Titans Read online

  1st February.

  They were still not sure of exactly when the wave would hit, but the crew were all gathered in the shelter by Thursday morning because the number of charged particles the sensors were detecting had reached dangerous levels. Even behind several layers of metal and a lot of water, the occasional flash in people’s eyes marked the point where a high-energy proton interacted with the fluid in their eyeballs. The particle density outside had to be massive.

  Everyone was in their EVA suits. It added a little extra radiation protection and far more in the way of comfort. And if the ship was torn apart around them, it meant that they might survive for a few extra hours, floating in space without the slightest possibility of rescue. If that happened, Mercy had every intention of unlatching her helmet and taking the quick way out.

  ‘It’s the waiting that’s the worst,’ Marsh said.

  ‘Yes,’ Yawen agreed. ‘I wish it would just get here and we could find out whether we’re going to live.’

  ‘Very fatalistic,’ Nick said. ‘I for one would prefer that nothing happened.’

  ‘That would certainly be the preferred option,’ Daryn said, ‘but the flashing lights in my eyes suggest something is going to happen.’

  ‘The source of many a UFO sighting in space. I’ve seen them before, of course, but never with such frequency.’

  ‘Do you think we’re in danger from the radiation?’ Sophia asked.

  ‘Undoubtedly,’ Nick replied, ‘but that was the case before this. Space travel is as safe as we can make it, but that’s not saying much.’

  ‘We’ve been protected by Saturn’s magnetosphere to some extent,’ Marsh said. ‘Since we got here anyway. It seems this source is pretty powerful to be pushing particles through it. If we survive this, I’ll be writing papers on it until I’m old and grey.’

  ‘Something to look forward to,’ Nick said, grinning.

  ‘Oh, I’m hoping for a–’

  The groan of metal under stress brought an end to the immediate conversation. For maybe a minute, everyone just sat there in the small communal area within the shelter and listened as Theia made the kind of sounds you might expect if a pair of giant hands were gripping her and stretching. They had shifted orbits to one further out from Titan and turned the ship so that it should be side-on to the coming wave. The hope was that it would reduce the impact on the vessel, give the wave less length to work with.

  ‘I, uh, know this may be tempting fate,’ Marsh said eventually, ‘but I think it’s working.’

  ‘It does not seem too bad,’ Valentin agreed. ‘We may be irradiated to death, but I don’t think we’ll be turned into spaghetti.’

  ‘That was an option?!’ Sophia squeaked.

  ‘Not really,’ Marsh said, ‘but a hull rupture was–’

  Yawen let out a shriek and everyone turned to look in her direction. For most, that meant they saw the streamer of reddish light which appeared in the air at the back of the room, snaking out like a living thing. For Valentin, it meant he did not see the plasma stream until it hit him and it was his turn to scream. His suit blackened where he was hit, just under the floating rib on his right side, and the scream cut off in a gurgle. His body did not slump forward or fall, because they were in microgravity, but the way he stopped moving seemed very final.

  ‘Someone see if–’ Daryn began.

  Mercy stopped him. ‘He’s gone. His suit biomonitors are registering no signs of life. What was that?’

  ‘Some sort of plasma stream,’ Marsh replied. ‘I don’t understand how it could form inside the ship like that.’

  ‘Everyone watch for them,’ Daryn ordered. ‘We’ll try to… try to avoid…’

  ‘Daryn?’ Mercy turned toward her CO to see him frowning and looking white. ‘Daryn, are you okay?’ She pushed toward him.

  ‘I’m not feeling so good. Pain in my chest.’

  ‘I’ve got a sudden headache,’ Marsh said. ‘It’s not too bad.’

  ‘Yawen, Sophia, check on Marsh,’ Mercy said. ‘Nick, how are you feeling?’

  ‘Fine,’ Nick replied, gliding toward Mercy and Daryn. ‘Nothing wrong at all. Perhaps the gravity wave is affecting some of us. Or it’s radiation poisoning. That can be unpredictable.’

  ‘Yeah,’ Marsh said. ‘That’s possible. I’m not too bad. Just a headache.’

  ‘Look out for signs of nausea, though it’s early for radiation exposure to show any effect.’

  ‘We know that, Nick,’ Mercy said. ‘It’s on the training programme.’

  ‘Of course.’

  Another streamer of plasma appeared in one corner of the room and began snaking out toward the centre. Mercy hooked one foot under a chair and pulled Daryn down toward the deck. The others took similar actions. The streamer seemed to avoid them all this time as it wound across the room to finally strike one of the walls before evaporating, leaving a blackened mark where it had made contact with the paintwork.

  ‘Getting worse,’ Daryn wheezed. His teeth were gritted and he was a little hard to understand. ‘It’s like something’s… something’s eating away at my insides.’

  ‘Marsh has blacked out,’ Sophia said.

  ‘Check his biomonitor,’ Mercy ordered. ‘Stay with me, Brigadier. Keep looking at me.’

  ‘He seems okay,’ Sophia said. ‘Marsh, I mean. He’s breathing and his heart rate is steady. He’s just unconscious. Should we get him out of his suit?’

  The ship chose that moment to groan again. ‘Not yet,’ Mercy said. ‘Watch out for the streamers and keep him clear of them.’

  The lights flickered once and came back on a little dimmer. Sophia looked up at the ceiling for no real reason. ‘I think the reactor just shut down.’

  ‘What the Hell else is going to happen?’

  ‘Uh, I’m feeling a bit strange,’ Joe said.

  Mercy looked around at the pilot. ‘Strange how?’

  ‘Kind of like a headache. Kind of like my brain is trying to expand in my skull.’

  ‘I wasn’t going to say anything,’ Sophia said, ‘but…’

  ‘Damn,’ Mercy said. She turned back to Daryn. ‘I don’t think this is radiation or weird gravity.’

  ‘We don’t really have a way of experimenting to find out what it is,’ Nick said. ‘And our astrophysicist is unconscious.’

  ‘Not helpful. We–’ Mercy stopped as a spike of pain lanced through her head, like someone had driven a nail through the bridge of her nose. ‘Ah! Damn, that hurts.’

  ‘You too?’ Nick asked. ‘Why am I escaping the pain?’

  ‘I’m not hurting either,’ Yawen said.

  ‘At least I’m not alone.’

  ‘Oh, Christ!’ Daryn exclaimed, pulling away from Mercy to curl up into a ball. ‘I think I’d prefer to p-pass out.’

  There was another groan of tortured metal, but somehow it sounded like a relaxing tone. ‘It sounds like it might be passing,’ Mercy said. ‘You’re going to be alright, Daryn.’

  ‘T-tell that to my chest!’

  And, if Mercy were honest, to her head. The pain had turned into some form of pressure. As Joe had said, it was like her brain was trying to expand inside her skull. She gritted her teeth and tried to focus on her boss, but it was not easy. A third streamer hissed into being and snaked out toward her, but then it slid around her and down, blackening a patch of the deck. The pressure continued to increase, and she jammed her eyes closed, willing the pain to go away.

  The sudden silence was deafening. The pain in Mercy’s head was gone, but that seemed to just highlight the sudden lack of sound from around them.

  Yawen voiced what everyone was thinking. ‘What just happened?’

  ‘I don’t know,’ Sophia said, ‘but the reactor’s restarted and that should take a good ten minutes after a sudden shutdown.’

  ‘There are no stress sounds,’ Nick said.

  ‘Get them out of their suits,’ Mercy ordered. ‘Get your own suits off first, but– No, wait. Sophia, head up to auxili
ary control and check the ship’s status. We’ll wait to be sure the hull’s solid.’

  ‘On it,’ Sophia said, pushing off for the door which would let her onto the second bridge.

  ‘Right. Brigadier? How are you feeling?’

  ‘Like my g-guts are being torn apart,’ Daryn replied.

  ‘Hang in there. We’ll have you out of that suit shortly.’

  ‘I’m not… not sure I want out. Feels like the suit’s keeping me in one p-piece.’

  ‘We’ll get you to the medical bay. You’ll be fine.’

  ‘I want the g-good pain meds. The ones that m-make you float.’

  ‘I’ll dose you up myself.’

  It took a couple of minutes for Sophia to return from the bridge and, when she did, she looked white. ‘Hull integrity is good,’ she said. ‘Atmosphere is breathable. We’ve lost main sensors and communications.’

  ‘If that’s the worst of it,’ Mercy began, reaching for the latches on her helmet.

  ‘There’s something else.’

  ‘Something dangerous?’

  ‘N-not dangerous, just…’

  ‘Spit it out, Sophia.’

  ‘According to the computer, the date is the twenty-second of December, twenty-one fifty-one.’

  ‘What?!’ It was not just Mercy’s reaction. Joe swore in French. Yawen did it in English and Chinese.

  ‘That’s impossible,’ Mercy said. ‘The computer was affected by–’

  ‘I got the auxiliary sensors to take a look outside,’ Sophia said. ‘I can’t be absolutely sure of the date, but I’ll tell you this: the stars are in the wrong place. Looking out from the Sun, we should be staring right at Libra with Scorpius on one side and Virgo on the other. Instead, I’m seeing Cancer and Gemini. I think the computer’s right. I think, somehow, we’ve skipped fifty years.’

  22nd December 2151.

  Mercy looked down at the three EVA suits which still held three of her colleagues, or what was left of them. Valentin was fairly intact but still dead. Daryn and Marsh had expired before they could be taken to the medical bay. The inside of Daryn’s helmet was painted red with blood; he had more or less exploded inside his suit. Marsh’s face was blackened, as though he had cooked from the inside out. The survivors had decided to put the three of them in one of the airlocks and pump the air out. Their families could at least hold funerals that way.

  ‘I suppose I should say something,’ Mercy said.

  ‘What could you say?’ Joe asked. ‘What the Hell does that to someone?’

  ‘And why didn’t it do it to us?’ Sophia added.

  ‘Leave the eulogies to their families,’ Yawen suggested.

  ‘Right.’ Mercy stepped back and tapped buttons on the airlock control panel. The heavy door closed and sealed. After a minute, a light turned red to indicate there was vacuum on the other side. ‘Right,’ she repeated. ‘I’m calling this mission a failure. We head home. Joe, see if you can get us a course plotted. Sophia, we need to know whether there’s anything else wrong aside from the communications and sensors. It’d be great if you could fix those.’

  ‘I’ll see what I can do,’ Sophia replied. ‘If there’s a problem with the engines…’ She looked at the door of the airlock. Valentin had been the expert there, though Sophia had been trained by him. She might be able to fix something if it came to that.

  ‘I’ll get on the plot,’ Joe said, ‘but it would be useful to know where Earth is.’

  ‘That’s what I’m going to do,’ Mercy said. ‘Marsh was better with the sensor systems, but I can handle routine operations well enough.’

  ‘And I will go over the sensor logs,’ Nick said. ‘Perhaps there’s something in there to tell us what actually happened. Again, Marsh would be the expert, but my physics isn’t terrible.’

  ‘Do that,’ Mercy said. ‘Yawen…’

  ‘If no one needs me, I shall get some rest. I’m feeling… not at my best.’

  ‘Sure. Get some rest. I think we should all do the same once we know what the situation is.’

  ~~~

  ‘Well, Earth’s still there,’ Mercy said. ‘At this distance, using the emergency backup sensor array, I can’t say much about what state it’s in, but there it is.’

  Joe looked up from the navigation console. ‘Right where it should be for late December twenty-one fifty-one. I guess that confirms it. They have to think we’re all dead.’

  ‘Well, I sent a message out. I’ve got it repeating every ten minutes. But it’s seventy minutes or so for it to reach Earth, then they have to figure out what to send back, send it, and there’s another seventy minutes…’

  ‘And that’s assuming we can pick it up with the equipment that’s working.’

  ‘Well, yes.’

  ‘We’re on our own.’

  Mercy nodded. ‘We’ve been that way since we left Earth.’

  ‘Not like this. I’m having my moment of existential crisis, Mercy. I think we’re all owed one of those under the circumstances. Fifty years. Gone. Just like that. It’s…’

  ‘More like forty-nine. Forty-eight years, ten months. And that’s not really important. I suppose I’m less bothered because there was no one back there I’m worried about.’

  ‘Maybe. Considering what happened to us, I’m not sure we’ll find anyone back there at all.’

  ‘Maybe. And maybe the same time freeze happened on Earth as happened here. Maybe they all just woke up and they have no idea we’ve been out of contact.’

  The Frenchman cracked a smile. ‘I think that may be too much optimism.’

  ‘No amount of optimism is too much at the moment. Not until we find out how badly it went in the other direction.’

  ~~~

  ‘I’m not sure whether the power surged when the reactor went down,’ Sophia said, ‘or a power surge caused the reactor shutdown. Whatever, there was a power surge which caused damage all through the primary and secondary arrays. The main computer is down too. We’re lucky they built Theia with redundancies on her redundancies.’

  ‘Well, we can probably get back with the systems we have,’ Mercy said. ‘There’s no other damage? Life support? Engine?’

  ‘Life support has had nothing to do for fifty years. The engine diagnostics say nothing’s wrong.’

  ‘The reactor?’

  ‘It was designed to operate without refuelling for a century. It’s still good.’

  ‘Okay. Can you get the main systems back for us?’

  Sophia frowned. ‘I need to work through everything and find out exactly what’s wrong. Then I have to hope we have a spare for anything that burned out. I’m… not entirely hopeful.’

  ‘See what you can do.’ Mercy turned to look at Nick. ‘Anything come up from your research?’

  ‘There’s evidence of increased cryovolcanic activity from Titan for several months after the wave hit. I’ll present it to Yawen in the morning, but I suspect the surface cracked, opening up more vents. The gravitational sensors detected the wave. It seems to have had quite a high amplitude, but a very long wavelength. We rode it out better because of that. Essentially, we were never exposed to the extreme flexing Titan was because we rode the wave.’

  ‘But Earth would have been hit worse, right?’ Joe asked. ‘Bigger planet, more stretching and flexing.’

  ‘It’s a reasonable hypothesis. I don’t believe the damage would be structural, but there may have been increased volcanic and tectonic activity. However, Titan seems to have calmed down. We can expect that the same is true of Earth.’

  There was silence while everyone digested that. It was not a good thought however you looked at it, but it was not hopeless.

  ‘Let’s get some rest,’ Mercy suggested. ‘We can start trying to get everything working tomorrow. Maybe we’ll have a reply from Earth by then.’

  ‘There’s that optimism again,’ Joe said.

  ‘Where there’s life, there’s hope. And, for now, we’re alive, so let’s keep hopeful.’

 
23rd December.

  ‘Yawen is sleeping in,’ Nick said as Mercy sat down at the break room’s table for breakfast. ‘I was expecting her to be here by now.’

  Mercy paused, looking at her bowl of cereal, then at Nick, then Joe, then Sophia. ‘Crap,’ she said. She started for Yawen’s cabin, hearing Nick get to his feet to follow.

  The door was locked, so Mercy tapped the button that would sound a buzzer inside the room and open the intercom. ‘Yawen? It’s Mercy. Are you okay in there?’ After a minute of no response, she said, ‘Computer, open cabin six. Authority Colonel Mercy Alice Garner.’ There was the sound of a lock unlatching and the door slid aside. Mercy stepped through.

  There was plenty of space in Theia’s cabins. Each came with a mid-sized bed you could fit two people in at a push, a bathroom cubicle off to one side, a personal desk with terminal to the main computer, and an easy chair with a lap strap. What this one did not have was an occupant.

  The bed had been slept in and there was evidence that Yawen had pushed the sheet aside with some urgency. About halfway to the door from the bed, a pile of cloth marked where Yawen had got to before something had happened. Rather dispassionately, Nick walked into the room, took a pen from his breast pocket, and used it to spread out the tank top and shorts Yawen slept in. There were holes in the cotton fabric, but not even the smallest sign of the person who had been wearing them. The holes showed no sign of burning. There were just irregular areas which had, apparently, vanished along with the woman.

  Nick looked up at Mercy. ‘She… disintegrated?’

  ‘Is that even possible?’ Mercy asked after a second.

  ‘Under normal circumstances, I would say no. What we’ve witnessed in the past few hours, however, has changed my view of what “impossible” means.’

  ‘So, it’s not over. Any of us could go at any time.’

  Nick looked down again, frowning. ‘That… is not impossible.’

  ~~~

  There was a new container in the airlock, though this time it seemed pointless. Mercy had gathered Yawen’s damaged nightclothes into a plastic sample bag and put that with the three EVA suits. It was symbolic more than anything else; there was no indication that Yawen had ever existed aside from what was in that bag.