by Jake Elwood
Takedown on Titan
By Jake Elwood
Copyright 2015 by Jake Elwood.
This is a work of fiction. A novella. Totally made up. Any resemblance to actual persons, places, Saturn moon bases or depraved kidnappers is entirely coincidental.
Chapter 1
"Repairs will take at least three days. We'd better hope nobody recognizes us, because we're stuck here now."
James Chan looked at Liz Jones, pilot of the Stark Raven, and shrugged. "It's a big solar system. I'm sure we'll be fine."
She nodded and turned back to the ship, a screwdriver in her hand. She had a panel open on the ship's hull and she was testing cables, seeing if anything had been damaged when the hull was dented by rail gun fire.
He let his shoulders sag and gazed around the repair bay, letting go of the chore of projecting a confidence he didn't feel. The truth was that they were being hunted, and the Raven was a distinctive ship, making them easy to find.
He looked up at the bulk of the ship, perched on the reinforced plastic floor of the repair bay like a bird of prey crouched among chickens. The other ships in the bay were blocky and practical, gray or white or plain unpainted steel. The Raven was as black as the gulf between stars, streamlined and lean, looking aerodynamic though her sleek curves were designed to reduce her radar footprint, not to navigate atmosphere.
The former pirate ship was striking, unforgettable, and entirely impractical for someone on the run. He couldn't bring himself to resent her, though. Every time he looked at the ship he felt a mix of pride and giddy disbelief. This beautiful, lethal craft was actually his! Well, it pretty much belonged to him, Liz, and their third crew member, Joss. Not on paper, of course, but this far from Earth it was finders, keepers.
One glaring imperfection marred the Raven. Her front windows were gone, shot away by the crew of a freighter as the pirates attacked. Chan and his crew had found the Raven, patched the hole, and flown her to Titan, and the Raven was getting a long-overdue repair.
"I'll watch over the repairs," Liz told him, and he nodded. His job would be to find them some work. They owned a fine spaceship, but they were pretty much penniless.
Dome Five was half a kilometre across, a vast open space full of ships, heavy equipment, bustling robots, and repair crews. A machine like a small crane on a wheeled platform rolled toward the Raven, and Chan paused to watch. He could see sheets of steelglass and a bucket of metal struts ready to be welded into place. It would be nice to have proper windows on the front of the bridge again.
"Hold it, hold it." A man came hurrying across the floor of the dome, a data pad clutched to his chest. "Zed 58, stop!"
The machine obediently halted twenty metres or so from the Raven. The man bustled up to Chan and looked him up and down, his face tight with disapproval. He wore blue coveralls with reflective stripes, but he had the look of a bureaucrat rather than a working man. His eyebrows rose in arches high above a pair of supercilious brown eyes as he stopped almost nose-to-nose with Chan. They were the same height, and the man rose onto the balls of his feet to make himself a few centimetres taller.
Chan's hand went to his chest and traced the outline of a tiny Buddha he wore on a chain under his shirt. His mother had followed the teachings of Buddha, not as a religion but as a philosophy. She'd tried to teach him acceptance.
"Is this your craft?" The man gestured at the Raven, and Chan nodded. "Well, what sort of ship is it?"
Chan shrugged helplessly. "A… spaceship?"
The man's eyebrows dropped into a momentary frown, then rose again into arches of outrage. "Don't take that flippant tone with me! Do you know who I am?"
Things are as they are. I have no emotional investment in this stupid little man's posturing. Chan dropped his eyes to the name strip proudly displaying the name "Roger" on the front of the man's coveralls. "I suppose you're Roger."
"I'm shift supervisor for all repairs in Dome Five," Roger told him primly. "Nothing happens here without my approval." He shot a frosty glare at the black ship. "Nothing."
Instead of answering, Chan just stared into his eyes. I am not annoyed. I am not upset. I accept this twerp as he is.
"This is very irregular," Roger said.
Chan inhaled, closing his eyes for a moment. Say something diplomatic. Smooth his feathers. He'll hold up repairs unless you reassure him a bit. Sure, he's an uptight little pinhead who's in love with his own little scraps of authority. That doesn't matter. Focus on getting what you want.
He exhaled and opened his eyes. It took only one glance at the man's self-important face to sweep all Chan's good intentions away. Anything he said, any plea, complaint, or explanation, would feed that sense of importance. So Chan continued staring.
"Your ship." Roger gestured at the Raven. "It looks like some sort of military craft." When Chan kept staring he said, "Are you with some sort of organized military force?"
"No."
Roger lifted his eyebrows even higher, waiting for Chan to elaborate. Finally he said, "Well, what are you doing in a ship like this?"
Acceptance. If you can't achieve calm acceptance, then pretend. Because it really annoys this guy. Chan kept staring at Roger, then shrugged and said, "Flying?"
Roger's face seemed to contract, his lower lip twisting upward as his eyebrows sank into a frown. "This is no legitimate trade vessel," he said. "You didn't even pay properly for repairs."
The Raven had brought in a shot-up freighter for salvage, and Chan had negotiated a straight swap, salvage for repairs and port fees. All that had happened well above Roger's pay grade, though, and Chan smirked. "In charge of payments, are you, Roger?"
Roger flushed. "I'm in charge of repairs. And on my shift, repairs will be limited to legitimate vessels only." He gestured again at the ship. "If you're not with a military force, then what are you? Some sort of pi—"
Metal clanked on metal, and Chan and Roger turned. Liz straightened, lifting her biggest wrench from the toolbox by her feet. At the best of times there was a hard, dangerous look to her, as if she was some sort of commando or hit man masquerading as a pretty young woman. Now she was clearly angry, and Chan, knowing she was on his side, still felt a cold shiver run down his spine as she came marching toward him.
She hoisted the wrench onto her shoulder and nudged Chan out of the way, taking his place in front of Roger. She leaned in close, and Roger leaned back. Liz was taller by about four centimetres, but she suddenly seemed twice his size. Her voice was as cold as the lumps of ice tumbling in Saturn's rings as she said, "Were you about to call me a pirate, little man?"
Roger's mouth opened, then closed, then opened again. "Look here," he said, his voice a dry rasp. He cleared his throat, glancing from side to side in a futile search for aid. He returned his gaze reluctantly to her glaring face and said, "Now, look here. You can't threaten me like this."
"I'm not threatening you yet." She smiled, and Chan thought of an owl, pleased to have discovered a mouse. "Don't get ahead of yourself."
Roger opened and closed his mouth a couple of times, but no sound came out.
"Pirate," she said. "That's a serious insult. I might even say that it's a mortal insult." And she tightened her grip on the wrench until one of her knuckles cracked. The 'pop' made Roger jump a little bit.
"So the question I have to ask you is," and the wrench rose a centimetre or two from her shoulder, "are you calling me a pirate?" The wrench trembled. Her lips were a white line, her eyes murderous slits. She looked like someone fighting a losing battle for self-control.
"Well, no, of course not." There was a sheen of sweat on Roger's pale forehead. "It's just tha
t—"
Liz leaned closer, Roger took a half-step back, and she moved in, closing the gap. "If I'm not a pirate, then you've got no reason to halt repairs on my ship. Isn't that right, Roger?"
The wrench was still trembling, and Roger stared at it as he babbled, "I, that is, no. Um, no, of course not." He edged back, then whipped his head around. "Zed 58! Resume repairs!"
The machine hummed and rolled forward, the wrench sank down to rest on Liz's shoulder, and Roger spun, squaring his shoulders, doing his best to look as if he was in charge as he trotted across the floor of the dome, not quite breaking into a run.
Chan looked at Liz, and her eyelid drooped in a wink. She looked amused, but there might have been a hint of disappointment in her expression as well. She turned back to the ship, and Chan shook his head, sighing. He headed for the dome's nearest exit, moving around robots and service machines, trying to push the confrontation from his mind. That girl's going to be the death of me.
Jocelyn Kirk, known as "Joss" to her crewmates, strolled through the arched tunnel connecting Dome Five to the rest of Crius. "Jocelyn" really was her first name, though she was a bit more flexible where last names and backstories were concerned. She ambled along, doing her best to look wide-eyed and impressed, which wasn't difficult under the circumstances. Crius was a fascinating city.
The tunnel walls were transparent, giving her a view of dark green domes on every side and a dramatic orange sky above. The sun was a speck of light, a dim ghost of the star she'd seen in her childhood on Earth. It was further blurred by the layers of cloud. Down on the surface of Titan the sun would be just about invisible.
Crius was far from the surface of Saturn's moon, however. In a feat of engineering that would have been impossible back on Earth, Crius perched on steel stilts hundreds of kilometres long. Only the tiny gravity of the moon made it possible. Titan's atmosphere made it a rarity among moons. At surface level that atmosphere was half again as thick as on Earth. Crius stood at the sweet spot where the pressure of the nitrogen and methane outside was slightly lower than the pressure of the air inside the domes. It was the warmest altitude on the moon, where the greenhouse effect brought the temperature up to a balmy -100 °C. The surface, where the clouds blocked out the sun, was much colder.
She didn't quite understand why the force field that gave her Earth-normal gravity here in the city didn't make the entire platform too heavy for the stilts to support. The physics were beyond her, but clearly it worked. She gawked up at the sky, the orange clouds giving it the look of a perpetual sunset, and marveled at the audacity of humanity.
"First time here, miss?"
She smiled as she turned. There were women in space, but men still predominated. A woman of 21, reasonably pretty and wearing a starry-eyed expression, was as irresistible as a juicy steak. The man speaking to her wore the blue coveralls of port services, his scalp and chin showing three days of stubble. There was grease under his nails and caked into the calluses on his hands, but he had the easy smile of a man without a care in the galaxy.
"Yes it is," she said. "I just arrived today."
His forehead creased. "You didn't arrive on that black ship, did you?"
"Why, no. I just walked over to take a look. Everyone is talking about it." That, unfortunately, was true. The Raven was causing quite a stir.
He leaned in close. "I think it could be a pirate ship."
She chuckled. "No, I hardly think so. I talked to one of the passengers. They just came out from Earth. That's the new design of private yachts." She gestured vaguely toward Dome Five. "It makes them harder for pirates to see. It's the new trend." She glanced around. "Now, could you give me directions to Astraeus Dome?"
She felt a bit bad as she broke off the conversation and walked away from him. He clearly would've been happy to chat with her for hours, but she had more rumors to spread. She was going to make the arrival of the Raven a non-event if she had to chat up every lonely spacer in the city.
Chapter 2
Dome Eleven was the highest dome in the city, with steelglass panels set into the floor to make the most of the view. Chan fought a mild vertigo as he gazed down on the domes of Crius. Years spent in the far corners of the solar system, often outside in a vacuum suit, had made him largely immune to any fear of heights, but the sense of weight combined with the gulf beneath his feet made him squirm a bit.
The city had been designed as a huge platform with nine enormous domes in a three-by-three grid. Crius was a Titan from Greek mythology, and the original nine domes were named for other Titans. That bit of pretension was abandoned when the city expanded. The newer domes, rising on stilts from gaps between the original domes, were numbered in a completely haphazard way based on when they were built. Dome Eleven was right beside Dome Two, while Dome Three was on the far side of the city.
The city resembled a mushroom patch, with hemispheres of every size rising on stilts of various heights. In some places girders connected the edges of different domes to provide anchoring points for new domes. There were windows here and there, but mostly the domes were opaque, their skins unbroken.
A chime sounded behind him and he turned. A place was open at the public access terminals lining one wall. Chan crossed over and took a seat, swallowing his irritation at the backwards technology. He had a perfectly good data pad in his pocket. Plodding through the city to visit a dedicated terminal made him feel as if he was stuck in the 20th century. Still, he had plenty of time, and he'd wanted to see something of Crius.
He tapped at the screen, browsing the menus, and found the job boards. He scanned the list, feeling his optimism fade with every listing. There were bulk cargo opportunities, much too big for the Raven, and a mining company that needed a fifty-person work crew taken to Coriolis Station and their replacements brought back. The only small-scale jobs were for passengers with departure dates anywhere from three weeks to three months away.
An entry near the bottom of the list caught his eye. "Transport needed for small cargo. Excellent money. Ask at Bay Twelve, Dome Four." The coy phrasing and absence of a contact code were not good signs. He touched the Buddha through his shirt. Acceptance of poverty was one thing. Missing meals was something else entirely. He shrugged and turned away.
A pair of robots were working near the exit. A bulky white maintenance robot, little more than a box on wheels, cleaned the walls with a rotating disk on a protruding arm. Beside it, a fully formed butler robot seemed to be inspecting the frame around the exit hatch. The maintenance robot wouldn't have much in the way of a human interface, but the butler robot would be able to answer simple questions. Chan headed toward it. "You there," he said. "Butler robot."
The robot reacted instantly, stepping through the doorway and walking briskly away. Chan stared in disbelief, then increased his pace. They were in a corridor between domes now, and he called out, " You there, robot. Stop!" When the robot kept walking he said, "Gold colored robot with red eyes. I'm talking to you. Stop."
The robot halted immediately and turned. The earliest butler robots had been made with human-like faces that people had found disturbing if not downright creepy. This robot was a later design, with a blank gray face that made Chan think of a hockey mask and circular red eyes mounted on gold bands. The eyes could have been mounted anywhere on the robot's body, of course, but they were mounted on the face right where human eyes would be. That was the current state of robot design. Human-like, but not too human-like.
"Were you avoiding me?" Chan asked, his voice tinged with incredulity.
"Of course not, sir." The robot's voice was deep and melodious, but there was a crackle of static after each word. He wasn't being maintained as well as he might.
"No, of course not." It was preposterous. Robots didn't do that. They followed simple instructions. That was all. "Can you tell me the way to Dome Four?"
"Certainly, sir." He gestured behind Chan. "That corridor leads you to a lift tube. Go down, follow the signs to Dome Nine, go through
Dome Nine, and take the exit on the far side to Dome Four."
"Thank you." Chan started to turn, then paused. The corridor in front of the robot was labeled "Automated Waste Processing. No Entry." It seemed like an odd destination for a butler robot who wasn't carrying any waste. "Where were you headed?"
"I have a great many tasks, sir."
Chan blinked. "Are you being evasive?" That should be impossible. "Never mind, don't answer. You've done me a favor; I'll respect your privacy." Shaking his head at the unreality of it all, he continued on his way.
He stepped into the lift tube, drifted down until his boots touched the deck below, and strolled through the corridor beyond. There was a lock every forty paces or so, the hatches open, and Chan nodded his approval. In the event of a breach the hatches would slam shut and only a small section would lose atmosphere.
Dome Nine was residential, with a small and cozy feel. He followed a public corridor through the center of the dome, and it was like a stroll through a forest. The walls were lined with greenery, and vines trailed across the ceiling, nearly obscuring the plastic surface above. Here and there doorways opened like green caves, and people ambled past in coveralls or jumpsuits or shorts and sandals. Some gave him curious looks. Others ignored him. A couple of running children grabbed his legs and used them to bleed off momentum as they turned into a side corridor, laughing and shrieking.
He found a sign that said "Dome Four Exit" and walked through another open airlock. The corridor beyond was only a few metres long, but the plant life and the warm sense of community ended abruptly. There was graffiti on the corridor wall, and the lock was closed. Chan palmed it open, then wrinkled his nose. Dome Four had a smell to it, a fug composed of tobacco smoke, spoiled food, and unwashed humanity. He moved through the lock, noting that the graffiti got thicker as he went along. A couple of young men lounged on the far side of the lock, eyeing him with suspicious disdain as he passed them. They looked like extras in a movie about urban decay back on Earth, the sort of punks you were supposed to find hanging out on street corners in bad neighborhoods. One had tattoos running up and down his bare arms, and the other made a show of crossing his arms and flexing his biceps and pectorals.