“What’s wrong?” Jenine’s fingers tightened around the armrests.
“Nothing. I tripped in the dark, that’s all. Missed seeing a step down.”
The view from Tsing’s camera flickered, returned, then darkened once more, the signal weakened by the heavy stone. One by one, the others in the team followed him inside. Jenine looked out the cockpit window and tried to spot the door they had used, but the details were lost in the snow squall. High above the surface, nearly at the top of the Wall, she saw another flash of light.
“Paul? I just caught sight of the intruders again. They’re above you and to the west.” She waited, but Tsing didn’t reply. “Paul? Are you reading me?”
“Yes. Stand by …” Tsing’s transmission was almost unreadable. The video feed flickered then cut out. The other cameras followed suit. Within seconds, the center screen was blank. Jenine stared at it while a wave of dizziness passed through her, as if the cabin had suddenly tilted then just as quickly righted itself. She glanced once more at the ship a hundred meters to her left.
It was gone.
“This isn’t happening,” she whispered, barely able to breathe. Her fingers flew across the control panel as she scanned the area around the lander. To her dismay, the instruments found nothing, no heat signature, no radar return, certainly nothing on the video feed. She stabbed the transmit button.
“Paul? Get out of there, now.” She knew she was letting panic sway her, but couldn’t stop. “If you can hear me, we have a situation out here. Return to the lander. Repeat, return to the lander.”
She boosted the gain and listened. No voices replied, no pings from any of their trackers. Quickly, she switched to the orbiter’s frequency and tried once more to reestablish contact. “Titan Control, this is landing craft Four-eight November. Please come in.” She waited without reply. Frustrated, she let the dish scan the southern horizon, hoping the computer might locate another radio source. “Any station, this is United Nations landing craft Four-eight November. Please come in.”
She frowned. Somewhere, buried in the blanketing white hiss of Saturn, she heard a faint trill. The sound built, then faded only to return a few seconds later. Jenine narrowed the scanning range, but the electronic warble remained damningly obscure. Less than thirty seconds after it began, the transmission vanished.
“What the hell?” Her voice echoed softly in her earphones, the words clipped by the intercom while she waited for the ship’s navigation library to identify the source. Seconds dragged into minutes as the computer searched through thousands of samples before it finally found a match. Jenine’s jaw fell open. The only object that could have created the brief, passing signal was an early space probe that had gone nonfunctional more than two hundred and sixty years earlier.
“This is impossible.” She flicked back to the ground-to-ship channel. “Paul, this is the lander. If you can hear me, please return to the ship. Do you read me?”
Without warning, as if to answer her call, a loud bang ran through the hull. Jenine jumped and struck her head against the cockpit ceiling, then steadied herself against the back of her chair and listened. Another thud followed the first, and then another, all centered near the small airlock at the rear of the passenger compartment. Someone was knocking at the door.
“Paul?”
Hopeful, Jenine switched on the fish-eye camera mounted inside the lock. Blood roared in her ears as the camera focused on a lone figure in a bright green excursion suit framed in the outer hatchway. She squeezed her eyes shut and looked again, but the figure was gone, nothing visible but swirls of dull red snow. Certain that she was losing her mind, she replayed the video. The dizziness and nausea she had felt earlier returned, so strong she nearly vomited inside her helmet, all doubt removed.
The person who had been banging against the airlock was herself.
Seventeen minutes. Jenine watched the clock on her visor, clinging to the passage of time as a drowning dog might grasp a log between its front legs as it was swept downstream. “Come on, think …” The sound of her own voice helped her regain her calm. “Got to be a rational explanation for all this.”
The obvious answer was the one she liked least. She was hallucinating.
“All right, then, why am I seeing things? Anoxia? My suit air is fouled.” To test her theory, she carefully unlocked her visor and swung it up into her helmet. The smell of her own sour breath washed away, replaced by the colder, musty cabin air. She filled her lungs, exhaled and filled them again. A breath cloud hung around her face as she let the air out. She glanced at her biomonitor, but the readout showed no change.
“Okay,” she said out loud. “Go to plan B. What the hell is plan B?”
Her eyes drifted around the cockpit and fell at last on the Emergency Medkit. She remembered it contained sedatives, but quickly rejected the idea. While a tranq patch might steady her nerves, it would also dull her senses. Until Tsing and the others returned, she had to remain sharp, even if she mistrusted what her mind reported. Still, the kit might contain something useful. Slowly, hampered by her suit, she reached for it but stopped as the radio unexpectedly burst life.
“Four-eight November? This is Tsing. Come in. Please come in.”
“Paul? Go ahead.”
“Thank God.” Tsing’s voice was raw. “We’ve been trying to contact you for hours.”
“Hours?” The statement confused her. The team had been inside the ancient structure less than seventy minutes, but she passed it off as nerves. “It’s the Wall. It’s blocking your signal. What’s your location?”
“I’m sitting in one of the portals. I think it’s on the upper tier, but I can’t really tell.”
Through the murk she could just make out a faint glow near the rim of the massive artifact. “Okay, I’ve got you. I think you’re in the same doorway the pot-hunters used. What’s your situation?”
“Not good. Bruner is down. He panicked when his air got low and jumped through one of the doors to the ground. Kvass and Morrissy went to find him, but I can’t raise them on the radio. Listen, Jenine, we’re all short on power and air. My reserve is down to thirty minutes.”
“Thirty minutes?” She leaned forward, certain Tsing was mistaken, and found his bioread. Now that he was back online, the telemetry functioned again. She stiffened. Instead of the seven hours he should have had available, his air supply registered thirty-four minutes of usable oxygen. “What happened out there?”
“Got lost … wandered around inside the …” The signal, diamond-bright only seconds ago, now began to break up. “Found the bodies … can’t …”
“Say again? What bodies?”
“The pot-hunters. They’re dead.” He spoke more slowly, but the signal continued to weaken. “No chance to retrieve them. Not now.”
“You found them?” Jenine blinked. “Paul, their ship is gone. Some of them must have made it out.”
“What are you talking about? That ship is still on the ground.” For a moment, Tsing’s voice came in clear again. “I can see it from here.”
Another wave of vertigo struck her. What should have been a routine mission had suddenly become impossibly complicated. One team member missing and most likely dead, three others on the verge of suffocation, her own mental health questionable. She took a deep breath, then spoke slowly, “Paul, what are the weather conditions where you are?”
“Huh?” He sounded perplexed. “What do you mean? They’re the same as what you have. Overcast sky, visibility fair out to five klicks. Wind conditions calm.”
She glanced out the window at the heavy snow driving past, the wind a howl. The Wall was nothing but a dark, blocky shadow through the haze, Tsing’s lamp the only discernable feature. Even as she watched, that light faded, then was gone.
“Paul?”
Static answered. She slumped back into her seat and began to shiver, chilled to the core. She tried again to raise Tsing without success, then, moving stiffly, rose and wandered toward the back of the craf
t. A small locker was built into the wall behind the couches. From it, she withdrew three oxygen canisters and put them inside a carry sack, then added as many charged batteries as she could find. She picked up the bundle. In Titan’s weak gravity the weight wouldn’t be a factor, but the sack was bulky and would hamper her movements. She sighed, unable to think of any other way to carry the emergency supplies. Bundle in hand, she shuffled to the airlock, pulled on her gauntlets then resealed her visor. A row of tiny green lights popped into view along the rim. She reached for the airlock controls, but paused.
“This is insane,” Jenine told herself. While she had been busy gathering supplies, the weirdness of the situation had been pushed to the back of her mind. Now, it returned with a vengeance. Regulations insisted she remain with the lander. So did common sense.
Unfortunately, that meant leaving a friend to die.
More frightened than she had ever been in her life, she slapped the broad red button beside the door and waited for the airlock to slide open. Before she could change her mind, stepped through.
Jenine leaned forward, fighting the quartering headwind, the bulky pack of spare oxygen cylinders slapping her leg with every step. The surface felt spongy underfoot, the methane slush sticking to her insulated boots. She paused a moment to rest, and turned to look behind. The lander remained an oasis of light, its rotating beacon painting the swirling snow a garish orange. A fast glance at her clock showed that fifteen minutes had elapsed since she had spoken with Tsing. With time running out, she hefted the sack and pressed on.
The Wall stretched from horizon to horizon, its top lost in the blizzard. She could just make out the individual portals, coffin-sized openings spaced irregularly across the structure’s stone face. She picked up her pace toward the nearest of them and hoped it was the one Tsing and the others had used. If she didn’t pick up their trail soon, all of this was for nothing.
Something lay at the foot of the monument. Jenine jogged toward it, her gait hampered by the odd gravity. From the color of his suit, she knew it was Bruner. Her headlamp threw his body into an almost surrealistic accuracy. His visor was rimed in frost, a thin, diagonal crack across it. She didn’t need to touch him to know he was dead. She swept the area with her lamp. Heavy footprints, half filled with drifted snow, led away.
“Thank you,” she said, blessing her luck at finding the tracks. She followed them to the portal, then stopped. The vertigo she had felt earlier returned, as if the moon’s orbit had suddenly gone mad. She fought down the sensation, then ducked inside.
A narrow passage lay in front of her, the stone rough-hewn. Her mind flashed back to a school field trip when she was ten or eleven, a sim-tour of Egypt’s Great Pyramid. The corridor could have been left by the same builders. Dragging the pack behind her, she continued down the passage. Twenty paces inside, the corridor turned left into a narrow flight of steps. Two more bodies sat upon them, unmoving.
“Morrissy?” Jenine knelt beside the nearer of the pair. “Can you hear me?”
The man stirred. Jenine bent closer, desperate to find an angle where her suit lamp didn’t blind him. His eyes fluttered open.
“How … how’d you find us?” His words were thick, barely coherent.
“Just hang on, okay?” She pulled out one of the cylinders and exchanged it with one of the empties on his power unit. After she made certain the seal was tight, she did the same with his spent battery. “Take a deep breath, okay?”
Morrissy nodded weakly. She stepped over him and repeated the operation with Kvass’s pack. Even with the fresh cylinder and battery, she couldn’t tell if he was breathing.
“Thanks for coming back,” Morrissy said, his voice stronger.
A cold finger skipped down Jenine’s spine. “What do you mean, ‘come back’?”
“The lander,” Morrissy said. “When we got down, it was gone. We thought you’d abandoned us.”
She thought about explaining, but decided against it. She still had to find Tsing. Dreading the thought of penetrating deeper into the structure by herself, she let her light play over the rough-cut stairs.
“Where’s Paul?” she asked.
“We hoped he was with you.”
“No. I talked to him from the lander, but he was on one of the upper tiers. Did you leave marker tabs?” Jenine helped Kvass sit up. The man groaned incoherently, the sound a muted roar in her headphones. She waited until the channel cleared, then asked again, “Did you tab a trail back to where you and Paul split up?”
“We …” Morrissy sounded on the edge of hysteria. “We ran out tabs hours ago. Doesn’t matter anyway. They don’t work in here.”
“What do you mean they don’t work?” The hair on the back of her neck stiffened. Standard practice was to drop a trail of the reflective tabs behind to leave a path for following teams, or to track your way back out. Unless the laws of physics were somehow violated, the system was practically foolproof. “Morrissy, how do I reach Paul?”
“Go up,” was all he said.
Annoyed and more than a little frightened, she squeezed past Kvass and started up the constricting stairwell, then paused. “Can you two reach the lander?”
“I think so,” Morrissy replied.
“Good. I’ll meet you back there as soon as I can.” She wondered if she was making a mistake. Given how frightened Morrissy sounded, she hoped he didn’t try to launch without her. She pushed the thought out of her mind and started climbing.
A small landing lay at the top of the stairs, another corridor branching past it. To her left, the passage emptied into blackness, obviously one of the doors she had seen from the lander. At the other end of the passage she saw a small circle glowing pale yellow. She smiled to herself. Despite what Morrissy had said, the marker tabs were obviously working as promised. She hurried toward it.
The corridor turned sharply to the left. A second marker tab glowed at the far end, twenty meters away. Leaning forward to avoid brushing the ceiling, Jenine shuffled to the tab, then stopped, confused. Instead of another corner, she found a blank stone wall.
“Wonderful.” Angry at the wasted time, she retraced her steps to the stairwell, then went past it toward the doorway. She steadied herself with a hand against the wall and carefully looked out. Far below she saw the lander, still bathed in the glow of its floodlights, the pot-hunter’s ship beside it. She forced herself to look down, but quickly pulled back inside, the view dizzying. Odd, she thought. She hadn’t noticed she had climbed so high. Again, she moved back toward the stairwell and dropped the carry sack beside it, then stared into the passage, utterly confused.
The descending corridor she had climbed only moments before was gone. Another stairwell lay in its place, the rough-cut steps beckoning upward.
“No. No, no, no …” she whispered. Over the frequency, she said “Morrissy, can you hear me?” She listened, but her radio remained silent, nothing in her headphones but her own rapid breath.
“Slow down,” she scolded herself, fully aware how much time she was wasting. By now, if Tsing’s estimate had been correct, his tanks were dry. If he was alive, he was living on whatever his scrubber salvaged from inside his suit. She needed to find him and find him fast.
“Just calm down,” she said out loud. “Don’t lose your head.”
Back and forth she moved along the corridor, each trip a dead end, every return bringing her not to her starting point, but to a new junction. Sweat poured down her back, her heart pounding furiously as the minutes trickled off. Unable to find her way back to the ground floor, she continued to take the ascending stairs.
She paused at the top of the next flight, blinded by the sheen of breath condensed inside her visor. She waited for it to clear, then looked around. Her lamp lit the far end of the corridor with a pale, bluish glow. Unsure what she might find, Jenine shuffled toward it. As she neared the end of the passage, she saw that the glow came from reflected snow. Cautiously, she edged toward the opening and looked out, but nothing was
visible, the blizzard impenetrable. Had the lander been directly beneath her she couldn’t have seen it. Dismayed, she slowly turned around.
“Hello, Jenine.”
“Paul?” Her jaw dropped open. Five paces behind her, his visor open to the frigid, toxic atmosphere, Paul Tsing stood, one arm propped casually against the stone wall. He smiled at her.
“I think you should follow me.” His voice was calm and edged with regret. “You need to see what I’ve found.”
Her head spun. Nothing made sense, not the man in front of her, nor the side passage Paul Tsing led her down. How had she missed seeing it before?.
“Where are you taking me?”
“Home.” Tsing turned and smiled at her, his face still exposed to Titan’s atmosphere. “I know it doesn’t make any sense, but believe me, everything is going to be fine.”
“Paul, don’t you understand, this is impossible?”
“Yes. I understand it. But I don’t think that really matters anymore.”
A faint glow lit the corridor, not the reflected gleam of helmet lamps against methane slush, but a softer, more subtle illumination. Confused, she followed Tsing into a small, vaulted chamber. Though it was constructed from the same rough gray stone as the rest of the Wall, the surface was smooth, almost polished, the floor patterned like marble. Tsing edged aside and let her step past toward a broad portico, slender columns supporting a trio of arched doorways. She shuddered as she crept beneath the middle arch onto a narrow ledge, an elegant stone handrail barring her from the precipice. Hands shaking, she leaned against it.
A city spread out below, high towers lit bright as candle flame. Helicopters and mag-rails flitted between the angular structures, little more than flashing red lights from her high vantage, while farther beneath an endless swath of roofed streets covered the ground like a network of capillaries, their translucent surfaces adding a pleasant yellow wash to the base of the skyscrapers. Lazy clouds drifted along the steel canyons, as if a gentle rain might recently have fallen.
The Year's Best SF 25 # 2007 Page 40
