet I was in didn’t show me a very good time.”

  “This one is different. It’s custom made. Did it myself.”

  “You did, did you?” she said skeptically, ducking through the low door. The back wall was missing. Beyond was a darkened room with hooded lights hanging from the ceiling. A wave of warm moisture bathed her face. It carried scents of summer meadows and mountain streams. She could smell the rich aroma of mulch, feel the humidity, taste a faint hint of loam.

  “This way,” Piers said.

  “What happened to the wall?”

  “I removed it. This used to be an outer storage shed. I asked if I could reinforce it to pressurize it. Nobody seemed to mind, so here we are. My greenhouse. Complete with a whole lot of insulation and some backup batteries for the grow lights.”

  He led her along a cramped walkway, metal plates lain across a bed of earth. On either side, low retaining walls buttressed the rich soil into mounds. He swept his hand as they walked.

  “Some oregano, mint—I love mint in my Darjeeling tea—parsley, onions, and—”

  A pungent, familiar fragrance hit her, a dense surge of perfume. “Roses! I smell them!”

  “My Rio Sambas all died in the cold—those are a nice rich yellow—but I still have some Belle Rouges left, and they even have buds coming back. One opened up just this morning.” He reached over and picked a red bloom. “Just in time for your tour.”

  The petals of the flower looked as if they had been crafted of velvet. The blossom was such a deep, luxuriant red, it seemed nearly black.

  “It’s stunning. So delicate. It’s, it’s…”