Abby’s cheeks warmed despite her veneer of a smile. Time for a deflection. “And what about Bavaria? What was being a kid like in the southern capital of the Neo Russian Confederation?”
Tanya shrugged, turning back from the window. “I suppose like anyone’s. I had good parents, mean sisters, protected by brother, who I am still very close with. And I loved visit the castles. Kevin said he once sees Neuschwanstein.”
“The one that gave Disney his ideas, right?”
“Yes, lots of history there.” Tanya pulled up her sleeve and tapped her wrist. The pad glowed under her skin. She scrolled through some photos and held her arm where Abby could look. “See? I am six here.”
A red-headed, freckled girl posed on a log with the white turrets and towers of Mad Ludwig’s palace sprouting behind her, framed in a rich evergreen forest.
“Beautiful,” Abby said. She pointed toward Tanya’s wrist. “What’s that pink thing you’re hugging?”
“Dmitri Dragon. You guys not have Dmitri Dragons? Very popular where I grew up. Pink toy dragon, long neck, sequins on furry back of shoulders—” She gestured to the nape of her neck.
“Right,” Abby said. “Mane. Like a lion.”
“Da. Mane. Purple mane. Pink dragon. You western kids missed out.”
Abby looked out the porthole. A slurry of organic soot was drifting down from above. She let out a long breath. Her trip here had been an elaborate tour across much of northern Titan. From her arrival at Port Antillia, just south of the equator, Titan had been a series of surprises. Antillia itself reminded her of some of the small mountain towns in the Colorado Rockies: independent, self-reliant in the face of stark wilderness, a small island of civilization in an untamed world. At the edge of the dusky plains and the Adiri rise, Antillia had a striking view of the flatlands to the north. Her shuttle had taken her northwest across the vast dune seas that reminded her of Africa’s Namib. A surly sky had painted the undulating landscape in a glowering red, the dunes like a giant’s black fingerprints on a flesh-colored table. Here and there, an island of bedrock—bed-ice in Titan’s case—reared up from the dunes, causing the drifts to bend and slither around themselves. Some of the braver sandbanks made their way up the bases of the buttes, fighting a losing battle to bury the outcrops in their dark blankets.
The umber hydrocarbon dunes gave way to the glistening ice hills of Aaru as the shuttle headed north of Kosovo/Taishan, the Sino-European launch center. In some places, the dunes died out among wandering features that looked like ancient lava flows. Where Aaru’s hills came down to meet the sandy plains, river valleys cut branching canyons into the frozen landscape, reminding her of winter maples lying on their sides. The river valleys did not look gentle but had the appearance of scars from flash flooding. The 2,000-meter high cliffs gave way to broken bedrock where rivers had once poured onto the plains. Many channels spread out into the plains as deltas, forming broad fans. Piles and drifts of fine material rested within the river bottoms and deltas, fading into the more gravelly flats beyond. Bright blemishes streaked across the bleak lowlands, marking wind trails.
All the civilization lay to the south, along the equator: Russia’s Novum Baikonur, AustraZealand’s Warawoona Station, the Brazilian Federation’s Cuzco and China’s Xanadu Mountain Research Station. Further west lay the great impact crater Sinlap, a relatively fresh feature 80 km across. Abby had seen Sinlap before, on a short trip in preparation for her Mayda expedition. Sinlap’s rim and bowl reminded her of some of Ganymede’s craters. Its knobby ejecta blanket, draped over the surface as the meteor dug out the crater eons ago, spread in great lobes over the landscape, a record of vaporized ice that refroze into icy spherules in Titan’s thick air. A small central peak crowned the center of the crater, rounded and fractured.
The farther north she traveled, the more pocked and irregular the terrain became. Bedrock reared up in great blocks where the crust had faulted along parallel east–west patterns. Complex semi-circular depressions marked areas of subsurface collapse, perhaps like the tundra she had seen in Alaska or the Martian north. The rolling plains seemed battered by sinkholes and kettles. As the craft pushed on into the northern lake district, some of the kettles filled with dark methane lakes and ponds. Finally, spreading before her like a purple bruise on the gray landscape, Kraken Mare stretched across the horizon. The shuttle crossed the convoluted shoreline at Okahu Sinus, where irregular cliffs sawtoothed along the methane waves. The flight continued northwest over the irregular island called Bimini Insula, and finally descended upon the scattering of habitats marking Mayda Research Station nestled on the shore at the straits of Bayta Fretum.
Which brought her back to the present. In the distance, the massive drilling project continued to progress out beyond the shore. Long tubes rocked up and down as lights flickered in the methane drizzle, reflecting in the undulating ruddy waves below. She shook her head as the monstrous machine kept up its hypnotic swaying. She shivered. “Why do we do these things?” she mumbled.
“Gravity maps.”
Abby glanced at her. “What?”
“Gravity maps. We found a thin place in ice crust here, so this is best place to drill down to water ocean. Deep Core is sealed, perfectly sterile, in case we find—why are you look like that to me?”
“It was a rhetorical question.”
“What kind?”
“I was just wondering why we are all here, in general. Not specifically. Never mind.”
She spooned some cereal into her mouth and chewed with more energy than she needed to. Sometimes it felt as though humans—poorly designed to live in a place like this—should have just stayed home where they belonged. But with that approach, Abby supposed, everyone would still be knapping flint in northern Africa. As it was, the migration into Europe and Asia and the New World was just the beginning. Her home on Mars was proof of that. She missed the blue sunsets and the rusty sky, so different from this one. There was a moment on Titan, just at twilight, when the sky reminded her of Mars at night. But there was nothing like the jewel-like metallic firmament of Mars, when the Sun poured from the sky and illuminated the fine dust at high altitude. Just a scattering here and there of the olden days, when the skies were a subdued salmon color and the rains never fell. She preferred the new Mars.
Tanya rolled her sleeve back and brought Abby out of her thoughts with a simple comment. “I could tell Kevin loved being away from Earth more. He says he always want to see ice flows on Ariel and Ganymede, ever since he studies the outflow stuff in remnant Antarctic glaciers. I guess they were the only big icy satellites he never saw. He gets around.” She dropped her gaze downward. Was she struggling with the language, or with the loss? “Got around.”
A dusting of goose bumps made their way across Abby’s shoulders. She leaned toward Tanya. “Are you sure he said those two? Ariel I can understand, but Ganymede?”
The Russian thought for a moment and glanced up. “Yes, because he mentions the big chasms on Ariel and then he says that Ganymede is more bigger than Mercury, which he has been to two times. He was for sure. Something like, ‘Never been to Ganymede, never knew anyone who has, never knew anyone there.’”
Abby’s pulse raced. Could Troy be right? Was Kevin hiding something? Did he lie to Tanya? Why would he? Who was this guy on Ganymede?
“Vell, speaking of Kevin and sweeties, what about that Troy?”
Abby rocketed back to reality and realized that Tanya was watching her…closely. “What about him?” she asked suspiciously.
“He is not bad to look on, and the two of you spend a lot of times together.”
“Just the hazards of the work. He can be—” she searched for a word, “abrupt, at times.” Read that as ‘a jerk.’
“And why he calls you ‘Apps’?”
Abby smiled and waved her off. “Long story.”
“Eat your oatmeal and share. I got time.”
She took in a long breath, as if bracing herself against some terrible embarr
assment. “It’s silly really. We have some history. We actually met back at Syrtis.”
“Mars? I did not know that part.”
Abby smiled. “There’s a lot that people don’t know about Troy and me. When I first got a research assignment post grad, it was for some cirrus studies at Elysium, and Troy was headed out there to do some organic studies of the ancient fumaroles. I was checking in at admin, and I knew the woman there. Chelsea.”
“Chelsea, Da. Who worked here for a while.”
“That’s the one—we’ve got a small community. So she and I knew each other from before, and we’d been chatting on vid coms leading up to my transfer, and she always called me ‘Abs,’ but Troy couldn’t hear over all the background noise. He thought she called me ‘Apps.’ He came up and tapped on his wrist monitor and said, ‘Apps? As in Applications?’ and I had no idea what he was talking about. It took us a while to straighten it all out, but the name stuck in his little pea brain, so there it is.”
“Apps. Cute. So you two did a tiff?”
“Had a tiff.”
“Had. Thank you.”
“I suppose,” Abby said. But it was more than a tiff. Troy simply wasn’t being a nice person. Or maybe he just couldn’t be nice to her any more. If he didn’t feel about her the way he had before, that was fine. She was neutral on the subject, wasn’t she? Still, she needed him, needed his help. She had a mission now, a task to discover what had happened to her freeze-dried friend, to find out what he had been mixed up in and what it all meant. She needed to get out there, preferably with the Grinch of Mayda Research Station. But there was something else to do first. Mars was rising.
© Springer International Publishing Switzerland 2015
Michael CarrollOn the Shores of Titan's Farthest SeaScience and Fiction10.1007/978-3-319-17759-5_8
8. Vesta Valentines
Michael Carroll1
(1)Littleton, CO, USA
“Strange place for a honeymoon,” the brawny workman said. Next to him stood an unlikely couple. She was tall, sinewy and athletic. He was diminutive and mousy.
“My wife and I come from mining families,” the man explained. “My dad was in uranium.”
The woman holding his hand added, “My mom invented a refining technique for lunar processing.”
The little man said to the big miner, “So, you were saying about copper?”
“Iridium and platinum are the biggies here, along with yttrium and neodymium. They don’t call them ‘rare earths’ for nothing! But not much copper. You get more copper from Mars.” The burly tech led his two charges through a cramped, unlit tunnel. Each of the trio wore headlamps atop their pressure suits to light their way.
“I visited Gaspra once,” the bride said, “and all the processing was on top. The place was basically a giant strip-mine. How come you guys are doing all this underground stuff? Seems like it would be easier to just scrape off the surface.”
“It would, if all the good stuff was up there,” the miner said, shoving his thumb toward the ceiling of the tunnel. “Problem is, Vesta is what they call differentiated. Like a planet. When it formed, the heavy stuff settled to the center, and the light stuff stayed up. So the good stuff we want is buried deep. Those other asteroids like Gaspra and Lutetia and Steins are just all mixed up. It’s all for the taking anywhere on the rock.” He paused and turned to face them, grinning proudly. “But they don’t have the same stuff that Vesta does. Not by a long shot.”
“That’s all well and good,” the woman said, “but I haven’t seen a lot of heavy machinery in these lower tunnels.”
“Right,” the guide said. “We use bio mining down here. Takes virtually no energy on our part. The bugs do all the work as long as we give ‘em something to drink.” He waved his hand toward the end of the tunnel. The passageway opened up into a large underground arena. Along its walls lay heaps of pulverized rock.
“The dump?” asked the thin man.
“Low grade ore. But it’s not just junk. We’ve seeded these mounds of debris with bacteria. If you look at your wrist pads, you’ll see that this area is pumped up a bit. Low pressure, but enough to keep bacteria alive and happy. We irrigate the tailings with diluted sulfuric acid. Acidithiobacillus and Leptospirillum are the miners. They use the sulfur in the acid to break down the rocky material. What’s left is the really good stuff.”
“Fascinating,” the woman said. “And where would that go?”
The miner pointed toward the ceiling, then nodded toward some tracks at the far side of the chamber. “Topside, in those robotic trams. We try to automate most of the operations that have to take place in vacuum.”
The woman looked at her companion. “Wise,” she observed.
“Very efficient,” he agreed.
The miner looked at the couple. They didn’t act like newlyweds, but then again, the mines of Vesta weren’t the most romantic of places. Still, something just seemed off. He pushed.
“So when did you two tie the knot?”
He could see the man’s shoulders shrug inside his suit.
The woman said, “Recently.”
The man added, “We’re touring a few out-of-the-way places, and then it’s home to Mars.”
“I thought your passport had you coming from Earth.” He was getting suspicious.
“He’s from Earth,” the woman cast a glance at her companion. “I’m from Mars.” She seemed more confident than her partner. “We’re going back to Mars after this. I won the coin toss.”
“Oh, I see,” he said.
“So I hear you do more than dig rock here. Vesta seems like a pretty important place if you’re going out to the Galileans or Titan or something.”
“Yep,” he said quietly, not volunteering anything more.
“We were thinking of going out to Titan sometime;” the groom said, “or maybe on one of those geyser sightseeing trips to Triton. Guess we have to go through here, right?”
“Just about everybody does who goes to the outer system,” their chaperon said, “at least in an electronic sense. We handle the traffic control, even if you’re on a route that isn’t physically close.”
The woman said, “It must be difficult to watch all these operations at once. Do you have some kind of secure control center?”
Now he was beginning to panic. Newlywed tourists didn’t take any interest in security, did they?
“I’d love to show you, but I’m out of time. I hope you enjoyed your tour of the Vesta underground.” He encouraged them to move back down the tunnel.
“Ah, yeah, great,” the little man said without enthusiasm. “We should be all set with that Bed and Breakfast at the surface village. What was it, Raymantown?”
The woman reached over and shook her guide’s hand. She gushed, “Thanks so much. Wait ‘til I tell Mom what we’ve seen here.”
He let them through the airlock first, waved them on, and stayed behind. He watched through the porthole, checking to see that they had doffed their pressure suits. He tapped a goodbye on the glass, watched as they entered the elevator, and then radioed security on his private channel.
“Donny? Make sure that couple gets back on their transport, will ya? They just don’t sit well with me.”
“How do you mean?”
“Just do it. I’ll fill you in as soon as I’m back topside.”
He looked down the corridor toward the tunnels and the bacteria and the valuable ores. The battered landscape of Vesta lay some 8 miles above, but this was his world, a realm of talus and tunnel and veins of riches. The mine flowed through his arteries, gave comfort when no person could. The hard work felt good at the end of the shift. Here, one could see what they had accomplished, in concrete form. None of this abstract computer stuff or theoretical science. At the end of the day, he could point to something substantial, something solid, and say, “See what I did?” It was a special job, a special place, like no other. No one could get down here to do any harm, could they? Vesta was a strategic place. Most p
roductive mines in the Asteroid Belt. Best med facilities, better than Ceres (which, in his opinion, was overrated. Ceres was an ice ball, basically a Ganymede too close to the Sun. Too much water and too little ore, except around the cryovolcanoes and a few faults). And, as his bosses kept reminding him, Vesta served as a critical hub for comms and traffic control to the outer system, a sort of gateway. What were those two up to, anyway, nosing around like that? Honeymoon, my ass. He knew he would sleep lightly tonight.
(*)
The woman leaned furtively into her communicator, her alleged groom watching over her shoulder.
“Horf? The tour went quite smoothly. It’s perfect, as you guessed. Just perfect.”
Minutes later, Horf responded by voice. “Thanks, Wendy. You’re the best sister a guy could ask for.”
© Springer International Publishing Switzerland 2015
Michael CarrollOn the Shores of Titan's Farthest SeaScience and Fiction10.1007/978-3-319-17759-5_9
9. Titanic Invitation
Michael Carroll1
(1)Littleton, CO, USA
At 60, Jeremy Belton was just entering his middle years. Mars had been good to him. He enjoyed law enforcement, and he loved the wide-open desert vistas. He’d found a nice little house in the canyonlands of Kasei Valley. From his living room bay window he could see the mountains rise from the chocolate-brown valley floor, looking like undercooked biscuits dusted with cinnamon and powdered sugar. Beyond, walls of salmon and tan stone stood as bastions against the glowing metallic sky. Farther out, chasms scored the plateau into freestanding buttes and mesas. Belton had been widowed once and dodged the bullet twice. He had friends. He was happy on Mars, happier than he had ever been on Earth. He considered himself lucky. He wasn’t in the mood to go anywhere, and he couldn’t imagine anything that would change his mind. Not even Abigail Marco.
On the Shores of Titan's Farthest Sea Page 5