Oscar propels itself with big cilia, arm-sized rubber strips rippling in sequence, scooping and shoving fluid behind, speeding up or slowing down to steer right or left. Buoyancy tanks in our tail and below the cabin fill with liquid. If Joe and Jacobi want to rise, the tanks boil some of the liquid into steam. Sluices eject the resulting thick salts and gaseous ammonia. When they cool, they suck in liquid again and we sink…. Makes a little singing sound behind us, like a chorus of crickets and birds, along with the deep chuffing of the cilia and the faint squeaking of the joints.
Ishida resumes. “I wonder what the spirits of this place are thinking,” she says. “Yokai do not enjoy intruders.”
“They don’t like humans much at all, do they?” Jacobi asks. “Ladies with long black hair and no eyes, right?”
“Not a yokai,” Ishida says softly.
“Well, let’s hope they don’t mind us taking a dip right…here,” Joe says. “Hold your noses.”
I suck in my breath as our forward view suddenly goes dark. Tiny sprinkles of the dimmest gray light blur and blink around us. We feel more impacting chunks of wreckage. There’s a body. Did I see it or just imagine it? A frozen face in the darkness. Now it’s gone. Nobody else saw it, or nobody will admit it. How long can a corpse float in this corrosive stuff?
“Releasing minnows,” Jacobi says.
“Tracking,” Joe says.
Little silvery lights brighten and flow ahead, five-centimeter drones that swim and corkscrew through the slush. They vanish quickly into the dark, but draw traces on the dive screen and in our plates. The minnows return what they are sensing tens and then hundreds of meters ahead. They’re our scouts and pickets.
Polymerized, membranous currents of almost pure water are flowing down here, held together by the powerful electrical fields. In our helms, they show as sinuous auroras rippling and waving deep into the fissure. We just passed through one—electric, icehouse cold.
“Strong current flow,” Tak says.
“Don’t rub your toes on the carpet,” Joe warns. “Whole ocean down here is like a giant battery. Lightning on the surface sparks up to the clouds. Cooks the hydrocarbons along the way.”
We’re all tied together, exercising cap-infused skills necessary to take charge of this beast, guide it, expand its sensory range—
Hours pass. I don’t mind. Everything is fine. I can’t feel any more poison capsules. Maybe I’m done with them—or maybe they’ve already done their work on me.
We finish our long dive between the rough, massive walls, then level off at twenty-three klicks and keep station under an immense icy dome. Minnows tell us there’s nothing below but slushy ice, more current membranes—and then the deep, deep Titanian sea. No sensation of pressure. Nothing in the ears. The Oscar is intact and our suits are doing their work. We’re pretty broad targets in the IR, I think. Cap training does not contradict that opinion.
Some machine, that’s our Oscar, our centipede, and some crew, sinking into almost unknown waters to see what we can see. I laugh in my helmet.
Keep it together, Venn!
I can barely hear or feel the captain. It’s like she’s slowly turning glass all over again.
OLD AND COLD
All of our sensors are tuned on the world beneath the crust. The deep saline sea that winds its way around Titan, around the equator and extending fingers north and south, with isolated lakes both saline and fresh, as if springs from far below access pure ice down in the mantle. The clarity of the sea around us is remarkable. The current flows seem to attract all the debris from the water and channel it deeper, to spread out across the seabed. Titan’s seas are constantly being purged. Based on what I learned in the textbooks at Madigan, that doesn’t make any sense. Such a process would have to be guided and controlled—implying at least a living ecosystem, if not a civilization.
But Jacobi’s feed to our helms is undeniable. We’re swimming through crystal-clear waters, way below freezing, with occasional cloudy globs of ammoniated, debris-laden slush being drawn toward the current flows—disintegrating and descending in long charged plumes as they glide past like UV rainbows.
We pass under a low-hanging arch of crustal material. The Oscar switches on its brights and scans the surface of the arch. Another icy dome, shot through with veins of black gunk. Where it’s most purely ice, it sparkles with a million reflections, a galaxy of glints. Farther along, we encounter a breccia of ice and clumped boulders held in place by a thick mortar of brown, gray, and black tar. Our lights warm the mix and rocks fall away.
“This could get hairy,” Joe says.
The falls reveal fresh underlying material—and frighten big worms or insects—fifty or sixty meters long! They escape from the sudden brilliance, burrowing deeper into the matrix.
“Jesus!” Jacobi says. “Sure those aren’t Antag weapons?”
“Pretty sure,” Joe says. “Alive?” he asks me.
“Yeah,” I say.
“Your bugs?”
“Much younger.”
“They’re not talking to you?”
“No.”
“Maybe our cousins?” He gives me a sour grin.
A few of the worms are large enough to kick out more boulders. We dodge two such rockfalls, then get a glimpse of huge mandibles on a wide, plated head—mandibles that pinch in from five sides, a pentagon of grasping, cutting jaws. These creatures are at least ten meters long, their serpentine bodies covered with bristles.
Borden communicates from the lead vehicle. “Serious question, Johnson, Venn—are these things intelligent? The ancestors of your bugs?” she asks.
“I’ve never seen anything like them,” DJ says. “But that isn’t exactly an answer.”
As we glide along a cleft exposed in the archway, we see more of the bristling worms. They dance in our lights as if in some sort of ecstatic ritual, then gather along their lengths and link clasping bristles to form triads. Each bristle tip has a minuscule claw—small by comparison to the bulk, but maybe as big as a human hand. The bristles cling together like Velcro, then let go, and the triads break free to burrow up into the breccia. As quickly as they appeared, all the bristling worms are gone.
“Easy come, easy go,” Jacobi says.
“Like in sand or aquariums,” Ishida says. “Acorn worms. Priapulids.”
“I’ll bet you’ve eaten them with rice,” Joe says. “Maybe they’re out for revenge.”
“No, sir!” Ishida sounds alarmed.
The crystal waters and the ice above again look empty and pristine. A wavy purple flow comes close to our Oscar on the left wing of the formation, so we move off—the entire squadron banking and retreating like birds in a flock. The cilia hum along our hull—hum with intermittent slapping sounds. Maybe they’re not in complete sync. Maybe they’re getting old. How long does a machine last down here? Longer than our Mars skintights, I hope.
The bottom of the ocean rises beneath us, low gray hills studded with boulders as big as Half Dome.
“Everybody stoked?” Joe asks. “All cheery-bye?”
“Tol’ably so,” Tak says.