Suddenly something bumped into his feet, and he saw that the door had opened. Jenna took a step back. Did the door have some kind of voice command? In front of them was a small, glass room with warm, moist air pouring out into the corridor. The moisture in the air condensed immediately, resulting in white mist billowing over the floor.
“What was that?” Boris asked.
Jenna shrugged.
“That was me,” Anna announced. “I opened the door for you.”
“But where—”
“I’ve been watching you two for a while now, little brother, but I didn’t want to disturb you. We found the command center a while ago and learned a little about how this ship operates. Or at least how to open doors, in any case.”
“I can see that.”
“Go take a look at what’s inside. Then come on up here. You can’t miss the command center. Just keep going up.”
“Okay, see you soon. And please stop watching us.”
“Certainly, little brother. See you later!”
‘Little brother.’ His little sister could show her older brother a bit more respect.
“I like how you and your sister get along,” Jenna said. “I can tell she’s always felt protected and taken care of, even though your mother couldn’t be there for either of you anymore.”
Okay, Anna, you can keep calling me little brother for now, he thought.
The glass room was a transition area. It was not sealed airtight. Boris immediately noticed the heat that must be coming from the space beyond the enclosure. He’d only be able to stay here for a few minutes.
In one corner of the glass room were four pairs of tall, yellow boots designed for Wnutri. They were much too small for Snarushi feet. There were also several white cloaks hanging on one wall. The founders had probably changed here, and the cloaks were most likely work clothes. He took one of them from a hook. The material was a little stiff and somewhat thin in spots, indicating it had probably been washed quite a few times. Boris draped it loosely over his shoulders.
“Looks good,” Jenna said.
She was lying. He looked at his reflection in the window. He thought he looked rather comical, because the cloak was much too small, as if he had stolen it from a dwarf.
Jenna touched his upper arm. “You... You can’t stay here long, can you?”
He forced himself not to flinch, though her hand felt like glowing lava, even with her hand still in its glove. He shook his head.
“Okay, then it makes no sense for me to take off my spacesuit. I’ll need it outside again anyway. Let’s just go quickly through the room, and then we’ll head up to the command center. Okay?”
“Sounds like a good idea,” Boris said as he took off the white cloak.
“Let’s go,” Jenna said. She picked up one of the cloaks and hung it around her spacesuit. Then she hooked her arm in his. “Come on, let’s take a walk in the garden.”
The greenhouse was wild and free. The ancient forests on Earth must’ve looked like this. The plants would have had 5,000 orbital periods to spread out and grow. The ship had kept them supplied with nutrients and water and had kept the temperature constant, but otherwise had not intervened at all.
The variety was impressive. Titan’s agriculture would undoubtedly benefit from this greenhouse. It took Boris a while to identify some of the species, usually because he had never seen them fully grown. In Titan’s greenhouses, they were always harvested when it was time to use them, so food plants and herbs never reached their ultimate, impressive size. When plants have enough time to grow, he noted, they seem much less fragile.
Jenna stopped and squeezed his arm. “Look over there!” She pointed toward the long, fine leaves of a carrot. Perched on it was a delicate creature with yellow wings that were moving slightly. “That must be a butterfly,” she said. “I’ve read about them.”
“Ah, that’s the reason for the glass room at the entrance. To make it harder for the insects to get out,” he said.
Jenna spoke very quietly, obviously enchanted. “Isn’t it beautiful?”
“Yes, it’s so... yellow.”
“Yellow?” She looked at him with a skeptical gaze.
“Yes, yellow. Or not?” Had he said something wrong?
“Yes, it’s yellow,” Jenna said with a laugh. “Come on, let’s keep going.”
As they walked past the butterfly, it lifted off into the air and flew away over their heads. Boris watched it with his goggles zoomed in. A delicate, yellow powder trickled from the insect’s dark-brown body and landed on Jenna’s helmet, but she didn’t notice. He took a deep breath and let it out.
“That was impressive,” Jenna said.
Boris closed the garden’s double doors. The windows on this side had already iced over again. But his outer skin liked the cold. The synthetic muscles relaxed, and the fungi that formed the biological basis of the outer skin woke up from its heat hibernation and replaced all the cells that had died off during the short time in the garden.
“I hope we can keep the garden just like it is,” Jenna said.
“Even if we have to survive on powdered foods out of plastic bags?”
“Yes. Then we could walk through the garden every day. Wouldn’t that be nice?”
She beamed, and that made him sad. In the three or four minutes in the garden he had gotten a very brief idea of the life he could have had as a Wnutri. But he could never experience the green, the heat, and the humid air like Jenna. His world was cold and inhospitable, and it was best if he accepted that.
“Yes, that’d be nice,” he said. He listened to his words, which sounded defiant. Simply giving up and accepting something wasn’t his way.
As Anna had told them, at the upper end of the corridor was another double-wide doorway. They also contained four iced-over glass windows. Boris pushed the doors open. In a brightly lit, windowless room with an area of about ten by ten meters, he saw two very different figures bent over a piece of black technical equipment on a waist-high shelf.
Anna turned around. She must’ve heard the door opening. “Ah, there you are, you two lovebirds.”
Boris felt hot, even though it was just as cold here as in the corridor. He decided to ignore Anna’s comment, instead of trying to come up with a witty comeback. “What are you looking at?” he asked.
“We don’t really know,” Anna answered.
“This glass container can be taken out,” Geralt said.
“Did you open up the doors above it?” Boris asked as he approached. Above the shelf there were cabinets mounted to the wall. He opened one and took out what he found. “What do you think?” he asked. “These look like cookies. They’re packaged in a transparent material. Looks organic. And here, that’s sugar.”
Boris pointed to a metal can on the shelf. “This area is clearly used for food,” he said, “so the black machine must also have something to do with food. Always pay attention to context.”
“Hey, I’m the smart-ass on duty here,” Geralt said. “I already thought of all that, too, but I didn’t want to waste your time with unverified hypotheses. But if you’d like, then I’d have to say that this machine has something to do with recycling drinking water. You see, there’s a tank, probably for the unfiltered water, and there is a pump, and right there is the filter.”
“Then what’s the heater for?” Boris asked, pointing to a heating coil behind part of the housing that he had just removed.
“Maybe they liked to drink warm water,” Geralt conjectured. “The founders were normal people. They came from Earth after the great climate disaster. They probably loved heat.”
“Okay, men, can we concentrate on important matters?” Jenna interjected. “Food is not the problem right now. We need communications. Anna, you’ve already found the ship’s internal communications, right?”
“Yes, up there.” Anna pointed to an area in front of them that had three cushioned seats. Each seat had a console with a screen in front of it. Anna sat down on the rig
ht and pulled the console toward her. “I think this is where the security officer must’ve sat,” she said. “The screen switched on when I pressed a button, and it immediately displayed the two of you. I think our presence must’ve triggered the ship’s security system.”
“Lucky for us it wasn’t programmed to take out intruders,” Boris said.
“You think they might’ve done that?” Jenna asked.
“The founders came from a world where violence was part of everyday life,” Geralt said. “They might’ve taken some precautions or made some preparations to defend themselves.”
“Well, we haven’t triggered any defensive measures yet,” Anna said. “But I also still don’t exactly know how this system works.”
“We found a locked room and thought maybe it was used to store weapons,” Jenna said.
“For not knowing how to use the system, it sure seems like you were able to monitor us pretty extensively, Anna,” Boris said.
“That wasn’t me. The cameras followed you two automatically. Then when you were standing in front of a door and wanted to open it, a question would suddenly pop up on this screen with a big green plus and a big red minus. I pressed the green plus because I was afraid I’d trigger something that might hurt you.”
“You got there at the perfect moment,” Jenna said. “Both of you have got to see the garden. There are even butterflies! It’s a real achievement that they were able to create such a stable ecosystem.”
“Too warm for me,” Anna said.
“So, we don’t know much about the security system,” Boris said.
“Only that it’s able to detect the presence of people in the ship,” Anna said.
“That’s a start,” Jenna said. “But right now, communications and control are more important.”
Geralt pointed to the two other seats. “On Earth, control and command were considered the most important functions,” he explained. “The commander sat in the center. The left seat was probably where the communications officer sat.”
“Are you sure?” Jenna asked. “Wasn’t communications the commander’s main job? Controlling the ship was something I think they’d order a subordinate to do.”
“Yes, I’m pretty sure. At least, that’s what I’ve gathered from the terrestrial literature that we’ve translated into modern Titanian. Action was always more important to them than analysis alone.”
“I see,” Jenna said. “Maybe that can be explained by evolutionary theory. At the beginning of human history, it would have been more important to be able to run away as fast as possible from a predator than to first think about the nature of the threat, or to try to convince the predator not to attack. Maybe people on Earth weren’t able to cast away this evolutionary legacy.”
I’m not always very good at it either, Boris thought.
“Boris, see if you can figure anything out with the communications system,” Jenna said.
“Me?”
“Yes, you. Out of all of us, you seem to have the best intuitive knack for this old technology.”
Boris went over to the seat on the left and sat down. It would almost certainly take him less time than his somewhat slow but methodical friend. As he had seen Anna do before, he pulled the console toward himself, then tapped on one of the buttons at the bottom. The screen was automatically activated, and a few fuzzy, hard-to-see symbols appeared. He wiped the screen with his hand, removing a thin layer of dust. Much better.
The screen was divided into six areas of equal-size, each containing a symbol and some letters. The text didn’t help him any, but one of the symbols looked like a parabolic antenna. Score! He tapped on it. A scale appeared with many short lines and a few longer lines. Hmm. That had to represent frequencies.
On what frequency did the base send out its transmissions? There was a magnifying glass symbol above the scale. He tapped on it and the screen went blank. Now all that was displayed was an analog clock with a single pointer slowly rotating around the circle.
“See? You’re already getting somewhere,” Jenna said as she put her hand on his shoulder.
It’s only a sign of encouragement, he thought. If Geralt were sitting here, she’d be doing the same thing.
The clock disappeared, and a list appeared in its place. The top line was underlined in green, and the digits, which had to be the carrier frequency of the KK base, were especially thick. All the other entries were displayed much fainter. Maybe they were other bases, or maybe they were radio frequencies from Earth that were better to avoid.
“That one at the top is the base,” Geralt said. “I recognize the digits.”
“But how do we have reception down here?” Anna asked. “There was no signal from the rover.”
“There’s some backscattering of the radio waves due to reflections at various atmospheric layers. The rover’s radio module isn’t sensitive enough, but the ship has a much more powerful radio system and can pick up those reflections, too,” Boris said.
“Then try to contact base,” Jenna said.
Boris tapped on the top entry in the list. The display went black. Then his own picture appeared in a small window. He looked around but couldn’t find any camera. They had also not seen any cameras in the corridor. All the lenses must be well hidden.
Nothing happened.
“Maybe you have to say something,” Jenna said.
“Jenna? Is that you, Jenna?”
“Oh, it’s Elisabeth,” Jenna said. “She’s supposed to be on duty at the base right now.”
“Yes, it’s me. It’s three minutes before midnight. All the others are asleep. Did you do it? Did you dig up the probe? The system didn’t recognize the radio signature, so I didn’t identify myself.”
“Yes, we’re inside... That is, we’re in the area where the probe is located,” Jenna said. “It’s strange that the system doesn’t recognize the signature. Must be a hardware error. I’m sorry, but you’ll have to go and wake up Geraldine. Can you go and get her? We’ll contact you again in ten minutes.”
Elisabeth was obviously not privy to the confidential details of the commander’s plan. Jenna had almost revealed their secret.
“On my way. Talk to you soon, Jenna.”
“How do you terminate the connection?” Boris asked.
“No idea,” Geralt answered.
Suddenly, his picture disappeared. Apparently, Elisabeth had ended the connection.
“See how easy that was?” Boris said.
Ever since this Elisabeth had mentioned that it was almost midnight, a heavy fatigue had descended upon him.
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“Thanks for being so careful with Elisabeth,” Geraldine said. “This signature isn’t from the rover. Does that mean you’ve reached your target?”
“We have,” Jenna said. She was now sitting in the seat on the left. Boris had sat down on the floor, his back against the wall, and was watching her. She had managed to take off her spacesuit within ten minutes and was now only wearing warm clothing. It was still below 270 degrees in the command center, but her suit’s thermal layer would protect her from the cold. Only her hands were exposed. She kept rubbing them together, almost continuously.
What delicate fingers she had! Boris wished he could have warmed them himself, but his outer skin gave off virtually no heat. He couldn’t even do that for her!
“Have you mastered the technology yet?” Geraldine asked.
“A little bit, but we’re working on it. So far, only the radio and internal security. There are plenty of provisions. We want to bring the rover and tank onboard, and then we’ll be self-sufficient.”
“There aren’t any vehicles on board already?”
“No, the founders must’ve unloaded all of them. But there is one locked storage room, and we don’t know what it contains.”
“A weapons arsenal?”
“That’s what all of us were thinking, too. We were able to open all the other storage rooms.”
“It doesn’t matter. It’s not
our top priority right now. What’s important is that you learn how to control the ship. It’d be great if you could launch tomorrow, or the day after tomorrow at the latest.”
“And what would be our destination?”
“The asteroid that’s moving toward Earth, just like we had discussed before. If the asteroid hits Earth and they think we had something to do with it, or could have helped but didn’t, I’m afraid of the revenge they’d take on us.”
“I understand. We’ll do what we can.”
“Thank you, Jenna. Good work! Contact me when you are ready to launch. But, if possible, don’t use this unknown signature. I don’t want any more rumors than usual spreading around here.”
“We’ll find another way.”
“Thank you, Jenna, and good luck to all of you!”
A dull thud woke him. Boris was disoriented. Around him was nothing but darkness. Then he remembered—he had gone into the tank to regenerate. Carefully he reached to one side, but Anna was no longer there.
He pressed on his ear, activating the radio module. “I’m awake,” he announced.
“Good morning,” Jenna said, causing his heart to skip a beat.
“It’s about time,” Geralt said. “I’m standing outside, waiting to attach your tank to the ship’s hoist.”
“I’m coming out,” Boris said.
He made his way to the outside through the gelatinous mass. Once out, he patted down his body. He felt good, although still a little tired.
“So here I am. What do you need me to do?” he asked.
Geralt was holding up an oversized carabiner. “Does the tank have anywhere I can attach this?” he asked.
“Of course. Repairs are much easier if you can lift the frame and undercarriage.” Boris crouched down and pointed to a spot on the bottom of the tank, directly below the exit. “Here. We’ve got to lift it with the exit pointing up or it might leak. I don’t know if the gel could hold back the pressure from the fluid if we lifted it from the other end.”
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