Yeah, she loves me, Tavalera thought. Like a pet dog. He walked away, morose and already lonely.
Gaeta could hear wind whistling past, even inside the thickly insulated helmet of his excursion suit.
“Breakup in five seconds,” Fritz’s voice warned. “Four …”
Even though he expected it, the sound of the explosive cords going off made Gaeta’s insides jump. The shell split apart beneath him, jerking him sideways as he hung on to the x-frame in which his booted feet and gloved hands were clamped. He got a glimpse of the shattered pieces of the aeroshell tumbling away from him, burning as they were designed to do, becoming bright fireballs streaking through the cloud-covered air.
“Can’t see the ground,” he said as he spun slowly, his stomach going queasy.
“Stabilize your spin,” Fritz replied, icy calm.
Gaeta let go of the frame with his right hand and slithered his arm back inside the suit, groping for the control studs built in its interior. He felt, rather than saw, tiny maneuvering thrusters squirt several small bursts. The spinning slowed, then stopped. All he felt now was a falling sensation.
“Looks pretty dark down there,” he reported. Gaeta could see a rough, broken expanse of ground kilometers below. It looked hard, uninviting.
“Escape pod separation in one minute,” Fritz said.
“One minute, copy.”
It sounded awfully dramatic to call it an escape pod, Gaeta thought, but Fritz insisted on using the term and Berkowitz loved it. The more dramatic the better, Gaeta said to himself as he dropped in free fall, arms and legs outstretched, toward the dim and murky surface of Titan. As if what I’m doing isn’t dramatic enough, he thought: they’ve got to use colorful language for the audience. Well, I hope they’re enjoying the show. Too bad VR can’t duplicate this falling sensation for them. He almost laughed aloud. Couple of million VR customers upchucking in their living rooms, inside their virtual reality helmets. That would be really funny.
“Five seconds to separation,” Fritz called.
Gaeta mentally counted with him. Fritz was adjusting for the communications lag between them, he knew. Exactly as Fritz said, “Zero,” the explosive bolts holding the return pod to his x-frame went off with a flash of light and a pitifully small pop. A huge parasail canopy unfurled above the pod and seemed to fly away from Gaeta. He knew that one of the engineers working under Fritz had the responsibility for remotely guiding the pod to a landing as close to Urbain’s stranded rover as humanly possible.
Me, Gaeta told himself, all I’ve got to do is land right on top of the monster.
28 May 2096: Titan landing
As she entered the bio lab, Cardenas saw a knot of white-smocked biologists clustered around Negroponte’s workbench. Pulling her palmcomp from her jacket pocket as she hurried toward them, she checked Manny’s mission timeline: he was due to land on Titan’s surface in less than five minutes.
This had better be good for her to call me here, Cardenas told herself, as she reached the men and women crowded around Negroponte’s bench.
“Excuse me,” she said, elbowing past the first few.
“Dr. Cardenas,” said one of the men. She recognized him as Da’ud Habib. At the sound of her name the others parted to make way for her.
“Kris!” Negroponte called out.
“What is it?” Cardenas asked. “What’s going on?”
Negroponte looked disheveled, excited, not at all like the tall, cool, reserved woman Cardenas had become accustomed to.
“Look at this,” she said, tapping on her keyboard. “It’s from the MRF microscope.” The display screen on her bench blurred, then steadied. “This is speeded up from real time by a factor of twenty thousand.”
Staring at the screen, Cardenas saw one of the ring creatures vibrating slowly inside its particle of ice. Then, as her eyes grew wider and wider, the creature extruded a mandible and began to pull together flecks of dust from its surroundings.
“It’s assembling …” Cardenas heard her own voice, hollow, breathless.
None of the others moved. No one seemed even to breathe. They’ve all seen this before, Cardenas realized. Yolanda’s shown it to them before I got here. But still they watched in silent, frozen awe.
The thing in the ice moved purposively, pulling dark flecks of dust to itself, taking smaller bits from the dust and then adding them to the object it was constructing.
“Molecular engineering,” a man whispered. Habib, Cardenas realized dimly, as she watched the microscope display.
“It’s constructing a daughter object,” Cardenas breathed.
“Constructing it from molecules within the dust grains inside the ice particle,” Negroponte said.
“It is a nanomachine.”
The group of biologists crowding around the workbench seemed to stir, like a bed of sea anemones swayed by an ocean current. They all seemed to exhale, sighing almost, at the same moment.
“Nanomachines,” Negroponte said.
“How … ?”
“Who put them there?”
Habib said, “We’ve got to inform the ICU about this.”
“And Nadia,” said Negroponte. “She’s got to know right away.”
In a corner of her mind Cardenas marveled at how subdued they were, how quiet and stricken with wonderment. None of the usual brash excitement. No shouting claims that this was the greatest discovery since … Cardenas hesitated. The greatest discovery ever made, she thought. We’ve discovered extraterrestrial intelligence, she realized. Some intelligent species seeded the rings of Saturn with nanomachines.
Why? When?
The insistent jangle of a phone broke the eerie silence. Turning, almost angry at the interruption, Cardenas saw Habib pull his handheld from his tunic pocket.
“Yes, sir,” he said in a subdued voice, glancing at all the eyes focused on him. “Yes, of course. Right away, sir.”
He folded the handheld shut and stuffed it back in his pocket. “Urbain,” he said, apologetically. “Gaeta’s about to land on Alpha and Dr. Urbain wants me at the control center right away.”
“I can see the machine!” Gaeta sang out.
His parasail had deployed on schedule, a huge plastic wing that arched above him like a beautiful rainbow. He glided slowly through Titan’s thick, gloomy atmosphere, swaying slightly beneath the graceful arc of the broad parasail.
“We’re getting your visual,” Fritz said, then in a rare burst of approval he added, “Good work.”
Urbain’s voice cut in. “Can you land atop Alpha? We mustn’t contaminate the organisms living in the ground.”
Gaeta held back an angry retort. This is his baby, he told himself. There’s no way Fritz could’ve kept him out of the loop.
“I’ll try,” he said.
From the mission briefings, Gaeta knew the machine was as big as an old semitrailer rig. I oughtta be able to land on its roof, no sweat, he thought. But he made no promises to Urbain, not even the suggestion of one. Easy enough to promise when we were in the conference room; this is reality now.
A flash of light caught his eye, off to the left of the stranded Alpha by maybe a hundred meters. The return pod, he thought.
“Escape pod has landed,” Fritz confirmed, “seventy-two meters from Alpha’s location.”
So I’ll have to walk across Urbain’s precious ground seventy-two meters after I’ve fixed his machine, Gaeta thought. Hope el jefe doesn’t give himself a hernia over that. Or maybe he’d like it better if I just stay on the machine’s roof and die after I’ve fixed it for him.