Dimly he heard Fritz and Pancho talking through the countdown. Fritz and his fuckin’ timeline, Gaeta thought. We’ve got enough lag time in the schedule to do everything twice, just about.
Then he heard Pancho: “On my mark, separation in ten seconds. Mark!”
Nine, eight … Gaeta counted with her.
At zero he felt a slight nudge in the small of his back. No sense of motion at all until the aeroshell yawed forty degrees as programmed. Saturn slid into his view, big and beautiful.
Gaeta realized that this might be the last time he saw it.
28 May 2096: Titan entry
Clamped to the aeroshell, his hands and boots wedged into cleats built into the ends of the x-frame on which he was stretched, Gaeta lay on his back with nothing to do except think. His backpack contained the parasail that would float him down to Titan’s surface, plus the life-support system and the thermionic nuclear generator that powered his suit. The nuke can run the suit for weeks, Gaeta knew. But there’s only a twelve-hour supply of fresh air and water, and I’ve gone through almost half of that already. The recyclers can stretch that to a couple of days if I need to.
He shook his head inside the helmet. I’m not staying inside this iron maiden for a couple of days, he told himself. Get down to Urbain’s misbehaving machine, plug in the package of nanos, and get the hell back out again. One hour on the surface, then back to the transfer ship and home to the habitat.
Back to Kris.
I’m staying down there just long enough to do the job and get credit for being the first man on Titan. In the headlines again. One last stunt. The best and the last.
“Aerodynamic heating has begun,” Fritz’s voice announced, flat and cool. “You should begin to experience some turbulence shortly.”
“Smooth so far,” Gaeta said.
He could see that the stars were drifting past now, and one side of the rocket pack above him looked brighter. It’ll get cherry red before we’re through, he knew.
The shell began to shudder, and for the first time since they’d gone into orbit around Titan Gaeta sensed a feeling of weight.
“Point five g,” Fritz voice said calmly. “Point seven … point nine …”
The front face of the rocket pack was glowing now and Gaeta could see tongues of flame-hot gases flickering past the rim of the aeroshell. Good footage for the vids, Gaeta thought. I hope Berkowitz is getting it all down and transmitting it back to Earth.
The shell began to rock like a leaf tossed into a stormy sea. Gaeta felt nauseous. Gesu Christo, he thought, don’t let me upchuck inside my helmet!
All around him the rim of the shell blazed with sheets of white-hot gas. Gaeta knew that the superconducting coil built into the rim of the shell enveloped him in a magnetic field that deflected the ionized gas away from him; still he sweated inside his suit. The shell started to shake so violently that Gaeta’s vision blurred. The rocket pack hanging over him seemed to be on fire. He squeezed his eyes shut and tightened his grip on the cleats built into the bathtub, holding on as hard as he could.
“They can’t be nanomachines,” Cardenas said, staring at the photomicrographs Negroponte had put onto her benchtop screen.
“But their nuclei are crystalline,” the biologist said, pointing with a long, manicured finger. “They don’t look biological at all.”
“Not terrestrial biology, that’s for certain.”
Negroponte looked distressed. “Dr. Cardenas, I—”
“Kris,” Cardenas said automatically.
“Kris, then.” Negroponte bit her lips, then went on, “Nadia’s back on Earth being congratulated for having found a new form of organisms in Saturn’s rings. But maybe they’re not organisms! Maybe they’re machines, nanomachines.”
Cardenas shook her head stubbornly. “They can’t be nanomachines.”
“Why not?”
“Because nanomachines don’t exist in nature. Somebody has to build them.” Before Negroponte could reply, Cardenas added, “And we sure didn’t. Besides, they’re not like any nanos that I’ve ever seen.”
“But what if they were built by someone? Someone other than us?”
“Intelligent aliens? Machine-building aliens?” Cardenas tried to scoff at the idea, but could only manage a weak snicker.
“It’s not impossible,” Negroponte said. “Those giant whale things in Jupiter’s ocean might be intelligent. And there’s that artifact in the Belt …”
“That’s nothing more than a rumor.”
“Is it?”
“Isn’t it?”
Negroponte got up from her laboratory stool stiffly, as if she’d been sitting there too long. Gesturing at the display screen, she said firmly, “They are not biological organisms. I’m convinced of that.”
“Despite the paper you and Wunderly wrote.”
Nodding. “Despite our paper.”
Cardenas looked from the biologist’s distraught face to the display screen showing the crystalline lattice of the ring creature’s nucleus and back to Negroponte again.
“Look, you’re dealing with extraterrestrial biology here. It doesn’t have to look like our own.”
“The Martian organisms have a recognizable analog of DNA in their nuclei. So do the airborne biota of Jupiter.”
“They can’t be machines,” Cardenas insisted. “Who built them? There’s no intelligent creatures in the solar system capable of that level of technology except us, and we certainly didn’t put those things in Saturn’s rings.”
Negroponte replied immediately, “Perhaps whoever built them has gone.”
“You mean they’re extinct?”
The biologist shrugged her shoulders. “Or perhaps they were visitors from another star system and they seeded our worlds.”
“With nanomachines?”
“And life.”
Cardenas sank back onto her lab stool. “Sheer speculation, Yolanda.” Yet she felt a tendril of fear shimmering along her spine.
“TNOs?” Tavalera looked both surprised and annoyed as he sat across the cafeteria table from Holly.
She nodded enthusiastically. “Stavenger put the idea into my head. There’s zillions of’em! That’s where comets come from.”
The cafeteria was half empty at midafternoon, but still there was enough clattering of dishware and chattering of conversations to force Tavalera to raise his voice.
“But Neptune’s orbit is more’n twenty astronomical units from here,” he objected. “That’s twice as far as we are from the Sun, for chrissakes.”
“I know,” Holly said as she chomped heartily on a pseudo-burger. She gulped down her food and went on, “I thought it was too far, too. But then I looked into the astrogation program.”
Tavalera’s face fell. “Don’t tell me, I already know: It’s not distance per se but delta vee that counts. I studied astrogation, you know.”
“So you understand,” Holly said. “From where we are we could send ships out to the Kuiper Belt and pick up really big chunks of ice and nudge them into orbits that’ll bring them here. Or to the Earth/Moon system, or the Asteroid Belt, wherever! They’ll be going downhill, gravitationally, once we push ’em a little.”
Despite himself, Tavalera grinned at her excitement. “You could get your sister to run the operation.”
“Right! Panch would love it!”
He took a forkful of his own burger and munched on it thoughtfully for a few moments while Holly said, “I knew you’d understand, Raoul. We could get water without mining the rings. We could get rich without running into a ban from the IAA.”