“Sorry, I had an inspection to run on the heavy booster.”
“That’s why we have AIs.”
“Instruction dictates to perform physical inspections at daily intervals for thirty days after any mission to check for stress fractures, missing coatings, and signs of fuel system compromise,” Adam responded.
“So, it does,” Prescott nodded and returned to the large display. “On another note, your process to shift the station was fortuitous. With each rise and fall above the ring, we have a very clear shot to Titan. This is really just a practice run for the rest of the outer planets, but still on the list of ‘never before attempted.’”
Prescott’s voice was collected, as if there was a sizeable disconnect between what he was saying and the reality of the whole operation. He had obviously compartmentalized the situation into manageable bits to enable his supervision of it all.
“What will you be needing me to do?” Adam asked.
“Don’t crash,” Hassan said with a chuckle.
“Not quite that bad,” Prescott continued. “Once we’ve recovered here and inspect the orbiter, we’ll be taking two landers to Titan. You’ll be in the trailing one as a backup; the rest of us will be in the lead. We’ll use the pair of ships to conduct an in-depth survey of the surface from the air and establish a suitable landing site. We’ve got a compliment of equipment to drop that will comprise a bare-bones installation for the permanent party, while we go on to the drop on Uranus.”
“A bare-bone insertion will definitely come to Uranus, so to speak,” Hassan added.
Prescott ignored the quip. “If we encounter any problems, we will scuttle one lander in favor of the other and limp our way back to Draco. The mission will be treated as a proof-of-concept, and Mission Control will utilize the data gathered to refine their plans for the permanent installation to follow. If successful, the base will begin local processing to be more habitable for anyone who follows.” He looked to Adam. “Can you handle piloting one of the landers?”
“I should; I’ve made a full orbit of Saturn, plus a dedicated trip and landing on Janus before you arrived.”
“Wonders shan’t ever cease.” Prescott turned back without a flicker of his blank expression. “How’re your skills with the radar?”
“As good as anything. I’ve taken readings of the whole G-ring and used them to compile my estimates on the safety of the platform.”
“Good. I’d like to use both landers for the imaging of Titan,” Prescott said. “It’s an easy task to run a straight SAR image to get us a good map and find a landing zone, but since we’ll be deploying in tandem, I’d like to write up a routine that’ll keep us in a known orbit and use a bi-static technique instead. If you set your system to transmit in sync with us, we can receive…”
“So, to speak,” Cooper whispered.
“…receive the terrain bounce and hopefully cut right through the atmosphere and isolate the ground beneath.”
“That doesn’t sound too hard,” Adam replied, thinking back to his early experiments on the station. It’d be different now with a new audience, but without Draco burning him at both ends and driving him to quit. He knew the tools inside and out, so performing the real deal would be a walk in the park.
“Good. We’re set to launch in thirty-four hours. You have Hassan’s attention to find us a solution and get it implemented.”
Adam nodded, although his heart skipped. He had spoken too soon with regards to real life not being executed under pressure.
***
“Solid return. I think we might have something,” Adam stated as he stared at the waterfall plot of radar images forming on his workstation. Hassan spun about from his task of manually adjusting the transmitter one miniscule step at a time to see the results for himself.
The system required careful calibration of multiple parameters in order for the pair of landers to receive any useful information at all. To simulate the environment, the astronauts had set the pair of transceivers up in the docking bay and connected them with an array of matched cables. Without radiating within the enclosed space, they built a similar chain using blocks in the radiofrequency pathway, which were set to the temporal delays that Prescott had estimated based on their projected orbital separation.
With correct parameters, the system would reject returns that arrived earlier or later than expected—in their case, the moon’s atmosphere—and preserve the stable signal that reflected off the surface. If the timing was off, they’d interpret the sky as the ground, and if the window was too wide, they wouldn’t get anything more useful than a blank streak across the images. By carefully tuning out the biases, they’d build a detailed topographical map of the surface to aid in their landing and exploration.
“That looks promising,” Hassan said while looking over his shoulder. “I think we’re on to something. Damn, good thing they brought me along.”
“Draco, can you confirm our calculations?” Adam asked the AI.
“Parameters are confirmed for your specified orbit at the equator. Review your transceiver protocol. I’ve taken the liberty to update it based on inclination.”
“Excellent. Good catch.” Adam knew he’d forget something. Of course, they could only specify a narrow range of latitudes at a given time, as the change in distance would slide their system out of focus. By actively adjusting the parameters for each look angle, they were ensured to get a solid return.
Eschewing the initial assistance of the AI was a dangerous gamble, but given the circumstances, Adam felt it was worth the risk. Draco was fully capable to address the programming and virtual operations short of the physical wiring. At the same time, Adam needed a few more wins in his column while dealing with the Hydra team. Getting a review from Draco to catch the details was far better than throwing up his hands and letting the machine take complete ownership of his station.
The event was a minor success. Hassan’s approval might have been suppressed, but Adam could read his expression nevertheless. The navigator would plan their course and find Adam’s piece of the mission ready to fly and waiting for the rest of the team to catch up. It was one of many steps forward on what was sure to be a challenging hike.
“Have you seen the sensor package we brought with us?” Hassan asked as he got to his feet.
“No, I don’t think Cooper’s made the offer yet,” Adam replied.
“Well, you probably should at least get eyes on it before we need you to do some work and you end up hosing the whole operation.” Moving through the docking bay’s primary airlock and into the attached Hydra orbiter, Hassan made his way to the attached heavy equipment pod.
On the left wall rested a tall conformal rack, loaded with a half-dozen pale, cigar-shaped devices. Each was no more than three feet long with rounded ends and perfectly polished skin which reflected a pale gold. To most casual observers, they might have been considered as solid brass blanks, wheel chocks, or anchors, but Hassan looked on with a high degree of pride and satisfaction.
“Here we are. Extreme condition submersible sensors.” He brushed a hand down the one at shoulder height as Adam looked on. “Capable of facing down any environment this side of Ragnarok.”
“These are… submarines?” Adam asked. “They don’t look like it.”
“You’ve never had to take precautions like this. Double-bagging with a heater isn’t even close. The shells are seamless titanium over tungsten and use a small nuclear reactor inside to provide nonstop power for its entire service life, plus enough latent heat to operate the physical components.”
“So you’ll dump them in a methane lake and drive them around? How do you even steer?”
“You should know it’s too cold to allow for any real joints or protrusions or we’d risk breakage,” Hassan advised, “so fins, propellers, and flagella are out. Instead, there are microscopic slits along the surface which use a set of valves to pull liquid methane into one side of the craft and expel it from the other. Since they’re so small,
they don’t pull enough heat from the skin to harm the system and also serve to reject impurities, so no worries about them clogging.
“A few on the front and rear are larger, which allow for more materials to flow through, which we can then chemically analyze. We can also attach external modules through inductive links to take larger samples and gather more data. Those are the parts with a one-time punch card from the exposed seals. Ask Cooper how dangerous it is to bust through things like that.”
Hassan opened the next cabinet, which was stacked with one-foot diameter orbs of the same color. “These are the relays which we’ll use to control each one from the habitat. Since the bodies are so large, we can also program them to run automated routes beyond the signal range and report once they drift back into view.”
“And you think something could be alive down there?” Adam asked, curious as to the validity of such a proposal.
“There’s a chance, to be sure, but the bigger question is if there are compounds present which could be the building blocks of life, or maybe even its residue. If Titan had a more hospitable past, it could have had a better chance to harbor some form of an evolutionary cycle. Besides,” Hassan said, “it’s not like they ever sent me here to look before.”
“You think you’ll make the difference?”
“Pretty sure. They couldn’t even build a sim routine that I couldn’t master,” Hassan replied, feigning to wipe some dust from his shoulder. “From day one, NASA knew they couldn’t pull this off without me.”
Adam suppressed an eye roll and went with the comment. “Is that when you met the rest of the crew?” he asked.
“Not immediately. I double-majored in physics and engineering before being picked up for grad school then pilot training where they troll for astro candidates. The early training was all individualized, until I got dumped in the Mission Specialist track. Once Hydra got the go, they assembled the crew.”
“So, they literally dumped you together before the launch?”
“That’s close. It was an abrupt start, but we had a few months working together. Two guys washed out before we launched.”
“That must have been quite the experience.”
“Don’t you know it. Say you’re an astronaut back on Earth and doors just open for you. Cooper…” Hassan stopped and frowned. “That’s strange.”
“What?”
“My mind just went completely effing blank,” Hassan said, looking away. “I was gonna say that Cooper always did something, but now I can’t remember. All I can think of is him having a stupid Ridgeback all through flight school.”
“He had a dog?”
“Yeah, it was the most retarded thing. It took tons of time, and all it’d do was drool on shit and bite people.”
***
“I think you might be overreacting.”
The words from Dr. Moroder hit Adam as anything but comforting. As before, he found himself holed away, this time in the corner of the hydrogen draw, to complete the transmission uninterrupted. “I’m just saying the personalities I’m having to deal with at the moment are a little… special.”
“Well, people are people, and to be honest, you’re a little special at times too.” Erin smirked. “What’s got you so bothered by them?”
“On one hand, it’s just more than I’m used to, that’s all,” Adam said. “But on the other, I’m curious as to their processing methods, if Mission Control made any sort of modifications since they developed us.”
“How’s that?”
“I get the feeling that they loosened the conditioning parameters and gave them the ability to walk through life unopposed. In any other circumstance, the result would have been the A-Type personalities I’m dealing with now; they were unrestrained all through life. The difference could be from the hundred-percent yield rate.”
Erin looked confused. “That last part, come again?”
“The yields,” Adam lamented. “When I cornered Draco about them in the lab a few weeks back and he told me that under normal circumstances on the station, they were able to monitor our development, and if we diverged too much, they had the ability to kill us off in favor of others. Is nothing sacred anymore?”
“That’s right. Dark, but I get where they’re coming from,” Erin said. “It puts things in perspective, that if I had moved off the script too much, they would have offed me. Like, if I changed majors at the last minute and decided to ditch astronomy to become a poet.”
Adam nodded. “Draco likened it to any inherent mission risk, like if we were asking pilots to fly an experimental craft if there was a one-in-ten chance of it crashing and burning.”
“That’s reasonable,” Erin admitted. “We’re in the most unforgiving environment imaginable, and it’s not beyond possibilities that we lose a complete station before we’re done. Morally, I still think you can square those two paradigms.”
“You’ll have to tell me how you come to your conclusions sometime,” Adam replied. “I’ve also got the first data point on how they built a crew. I think the Genesis pods have some way of sharing data between them. It’s nothing too complex, but enough so that they think they have a bond to the rest of the crew.”
“That’s interesting. Surprising too.”
“I saw it myself. The mission specialist went on about being friends with the lot of them, then couldn’t remember a thing they did together.”
“Alcoholism will do that too.”
“You know what I mean,” Adam said. “Anyway, I wonder if the Hydra didn’t have the opportunity to pare down its crew over their gestation, and it got us a team of people who are a bit off from what we’d need most. They were forced to grow every attempted embryo to adulthood and smash them together, regardless of the results.”
“Are you sure about that? Maybe they’re exactly what we need and you haven’t seen it yet.”
Adam hadn’t thought of it in that way before. He paused, carefully considering the doctor’s words. “That’s reasonable,” he finally said. “Thanks. I hope you’re right. In any case, I’ll have a couple weeks of radio-contact-only while trailing them on the way out to Titan to break things up a little bit.”
“There you go. Keep proving yourself to them and maybe they’ll relent.”
Adam nodded. “Ma’am, you have a way about you to make things simple. Thanks again for the help.”
“Anytime. Go show them who’s boss.”
Adam kept his eye on Erin’s beaming face as the screen went dark. It wasn’t a mere platitude; he was genuinely happy that he had access to someone to keep him grounded, such as it was. More than that, he appreciated having a friend within reach as Draco didn’t always provide the most satisfying conversation. One way or another, he would use the adversity to make himself stronger, and with any luck make up for his lack of formal academy training.
Titan’s Children
Adam trailed the Hydra crew in their fully-stocked lander as they extracted a booster from its protective pod and moved on to fueling and finally to the opening burn. After mirroring their actions at the hydrogen draw, Adam lined up and allowed the opening acceleration to push his capsule well on its way to the distant planet-sized moon, relieved at once to be left in a brief moment of solace. He had suffered the company of his companions in silence, ignoring their crude humor and narcissistic personalities, as much as their ambivalence to his skills. Out of spite, he had taken each operational movement in his lander aggressively, cutting down on seconds of lag in an effort to prove his skills to himself, as well as his guests, as they prepared to leave the station.
Now with them safely contained in their heavily-laden ship and Adam trailing comfortably a few kilometers back, his cabin had finally returned to blissful silence. The excursion to Titan would be several times longer than his previous outing to Janus, and he relished every moment of the peaceful air. Once again, he found himself sitting comfortably without an immediate task or crisis, so he returned to his course of study, focusing on Draco’s lectu
res of the solar system’s construction and movement while he chewed away the idle hours.
It was just in time. The constant battle had done a number on Adam’s nerves beyond what was normally experienced around the station. He was tired of it and, by the way his stomach continually churned, was one step away from a serious case of ulcers.
After two weeks, he could just make out the yellow halo of the moon and discern it from the accompanying field of stars. The dot was close enough to have an identifiable diameter, which slowly grew in Adam’s forward windows as the landers approached their destination.
If the Hydra crew held any excitement about the mission, they kept it hidden beneath a mountain of stoic resolve on the far side of the radio channel. Various team members, although usually Prescott, gave reports on their status every six hours or so in an agonizing monotone as if they were on a forced march around the block. Adam responded to each in time, giving little more information than the assurance that he was in fact still breathing.
On the day of their arrival into the moon’s orbit, things grew more animated. Prescott’s voice broke in early, reiterating the plan for the mission. “Captain Montgomery,” his voice echoed in the tiny cabin, “Lander One is beginning deceleration. Match speed and prepare to pick up the orbit.”
“Copy that. Matching speed,” Adam replied, keeping one eye on the craft ahead, while with the other he took in the growing disc of Titan as it became the dominant feature outside. He compared it immediately to its parent, making note of the changes of the pale-yellow atmosphere that continuously swirled about the world. “On your lead.”
“Maintain heading. Sync complete for SAR imaging, standing by for bi-static transmission.”
Adam flipped the switch for his radar system. “Transmitter active.” The operation could have made do with the Synthetic Aperture Radar capabilities of a single ship, but Prescott was likely entirely correct about the different angles of attack being able to isolate and remove the thick atmosphere smeared across their target. He wouldn’t see the results himself, since without another transmission they’d simply stay in the leading ship’s system, but it didn’t much bother him; Adam knew that if they uncovered a problem, he’d hear about it in forceful clarity before too long.
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