The Enceladus Crisis

by Michael J. Martinez

  Tully smiled broadly with evident relief. “Thank you, sir! I figured it best to say what I said, sir.”

  “And you were right to do so. Now, allow me to borrow that device a moment, if you please.”

  Tully pulled at the straps holding Hawkins’ glasses to his head and handed the device to Weatherby, who had the man hold his hat in return. He then managed to strap the strange lenses to his eyes, with only a minimal amount of consternation and but one epithet.

  And when his eyes focused, the world changed.

  The fog was gone, and Weatherby could plainly see the setting Sun, the first twinkling stars of night, and the beauty that was Saturn and its rings. Before him was land—the shores of Titan itself. Looking aft, he saw just how close they had come to running aground, for the outcropping of rock was quite large and would have easily stranded them upon Titan.

  “Two weeks extra grog, Tully,” he said quietly. “Well done indeed.”

  He then focused upon the shore behind the outcropping, and was doubly amazed, for it was the ruin of a city like no other he had ever seen.

  The buildings were tall—easily fifty floors upon many of them, and they would have been stacked straight and true if not for the ravages of war and millennia of ages upon them. There were streets, and machines upon them, all covered in rubble from the ruined buildings. Gaping holes in walls and grounds spoke of terrible engines of pure destruction. The coast itself was lined with wharves and docks, many of which were half-collapsed.

  Weatherby thought back to the cities upon the rings of Saturn, and to the settlement on Callisto he visited many years prior. These buildings seemed far less elegant, with more stone used in their construction. Some of the sloping tiled roofs reminded him of the architecture of the Orient he had seen once while on a voyage to China. Other elements seemed more akin to Greek temples, the design of which had since been widely appropriated by Europe’s capitals.

  On the whole, it was a disturbing mix of exotic, alien workings, combined with hints of Earth’s ancient past. Or did the ancient past contain elements of Xan architecture?

  No matter, for the ruins remained formidable, stretching from horizon to horizon. Somewhere in there, perhaps, was the Count St. Germain, but it would be as if searching for a thimble in all of London.

  “I hope that bloody Xan has a map,” Weatherby muttered.

  CHAPTER 18

  June 21, 2134

  The accelerator was working perfectly. To Diaz’ untrained eye, it was almost too perfect.

  She’d reviewed enough of Greene’s experimental data from Mars to know what kind of Cherenkov levels to expect as the particles continued to smash together and generate more energy. Up until now, they had been unable to sustain more than a few milliseconds’ worth of radiation even approaching Yuna Hiyashi’s fateful work two years ago.

  Here, though, with BlueNet focusing all of Earth’s ambient Cherenkov energy on the Siwa site, they were sustaining high levels for a second or two at a time—and the amount of radiation was rising as well as growing longer in duration.

  She looked over at Greene, who remained at the front of the room, working with Ayim. He was still smiling, but every now and then a look crossed his face. He sees something. Something off, Diaz thought.

  “Ma’am,” Coogan said quietly.

  “Yeah?”

  “Underneath the main accelerator core, behind the glass,” he said, nodding with his head. “Does that look right to you?”

  Diaz leaned over Hutchinson to look down the main aisle of workstations toward the front of the room. Under the old ceremonial altar in the temple, right where the collider sensors were stored—something was glowing a very soft, pale blue.

  “Oh, boy,” Diaz said. “Not good.”

  She turned to one of the men guarding her. “I need to talk to my guy up there. Now.”

  The guard looked puzzled. “No, you sit.”

  “No, I don’t sit,” Diaz said, standing. Huntington and Coogan rose with her. “You wanna have a shoot-out with all this gear in here? Be my guest. I’m walking up there to talk, that’s all.” And with that, Diaz turned and strode toward the front of the room, her two officers walking behind her, side-by-side. Behind her, she could hear the two guards arguing in Arabic as they followed. That was fine. She didn’t care if they tagged along.

  Passing rows of surprised techs and scientists—well, the ones who weren’t buried in holodata were surprised, at least—she walked straight up to Evan Greene and tapped him on the shoulder. He turned, and his eyes widened, as if he expected Diaz to beat the shit out of him right then and there. Tempting, but there were bigger problems going on.

  “Under the altar,” Diaz said quietly.

  Greene turned back to his holodata. “I know. It shouldn’t be there. It’s giving off more than 57 percent of the Cherenkov generated in there. It’s as if it’s supplying additional power to the accelerator process, but we aren’t actually seeing any power spikes. Just the radiation.”

  “Theories?”

  Greene paused. “General, I’m sorry, but I’m not reporting to you anymore.”

  “Dammit, Evan,” she hissed. “These are my people down here. Mags and Jimmy, people you’ve worked with. Are we in danger here?”

  Greene looked down momentarily before turning back to Diaz. “I don’t think we’re the only ones at this particular quantum space-time inflection point.”

  “Shut it down,” Diaz said, urgency underlying her best calm command voice.

  “No,” he said. “This is what we’ve been waiting for. This is why it’s working. We can’t shut it down now.” A momentary surge of blue light washed through the room, drawing their attention away from the data, before Greene continued. “We’re getting all we’re going to get from the particles, but Cherenkov levels are still increasing, even as our own power levels off. Whatever’s under that altar is generating it. I think it’s the key to the other side.”

  “And look what happened the last time that door opened,” Diaz said. “We were invaded. Literally invaded by another dimension. Please, Evan, shut it down.”

  A sudden click behind her right ear made her tense up. It was a very familiar sound to a soldier.

  “Back to your seat, Maria,” Harry said. She turned to see her guard pointing his weapon right at her head, with Harry beside him.

  Diaz tried to plead her case. “Harry, you have energy here you aren’t controlling. Maybe that’s the key to this, sure, but where’s your safety measures? Hell, did you even bother looking under the altar?”

  “Actually we did,” Harry replied. “That was the source of the latent radiation in the room. That’s why we built the reaction chamber right on top of it. And I don’t want to control it. I want to open it up. And keep it open.” He turned to look at Greene and Ayim, who were now busy going through a new set of holodata. “Gentlemen, let’s get the barriers in place.”

  Ayim looked over at Harry—and the gunman—with a concerned look on his face, but ultimately used his hands to sweep away the holodata he was looking at, replacing it with a holo control board. A moment later, machinery on either side of the altar began to whir into motion. A pair of what looked like giant brackets arose from either side of the altar and began extending, ultimately locking together and surrounding the altar on the horizontal axis. A moment later, these were joined by vertical brackets.

  “What the hell is that?” Diaz demanded.

  Harry smiled. “What’s the use in opening the doorway to another dimension if you can’t put a doorstop in it? Damned if I know all the quantum mechanics behind it, but that there, my friends, is our doorstop. That’s what’s going to let us go back and forth, stake our claims to what we find on the other side, and not only make history, but a ton of money in resource extraction.”

  Diaz grabbed Harry’s arm and pulled him around, prompting the gunman next to her to raise his weapon; she didn’t care. “And what happens if this whole area floods with energy you can’t contro
l? What if there’s something on the other side that wants to come over and seriously fuck with us? What if it’s Althotas? I have no doubt you know exactly what happened on Mars.”

  Harry looked the gunman off and actually smiled at Diaz. “Of course I saw the holos, Maria. I know what happened. Hell, we built off that. We just had to wait for their knock on the other side. As for protection,” he said, pointing to the sealed-off altar, “I can drop a meter of steel all around those brackets. I can vaporize anything that comes through if need be. I can blow the entire altar. Hell, I can take out Siwa if I have to, if it gets that bad. I mean, shit, Maria, I’ll do a lot for profit, but I won’t risk the whole damn planet. But if we can make this stable and get in and out of there regularly, we don’t have to go to freakin’ Saturn to find new natural resources. We just hop across.”

  With that, Harry nodded at the guard, who glared at Diaz and her officers and motioned toward the back of the room. Diaz turned crisply on her heel and strode toward the back of the room once more, with Coogan and Huntington trailing behind slightly, looking over their shoulders at the increasingly numerous flashes of blue light flooding the chamber.

  “Resource extraction,” Diaz muttered as she flopped back down into her chair. “He thinks he can go over there with zappers and machine guns and take their oil. It’s the 20th century all over again.”

  “So it would seem,” Coogan said very quietly, out of the guards’ earshot. “I’m not an expert, but I glanced at their holodata during your conversation up there. They seem to be quite close to a breakthrough. We’ll need to act soon.”

  Diaz turned to Huntington, who was scribbling idly on a pad of paper.

  Not quite idly, however, as Diaz looked over at the scratch marks. The seemingly random bunch of lines were in fact a map of the room they were in, with lines of crudely-drawn flowers marking the rows of desks, a little cloud and rainbow marking the altar-chamber, and swoopy, squiggly lines pointing from two stars in the back toward a variety of happy faces and, in one instance, a unicorn.

  It was a tactical map. Huntington had split the room into fire zones. If they could overpower their guards and grab their weapons, they could clear a path for one of them to reach the holocontrols and maybe shut everything down.

  “The unicorn?” Diaz asked with a slight grin.

  “Your old pal Harry, ma’am,” Huntington replied. “Thought you’d like that.”

  Diaz saw taking out Harry was her responsibility in Huntington’s plan. “It’s very sweet of you, Captain. I might take this home to show my kid.”

  “Home’s the idea, ma’am.”

  Diaz turned to Coogan. “You think you could put a wrench in their works?”

  Coogan’s eyes shifted around, as if he was casting about for data in his now-missing HUD. “Since they’re linked to BlueNet, I could simply power down the satellites. If we’re fortunate, I might be able to cut power entirely. But introducing that sort of instability . . . it could blow up in our faces quite neatly.”

  “Sad to say, but we may have to consider this facility a loss if it means shutting this down,” Diaz whispered. “We have to do whatever it takes.”

  Both Coogan and Huntington nodded soberly, and Diaz felt a small twinge of pride and sadness inside.

  Suddenly, a massive, intensely bright blue-white light flooded the room, accompanied by the sound of sirens and klaxons a moment later.

  Once her eyes adjusted, Diaz peered toward the front of the room.

  Between the brackets, the collider chamber was gone.

  In its place were three men. One was an old, pale, fat guy dressed like an Egyptian. Another was dressed in an antiquated soldier’s uniform, and was pointing a flintlock pistol at a third man, dressed in a combination of traditional Arabic robes and 18th century clothing.

  Despite what seemed to be some serious ravages of time, Diaz recognized the third one.

  “Finch?”

  The alchemist Dr. Andrew Finch looked up, and his brow furrowed a moment. And then confusion gave way to a look Diaz knew well from her years of combat training.

  It was the surprised look of shit going down wrong.

  October 18, 1798

  What the bloody hell was that? Finch thought to himself. For a brief moment, he had caught a glimpse that was both incredibly foreign and yet strikingly familiar—a group of people, dressed in odd clothing, standing in the room about ten feet in front of the altar, surrounded by glowing numbers and massive banks of machinery.

  And two of those people seemed quite familiar. Finch began scouring his memory, but quickly remembered where he was and what he was doing. It was all related, snapping into place in a flash of terrible insight.

  “Berthollet, stop,” Finch said quickly, turning to the costumed alchemist next to him, who was busy chanting at the altar, reading from The Book of The Dead while his audience sat before him, enraptured. “You must stop this. Now!”

  Berthollet did nothing of the sort, except move his right hand nigh imperceptibly in Finch’s direction, prompting his captor to shove his musket directly into the back of Finch’s head. The French alchemist continued his ritual, even as the scene before them—was that really that Diaz woman?—flickered in and out of reality. It didn’t matter, of course, for the appearance of strange people in the midst of a ritual such as this would most assuredly bode ill. In fact, the edges of that scene looked rather familiar.

  The edges were of darkness—a blackness so pure and miasmal that it seemed to absorb life and energy itself from around it. He had seen that darkness on Mars two decades past, and saw what came from it.

  “Berthollet!” Finch shouted. “No more, damn you!”

  Finch lunged forward for the Book, but found hands grasping at his arms. His guard had been joined by another, and they were pulling him away from the altar even as he sought to put an end to the occult working that, now, he was sure would threaten far more than those in the room.

  “Berthollet, he will come through!” Finch yelled, still trying to press his case. “You are being played the fool by a power you know nothing of!”

  The Frenchman merely smirked as he chanted.

  And the image flickering before the altar began to grow more substantial. Clearer, aside from a particular, peculiar shade of blue. Finch could recognize the small, flat machines some of the people in the image carried about. These would carry information, along with buttons and switches made of light. These would . . .

  . . . act in concert with Berthollet’s working.

  “It’s happening again,” he whispered to himself.

  Tendrils of blue light started to snake out from around the edges of the . . . portal, for want of better language for it. For it was a door, Finch knew. And those tendrils, reaching out like strands of blue hair caught in an unfelt breeze, represented some sort of trouble, though he knew not how.

  He would not wait long for an answer.

  June 21, 2134

  While Stephane and Hall stood watch outside the Chinese lander, Shaila did a thorough survey of the ship itself. It appeared to be in fine working order. She didn’t know the codes necessary to fly it—the Chinese were big on security, and she knew each astronaut had a code to key open pretty much everything, from e-mail to flight controls—but she imagined she could hot-wire it if necessary. She suppressed a twinge of jealousy, actually, since the Chinese lander seemed more robust and technologically advanced than the ones they had on Armstrong, even with ExEn as a major backer. Of course, the Chinese government had been a monolithic enterprise for nearly two centuries, while the E.U. and U.S. could barely put together a joint mission without squabbling over the bill for catering the planning meetings.

  “All right, all clear in here,” Shaila said, climbing out of the lander. “Figure we have two options. We wait for them to come back, or we go find ’em.”

  “I vote B,” Hall said. “All this waiting around makes me nervous.”

  “I agree,” Stephane added, sounding surprisi
ngly calm. “Whatever they’re doing, we must find them doing it.”

  “All right. Armstrong, you copy all this? We’re heading out to find the lander astronauts.”

  Archie came on the comm a moment later. “Roger that, Commander. You be careful. I’ve spotted Nilssen and Conti on board Tienlong. They’ve given me a thumbs-up through the cockpit window, but damn if I can’t get a signal through all that crap they got layered on that goddamn ship.”

  “Keep trying,” Shaila said. “Link us up to them if you can get a signal through, and keep sensors on both teams. I want as much heads-up as possible if we get more people milling about down here. Jain out. Now,” she said to Stephane and Hall, “how do we find ’em?”

  “Footprints,” Stephane responded. “I saw some boot prints heading off that way, toward the canyon walls. The tread wasn’t like ours. And there aren’t too many other people out here, are there?”

  Shaila rapped Stephane’s helmet and smiled; at least his head remained screwed on well enough. “Good eyes. Let’s go.”

  They began at a shuffle, then started leaping when the mystery treads grew further apart. It seemed as though the Chinese astronauts—there were indeed two sets of tracks—knew where they were going, or at least had some killer sensor gear, because there weren’t any turn-backs or dead ends. The tracks led directly toward the canyon wall, with little detour.

  The JSC astronauts leapt across a small river of liquid hydrocarbons and landed on the opposite bank, right up against the canyon wall—and that’s where the trail stopped. They doubled back and checked both banks of the river, but to no avail. The only possible trail was up a high mound of rubble—one that hadn’t shown up on maps of Titan made prior to their mission.

  “Rock slide?” Hall wondered aloud. “Maybe they got buried?”

  “Our survey images are just three months old,” Stephane said. “There’s not enough erosive activity for this. This may have been created by the Chinese.”