by Allen Steele
DeSoto continues the attack. “If aliens caused this,” she says, glaring at Christ-Ortega, “then why did we hear someone laugh in the background after Marquand was killed? And don’t tell me an ET can laugh like that.”
Isidore shrugs. She has him stumped. They have watched the transmission twice now; both times; they had heard distinctly human laughter near the end. “Nada explanation,” he concedes. “But rule out ETs either, we cannot.”
“Which leads us back to my first question.” DeSoto turns to look at Kinnard. “You’ve received your orders direct from River House. I can’t believe Pax intelligence has seen this disk and hasn’t come to conclusions of their own. So what are we looking for? Humans, aliens…what?”
It isn’t hard to read meaning into the what? part of the question. DeSoto wants to know if NAVINT believes that Superiors are behind the attack on Huygens Base and the loss of signal from Hershel Explorer. After all, Bravo Squad aboard a vessel crewed almost entirely by Superiors much like those her troops have been trained to fight.
Kinnard idly plays with the squeezebulb in his hands. “The truth is, nobody knows for sure what we’re up against. It could be ETs, or baseline humans, or…” giving his first officer an apologetic look “…a Superior clan that has aligned itself with the Jove rebellion.”
“No clans have sent expeditions this far out.” Isidore remains calm, but his voice has a threatening edge. “This range, their ships don’t have.”
Kinnard quickly nods his head. “I understand that, jefe. I’m not accusing you or any other clans of…”
“But the possibility of goo…of Superior involvement can’t be ruled out, either.” DeSoto pointedly doesn’t look in Christ-Ortega’s direction. “And there have been no indications of ET ships entering the system, have there, Captain?”
Kinnard takes a deep breath. True, relics of an advanced alien race were discovered on Mars almost sixty years ago; indeed, the official record of what occurred at Cydonia Base in 2032 has remained a secret that the Earth governments involved in the incident have guarded ever since. In 2056, astronomers in North America and Europe detected what appeared to be an alien craft passing through the Kuiper belt. Attempts were made to signal to the suspected starship, but if they were received or understood, there was no indication; the vessel simply vanished as if it had fallen into a hole. Intelligent life existed elsewhere in the galaxy—that question had finally been laid to rest, at least—yet it didn’t seem to be very interested in humankind.
“No,” he says truthfully, shaking his head. “No one has spotted an alien ship entering the system, let alone in proximity of Titan. I would have been informed if that was the case.”
“So if it isn’t aliens,” DeSoto says, “and if there aren’t any PARN vessels out this far, and the Jovians haven’t decided to take out a Pax expedition just for the hell of it…” She raises an eyebrow. “Well, it does narrow down the list of suspects, doesn’t it?”
“A clan would not slaughter civilians!” The crucifix on Isidore’s forehead wrinkles; his long fingers clench the chair armrests “Insult us you do, suggesting that my people would…”
“Knock it off, both of you!”
DeSoto and Christ-Ortega are startled in silence. Isidore’s hands relax from his hand rests. DeSoto takes a sip from her squeezebulb and looks away. Kinnard gives them a moment to calm down, but before he can continue, DeSoto raises her hand.
“Regardless of whoever may be at fault,” she says, still avoiding Isidore’s eyes, “I have an objection with the current mission profile.”
“Go on.”
“As it stands now, you intend to drop my people on Titan before proceeding to Saturn. I understand the reasons for doing it this way. You need to refuel as soon as possible.”
“But you have a problem with it.”
“From Titan flyby to return rendezvous with Excalibur, there is a twenty-six-hour stretch. That’s the time, at bare minimum, that’s required for Intrepid to make its run and meet up with the shuttle. During that period my team will be on Titan, with no backup from orbit.”
Kinnard frowns. “Excalibur is outfitted for a two-week stay, if necessary.”
“In terms of basic life-support, sure. But the shuttle is not equipped with its own weaponry. Given the presumption…” DeSoto hesitates, then corrects herself. “Given the likelihood that there are no survivors at Huygens Base, I consider it imprudent for Intrepid to be so distant from Titan.”
Kinnard absently caresses his chin with his forefinger. She has a point. Once Intrepid went deeper into Saturn’s magnetosphere, radio contact within the landing party would become progressively difficult, finally impossible as the ship went around the planet’s far side. If Bravo Squad ran into problems, it could be several hours before Intrepid found out, and even longer before it could respond. More to the point, though, Intrepid also carries two orbit-to-surface missiles. If there is trouble on the surface, Bravo Squad can call in a space-strike as a last resort.
And without a doubt, there’s something hostile on the Galileo Planitia. Leaving eight men and women down there—however well-armed and trained they may be—could be a fatal risk.
Isidore is already recalculating Intrepid’s course on his wristcomp. “Jefe, can we adjust the trajectory to put us in orbit around Titan?”
The first officer doesn’t look up from his work. “Burn more fuel from reserves, but that we can do, yes.” He hesitates, still tapping at his wrist. “Even tweak the delta-vee a little, rendezvous with Hershel after we drop Excalibur. Give us a little time for a look-see.”
“How does that affect the refueling run?”
“Like I say, takes more from the reserves. Ten-plus drain, my figure.” He shrugs. “Little more, little less. May have to armstrong it down the gravwell. Iffy kinda but can do.”
Kinnard considers it for a moment. “Okay,” he says, “go topside and tell Jon to lay it in. We’ll do the run after we get Excalibur back aboard. Tell Marie to alert FLTCOM of the change.”
“Pitch a bitch, prolly.”
“Prolly…but it’s my ship.”
“Gotcha, Captain.” Isidore pushes out of his seat and heads for the hatch.
Kinnard looks at DeSoto. “Satisfied, Colonel?”
“Completely. Thank you, Captain.” She starts to push out of her chair. “Would you like to accompany my team down to the surface? I can ask one of my men to stay behind to give you room on the shuttle.”
Kinnard catches a wary glance from Isidore. “Thanks, Colonel, but that won’t be necessary. I prefer to stay behind with my crew.”
Isidore’s sly smile is matched by the stiffness of DeSoto’s parting salute. Kinnard waits until they’ve both left and Isidore has shut the hatch behind him before he slowly exhales.
Looking down at his hands, he is not at all surprised to find that they’re trembling.
3.12.2070 0100Z—PARN Excalibur
“Three…two…one…drop.”
A dull vibration runs through the fuselage as the shuttle disengages from its cradle.
DeSoto looks up, catches a brief glimpse of Intrepid’s lower hull and blunt prow gliding past the cockpit canopy, then Lieutenant Simms pushes the throttle forward and twin liquid-fuel engines mounted on both sides of the fuselage ignite.
Gravity forces her back into her couch as Excalibur darts forward. Intrepid falls away, becoming toy-like in only a matter of moments, finally disappearing entirely as the shuttle yaws forward.
She looks forward as Titan hoves into view through the canopy: a burnt-orange hemisphere, featureless except for the thin hazy-blue skein of its upper atmosphere. Saturn hovers above its limb, twice the size of the Moon as seen from Earth orbit, its vast rings now a tilted plane that bisects the planet neatly in half.
“Are we there yet?”
“Mommy, I gotta go to the bathroom!”
“Tell Swee’ Pea to stop hitting me!”
“Smoker hit me first!”
Mock-chil
dish voices and coarse adult laughter in her headset. DeSoto glances at Slick Nick; his concentration is totally focused on his instruments, but a wide grin spreads across his face. “Now, now, behave,” he murmurs. “We still have eight hundred kilometers to go. If you can’t behave yourselves, we’ll just have to turn around and go home.”
“Can we really?”
“Yeah…I wanna go home, too!”
DeSoto finds herself grinning despite her nervousness. She can’t see her team; they’re in the passenger compartment on the other side of the cockpit hatch, already sealed inside the massive Hoplite combat armor suits they’ll wear on the surface. They can’t share the stunning view she and Slick Nick have through the pressurized cockpit windows.
She clicks on the comlink. “If you’ll promise to be good,” she says, “I’ll let you look out the window.” She then reaches up to the com panel and flicks switches that will feed Excalibur’s forward camera into their suits’ stereo-optic viewplates. Her people immediately drop the back-seat-brat routine.
“Whoa…!”
“Hey, check it out…!”
“Man, will you look at that…”
“Shit, that’s better than sex…”
“How would you know?”
DeSoto lets them carry on like this for awhile, until Titan completely fills the canopy and she can see the first amber glow of atmospheric friction lighting the edges of Excalibur’s long wings. Slick Nick silently holds up his gloved left hand and clenches his fist three times. “Okay,” she says, “tighten it up back there. We’ll be on the ground in about fifteen minutes, so double-check your suits, then check your buddy’s.”
A sudden surge of turbulence causes Excalibur to lurch violently, its wings waggling back and forth as they grab the first reaches of the upper atmosphere. Her stomach jumps up and down; she grabs her armrests. “This could be rough,” Slick says, “so hang on.”
And don’t puke, she silently adds, now glad that she insisted against Anna Christ-Webster offering breakfast to her team before they left. Not that anyone was looking forward to more algae salad…
Excalibur dives through Titan’s hazy blue stratosphere, wingtips leaving behind long curling streamers as the shuttle streaks over dense cloud banks of hydrocarbon smog. For a few scant moments, the roiling cloud tops are highlighted by refracted sun dogs; Saturn is a placid quarter-moon suspended in blue mist above a weird twilight. A surreal vista, as breathtaking and pure as any DeSoto has seen in her far-traveling life, easily matching an autumn sunrise over the Colorado Rockies or twilight on Olympus Mons.
Then the shuttle plummets through the cloud layer and Saturn is lost to sight. DeSoto glances at the altimeter; they’re now three hundred kilometers above the surface. Nothing can be seen through the canopy except dense orange smog reminiscent of the noxious fumes that billowed out of factory smokestacks on Earth in the last century.
Slick Nick taps commands into the keypad on his yoke and a translucent heads-up display appears on the inside of the canopy: a three-dimensional map of Galileo Planitia’s equatorial zone. A red spot pulses below their angle of descent. “Intrepid, this is Excalibur,” he murmurs into his headset mike. “Altitude three-seventy-five klicks, downrange one hundred two klicks and closing. Huygens Base homing beacon acquired. Picking up some chop, but all systems green for go.”
“We copy, Excalibur,” replies Marie Christ-Ortega. “Confirm your position, you are go for primary approach. Over.”
“Roger that, Intrepid.” Nick cups his hand over his mike and glances at DeSoto. “Nice of her to knock off that google shit for once. I swear, I can’t understand what they’re saying half the time.”
DeSoto clutches her armrests as the shuttle lurches again. “Keep your mind on the job, Lieutenant,” she says. “This isn’t the simulator.”
“Naw. It’s easier.” But he places both hands firmly on the yoke as he returns his attention to his instruments.
It takes forever to penetrate the smog, and when they finally do, visibility is only slightly better. At two hundred kilometers, the ground is still invisible, lost beneath vast methane clouds only slightly darker than the sky around them. Yet the turbulence diminishes as Excalibur sweeps downward through the reddish-brown sky.
The beacon pulses brighter now; the pilot locks the guidance computer onto its signal and a concentric grid appears on the heads-up display. As he radio-checks Intrepid again, DeSoto roll-calls her team through the comlink. No problems; everyone’s CAS is working properly, no suit leaks or computer glitches.
Excalibur is twenty-six klicks up and fifteen klicks northeast of the target when it penetrates the lower cloud decks. DeSoto is startled by the gentle patter of rain against the canopy. Looking up, she sees fat amber droplets splattering against the dense glass. She remembers her mission briefing at Highgate: it’s ethane rain. Titan is one big soup kettle of organic chemistry—nitrogen, methane, trace amounts of various compounds and acids existing in gaseous, liquid, and solid states—much like Earth itself during its primitive millennia, although Titan’s atmospheric pressure at sea level is four and a half seas as dense than Earth’s, and its globe-circling ocean is a sludgy mass of liquid ethane. If the pressure were to crack the shuttle’s fuselage and the cockpit was flooded with gas, she imagines that her last impression of this life would be of a rank odor like an elephant fart.
Thinking of this, she reaches beneath her seat to retrieve her pressure suit helmet. Why take chances?
Ten klicks above the surface, seven klicks downrange from Huygens Base, and still she cannot see the ground. Outside the canopy, everything is cloaked in dung-colored darkness, broken only by the strobing wing lights and the geometric graphics of the heads-up display. Slick Nick no longer makes wisecracks; his concentration is totally focused on his instruments as he coaxes Excalibur toward the homing beacon. DeSoto wants to ask him if this is still like running the simulator back home, but decides against it; she just hopes that he’s worthy of his nickname.
Five hundred meters above the surface, two hundred meters from the base; Nick switches on the landing lights, but they still can’t see a thing outside the canopy. Sweat oozes down the pilot’s forehead as he throttles back the main engines, hits the VTOL pods and lowers the landing gear. The jets howl bloody murder, almost drowning out the steady stream of pings sent by the sonorscope; there’s solid surface down there after all, but that’s the only comfort they have.
It isn’t until Excalibur is less than twenty-five meters above the surface and forty meters from the beacon—almost dead-center in the bulls eye—that she catches the first glimmer of light through the canopy: a glowing oval of spotlights off the port wing, fading and out of the darkness like a lost soul.
“There it is!” she shouts, pointing toward the light. Her cry is lost in the staccato rattle of broken ice bouncing off the lower fuselage. There is a loud thud as the landing gear pads stamp down upon the frozen surface. Slick Nick’s hands rush across his console, switching everything off, as Excalibur settles on its gears and, finally, comes to a halt.
DeSoto closes her eyes, takes a deep breath, and slowly lets it out. Then she tells her pilot to decompress the passenger hold and pop the lower fuselage hatch.
3.12.2070 0234Z—PARN Intrepid
Hershel Explorer drifts in equatorial orbit a thousand kilometers above Titan, somehow looking less like a spaceship than an abandoned house. The windows of its rotor arms are dark and the arms themselves are still, nor is there any light shining through the portholes in its barrel-like hub. The only clue that the vessel’s nuclear generator is still active is the glow of red and blue navigation beacons scattered along its hull; otherwise, the giant ship could well be one of those decommissioned spacecraft parked in the orbital junkyard at the third LaGrange point between Earth and the Moon, awaiting salvage for scrap metal spare parts.
“Word up from Excalibur, Captain.” This from Marie Christ-Ortega, seated at the com station. “Safely arrived at Huygens B
ase, preparing to send out the squad.”
Kinnard nods, not taking his eyes from the windows. Intrepid is positioned three hundred meters from the Hershel Explorer; he hasn’t been able to take his eyes off the silent argosy since they’ve arrived. “Copy that,” he says distractedly. “Let me know when they’ve entered the base.” He prods his jaw with his fingertips. “Cayenne, how’s Isidore doing?”
“Suited up, in the airlock.” The chief engineer’s voice is a mosquito buzz in his left ear. “Decompressing now.”
“Very good.” Kinnard looks back at Marie. “Open comlink with Isidore and his ’bot. Display everything on the screens.” He hesitates. “Feed everything into the flight recorder,” he adds. “Audio, suitcam, telemetry from the ’bot, the works. I want everything on both disc and hard memory.”
Marie fingers twitch in midair as she follows his orders, and Kinnard revolves his chair to gaze at the multiscreen above the chart table. Two sets of images appear on the screens: the interior of the main airlock as captured by the tiny camera mounted on Isidore’s right shoulder, and an external shot of the airlock hatch as seen by the spider-like repair ’bot clinging to Intrepid’s outer hull.
“Comlink check, one two three.” Isidore’s voice is slightly fuzzed as it comes through ceiling speakers in the command center. He holds his left hand up to the camera and wiggles his thick-gloved fingers; the image blurs for a moment, then refocuses. “Copy everything, Marie?”
“Roger that,” she says to her first-husband. “See you just fine. Careful now, you be.”
“Airlock decompressed,” Cayenne says. “Opening outer hatch.”
Two points-of-view of the same action: inside the airlock, the hatch unseals and silently slides upward; the ’bot catches the same image from outside the ship. On one screen, the circular portal moves closer until it is filled with Titan’s orange hemisphere, with the Hershel Explorer hovering in the foreground; on an adjacent screen, the head and shoulders of a figure in bulky EVA armor slowly emerges from the open hatch.