Titan Cruel Moon

by Kate Rauner

  Heat rose in Greta in response to her spouse's anger, and she gestured him to a chair by the sofa. It was foolish to argue with Tanaka, but at least, sitting down, Yash was less likely to lose his temper. She was sure she knew why he'd come.

  Tanaka settled in the center of the sofa and the adjuncts pushed pillows against his sides as he gazed at Yash. "Doctor Rupar. You should be down on the playing field with the others."

  Yash sat straight with his fingers intertwined in his lap.

  Take a deep breath. Greta willed the thought to him.

  "I should be working in the greenhouse," Yash said. "And so should the team. This exercise will cost me the rest of today and probably tomorrow too. I thought we'd agreed not to do anything impacting the schedule without discussion."

  Tanaka waved a hand without lifting his arm. "Kin are strong. You'll make up the lost time."

  "It was you, sir, who emphasized the urgency of our work at the last Cohort meeting on Earth."

  "I also emphasized your responsibility in meeting our goals. Doctor Lund, if you would administer my injection and then leave, Doctor Rupar and I need to talk."

  Greta pulled an injector from her bag and tilted her head in a slight bow when she finished.

  She turned to Yash and raised her brows just enough for him to notice. "Yash, I'll wait for you at the clinic."

  ***

  Greta hovered at the clinic door, watching the tower stairs. She smiled, remembering another time she'd waited. It was shortly after she married Yash at one of Tanaka's parties for the Cohort Leaders and their guests. As various men arrived, each had offered to escort her inside.

  She was attractive now, but she'd been a beauty in her youth and a perfect Viking warrior. Tanaka often said so. By taking the arm of a man, laughing at his jokes, paying him any attention at all, she raised his status in front of the others.

  She clenched her fists. Remembering still annoyed her. Back then, the Cohorts admired her body and ignored her accomplishments. Irritating, but she'd known how to use their attentions.

  "Thank you, but no," she'd said to each man. "I'm waiting for my husband, Doctor Rupar."

  There were few Indus Archetypes among the Kin. Too many Cohorts devalued Yash's gangly frame and wide, dark face. Oh, he could be abrupt. She knew that. But they didn't appreciate his intensity, and they missed his charm. So by waiting so publicly, she emphasized that he had attracted her. Her, a perfect Viking.

  Remembering that day, she stood straight and proud. What she'd done at the party was silly, perhaps. Something a newlywed would do. But her chin tipped upwards as she watched the stairs and waited for Yash.

  Chapter 8

  O nly a few Kin ate breakfast the morning after the endurance rally kept them up all night. Drew hadn't stayed on the playing field any longer than Fynn, but he made it an excuse to sleep in. Maybe just as well. Fynn approached the kitchen with a smile because Rica was heating a cup of tea and he wouldn't mind a chance to talk to her alone.

  "Shall we sit together?" Fynn asked.

  "Sure. And, tell me if I'm crazy, but wasn't that cabinet full of breakfast meals yesterday?"

  "You're right." Fynn had to crouch to pull a scrambled egg package from the back of a shelf. "Not many people are awake yet. I guess we both tapped out early. We must be the wimpy ones."

  "Maybe we're the smart ones." Rica carried her meal to an empty table. "Casper was still at it when I left. We're not children in school barracks anymore. Do they honestly think they can keep us up all night when there's work to do?"

  Fynn noticed that, despite her criticism, Rica didn't call out Tanaka by name for launching the rally.

  "We wouldn't be Kin without rallies." Fynn often shared a cynical attitude with Drew in private, but he was cautious about endorsing Rica's disapproval. Back in school, sometimes kids tried to lure others into trouble.

  Rica pushed her pink curls behind her ears. "We wouldn't be superior humans if we didn't use our brains."

  They talked about the methane furnace dome while they ate. Then they skirted the tables and walked to the greenhouse.

  A powerful smell of plasticizers permeated the tunnel leading to the new dome, and they both sneezed.

  "I'm gonna gag." Fynn panted through his mouth.

  Rica scrunched her nose. "Let's take a quick look inside."

  Fynn's hand light didn't penetrate far into the darkness. This dome was as big as the other two and basically identical. Each came with ribs of lights and four panels closing off stubs located like points on a compass. The decabots had glued this latest dome to the greenhouse, then shoved all the cargo in from the stub directly across, and sealed the open stubs.

  Rica tapped her sleeve. "The pre-installed cameras are working. No, wait. One's out." She looked up but couldn't orient herself to face the dead camera. "Doesn't matter for the stevedores. They can operate in infrared. I'll call them."

  Rica was wonderfully confident, and Fynn wondered if she'd always been this attractive. "Wouldn't you rather wait for Casper?" He hoped to gauge her feelings, and then worried he was being too obvious. "And the others, too."

  She grunted. "Casper will sleep till noon. You and I can get a lot done in the meantime. The bots can inventory the cargo and pattern-match the bins to the programed layout."

  "Bots don't need us for that. Let's look around."

  Fynn's eyes were adjusting to the gloom. He led the way past tumbled cargo and there, floating in the darkness, was a rectangle of faint yellow light.

  Rica huffed a breath. "What's that?"

  "The furnace dome has its own airlock and that's its window." Fynn enjoyed showing off for Rica, and a smile parted his lips.

  "Then, am I seeing sunlight?"

  "Must be. The robots use wide-spectrum cameras, so there's no artificial lighting outside. Only sunlight and Saturn-shine."

  They had to walk slowly. The floor was too dark to see and every move felt like falling.

  A soft beam of light angled onto the airlock floor. Fynn tripped over the shadowed hatch frame and fell on all fours.

  "You okay?"

  "Yeah." Low gravity was good for something. He took Rica's offered hand and scrambled up, but she didn't let go. The outer door had a round-cornered window in its upper half.

  A thin fog floated down and Fynn shivered where the cold swirled around his legs. They stopped a step back from the window and peered out.

  Maybe it was Titan's daytime, but the light was pale, like shortly after sunset on Earth. After a very orange sunset. Palm-sized globules and smaller pebbles lay partly buried in ocher sand, and their shadows were orange too. The lumpy ground turned to dark streaks before melting into a hazy sky.

  "I know what we're looking at." Fynn felt light enough to float away. "Ripples. Do you see, Rica? Ripples on a methane lake. Marvelous."

  She intertwined her fingers in his. "It's awfully barren."

  Chills crept up Fynn's body, and not just from the cold draft at the window. No breathable air waited for them beyond the airlock, but Rica's hand was warm in his.

  From its color, the ground might be tinged with dried blood, but there had never been any living creature out there to bleed. Not red blood, anyway. There wasn't any iron on Titan's surface to incorporate into blood cells. Just water frozen hard as granite in a cold deep enough to liquefy methane. Cold enough to hold a thick nitrogen atmosphere in the moon's feeble gravity.

  Fynn stood still, holding Rica's hand, resisting an urge to retreat farther into the safety of the Kin's fragile habitat.

  ***

  A platform designed to support the methane-fueled power plant stood twenty paces away from the dome's airlock, but Fynn could feel a chill as a stevedore dragged in a block of ice. The bot hefted it into one of the empty cargo bins repurposed into a melting pond. Rows of pallets stood nearby, stacked with ducts and pipes, and compressors and pumps.

  Yash and a dozen crewmates arrived with pry bars. "We're here to lay ductwork," he said. "We won't
get in your way."

  Fynn pointed to lines marked in the floor. "I see where the channels run. And there's pallets stenciled for oxygen, nitrogen, and carbon dioxide lines. But what about those yellow diagrams?" Everything needed for the furnaces easily fit in half the dome, and Fynn waved toward the empty space, larger than the village dome's playing field. "I recognize the layout. Circles and lines numbered and lettered for a recycling system and rectangles where barracks units should go."

  "That's for the future, for a growing colony. Your furnaces don't require the entire space, so we've planned uses for the rest. Barracks in this dome will serve as family cottages once babies are born. That's why this dome is blue inside."

  Fynn felt a twinge of jealousy as Yash returned to his crew, to work side by side with them. But his father had given him an important task, so Fynn squared his shoulders and, determined to succeed, hopped up on the furnace platform.

  Rica fluffed her pink curls, perhaps to hide the light brown roots growing out. "When can I have the stevedore back?" she asked. "It has to tilt these control cabinets onto their sides. The wiring harnesses pulled loose. Probably they shrank in the cold of space. I need to solder on spade lugs and get the power reconnected."

  Wiring problems were causing delays that Fynn would have to report at the next status meeting. "There's no time in the schedule for repairs. Yash won't be happy."

  "Well, you can tell him that I'm an electrician and I say, no repairs, no furnace."

  She couldn't use the second stevedore because Fynn had it hoisting a combustion furnace into place. One of four identical units, it was a tall, sealed cylinder and looked a lot like the nuclear reactor did in the videos, but with a combustion chamber instead of uranium for heat. A Stirling converter sat on top to generate electricity, also hidden in a cylinder with only a few connections visible. One pipe would connect to a heavily insulated line bringing in cold Titan atmosphere to create the temperature difference that powered the converter.

  The colony needed a methane combustion plant for more than electricity. Bundles of switch-backed tubes on the exhaust side would heat air to warm the domes. Combustion products could be directed outside the dome or through pipes Yash was installing to feed carbon dioxide to the greenhouse.

  Combustion exhaust seemed like an odd thing to vent into the domes, but, his files included a model of the colony's air balances, with estimates for human respiration and greenhouse biomass. Advance Team members wouldn't exhale enough to support the necessary plant growth, and even when all four hundred-eight colonists were finally out of stasis, a greenhouse growing enough food for everyone needed extra CO2.

  Controlling the air balances depended on a complicated system of ducts, fittings, dampers, vents, and big butterfly valves. Plus fans to mix the air in each dome. Fynn fretted about all of those components too. A lot of effort would go into maintaining the dome's air system, even if the equipment worked flawlessly.

  Fynn crossed his arms over his chest and hugged himself. As every graduate student knew, nothing worked flawlessly for long.

  He watched the first stevedore finish loading ice blocks and called to Rica. "You can have the bot now."

  With the console tipped over, Rica crawled partway in, humming to herself as she worked.

  Sparks flew with a sharp crack and she yelped.

  Fynn leaped up on the platform. "Rica! Are you okay?"

  Rica leaned back on one elbow, rubbing her head. "Fine, fine. It's those solenoids. I forgot to de-energize them and a couple shorted out. I banged my head."

  He laughed with relief. "And you call yourself an electrician."

  She waved him away and got back to work.

  ***

  Fynn torqued the last bolt into a heat exchanger's support frame, sat back on his heels, and heaved a satisfied sigh. He found Drew standing nearby, watching him.

  "Can you spare a stevedore?" Drew asked. "Liam's bringing a shuttle down and I don't want to move the cargo by hand."

  "It's good timing, so - sure. But I haven't seen a landing notice. How do you know?"

  "For one thing, I keep in touch with Liam and the other guys on the Herschel, so they called me. Secondly, I need a break and thought you might too."

  Drew clumped along in his foot brace to the greenhouse. "I've been hooking up some aqueous systems in here. These are algae tanks, or, they will be. No reason to run the bubblers until your furnaces produce some CO2. See this iridescent sheen floating on the water? My maintenance crew doesn't have the right instruments to analyze it, but your decabots are sending some kind of oil in with the ice."

  Fynn frowned. "There're not my decabots. But there's lots of hydrocarbon haze in the atmosphere, and it rains methane sometimes. So organics in the ice aren't a surprise."

  Drew cupped some water in his hand. "Vinyl cyanide, maybe. I seem to recall something about it forming membranes under certain conditions."

  Fynn shrugged. "You're the biologist."

  "That hardly makes me an expert in low temperature organic chemistry. You won't get your money's worth out of me until I'm in the Hershel's labs."

  Fynn didn't like to think about Drew's permanent assignment in orbit. He'd miss his friend's daily presence, though there should be a lot of travel up and down from the space station. It might not be so bad.

  Drew splatted the water back into the bin and wiped his hand on his coveralls as they walked along the aisle. "It may not matter. Evaporation columns came with the greenhouse equipment. There're intended to distill stasis fluids from the Herschel's pods, to collect the salts and minerals for fertilizer. With a little tweaking, they could boil off hydrocarbons. But I'd love to analyze this stuff. Gotta wait for the Herschel to be reconfigured."

  Liam slouched out of the village dock and greeted them with a smile. "You guys must be getting fat down here. Your meal packages should have lasted another month at least."

  "Good of you to bring down the freeze-dried grub," Drew said, extending a hand to the Herschel's commander.

  "Don't want anyone hungry. Shuttles are entering a maintenance cycle for a couple weeks. Thought I'd bring these buckets down while I had the chance."

  Fynn frowned at the pallet the stevedore towed across the playing field. It didn't seem like anyone was doubling their meals. But Liam wanted to see the rest of the domes and Drew was leading him to the greenhouse. Probably nothing was wrong. Fynn would remember to ask Yash about it. He hurried to catch up with Drew and Liam, anxious to show off the furnace dome's progress.

  Chapter 9

  G reta plaited her hair into a single braid. Plastic mirrors weren't flattering and it was hard to check for gray in her flaxen hair. Flaxen. Her mother had called it that. Greta wasn't sure what flax looked like, but knew it was a compliment.

  Her image blurred further from tears in her eyes. Thinking about her mother, she wondered if the Kin compound had been seized by creditors and if her mother now lived on the government's Universal Allotment. She'd never know and worrying about it wasn't useful.

  She wiped away the tears and smoothed her coveralls. She didn't have to change the color since she usually wore them blue to bring out the color in her eyes.

  The bag she kept packed for Tanaka sat on her desk, now with a shoulder strap clipped in place. Greta headed for the tower, entering through the ground floor door into the cybernet room. The front row of shiny white racks stared at her with pinpoint green lights, a few blinking.

  Maliah looked up from a pad on her desk and smiled. "Hi, Mom. Going to see Doctor Tanaka?"

  Information on individual patients was private, so Greta dissembled, even with her daughter. "Yes, for my weekly report on how the Kin are adapting." She could provide that, as well as a treatment.

  Maliah lifted her chin. "I know Doctor Tanaka called for you because of his headaches." Her pride at being informed turned to concern. "Stasis sickness, but nothing serious, right?"

  "It's hard to know the extent of aftereffects. There are very few human trials
in our database, and neither animal studies nor sentient models tell us much about psychological effects." Greta could only treat symptoms anyway, whatever the underlying cause might be. All the advanced medical equipment was aboard the Herschel, inaccessible until the ship's conversion to a space station was complete.

  "Don't worry." Greta smiled at her golden girl, savoring a few minutes of conversation. "How are you feeling?"

  Maliah returned the smile. "Kin strong."

  Greta lifted the bag's strap over her head to lay across her chest and started up the vertical ladder in the corner of the room. Maj had specifically asked her to climb up inside the tower, away from the Kin's view. Frequent visits from a doctor might create concerns for Tanaka's health, she'd said, which could upset people.

  At the adjunct's quarters on the second floor, Maj met her and they continued to climb. The third floor was storage for Tanaka's private supplies. The adjuncts lived below to keep guard, Greta supposed, though there was no one to guard against.

  She didn't pause to look around, but had a fleeting impression of shelves and bins filling the large room. Maybe the adjuncts guarded those. Youngsters were known to prowl off-limits places, just for the thrill of it. Back on Earth, Maliah often led Fynn on forays. Though Greta had heard about such raids from the barrack chiefs, they seldom caught her children and she smiled to herself at the memory.

  She emerged in the corner of Tanaka's lounge beside a plump, cushioned chair. Shun and Trina sat facing her. As Greta stepped off the ladder, they nodded a greeting.

  Tanaka's voice, strong and confident, came from across the room. "Doctor Lund. Greta, my dear. You look lovely." He sat at his massive desk, plastic like all the furnishings, but pigmented a deep mahogany, with a curved front and legs. Behind him hung a large, golden plaque with five symbols from the ancient Indus Valley culture, the Kin's U-shaped symbol with a sprouting seed inside, flanked by a winged U and T on one side, and on the other, a pair of sprouts and a teardrop with a star inside. Like all Kin, Greta often meditated on the symbols, strengthening her connection with their shared heritage.