Impact

by Brandon Q Morris

  Impact: Titan

  Hard Science Fiction

  Brandon Q. Morris

  Contents

  Impact: Titan

  Author's Note

  Also by Brandon Q. Morris

  A Guided Tour of Saturn

  Glossary of Acronyms

  Metric to English Conversions

  Excerpt: The Triton Disaster

  Impact: Titan

  4790.3

  Boris waited until the veneer of oily liquid methane had evaporated from his skin. Then he spread out his toes, bent down, and dislodged the granules of ice that had become stuck between his fourth and fifth toes. The number 92 lit up in green on the back of his right hand, revealing that the liquid was two degrees colder today than it had been yesterday. But how deep was it? It was so still that the black surface looked almost like glass, reminding him of gelatin. If you looked closely enough, you could see thin, gray wisps of mist rising into the brownish air. After almost three days of nothing but constant rainfall, the air was almost perfectly still.

  Boris pushed through the upper surface of the lake. Their plan was crazy and could only have come from a Wnutri. He turned around. Anna was a few meters behind him, slightly to one side, and scratching her armpit at that moment.

  “What’s wrong?” she asked. Her lips moved in sync with her words behind the membrane over her mouth, but her voice sounded directly in his mind.

  Boris switched off the transmitter. At this short distance, they could understand each other just as easily the good old-fashioned way, by sound waves. It was never a bad idea to save energy.

  “You want me to keep standing here, or what?”

  His sister was the nicest colleague that anyone could want, but today she had been strangely irritated since breakfast. She hadn’t said why, however. Had she had another fight with her girlfriend? He reactivated the transmitter, suddenly remembering they had a project to complete. He was obviously a bit unfocused himself. It must be due to the object of this task. Geralt, the archeologist, was talking to them in a muted voice. He was sitting in the Wnutri section of the station, and all he needed to do was wait until they brought him what he wanted.

  You’ve got to focus, Boris, he told himself. A Snarushi isn’t immortal.

  Slowly he moved his right foot forward, testing the lakebed. Sandy, a good sign. He transferred his whole weight onto his right foot and it sank about five centimeters. So far, so good. He brought his left foot forward, testing the floor of the lake again. Slowly, cautiously, he slid it a step’s length across the lakebed, which remained sandy feeling. That was good. At these viciously low temperatures, water-ice crystals behaved like silicon sand.

  The danger came from the methane. If it got too cold, the lake would freeze from the bottom up. Couldn’t it have occurred to Geralt to look for this bit of junk a few orbital periods earlier? Then it would have still been fall here and not already winter. A five-degree increase and there definitely wouldn’t have been any ice on the lakebed. Maybe the entire contents of the methane lake would have even evaporated. Then they could have easily and comfortably dug into the water-ice sand.

  Boris slid his right foot forward. Another step. The wet sand on the ground tried to hold him back, but it had no chance against the power fibers in his joints. Still no ice on the bottom. Maybe they were going to be lucky. Now it was his left leg’s turn.

  Boris made each of his movements carefully and intentionally. He had grown up in this outside world, but that didn’t mean that the moon still wasn’t dangerous to him. Only one out of ten Snarushi died due to old age. Nevertheless, almost every young person on Titan wanted to belong to the ‘Outsiders,’ as some called the Snarushi. Boris had never regretted the decision, even if it had come with certain restrictions. The Wnutri owned all the laboratories and greenhouses, but all of Titan belonged to him.

  The liquid methane now came up to his hips.

  “Looking good,” he said, then turned around.

  Anna was following him. His younger sister was at least as skilled and nimble as he was, even though she had only become a Snarushi 50 orbital periods ago. It took at least five orbital periods for the inner and outer skins to grow together. Anna had completed the subsequent training phase, when the recruit learned how to handle her new body in two-thirds the standard time. Their mother, if she were still alive, certainly would have been proud of her.

  Boris tried to feel the ground in front of him with his right foot. But there was nothing there. He was so surprised that he almost fell. “Watch out. There’s a drop-off here,” he warned Anna.

  It wasn’t unusual. The subsurface behaved something like karst rock kneaded by the tidal forces of Saturn. Sometimes cracks formed or the ground collapsed due to an underground methane channel.

  Boris slid his eyewear into place. They looked something like diving goggles, but contained a combination of sonar, radar, and lidar instruments. With them, he could see while he was under the surface or in dense fog. Then he adjusted his heavy backpack filled with lead blocks. Without them, he’d remain floating on the surface of the methane lake like a rubber ducky.

  He put his arms forward, pushed off, and dove under. Anna dove, too, at the same time.

  The arrow pointed forward. Boris snapped his fingers, and the display on the back of his hand changed. It was very gradually getting colder. He snapped his fingers again. They were already at eight meters. There hadn’t been any lakes as deep as this when humans first arrived here on Titan. But the energy they needed to stay alive produced waste heat that entered the atmosphere, and this heat was slowly warming the environment.

  It rained more than it had before, and there were thunderstorms now, not only every few orbital periods, but instead, almost every orbital period. In the Council, there was even a small faction demanding the elimination of Wnutri, the ‘Insiders,’ who needed the warmth of the stations. But that was a naïve assessment of their situation. Without the food from the greenhouses and the oxygen from the tanks, the Outsiders wouldn’t be able to survive here, either.

  The luminescent cells on his hand showed that they were still 150 meters away from their target search area. Boris turned around and looked for Anna. She was swimming toward him with strong, powerful strokes. Despite the centimeter-thick outer skin, he could still see the rippling of her muscles. Her shoulders had grown as wide as her hips. She had become quite a beautiful woman, and lately she’d been turning the heads of all the boys, and girls, too. Now she braked her forward motion with quick arm movements. Her gaze was fixed downward, and she appeared to be straining to make something out.

  What did she see down there? Boris switched his goggles through all the different wavelengths. There was something there, in the infrared. It looked something like a snake, emerging out of the interior of the moon from below. It must be some kind of underground spring source.

  They still knew much too little about the geophysics of this moon to explain the existence of these spring sources. But they were interesting for the geologists, because they often led to all sorts of fascinating, different compounds. Mining was difficult on Titan because there was very little exposed rock, so it was usually worth it to obtain metals and other elements from such liquid sources.

  “Are you recording that?” he asked.

  “Of course, little brother. No worries.”

  He shook his head. Of course he was going to worry. In reality, she was the little sibling, and Anna sometimes did things rather impulsively. It was why she had almost been kicked out of the Snarushi program. She had left the station without permission before her training had been completed.

  Never before, or since, had there been such a scandal. No Snarushi had ever been made to give up its outer skin, which protected it from Titan’s atmosphere, but
her transgression had provoked talk about that as punishment. The special layer eventually grew together with the inner skin. Thus, to remove it, Anna would have had to be skinned alive. The Council had ultimately deemed that as too drastic a punishment.

  “Let’s keep swimming,” he said. “We’ve still got five hours before we’ve got to be back in the tank.”

  “That’s got to be it. Down there, in front of us.”

  Boris instinctively turned around. Anna was swimming a few meters behind him. He could see her silhouette most clearly in infrared. The outer skin provided excellent insulation and emitted very little heat, but in the extreme cold down here, a half-degree difference in temperature was clearly distinguishable in the goggles.

  “Do you see anything?” he asked.

  “No, but these are the coordinates that Geralt gave us.”

  “That doesn’t mean much, I’m afraid.”

  He considered Geralt to be a friend, but the archeologist often acted more knowledgeable than he really was. His statements and proclamations too frequently turned out to be based on nothing more than hunches or wild guesses.

  Anna didn’t wait for his approval. “Let’s take a look, anyway.” She was soon floating just above the mud covering the bottom.

  Mud wasn’t really the right word for it—it wasn’t a mixture of sand and liquid. Instead, the bottom of the lake was in a constant state of either slowly thawing and melting, or slowly freezing solid, so that an exact bottom couldn’t be defined. The material had a consistency something like soft butter. Or at least that was Boris’s experience during his first visit to the bottom of a methane lake.

  Boris took a deep breath and followed his sister. She had just reached the bottom and was trying to search through the mud with her hands.

  “I don’t think that’s going to work,” he said.

  “No. The bottom’s much too hard.”

  “Too hard?” That’s strange, he thought.

  “Yes. Try it yourself.”

  He touched the bottom and knew Anna was right. This isn’t mud. What does this mean? “Hmm,” he grumbled.

  “You didn’t believe me? You’re impossible.”

  Please don’t start another useless conversation right now, he thought. We’ve got a job to do. “I suggest you switch to radar,” he said. “It should be able to penetrate far enough into the lakebed so we can find this thing.”

  “Let’s hope.”

  They slowly glided over the frozen lake bottom, staying about four meters apart. Geralt had given them an area where the object they were searching for might have crashed. With a search radius of about ten meters, they had about two hours to comb through the whole area and return to the station. One hour for recovery, one for the return trip, that left another hour for a margin of safety, more than enough.

  It was a tedious task. He was sure Geralt was back at the station, sitting in the library and reading. But Boris didn’t feel jealous. Just the idea of having to rely on one of those bulky suits whenever he wanted to leave the station gave him a claustrophobic feeling. He loved the vastness of the landscapes on Titan. Floating through the dense atmosphere with a set of flying wings, or diving in a lake, that was the life.

  “Do you see that down there?” Anna asked while pointed toward the bottom.

  “A crater. Probably caused by the lakebed caving in.” He was grateful for the question, because at least it was a distraction.

  “I don’t want an explanation. Look at the shape. What do you see?”

  “I see a crater that—”

  “Don’t you have any imagination, Boris?” she interrupted.

  Of course he had imagination. He could imagine Anna diving into the crater and then being swept away by an unexpected current, or Anna slicing open her outer skin on the sharp material of the crater’s rim, even if that would be practically impossible. Didn’t that prove that he had imagination? But he wasn’t about to tell his sister any of that.

  “It’s an arch. Right there.” Her lamp illuminated a roundish shape that someone might call an arch if they were being somewhat generous.

  “Yes, I see it. Super,” he said.

  “It looks like half of one of those anticyclone storms on Saturn.”

  Half an anticyclone. Of course. Half a cyclone was not a thing, and, of course, half an anticyclone was also not a thing. But Boris refrained from making any comments.

  “I think I’ve found something,” Anna said.

  “Let me see.” Anna’s field of view appeared in front of his eyes, instead of his own, projected by tiny lasers onto the insides of his synthetic lenses. Yes, there was something there in the subsurface that didn’t look like it had grown there naturally.

  “Well?”

  “You’re right, Anna, that just might be it. Going to take some time to dig whatever that is out, though.”

  Boris displayed their remaining time. Still three hours and four minutes. He felt relieved. They were well within schedule.

  “Okay. Let’s think about how we should proceed first,” he said.

  Anna didn’t answer. Instead, she jackknifed and headed down toward the radar hit.

  “Wait for me, dammit!”

  The lake was unusually deep here. He switched his hand display to show his current depth—10 meters, 12, 15. When he reached the bottom, the display read 29 meters. That had to be a depth record on Titan. There were plenty of lakes covering parts of the moon’s surface, but they were seldom deeper than a few meters. Why hadn’t they noticed before that it was so deep here? There must’ve been a massive cave-in here, maybe a crater.

  His wrist vibrated. His outer skin was giving him a warning. Red numbers appeared on his hand: 86 degrees. It had gotten damn cold down here. The methane was supercooled by four degrees. The fact that it wasn’t frozen had to be due to the higher pressure that existed at this depth. It was a lucky break for them. They would never have been able to reach the museum piece if they’d had to dig through 10 or even 20 meters of frozen methane.

  Anna was digging in the mud that formed a cover over the bottom of the lake here.

  “Be careful!” he called.

  “I’ve got it,” his sister said, “but it’s really heavy!”

  “Wait a minute... I’ll give you a hand.”

  He swam to her with two strong strokes. She was pulling on something that looked sort of like a propeller.

  “It doesn’t look anything like a hang-glider, though,” said Anna. “Didn’t Geralt call it a dragonfly?”

  “The probe’s name was Dragonfly. I know you’ve seen pictures of hang gliders called dragonflies, but this refers to the old-English name for the insects of the order of Odonata.”

  “It doesn’t look anything like an insect dragonfly, either.”

  He had to agree with her. The object didn’t look like anything that would be able to fly. Instead of wings, it had four rotors. Geralt claimed that these rotors also made it possible for this thing to float in Titan’s atmosphere, but that was hard to imagine, finding it here sunk to the bottom of this methane lake.

  According to old documents, it would have landed here almost 6,000 orbital periods ago, then explored Titan for their ancestors for 50 orbital periods, and was ultimately deliberately sunk.

  “Well, come on, let’s get it out of there,” he said. “It’s about time we got home.” He took off the belt that he was wearing around his waist and clipped the carabiner at one end of the belt to one of the rotors.

  Anna attached her belt to the rotor diagonally opposite his. “And... up,” he said.

  They pulled on their belts simultaneously. The object was massive, even under the low force of gravity on Titan. Geralt wasn’t exaggerating when he said it would weigh something like 450 kilograms.

  The dragonfly moved. Mud was stirred up in the area all around it. Suddenly the object fell back downward on Anna’s side.

  “Shit. The belt slipped out of my hand. The rotor must’ve moved or something.”

&nbs
p; Boris inspected the terrestrial machine. One of the rotors was rotating slowly. Even after all this time! Their ancestors must’ve had some impressive technology. What had ever happened to them? Almost 5,000 orbital periods ago, when the Great War had erupted on Earth, the people on Titan had broken off all connections with it. Everyone had always worked well with each other on Titan, no matter where they had come from. Titan’s founders had decided that the only way to preserve that was to become completely independent and self-sufficient.

  “Wait,” he said, “let’s try the other two rotors.”

  He detached the carabiner and pulled himself along the probe to the rotor directly next to him. He bent down to clip the belt onto the probe again when he heard a noise like he had never heard before. It sounded like very fine, delicate crackling repeated a billion times over.

  It wasn’t just in his head. It came from outside, which was impossible. Was the ground caving in more? He’d seen the ground collapse before. It had started with a loud crackling noise. But this noise was somehow different. It came from all directions simultaneously and seemed to be advancing from below.

  “We’ve got to get out of here, now!” he yelled.

  Now he had an idea of what might have caused the noise. It was too cold down here, much too cold. The methane should’ve frozen a long time ago. Only the higher pressure was keeping it from freezing solid. But all it needed was a trigger, a slight shift in the conditions, to start the methane freezing, and their recovery action might’ve just provided that trigger.

  “I’ve still got to detach my belt from the rotor,” Anna said.

  “Fuck the belt! Get out! Now!”

  He could feel panic building in the pit of his stomach. He couldn’t let it grow any bigger. He had to listen to his own advice. The basic rule for heroes—first get yourself to safety, then help anyone else who needs it. If the ice caught him, he wouldn’t be able to help Anna at all. He swam frantically upward. The noise grew fainter and then finally stopped. Boris looked at the display on his hand. He was at a depth of 12 meters. Where was Anna?