Then the Lady’s data turns harshly practical, adding more layers over what the caps have already infused. As a battlefield, Titan is unbelievably difficult. Most of the water in the surface layers is mineral ice—like rock or sandy grit. Lava on Titan is water mixed with ammonia, rising from Titan’s seven inner oceans through deep vents—cryo-volcanoes. All but two of the oceans are salty in the extreme, and not just table salt. There’s ionic sulfur and potassium—a devil’s brew that at times generates amazing electrical currents, which some of our machines—especially the excavators—are designed to use to advantage.
Basically, Titan is a giant wet cell battery. No one in his right mind would choose it for fighting ground. Our basic protections need to be stronger than anything made for Earth or Mars. To that end, there’s one new plus: Water, along with hydrocarbons scooped up from the surface, can be woven into a superstrong fiber. Don’t ask how. The structural diagrams make my head hurt. Did you know that concrete contains water even after it sets? I didn’t.
Then—basics again, like a break between bad news.
Titan’s brown color comes from complex hydrocarbons called tholins. There are lots of different gases down there, many of them poisonous, some flammable (if you have a lighter filled with oxygen!), but mostly there’s nitrogen. Because there’s lots of lightning and other electrical discharge between the methane clouds, billions of tons of tars and waxes and precursors to more complex chemistry are made and scattered over the surface or swept into the basins of the methane seas. These organic compounds will provide many of the raw materials used by our weapon and vehicle seeds to double and even triple their present mass.
Follows more harsh. We’ve been fighting down there for six years. Lady of Yue fills us in on what those battles were like, how they were fought and with what. First impression: big and scary. Second impression: worse.
Joe’s eyes close and he curls up. I feel the same way.
But there are some things Lady of Yue and cap learning can’t teach us. Having been hit by quite a few comets in the last year or so, as the pilots told us, Titan’s topology has been massively altered. It’s possible even the number of inner seas has changed, not to mention the outer methane lakes. Titan now rocks to a different music.
It’s clear Borden and Kumar and maybe even Joe are of the opinion that the Gurus know what’s really down there. Question remains, why is it so dangerous that they’d jeopardize the entire war?
Final bit of info: We’ll be descending in twenty-eight hours, a ship’s day—if the landers can be pried from the twisted frames, if the seeds can be salvaged, if there’s still any good reason for us to drop. The grunt’s delight is that matters of life and death are rarely his responsibility until he’s deep in the shit.
LAST CALL
Two of the five gliders respond positively and check out to Bueller’s satisfaction. With our reduced force, all we need is one to put us down on the Wax and complete the mission. We’ll get just one chance. Lady of Yue will station-keep for as long as she can.
Bueller escorts us down a tight, cold aft corridor to inspect the best glider. It’s a genuine aircraft, not the pop-up-and-down landers used on Mars. The fuselage is almost eighty meters long, bulbous and heavy at the nose, oval in profile at the middle, where the wide delta wings are currently upswung, casual and awkward. About five meters behind the blunt nose circle twelve intakes, each two meters wide. Farther back, behind the wings, the glider’s middle tapers to a more slender V, followed by three jet exhaust nacelles spreading wide the profile. The whole thing finishes with a screw-twisty triangle of ailerons.
As we watch, the glider’s fuselage opens long hatches to allow stowage of seventeen parcels, varying in size between five and twenty meters. These are so-called seeds from Lady of Yue’s aft bay. They look like presents for a grim Christmas, long and lumpy, concealed by black plastic wrap cinched down by red strapping. Stowage in the glider is accomplished by slender and flexible mechanical arms, watched over by a skinny, naked crewman enclosed in another bubble on the end of a boom—the only crew member we’ve seen so far. His outline is exceptionally fuzzy, for which I am grateful. He pays us no attention whatsoever.
“These are your rudimentary seed packages,” Bueller says. “Some will combine in place to form more complicated structures, like excavators or centipedes. Others will take more time and grow out to full size by themselves, mostly the vehicles supporting big weapons—zapguns, ionics, penetrators. Once placed in their cradles beside the station, all the seeds will dip from the station storage tanks, and they’ll also start pulling in gases and liquids from the local atmosphere, plus solid raw materials arranged for them just outside the installation’s perimeter. I’m being told that the station itself may be recycled if those supplies are not sufficient, so you’ll want to get in and get prepped quickly.
“Seeds are hungry,” she says. “Don’t fuck with them. Don’t get between them and raw material reserves. Don’t mess with anything growing. Half-finished product has been known to absorb whatever it touches. Stay the hell away from developing product.”
We all nod. Respect your weapons. Nothing new. Then why am I trying to swallow my Adam’s apple?
The ship’s now-rigid skirts form a pale backdrop around Lady of Yue’s damaged midsection. I try again to assess the ship’s overall condition. Doesn’t look great. Optimism always leads to disappointment. Pessimism is wiser anytime we’re about to land in the shit. And that is surely where we’re heading. Maybe this was a suicide mission from the start.
Bueller has let us absorb long enough. “Time to load,” she says.
DOWN TO A DISTANT SEA
Our cleaned and repaired skintights are handed back and we clamber gingerly down the dim passage into the glider’s main cabin, equipped to carry fifty. We’re only thirty.
Bueller hands out another stack of caps and taps her head. “Ready?” she asks. “Part two. We save the best for last.” We shuck the doilies and inspect them. Damp and fibrous, as before. Again we paste them over our crowns. Ishida’s cap folds in half away from the metal side, and settles down on softly fuzzy hair and flesh. She looks at me, looking at her. “I’ll be fine,” she says. “What about you? How many haunted heads can you handle?”
Jacobi grimaces.
We push ourselves back in the glider’s narrow couches. Bueller checks us over, nodding at each fitting. DJ’s cap squirms on his crown and he reaches for it. Bueller slaps his hand.
“Bon voyage,” Bueller says as she returns to the hatch. “Wish I was dropping with you. I surely do. Suck smog and come back soon.” She withdraws. The hatches seal. Behind us, muffled groans, clangs, sounds of machinery and fluids.
Cap works faster than last time. There’s an odd taste in my mouth, my entire body. “Hey!” I say out loud. I now see and understand, very clearly, that the liquid oxygen necessary to burn a portion of Titan’s atmosphere is being pumped into the aircraft at the last, after the seeds are stowed. Our so-called glider is more of an ice-sucking jet designed to enter atmo, inhale combustibles, light them off, then power along for a few hundred klicks and coast to a tightly controlled landing.