Not Poole, though. He was watching those receding spiders. ‘They’re heading down into the volcano. Which is a vent that leads down into the mantle, the ammonia sea, right? Why? What the hell are those things?’
Miriam said, ‘One way to find out.’ She hefted one of those ceramic eggs in her right hand, pressed a stud that made it glow red, and hurled it towards the nearest spider. It followed a low-gravity arc, slowing quickly in the thick air, and it seemed to take an age to fall. But her aim was good, and it landed not a metre from the spider.
And exploded. Evidently it had been a grenade. The spider shattered satisfactorily, those ugly claws going wheeling through the air.
Miriam had already started to run towards the spider. ‘Come on.’ You couldn’t fault her directness.
Poole followed, and I too, unwilling to be left alone with Bill’s frozen remains. Poole called, ‘What did you do that for?’
‘We want to know what we’re dealing with, don’t we?’
‘And why are we running?’
‘So we can get there before the other spiders get rid of the corpse.’
And sure enough the other spiders, still laden with bits of the gondola, had already turned, and were closing on their shattered fellow. They didn’t seem perturbed by the sudden destruction of one of their kind, or of our approaching presence.
We got there first, and we squatted around the downed spider in a splash of suit light. The spider hadn’t broken open; it was not enclosed by a hull or external carapace. Instead it had shattered into pieces, like a smashed sculpture. We pawed at the debris chunks, Miriam and Poole talking fast, analysing, speculating. The chunks appeared to be mostly water ice, though Poole speculated it was a particular high-pressure form. The internal structure was not simple; it reminded me of a honeycomb, sharp-edged chambers whose walls enclosed smaller clusters of chambers and voids, on down through the length scales like a fractal. Poole pointed out threads of silver and a coppery colour – the shades were uncertain in Titan’s light. They were clearly metallic.
The other spiders closed in on the corpse. Wary of getting chomped by accident we backed off, dimming our suit lights.
Miriam asked, ‘So, biological or artificial? What do you think?’
Poole shrugged. ‘They seem dedicated to a single purpose, and have metallic components. That suggests artificial. But that body interior looks organic. Grown.’
I felt like putting Poole in his place. ‘Maybe these creatures transcend your simple-minded categories. Perhaps they are the result of a million years of machine evolution. Or the result of a long symbiosis between animal and technology.’
Poole shook his head. ‘My money’s on biology. Given enough time, necessity and selection can achieve remarkable things.’
Miriam said, ‘But why would their systems incorporate metal if it’s so rare here?’
‘Maybe they’re not native to Titan,’ I said. ‘Maybe they didn’t evolve here.’ But they weren’t listening to me. And besides, they didn’t want to hear any kind of theory that implied sentience. ‘The real question is,’ I said more urgently, ‘what do we do now?’
The head of Harry Poole, projected somehow by our suit’s comms systems, once more popped into existence, the size of an orange, floating in the air. The small scale made his skin look even more unnaturally smooth. ‘And that,’ he said, ‘is the first intelligent question you’ve asked since we press-ganged you, Jovik. You ready to talk to me now?’
Michael Poole glared at his father, then turned and sucked water from the spigot inside his helmet. ‘Tell us how bad it is, Harry.’
‘I can’t retrieve you for seven days,’ Harry said.
I felt colder than Titan. ‘But the suits—’
‘Without recharge our suits will expire in three days,’ Poole said. ‘Four at the most.’
I could think of nothing to say.
Harry looked around at us, his disembodied head spinning eerily. ‘There are options.’
‘Go on,’ Poole said.
‘You could immerse yourselves in the crater lake. The suits could withstand that. It’s cold in there, the briny stuff is well below freezing, but it’s not as cold as the open air. Kept warm by the residual heat of impact, remember. Even so you would only stretch out your time by a day or two.’
‘Not enough,’ Miriam said. ‘And we wouldn’t get any work done, floating around in the dark in a lake.’
I laughed at her. ‘Work? Who cares about work now?’
Poole said, ‘What else, Harry?’
‘I considered options where two people might survive, rather than three. Or one. By sharing suits.’
The tension between us rose immediately.
Harry said, ‘Of course those spiders also left you Bill’s suit. The trouble is the power store is built into the fabric of each suit. To benefit you’d have to swap suits. I can’t think of any way you could do that without the shelter of the gondola; you’d freeze to death in a second.’
‘So it’s not an option,’ Poole said.
Miriam looked at us both steadily. ‘It never was.’
I wasn’t sure if I was relieved or not, for I had been determined, in those few moments when it seemed a possibility, that the last survivor in the last suit would be myself.
‘So,’ Poole said to Harry, ‘what else?’
‘You need the gondola’s GUTengine to recharge your suits,’ Harry said. ‘There’s just no alternative.’
I pointed at the toiling spiders on the cryovolcano. ‘Those beasts have already thrown it into that caldera.’
‘Then you’ll have to go after it,’ Harry said, and, comfortably tucked up in the Crab, he grinned at me. ‘Won’t you?’
‘How?’ I was genuinely bewildered. ‘Are we going to build a submarine?’
‘You won’t need one,’ Harry said. ‘You have your suits. Just jump in . . .’
‘Are you insane? You want us to jump into the caldera of a volcano, after a bunch of metal-chewing monster spiders?’
But Miriam and Poole, as was their way, had pounced on the new idea. Miriam said, ‘Jovik, you keep forgetting you’re not on Earth. That “volcano” is just spewing water, lava that’s colder than your own bloodstream.’ She glanced at Harry. ‘The water’s very ammonia-rich, however. I take it our suits can stand it?’
‘They’re designed for contact with the mantle material,’ Harry said. ‘We always knew that was likely. The pressure shouldn’t be a problem either.’
Poole said, ‘As for the spiders, they will surely leave us alone if we keep away from them. We know that. We might even use them in the descent. Follow the spiders, find the engine. Right?’
Harry said, ‘And there’s science to be done.’ He displayed data in gleaming Virtual displays – cold summaries only metres away from Bill Dzik’s corpse. Harry said that his preliminary analysis of our results showed that the primary source of the atmosphere’s crucial methane was not in the surface features, but a venting from the cryovolcanoes. ‘And therefore the ultimate source is somewhere in the ammonia sea,’ Harry said. ‘Biological, geological, whatever – it’s down there.’
‘OK,’ Poole said. ‘So we’re not going to complete the picture unless we go take a look.’
‘You won’t be out of touch. I’ll be able to track you, and talk to you all the way in. Our comms link have a neutrino-transmission basis; a few kilometres of ice or water isn’t going to make any difference to that.’
A few kilometres? I didn’t like the sound of that.
‘So that’s that,’ Miriam said. ‘We have a plan.’
‘We have a shared delusion,’ I said.
They ignored me. Poole said, ‘I suggest we take an hour out. We can afford that. We should try to rest; we’ve been through a lot. And we need to sort through these supplies, figure out what we can use.’