The Enceladus Crisis

by Michael J. Martinez

  The sounds of the battle below could be now be heard—cannon fire, mostly, punctuated by the occasional explosion as a ship’s powder magazine succumbed to burning timbers. Weatherby was thankful that they were still too far aloft to hear the inevitable screams of dying men.

  He would hear those screams soon enough, however. “We’re close!” O’Brian shouted from his post along the quarterdeck railing, where he leaned out to determine their best landing point. “Two points to starboard, thirty degrees up on the planes!”

  Immediately, the six men on the wheel began cautiously turning to starboard, while the men on the Fortitude’s four planesails—two on each side, running outward at a square angle from the hull—were brought up to catch the winds and soften their decent.

  “Larboard battery, make ready!” Weatherby shouted, trying desperately not to clutch his throbbing shoulder. It would do no good for the men to see him weakened mere moments before engaging the enemy.

  The men on the left side of the ship complied with his order, running the guns out and bringing their flintlocks upward. But they looked to the quarterdeck with fear, and rightly so. Not only were they to be the very vessel to try to drop from the Void straight into an engagement, they were also aiming for a spot uncomfortably close to shore, at night, and with only an educated guess as to their opponents.

  “Attention all hands!” Weatherby cried out as he approached the front railing of the quarterdeck. “Englishmen are dying down there at the hands of the damnable French! We cannot—will not—allow this to go unmet! Stand fast and show these frogs what Englishmen can do when they show their Fortitude!”

  The men below cheered and rejoined their work with a grim determination, while Weatherby took a deep breath and tried to ignore the throbbing pain in his shoulder. It wasn’t his first speech by far—he’d commanded ships for over a decade now. In fact, he remembered his first such rallying cry as if it were yesterday, even though it was nearly twenty years ago, and he was barely past boyhood then.

  The fact that his ship at the time was destroyed shortly thereafter was something he preferred not to dwell upon.

  “All hands, brace!” O’Brian cried out. Weatherby immediately grabbed on to the rail before him with both hands, ignoring the pain that lanced through his shoulder as a result. He looked to larboard, where the tops of other ships began to fly past . . . then the sails . . . the rigging . . .

  With a deafening splash and a bone-shaking collision that sent the entire crew sprawling, the Fortitude arrived on the seas of Earth once more.

  Water cascaded over the sides of ship, primarily upon the maindeck, but even the officers aft were soaked. The cries of men could be heard—on Fortitude? The other ships?—as everyone was tossed about violently. Weatherby fell backwards, slamming his back into the mizzenmast. One of the marines in the tops fell, his body line failing him, and landed upon the main deck with a sickening smack of flesh upon planking. The fo’c’sle nearly submerged itself entirely into the waters of the Mediterranean as the ship’s momentum carried it forward, and dozens of men skittered forward across the deck, desperately grabbing at ropes and railings.

  Fortitude continued to bob and sway upon the sea as her captain regained his feet, his shoulder throbbing anew from the lashing his body had taken upon keel-fall. “Run out the guns!” he cried, not even sure of where they landed at this point, but knowing he must be ready. Weatherby looked toward his left once more and saw Fortitude had been lucky enough to come alongside a slightly larger ship, a third-rate with a few extra guns. He quickly scanned her stern.

  The French tricolor hung there.

  “Larboard battery! FIRE!” Weatherby shouted.

  Almost as one, thirty-seven gun crews responded, sending streams of alchemical cannonballs hurtling toward the French vessel. The captain looked on as the glowing shot broke through rigging, planking and men. Most of the French crew was engaged on the other side of the ship, and had only began rushing to their starboard side to engage this new threat that had seemed to materialize out of nowhere.

  It didn’t matter. Fortitude’s guns fired true, and many Frenchmen died painfully under their wrath. Weatherby saw that the enemy vessel was likely out of the fight, her quarterdeck a smoldering ruin and her guns askew throughout.

  “Rudder amidships, full sail!” Weatherby shouted. “Reload! We shall engage the next ship in the line!”

  The men flew into action, and a moment later the Fortitude surged forward, her captain looking forward to the next French ship—a massive first-rate ship with three gun decks. It was likely L’Orient, as the French had very few ships of that caliber, and she was their best. Fortunately for Fortitude, the ship already appeared to be in dire straits, with fires seemingly spouting from every gunport.

  But L’Orient was not dead yet, as the report of her cannon soon attested. Thankfully, her full complement of guns were not available to her—only twenty or so managed to get off shots toward Fortitude as she neared. This was more than enough, however. The crew ducked as shot careened through the ship, boring holes into the upper and lower gun decks, blasting part of the fo’c’sle into shards and cracking the ship’s foremast, which nonetheless managed to hold.

  “Return fire at will!” Weatherby shouted, and the Fortitude’s guns responded quickly, shredding L’Orient’s lower gun deck with cannonballs laced with mystic alchemical formulae. Some pounded through the oaken planking like a knife through butter, while others followed to set all ablaze as if it were mere tinder. Still others exploded within the ship itself, causing splintered wood and ensorcelled iron to cascade through the air and turning the interior of the ship into an abattoir.

  Weatherby saw the fires raging through the blasted gaps in the French flagship’s hull; she was not going to last much longer. “Mr. O’Brian, twenty degrees to starboard, if you please, and post lookouts to keep us away from those shoals. Fire teams make ready.”

  Just as quickly as she arrived, Fortitude peeled away from the French line—joined by many of the French ships seeking to escape the wreckage of L’Orient. The fires on the French flagship were spreading, and the men aboard—she had a complement of at least a thousand men—were streaming over the sides and swimming for shore, for their fellows, and even for the English ships. Weatherby dispatched his more junior lieutenants and midshipmen to oversee the recovery of any man overboard; the laws of sea and Void required no less.

  “Sir?” O’Brian said quietly.

  The captain turned to see his first lieutenant peering back toward the French line before handing him the looking glass. “The first ship we engaged, sir,” O’Brian said.

  Looking through the glass, the captain saw that their first target was trying to move off from L’Orient along with the rest—and the rest of Nelson’s fleet was doing an admirable job of making it difficult for any of the French to find room to escape. Weatherby focused on the ship’s aft.

  Emblazoned there, below the French tricolor, was her name: Franklin.

  A moment later, fire filled the captain’s field of vision. The powder magazine aboard L’Orient blew, turning the proud flagship into a pile of tinder. But by this point, only a few flaming shards made it to Fortitude, and the crew quickly extinguished the fires.

  Weatherby somberly handed the glass back to O’Brian, his mind filled with thoughts of an old, wise friend from his youth, one who put aside politics and rancor in the name of a greater good. “Come about, Mr. O’Brian. I want to take Franklin as a prize before the rest of the fleet blows her out of the water,” he said.

  “She deserves no less.”

  CHAPTER 2

  July 28, 2134

  With less than four weeks to go until their scheduled arrival at Saturn, the mood of the Armstrong crew had been improving daily. Their mission checklists had started going from the banal repetition of routine shipboard duties to experiment diagnostics and increased observation of Saturn and its moons. The six members of the crew were going to be the first-ever human b
eings to survey Saturn first-hand.

  Or would they? Everyone had already received word about the Chinese intercept, and the faces around the table were pretty glum. Shaila wondered how they’d take to this briefing. There was even more going on than they realized.

  “All right, people, let’s go,” said the ship’s commander, Col. Mark Nilssen, U.S. Marine Corps. The wiry, crew-cut skipper was every inch a Marine, from the tattoos to the muscles to the weathered eye. “Three hours ago, Archie discovered an interruption in our comm feed. Normally, this wouldn’t be such a big deal; we’d just run a diagnostic, find the source of the interruption, fix it and request the data again. But this wasn’t just an outage. The comm signal was interrupted by another signal entirely, and the computer decrypted it and translated it from the original Chinese. What we got were several personal vidmails and e-mails, some basic ship-update commands and about twenty minutes of a popular Chinese reality holoshow.” This prompted a few smirks and raised eyebrows around the table as the skipper continued. “But those personal messages contained a few references about Saturn which surprised us. So Jain ran some queries through our intelligence database. Jain?”

  Shaila nodded at the colonel and turned to address the rest of the crew, unconsciously giving Stephane a slight smile as she did so. “According to JSC reports, there are only a handful of communications stations that can relay laser-comm data and only a few long-range survey ships that can receive it—that we know of. They can broadcast from Earth, of course, their base on the Moon, and from a pair of satellites at the L4 and L5 Earth-Sun Lagrange points. And right now, there are three ships out there that could receive that data. One’s in the shop, one’s around Venus and one’s supposedly in the Jovian system.”

  Shaila paused to call up a hologram of the Solar System, which sprung to life above the conference table for all to see. “As you can see, Venus is on the other side of the Sun from us, so there’s no way they could miss their ship that way. Jupiter is at least in the right direction, but still a good 40 degrees away. They’d have to have a major technical foul-up in order to cross our signal streams.”

  “I think there is a ‘but’ coming here,” Stephane said. “This is too easy to explain away.”

  Nilssen nodded. “Naturally. The Chinese ship Tienlong was supposed to be surveying the Jovian system for the past month or so. Our satellites there caught it entering the system and swinging around toward the far side of the planet. We assumed they were using the planet’s atmosphere for braking, but we never caught them entering a stable orbit. We assumed they plotted a course away from our assets, like they usually do, but we always manage to catch a peek somewhere. This time, no luck. At first, we thought they may have skirted the atmosphere too close and took a dive into the planet, but the Chinese assured us that their mission was fine—and of course, told us to mind our own goddamn business.”

  The Chinese were notoriously insular and private about their space activities, a tradition going back more than a century. They had even taken to using holographic cloaking and light-dampening coatings for some of their near-Earth assets. Naturally, such reticence made the Chinese immensely popular for congloms—shorthand for multinational conglomerates—to partner with. Space exploration and, more importantly, exploitation was the next frontier in big business, and would likely stay that way for decades to come.

  Nilssen nodded over to Archie, who picked up the thread. “With Jain here looking up China’s assets in place, it was easy to figure out where the laser comm might have been going,” Archie said. “It’s a simple point-A to point-B thing. Logically, however, there was no way that any of their Earth-based or Lagrange assets could’ve been sending that signal to anybody unless they had a major technical fuckup. Unless . . .”

  Archie stood and gestured within the holographic image of the Solar System. “We know when Tienlong left Earth, about two weeks after we did. We also know from its course that it was headed for Jupiter, and we saw it arrive there last month before it disappeared. However, what if they didn’t stop at Jupiter, but used its gravity in a slingshot maneuver to head to Saturn?” Archie traced a path with his finger, which the computer dutifully illuminated in the hologram. “We know their speed from the time it took for them to get to Jupiter from Earth. And we can extrapolate their Jupiter approach from what our satellites there caught. The boost they’d get would place them about here.” Archie jabbed a gnarled finger at a spot on the hologram, which began to glow red. “Now, take a look at China’s L4 comm satellite, the position of the Armstrong and that big red dot.” Archie traced a line between the three points.

  A very straight line, one which the computer dutifully animated.

  “We got lucky,” Nilssen said as Archie took his seat. “If this were some random intercept, the odds would be huge. But seeing how their orbits worked out, they probably should’ve known we’d be in their way at some point, and they didn’t do a good enough job on their security.”

  “Actually,” Archie interrupted, “I don’t think it was security. I think they didn’t get as much of a boost from Jupiter as they thought. The idea would be to beat us to Saturn, after all. As it stands, we’re going to arrive pretty much at the same time.”

  “Which means there’s a very good chance we could run into them, literally,” Shaila added. “Lord knows they can be pretty cavalier about respecting other people’s space out here. I wouldn’t be surprised if they maneuver just to edge us out of our orbit, since they’re behind schedule.”

  There was silence around the table for several moments until, finally, Dr. Maria Conti, the ship’s medical and biology officer, spoke up. “Why did we not slingshot around Jupiter and save a few weeks?” she asked.

  “Safety, mostly,” Nilssen said. “Cutting it that close around Jupiter requires a lot of extra shielding and energy. Sure, you shave a few weeks, but if you’re off your game for a minute, you end up either diving into the planet or shooting off target into nowhere. The magnetic and gravitational fields play hell with your sensors at high speed. And don’t forget, until now we didn’t realize this was a race. Now we’re stuck playing a huge game of chicken with a really big planet, and the Chinese had the element of surprise.”

  “But now they will play chicken, as you say, with us, yes?” Stephane said.

  “Possibly,” Nilssen said. “As you can imagine, Houston’s having kittens about this, and they’re doing everything they can to get a firm track on Tienlong, if it really is Tienlong out there in the first place. Once we get them pinpointed, we can at least make some adjustments to our course before we get there so we can avoid them. Archie, how’s our reactor output looking?”

  “We’re running at about 85 percent,” he said, running a liver-spotted hand across his face. “I suppose I can get you to 95 percent, but any more than that and we start having to worry about fuel consumption. We need some wiggle room once we get there in order to rendezvous with the depots.”

  Prior to Armstrong’s launch, JSC had sent three depot ships on a slow course to Saturn. By sending food and fuel ahead, the Armstrong could get to Saturn faster without carrying the cargo necessary for the return trip. In fact, they only needed to rendezvous with one of the ships to get home safely—the other two would simply allow Armstrong to extend its mission and survey more of the Saturn system if the situations warranted.

  “What about their fuel situation?” Conti asked. “Any sign of depot ships from them?”

  “Great question. Hard to say,” Nilssen responded. “The Chinese wouldn’t let anybody get close enough to the ship in orbit to get a good look, and the intel is pretty spotty. It’s possible they simply brought enough food and fuel for the entire trip, or maybe the depot will launch once they’re there safely.”

  “They could always try to refuel after arriving,” said Dr. Elizabeth Hall, the mission’s corporate specialist. Hall was executive vice president for extraterrestrial resources at ExEn Corp., the world’s largest energy conglomerate and the miss
ion’s corporate underwriter. Unlike most corporate specs, she had a Ph.D. in geology as well as an M.B.A., and thus was actually qualified to be aboard; she had even taken on additional training to serve as emergency pilot.

  “Exactly,” Nilssen said. “Between water on Enceladus and pick-your-hydrocarbons on Titan, refuel is a definite possibility.” He didn’t need to mention that Armstrong had emergency procedures in place to refuel on site as well, in case the rendezvous with their pre-launched fuel depot didn’t go as planned. “For now, we just don’t know. In the meantime, though, we got about three and a half weeks to get ready. Jain?”

  As second in command, it fell to Jain to let everyone know just how much their workloads would be increasing as they approached Saturn. Funny how the number two person aboard ship never got to be the popular one. “All right, then. Archie, we need to get some short-range comm gear up and running. We don’t have an extra laser-comm on board, so we’ll have to use good old-fashioned radio waves. I want digital, analog, holo, 2D vid, audio-only, and text. Throw in Morse code while you’re at it. English and Chinese. Let’s say hello, ask them their intent and offer assistance if they’re off course.”

  Archie nodded. It was highly doubtful, at this point, that the Chinese were off course. “I’ll put it on a repeat loop so they’re absolutely sure we’re here.”

  Shaila smiled. “Well done, then. Maria, there’s a chance that their slingshot move didn’t go so well, since they’re not ahead of us, so let’s double check our medical stores and make sure we can actually offer assistance if they need it,” Jain continued. “Stephane, research everything you can about their landers and their docking systems, then request some docking simulations holos from Houston. If we need to shuttle over to them, we need to be sure we can dock with them safely.”

  She looked up at the table, trying to catch the gaze of each of her colleagues. “I know we’re going to be busy with experiments and observations as we get closer to Saturn, but with another ship out there somewhere, God-knows-where, we’re going to have to squeeze in some additional drills, particularly evasive and collision drills. Some of them will be unannounced. I’ll apologize now so that I can freely tell you ‘tough shit’ later.” This got the laughs that she had hoped for. Always deliver bad news with humor. “Our first announced drill will be tomorrow at oh-nine-hundred, to start things off civilized. Everyone else, try to think of your worst-case scenarios and come up with procedures for dealing with them. Colonel?”