She stepped past the center console and the ladder leading up, and proceeded to the aft logistics compartment, the small closet from which Troy had just returned. There, lying on the deck, was a cable, unplugged from its place in the wall.
She felt a wasp-sting in her neck, and swiveled to see Troy with a glistening hypo. “What do you think you’re doing?” The words lay heavy in her mouth. Troy had done something to the cabin lights. They were so soft, so dim and romantic…
“Preserving my investments.” His voice reverberated strangely.
Everything leaned sideways, including Troy. She wondered, for just a moment, how he could stay on his feet at such an odd angle.
© Springer International Publishing Switzerland 2015
Michael CarrollOn the Shores of Titan's Farthest SeaScience and Fiction10.1007/978-3-319-17759-5_40
40. Silence of the Grave
Michael Carroll1
(1)Littleton, CO, USA
It had been far too long, and Piers knew it.
“Mayda to sub. Piers to sub. Do you read?”
He heard only the waves of energetic fields radiating from Saturn as background static. Where were they? He felt a tendril of sweat weave its way down his back, and another threaten to drop into his eye from his forehead. He wiped his face, sat up straight and began again.
“Mayda Station to sub. Do you read, Troy?”
Silence.
By now, they should have been two-thirds of the way to the other side, and he wanted to make sure he could remain in contact. Perhaps he had just proven the negative. But the channel was open. The light was green. The radio was able to send as well as receive. At least it thought it was.
Piers flipped to a different channel and listened. More static. He tried a third. Nothing. He returned to the first.
“Piers to Troy. Do you read? Troy, where are you?”
If the radios worked, and the channel was open between them, there were only two possibilities: they chose not to respond—unlikely at best—or they were unable to respond. That would be bad.
(*)Clark and Montenegro sat at the small desk in what used to be Clark’s office. Marv burst through the door without knocking. Montenegro smiled mildly. Clark glared at Marv as he had so many times before.
Marv stood at attention. “Sir.” His eyes swiveled from Montenegro to Clark. “Sirs. Radar has just spotted an incoming ship.”
“Incoming?” both men said at once. It was Montenegro’s turn to glare, and he cast his baleful eye at Clark. Clark fell silent.
Montenegro said, “Incoming from where?”
“Our best radar guy has narrowed it down to a couple possibilities. He says the thing is either coming from Port Antillia on a polar run to Cusco, in which case it’s just a little off course and will be headed east soon, or it’s coming from the Sino-European complex at Kosovo/Taishan, headed for Mayda.”
“And how soon will they know?”
“Minutes, sir.”
Montenegro looked at Clark and gestured toward the door. “Shall we?”
Three techs hunched over two screens, trying to balance in the cramped quarters. The addition of Montenegro, Clark and Marv didn’t help.
“Report,” Montenegro snapped.
Two of the techs stood, while the third, eyes glued to the screen, reported. “It’s definitely coming this way. I had hoped it was just a transport on its way to Cusco, but no such luck.” He looked up and realized who was in the room. He launched to his feet and said, “Sorry sir.”
Montenegro waved the air with his cudgel. “Continue.”
“It’s a fairly substantial ship, cargo of some kind. Definitely coming for us, not for anywhere else.”
“No possibility it’s going to the east or west?”
“No sir. I tracked it from the Sino-European complex at Kosovo/Taishan. Right down the pike.”
“Crew?”
“On a ship of this type, undoubtedly.”
Montenegro swiveled to Marv. He raised his famous baton and waved it at him. “It must be headed for Mayda. Get rid of it.”
“Sir?”
“Get rid of it. Now. If you don’t have missiles with the range or speed, we brought plenty. Surely you have a few minutes to get a bead on the thing.” He turned to the radar tech. “Yes?”
“Yessir. It’s still half an hour or so out.”
Montenegro turned back to Marv and raised his eyebrows at him. Clark put in, “Well, Marv? Get to it, man!”
“Yes sir.”
Marv slammed the hatch behind him. Clark turned to Montenegro, eyeing the truncheon. “What is that thing, anyway?”
“This ol’ thing? Just an artifact I picked up. A baton of the Black Watch.” Clark looked at him vacantly. “Senior regiment of the Royal Highlanders. Part of the Scottish Division. Highly trained. Dated back to the eighteenth century. When people heard their bagpipes coming, it struck such fear that they usually chose to flee rather than fight. That is the kind of discipline we need here, wouldn’t you say?”
“Yes, yes sir. I would.”
© Springer International Publishing Switzerland 2015
Michael CarrollOn the Shores of Titan's Farthest SeaScience and Fiction10.1007/978-3-319-17759-5_41
41. The Long and Winding Road
Michael Carroll1
(1)Littleton, CO, USA
Piers had not been kidding. The drive to Kosovo/Taishan was a long one, and none too easy. There were no roads in the north, and when the duo finally found the “equatorial highway” that made its way from Novum Baikonur through Kosovo and eventually to Antillia, the road turned out to be a wash-boarded, potholed mess. Brian’s second in command, Laurita Hernandez, found it easier to offroad on the rover’s inflated donut-like tires. Deployable treads handled the few scattered dunes easily.
Willy Braun, riding shotgun, cocked a thumb out the window toward what was left of the road. “Don’t they ever grade that thing?”
“Once a year, whether it needs it or not.”
“Once an Earth year, or once a Saturn year?”
She just smiled.
“We ought to be getting close enough to the place, don’t you think?” Willy held up a portable radio.
Laurita stuck out her bottom lip. “You can try. I think we’re still out of range. These little things are local only. I just don’t understand why the satlink doesn’t work. It always works.”
“Murphy’s law.” The tech held up the small radio. “This is Willy Braun of Mayda Station, Willy Braun of Mayda Station. Do you read, K/T Station?”
Silence. The rover bounced in and out of a deep rut. Willy grunted. Laurita sounded concerned. “How’s the car sickness?”
“Not so hot.”
“I’m telling you, these patches work great, and you’re not being a wimp to use one.” She held up a flat packet the size of her thumb with one hand as her other hand cranked on the steering wheel.
Willy took it reluctantly, reached through his open visor, and slapped the patch against the side of his neck.
“Wimp,” Laurita taunted.
“Willy Braun to K/T Station. Do you read?”
“Give it a rest, Wilhelm. We’ll be there soon enough.”
The man let out a long sigh. “Guess you’re right. I just keep thinking of all our friends freezing back there, and we don’t even know if these guys can help.”
“Oh, they’ll help, all right. Come hell or high methane, they’ll help. Hey—” Laurita was leaning toward the windshield.
“Looks like…yeah, it’s a ship. And it looks like it’s headed toward—”
“The north!” Laurita yelled.
“Toward Mayda. Piers must have gotten his mayday through after all, bless his little limey heart.”
A milky white trail weaved in and out of the mist above. As it approached a point overhead, Laurita and Willy could make out its details.
“That’s a substantial-looking ship,” Laurita said.
“Big enough to carry a decent lo
ad,” Willie agreed. “That’s good. Mayda needs all the supplies they can get.”
Laurita shimmied the rover to a stop. They watched the ship glide above them, its engines singing a low thrum. Suddenly, a piercing scream came from behind, to the northwest.
Willie swiveled in his chair, craning his neck and looking through the roof windows. “What the heck is that?”
“Now that, that looks like a missile.”
“Not good.”
“What’s going on?”
The two watched, mouths hanging open, as the glowing point of light tore a crack through the sky, meeting the transport ship in a blossom of fire. They cringed reflexively. Willy groaned.
The glow faded from the clouds. Radiant pieces of wreckage appeared out of the fog directly above them, trailing smoke.
“Somebody did that,” Laurita said, numbed by the surreal scene. “On purpose. Killed them.”
“Hey, that stuff. It’s coming this way.”
Laurita’s monotone betrayed her shock. “You mean, as in down? It’s pretty straight-forward Newtonian physics. What goes up must—”
“I mean,” Willy cut in, “It’s coming down on us!”
He opened his door. Laurita reached over and grabbed his arm. “We have a better chance if we stay in here. Duck!”
The tinkle of metallic hail rang out on the roof of the rover. Ten yards ahead, a large cone of steaming metal slammed into the ground, digging out a crater and tossing a slurry of dust and icy gravel over the windshield.
“That was close,” Willy said. The grating crunch of metal jarred the rear of the rover. The cockpit nosed up into the air a few feet, then hit the ground at an angle. The vehicle bucked, bounced to the left, and then rolled right, farther and farther, and finally onto its right side, spilling coffee cups, papers, and Laurita all over Willy.
“That was closer,” she said, prying herself off of him.
They pulled themselves from the crippled rover. The airlock had busted open, and cracks spidered several of the windows. The left quarter of the windshield was gone, leaving the cockpit open to the elements. Laurita put her hands on her hips. “Can we make it to KT if we walk?”
Willy called up the map on his heads-up display. “Just under twenty klicks. We can make it if we take the other set of suits with the extra oxygen. But it’s going to take us a couple days. By then, I don’t know what shape Mayda will be in.”
“I doubt Kosovo’s got another ship like that one to spare, anyway. Not that they’d be willing to risk, with somebody shooting things down. We may end up being the only survivors of Mayda Research Station.”
© Springer International Publishing Switzerland 2015
Michael CarrollOn the Shores of Titan's Farthest SeaScience and Fiction10.1007/978-3-319-17759-5_42
42. Remembering Old Times
Michael Carroll1
(1)Littleton, CO, USA
It was a dreamlike feeling, stepping with your feet while not really touching the ground, moving while still waking up. Abby remembered having oral surgery on an impacted wisdom tooth as a teenager. The normal laser procedures wouldn’t work in her case, and she had to be put under light anesthesia, but she had one of those sensitive systems. The dentist had never seen anyone react to the medication as she had. Her first post-operation memory was one of walking along a passageway, propped up by her mother. But in this case, her mother was nowhere to be seen. Troy was ten steps ahead of her, and the people propping her up were not very maternal.
Troy glanced over his shoulder. He grinned. “Hello, sleepyhead.”
Abby grunted. The corridor in which she found herself had clearly been constructed of hollowed-out ice with some kind of coating over it. The air was chilly, but certainly heated beyond the outside temperatures.
Troy. Now she remembered. He used to be her companion, her Sputnik, as Tanya would put it, her attendant traveler. But now he served a more Biblical role. That Judas! Betrayed by a hypo. His actions went far beyond any illness he might have had from whatever was going around the habs. No, this went deeper. He said something about his investment. What kind of investment? How could he betray her like this?
They passed through a succession of chambers, and she began to focus for the first time. All were filled with weapons. The first housed an assortment of small arms, handguns and large automatic pulse weapons, shoulder-held rocket launchers and the like. The second room upped the game, with person-sized rockets that looked to Abby like small surface to air missiles. The next room was far larger and housed all-terrain vehicles outfitted with various pulse-guns. There were even small single-seat hovercraft and suborbitals.
“Next right,” one of Abby’s keepers called to Troy. The group turned into a cavernous room with tables and the smells of food.
Abby sniffed in the aromas, realizing how famished she was. “Mmm.”
“Hungry?” the guard on her left asked. “I will be sure to call room service, first thing.”
The other cackled. “You crack me up, Kinto.”
At the far end of the cafeteria, they passed through an open hatch into an office of sorts. Two men sat at a central desk. Another stationed himself in the back corner, and several others seemed to be spending a lot of time attempting to appear menacing. They were doing a pretty good job. These, she supposed, were the pirates everyone had been talking about, the thieves of the outer system. These weren’t the kind of pirates who wore eye patches and went around singing happy songs to their parrots. These were the kind who hijacked expensive freighters and slaughtered innocent crewmembers.
The two oafs seated her unceremoniously in a chair in the center of the cramped room. She scanned the floor. Most of the foot traffic had gone from the door she had just passed through to the desk and back, but some had led off to a door at the right wall. It was open a crack, and beyond it she could see a battery of monitors. Perhaps some kind of control booth? A security center? Abby was wide-awake now. Her entry into the room hit her like a blast of cold air, but it wasn’t the ambient temperature that had brought her to full awareness. It was the man at the desk.
“Admiral Montenegro,” Troy announced, “Here is our little troublemaker.”
Abby smiled at the man incongruously. “Hello, Demian. Last time I saw you, you were just being locked up.”
Momentarily flummoxed, Montenegro quickly recovered himself. “Hello, my dear. I had heard you were here on Titan.”
“I see you have new hobbies.” Montenegro frowned. Abby jutted her chin toward the armory behind. “Not your typical hunting club.”
“Oh, that. You have no idea. You’ve turned into a lovely young woman.”
“We’ve both aged,” she said impassively.
“Demian?” Kinto asked. He glanced around in puzzlement.
Abby grinned. “They don’t know, do they?”
Kinto looked back at the prisoner. “We don’t know what?”
“Your leader has a colorful past that goes way beyond piracy.”
Montenegro stood. “Take her away. To the dock, for now. Kinto, you stay.”
(*)As soon as Abby had been removed from the room, Montenegro pounced on the man. “Get rid of her, Kinto.”
“Yessir.”
“I mean permanently.”
“I thought we needed her as leverage,” Clark put in.
“That time has passed. She has lost her usefulness.” He leered at Kinto. “I hope you won’t lose yours. Go get her and do what you have to do. Chop chop. Dismissed.”
Montenegro turned to Clark. “Things seem to be moving along, and we need to control them more carefully than we have been. I think it’s time we paid a visit to Mayda Station to offer our help. Once we’re the knights in shining armor, they’ll welcome us into their deepest, most secret corners. Get a team ready. Take a rover along the western shoreline. We need to be in control of Mayda outpost before anybody else gets the bright idea of rescuing them.
“Yessir.” Rather than hitting his intercom, Clark rushed
from the room like a hunted squirrel.
In the hallway outside, Clark leaned with his back against the wall, breathing hard. Grudgingly, he admitted to himself that this was the turning point. No longer was he the man in charge, the emperor of Titan’s Northern Quadrant. No longer did he command a great fleet of clandestine ships, plying the dark waters of the outer planets. Those days were gone. A new world had taken their place, a world hijacked into existence by the man in Clark’s own former office of operations. He should have been incensed. Instead, he was exhausted.
He sensed Montenegro’s urgency. He knew that if he wanted to be a part of the Admiral’s “new order” he would need to please him. The situation called for perfect timing and superb performance. But before he put into motion a rescue party—an action that would lead, inexorably, to the demise of Mayda Research Station—he took a moment, simply glad to be out of Montenegro’s presence.
© Springer International Publishing Switzerland 2015
Michael CarrollOn the Shores of Titan's Farthest SeaScience and Fiction10.1007/978-3-319-17759-5_43
43. Unwelcoming Committee
Michael Carroll1
(1)Littleton, CO, USA
The shuttle had flown from Port Antillia up over the north pole and across the lake district. It came in low over the hills to the east, across Moray Sinus, past Bimini Insula, dipping down toward the shore between the beach and Mayda Station. If anybody was running radar, they wouldn’t see it coming. It was a simple commercial shuttle. The SWAT team should be giving them a welcome as soon as they touched down.
But there was no SWAT. There was no military. There was nobody. The place seemed abandoned.
“Where is everybody?” Jeremy Belton whispered to the pilot.
On the Shores of Titan's Farthest Sea Page 21