by Kate Rauner
"Then you're saying Maliah can do whatever she wants. Like Tanaka."
"No. I'm saying we need each other." Greta tented her hands against his lips. "Look, after the problems we've had setting up the domes, people are frightened, and frightened people don't think straight. It might help if your crew slips back into their Village barracks. Show the others nothing's changed."
"I can't slip back anywhere," Fynn said. "They threw me out, remember? And Rica, Ben, Olsen..." He scanned the faces around him.
"But most of your crew weren't evicted."
One of the new Mechanics, a greying Viking, thumped his red-clothed chest. "I'm not going anywhere. My own barracks mates thought tossing Fynn off the balcony was funny. That corks it for me. Rica says, soon as the decapods have power again, they can pass blocks of ice through the airlock, so we can charge our own water system. Our new barracks are ready. I'm a Mechanic now."
Greta slid a shoulder under Fynn's arm. "Let's get you to your bunk. But, Fynn, you should talk to your crew. Encourage them to stay with their Village units."
"They're Kin. They make their own choices."
***
Fynn stood at the base of the dock's ramp, both feet on Titan's rock-hard ice surface. Any film of hydrocarbons had been scraped away when the robots prepared the dome pad, months before the colony landed. Rica and Lukas stood beside him while a half dozen Mechanics clustered around Ben, each one eagerly gripping a flier. The morning's Gravitron run had been completed, and the crew had time for fun.
"Final comms check," Fynn said. "Raise your hand if you hear me." Hands shot up. "Okay Ben. Take it away."
Ben thumbed his flier's handgrip and hovered. "We'll be back in time to greet the next group of awakened. Sure you guys don't want to come? Pilgrimage to Black and White Hill is the first ceremony created on Titan. We'll honor our martyrs, laid out for all Kin to visit, for all time."
It was Tanaka's ceremony, but somehow it resonated with the Mechanics, and this group wanted to go. Despite his surface suit's heaters, Fynn shivered. His father was one of those martyrs, frozen for all eternity. Methane rains wouldn't bury him or wash away his dead stare.
"Not today," Fynn said. "I have to check the decapods."
"I thought you and Rica fixed the power cables."
"We did, but the bots left the depot. According to the Herschel's readings, they're parked at the dock again, so I need to get them moving."
"Good luck with that."
Ben's group rose slowly and tilted their fliers inland across the peninsula.
Fynn held out his left arm, tapped the channel selector, and twisted so Rica and Lukas could see the pad.
Rica tapped her own sleeve. "Okay, I'm on your comm channel."
"Me too," Lukas said.
"Do you think Ben can take care of so many Kin on their first trip?" Rica asked.
"Ben seems to think so. My father said, to conquer Titan, we need to claim the surface, so they have to learn. Now, are you two ready to go?"
"How about your leg?" Rica asked.
"Since when did you become a mother hen?" Fynn jumped straight up and drifted down, landing on his good leg like a ballerina in boots. "In this dense atmosphere, it's like walking under water. Flying's even easier." He hopped on his flier and banked around the furnace exhaust. A column of gas barely rose above the short stack before tilting into a plume of tiny ice crystals that glided against the domes as it dissipated.
After flying over the furnace dome and skirting the greenhouse to arrive at the Village, they landed at the colony's main dock. There the two decapods sat like giant hermit crabs living in soda cans, but stubbornly inert.
Rica crouched next to one, ready to escape if the bot moved, and cautiously pried open its control panel. "I can't tell why these things left the fuel depot, or why they decided to stop here." She poked around and frustration tinged her voice. "This console isn't intended for manual access. No labels, no obvious controls to adjust. What if the bots only produce fuel on some pre-set schedule instead of when the shuttles need it?"
Fynn sighed. "The decapods used to react whenever a shuttle landed, so something's changed."
Rica slapped the obstinate bot. "Maybe some of Lukas's rain leaked into the circuits. Or it could be an artifact of whatever algorithm runs in their brainless heads."
"There's only enough fuel to refill a shuttle after this afternoon's trip," Fynn said.
"We may have to wait until these idiot bots decide to manufacture more, but I'll take helmet-cam pictures to study when we get inside."
"I guess that's all we can do for now. Thanks. Anything else we need to do outside?"
Lukas spread his arms wide and tipped over backward, settling gently onto his backpack. "At least I can gather my weather data. With my helmet cam pointed straight up, I'm recording sky opacity. We're so lucky that the rainy season's starting. It's easy to build a rain gauge. I made them in school. If you get those bots fixed, they could collect readings for me."
"What good will that do?" Rica asked.
"The Herschel's monitoring cloud patterns. If I can connect orbital data with ground observations, I'll develop a decent weather model."
"How long are you gonna lay there?"
"Five minutes, tops."
"Take your time," Fynn said. "I'll check the tie-downs." He examined the domes' anchors frequently. Domes were like hot air balloons moored in the ice. Breaking loose would be a disaster.
Fynn took a step toward the Village dome, leaning into the dense atmosphere, and his feet slipped. With a yelp, he fell forward. Flat on his belly, he swept a hand over the surface. "The ground's slippery."
Rica knelt next to him. "I thought it looked shinier than usual."
"Thanks for the warning." Fynn rose to his knees. "Lukas, are you listening? I think it rained."
Lukas stood and slid his feet back and forth, but barely moved. He held out a hand. "It's not raining now, and the ground should dry quickly, like after a water shower on Earth."
"Try a different spectrum." Fynn adjusted the helmet's image intensifiers until a bluish sheen appeared on his yellow sleeve.
Lukas scrambled back on his flier. "I'm going to look at the lake's surface."
They all flew over the domes and landed close to the shore.
The lake lay flat and smooth, and the air seemed thick with reflected sky glow. Fynn switched to visible light, tapped the record button on his sleeve, and held his helmet steady, aimed across the lake. He was about to switch to infrared when something changed. "Are the clouds thinning? The lake looks brighter."
"What's your spectrum setting?" Lukas asked. "I'm in visible light and something hazy is moving under the methane."
In a dozen spots, pale flecks of light drifted together and merged. They broke through the surface to float like giant, wobbly soap bubbles.
The crewmates watched silently for several minutes until the bubbles sank back into the methane and dissipated, leaving behind only a brown refection of the sky.
"What did we just see?" Rica asked.
"Ghosts," Fynn said. "And I've got them recorded." He'd have to post the video on the cybernet, so everyone could see, but he'd alert Drew on their private channel. His friend would be excited.
Chap ter 5
T here was barely time to stow the surface suits and plug the backpacks into their charging stations before the shuttle came sliding into the Village dock. Fynn posted his video of the bluish ghost bubbles and sent a link to Drew, stopped to thank crewmates stuck tending the furnaces, and hurried after the other Mechanics.
With their recently awakened medical assistants, the Herschel had enough crew onboard to handle the awakening, so Greta and her clinic's medics had stayed in the domes. Now they waited at the airlock door. Otherwise, this arrival was a replay of the last one. Kin from the domes jumped forward to greet friends, to prop them up as they learned to walk in Titan's gravity, and to lead them to the mess hall for a meal.
The pilot, Eva
n, made excuses to leave as soon as Fynn and his crew unloaded a dozen buckets of freeze-dried meals.
"I'm worried," the chubby pilot said. "Those decapods are sitting by the dock, and never moved when the shuttle landed. On my last trip, they headed for the depot as soon as I touched down and were waiting to refuel me."
"Maybe I can get them started," Fynn said. "I'll meet you outside."
He bounded back to the furnace dome, grabbed a rubber mallet from a tool bin, selected a fresh pack, suited up, and was outside on a flier in record time.
The sky was brighter, and the ground no longer looked shiny. Instead, it was dark with some sort of hydrocarbon film. He flipped on the flier and vaulted over the domes to the shuttle's landing zone.
Fynn had been close to a shuttle on the surface before, but he'd been busy then and only remembered a looming, shiny box of a ship, its white surface tinted yellow with sky glow. Now he had a chance to examine Evan's ship, the Hera.
His earthly sense of how a plane should be proportioned was all wrong for Titan. The shuttle was blunt-nosed, boxy, and looked clumsy as a puppy.
Its wheels seemed too small to support the craft and the wings too stubby to fly. This was the only shuttle outfitted for passengers, and from his own trip down to the domes, Fynn knew the inside was packed with berths running the length of the cargo compartment. He'd always focused on the passenger hatch, but that was a door inside a door. The whole backend could hinge open, which was how the other three shuttles collected cargo in orbit and off-loaded on the surface.
Thruster nozzles ringed the ship about where an inner bulkhead separated its cargo compartment from the command cabin, right where the life support compartments were located. Fynn had ridden in that cabin once. There were no windows, but he knew Evan could watch him on monitor screens. He waved.
Evan backed the shuttle away from the dock and down the ramp, but the two decapods didn't budge.
Fynn hovered over the recalcitrant bots, blasting them with the flier's downwash. Nothing. He whacked one bot's central column, then landed, and whacked its base between two crab legs. Still nothing.
A green light blinked on at his jawline. Evan had opened a comm link through the Herschel. "I'm going to try rolling back and forth. Maybe the stupid things will notice me."
The boxy shuttle backed a few lengths on its studded wheels, a thruster fired to slide the nose sideways, and it rolled toward the bots, but they didn't react.
Fynn tilted the flier to stare downward. "Evan, are your manipulator claws big enough to pick up a bot? Let's fly them to the depot."
A multi-jointed arm unfolded above one short wing. The manipulators were the only slender components on the shuttle. Designed for use in space, they seemed frail compared to the decapods. Joints rotated and the long fingers closed around a bot's central cylinder. The shuttle tilted as it tugged at the bot, so Evan repositioned, deployed a second manipulator, and grabbed both decapods. That balanced him enough to lift off, kicking up an auburn cloud of vaporized hydrocarbons. The shuttle lumbered into the air and, with sustained thruster blasts, headed for the depot with Fynn following.
The bots were no more cooperative there. Pushing them toward the hose bibs was useless.
"I can fill your tanks," Fynn said. Riding the flier as much as possible, he dragged hoses to the shuttle. Fat cylinders hung under each wing in front of the engines. At each one, he mated the proper hose to its nozzle and spun the connection collar tight.
Back at the supply tanks, plastic boxes housed pumps and compressors. No controls were obvious.
"Drew, are you still listening?"
"I'm here."
"Check the instruction videos, will you? See how I turn these things on manually."
A few minutes later, Drew responded. "I found a whole directory on manual operations. Start by opening the green panel."
"Green? Everything down here is shades of orange."
"Look for a browner shade of orange. A square panel the length of your glove. There's a ridge on one side. Pry up there."
In a few minutes, the system was filling the shuttle's tanks.
"You've got to do something with those bots," Evan said.
Fynn swore silently as the shuttle disappear in the thick atmosphere.
He returned to the furnace dock under a yellow blur of Saturn-shine. A fog of ice crystals blew straight up from the furnace exhaust stack and wafted outward in all directions, coating the domes with sparkling fairy dust and adding to snowdrifts edging the dock.
Inside the airlock, Fynn eased down onto a bench with a contented sigh. Even without the obstinate decapods, he'd refueled Evan's shuttle. Awakened Kin could be brought to the surface whether the bots functioned or not.
With the right instructions, he was sure the entire operation could be performed manually. Ice blocks had to be moved to the electrolysis units, and he wasn't sure how to dig them out of the quarry, but he'd think of something.
Fynn relaxed as the equalizer chamber mixed warm, breathable air into the intensely cold nitrogen around him. As soon as he removed his helmet, the inner door opened.
Rica was waiting for him and she looked grim. "Fynn, the guys need to talk to you."
That moment of relaxation in the airlock had been too short. Fynn twisted a hand through his hair, plugged his backpack into a charger, and followed Rica.
A dozen Kin in multi-colored coveralls leaped from their circle of benches, all talking at once.
Rica held up her hands. "Olsen, why don't you start? Tell Fynn what happened in the mess hall."
"Magnus said we only get algae cakes to eat from now on."
A graying man in red broke in. "He said, with more Kin awakening, the greenhouse can't keep up."
"Some of you worked on the greenhouse crew," Fynn said. "Is it true that..."
A slender woman in yellow interrupted him. "It's nonsense. Crop rotations will support us all now that the last frames have been seeded. With supplemental dehydrated meals for a month or two, there's plenty of food." Anger twisted her features.
Rica glared at Fynn. "This is garbage. We work as hard as any Kin and deserve to be treated fairly. What're you gonna do about it?"
He twisted a hand through his hair. How should he know what to do about another pointless edict? "I realize you're upset, but we've got another problem." The bots were a problem he might be able to solve. Fynn explained that the decapods hadn't recovered.
"Our furnaces are top priority, followed by the Gravitron," Fynn said. "But I'd like six crewmates to join me outside."
Hands shot up. Lukas bounced high above the Kin around him, waving.
Fynn smiled. "Okay. Search the cybernet for videos on manual operations. Find the refueling depot files and spend the rest of today studying those."
***
The Mechanics marched together to supper, ignoring the spicy smell wafting from the kitchen microwaves. Trustees crowded around them, but Fynn and his crew never glanced at bowls of rehydrated chili. They were a team and triumphantly carried algae cakes to their own table. Fynn was surprised to discover they needed two tables, since they seemed to gain a handful of defiant algae-eaters.
His crew's mood had improved, or maybe they wanted to prove that being denied a share of the main meal wasn't hurting them. Rica didn't glare at him once, and Fynn didn't twist a hand through his hair. Chili was easy to turn down for a lot of Kin since stomach troubles were chronic, another problem that gravity treatments should improve.
Maliah appeared after everyone was seated. The fat disk of a holo projector waited on the serving counter, so when she tapped it, Tanaka was visible to them all. Some Mechanics had to turn their chairs around to watch, and they did. Their dead leader was a martyr.
"You, my Kin, stand at the end of a great line," the hologram said.
Rica whispered, "We're sitting, actually." Someone hushed her.
"My grandfather's great discovery was Nature's ultimate purpose for true humans. She molded the Kin's
ancestors in the Indus Valley, but we are explorers. Over eons, some of our people went east to become the Samurai. Some west, to become Vikings. But mongrels swarmed across the Earth, so destiny led us to Titan.
"My beloved Kin, when our shared meal is done, retire to your barracks. Let no one step foot outside until tomorrow dawns."
The trustees stood up, arms crossed, faces rigid. They were scattered around the mess hall and scanned those seated as a reminder they'd be enforcing the curfew.
"Pocket anything you haven't eaten," Fynn said. "Let's get out of here while the crowd's occupied."
Safely back in the furnace dome, Fynn left the Mechanics settling onto their benches to talk and definitely to not retreat inside the barracks for a curfew. Fynn wondered if Maliah was purposefully ignoring them to avoid a fight she couldn't win. Or maybe she was plotting a way to win. He didn't like to think about it and headed for his sleeping bin.
Rica followed. "I thought you might like some company."
Fynn arranged his pillows, stretched out his limbs, and flopped down, taking advantage of the slow motion fall. Rica snuggled against him on the narrow bed.
"Fynn," Rica said. "Why don't we move your stuff to one of the new barracks?"
A hint of tension crept back into Fynn's shoulders. "I don't know. I'm alright. Maybe it's better not to change anything."
"You really got used to being alone at your university, didn't you? The rest of us have formed Mechanics units. We want to turn these sleeping bins into a Lovers' Lane. It might make people uncomfortable to have their crew leader so close all night long."
Fynn tried to look into Rica's face but only got a mouthful of curls. "I'll have a stevedore shove my bin farther along the wall, well out of the way."
University had changed him, but life there was lonely at times. Fynn missed his home barracks. Drew had slept in the next bed since his seventh birthday and even forgave Fynn for breaking his nose in boxing class. They'd laugh and joke with the other boys until lights out. Meals, sports, classes. They were a dozen brothers within the larger Kin family. Their unit didn't always win at track and field, but they always had fun.