The Crab swung about and Titan itself was revealed, a globe choked by murky brown cloud from pole to pole, even more dismal and uninviting than its primary. Evidently Michael Poole had placed his wormhole Interface close to the moon in anticipation that Titan would someday serve his purposes.
Titan was looming larger, swelling visibly. Our destination was obvious.
Harry Poole took charge. He had us put on heavy, thick-layered exosuits of a kind I’d never seen before. We sat on our couches like fat pupae; my suit was so thick my legs wouldn’t bend properly.
‘Here’s the deal,’ Harry said, evidently for my benefit. ‘The Crab came out of the wormhole barrelling straight for Titan. That way we hope to get you down there before any of the automated surveillance systems up here can spot us, or do anything about it. In a while the Crab will brake into orbit around Titan. But before then you four in the gondola will be thrown straight into an atmospheric entry.’ He snapped his fingers, and a hatch opened up in the floor beneath us to reveal the interior of another craft, mated to the base of the lifedome. This was evidently the ‘gondola’, some kind of landing shuttle. It was like a cave, brightly lit and with its walls crusted with data displays.
I said, ‘“Thrown straight in,” Harry? And what about you?’
He smiled with that young-old face. ‘I will be waiting for you in orbit. Somebody has to stay behind to bail you out, in case.’
‘This “gondola” looks small for the four of us.’
Harry said, ‘Well, weight has been a consideration. You’ll mass no more than a tonne, all up.’ He handed me a data slate. ‘Now this is where you come in, Jovik. I want you to send a covering message to the sentience-law compliance control base on Enceladus.’
I stared at the slate. ‘Saying what, exactly?’
Harry said, ‘The entry profile is designed to mimic an unmanned mission. You’re going in hard, high deceleration. I want you to make yourselves look that way in the telemetry – as if this is just another unmanned probe going in for a bit of science, or a curacy inspection, or whatever it is you bureaucrat types do. Attach the appropriate permissions. I’m quite sure you’re capable of that.’
I was sure of it too. I opened the slate with a wave of my hand, quickly mocked up a suitable profile, let Harry’s systems check I hadn’t smuggled in any cries for help, and squirted it over to Enceladus. Then I handed the slate back. ‘There. Done. You’re masked from the curacy. I’ve done what you want.’ I waved at the looming face of Titan. ‘So you can spare me from that, can’t you?’
‘We discussed that,’ said Michael Poole, with just a hint of regret in his voice. ‘We decided to take you along as a fall-back, Jovik, in case of problems, any kind of challenge from Enceladus. Even if they’ve discovered the craft is manned, having you aboard will give us some cover.’
I snorted. ‘They’ll see through that.’
Miriam shrugged. ‘It’s worth it if it buys us a bit more time.’
Bill Dzik stared at me, hard. ‘Just don’t get any ideas, desk jockey. I’ll have my eye on you all the way down and all the way back.’
‘And listen,’ Harry said, leaning forward. ‘If this works out, Jovik, you’ll be rewarded. We’ll see to that. We’ll be able to afford it, after all.’ He grinned that youthful grin. ‘And just think. You will be one of the first humans to walk on Titan! So you see, you’ve every incentive to cooperate, haven’t you?’ He checked a clock on his data slate. ‘We’re close to the release checkpoint. Down you go, team.’
They all sneered at that word, ‘team’, and at the cheerful tone of the man who was staying behind. But we filed dutifully enough through the hatch and down into that cave of instrumentation, Miriam first, then me, and Bill Dzik at my back. Michael Poole was last in; I saw him embrace his father, stiffly, evidently not a gesture they were used to.
In the gondola, our four couches sat in a row, so close that my knees touched Miriam’s and Dzik’s when we were all crammed in there in our suits. The hull was all around us, close enough for me to have reached out and touched it in every direction, a tight-fitting shell. Poole pulled the hatch closed, and I heard a hum and whir as the independent systems of this craft came online. There was a rattle of latches, and then a kind of sideways shove that made my stomach churn. We were already cut loose from the Crab, and were falling free, and rotating.
Poole touched a panel above his head, and the hull turned transparent. Now it was as if we four in our couches were suspended in space, surrounded by glowing instrument panels, and blocky masses that must be the power supply, life support, supplies. Above me the Crab slid across the face of Saturn, GUTdrive flaring, and below me the orange face of Titan loomed large.
I whimpered. I have never pretended to be brave.
Miriam Berg handed me a transparent bubble-helmet. ‘Lethe, put this on before you puke.’
I pulled the helmet over my head; it snuggled into the suit neck and made its own lock.
Bill Dzik was evidently enjoying my discomfort. ‘You feel safer in the suit, right? Well, the entry is the most dangerous time. But you’d better hope we get through the atmosphere’s outer layers before the hull breaches, Emry. These outfits aren’t designed to work as pressure suits.’
‘Then what use are they?’
‘Heat control,’ Michael Poole said, a bit more sympathetic. ‘Titan’s air pressure is fifty per cent higher than Earth’s, at the surface. But that thick cold air just sucks away your heat. Listen up, Emry. The gondola’s small, but it has a pretty robust power supply – a GUTengine, in fact. You’re going to need that power to keep warm. For short periods your suit will protect you; there are power cells built into the fabric. But you won’t last more than a few hours away from the gondola. Got that?’
I was hardly reassured. ‘What about the entry itself? Your father said we’ll follow an unmanned profile. That sounds . . . vigorous.’
Bill Dzik barked a laugh. Nobody else replied.
Poole and the others began to work through pre-entry system checks. Harry murmured in my ear, telling me that fresh identity backups had just been taken of each of us and stored in the gondola’s systems. I was not reassured.
I lay helpless, trussed up and strapped in, as we plummeted into the sunlit face of Titan.
5
Fifteen minutes after cutting loose from the Crab, the gondola encountered the first wisps of Titan’s upper atmosphere, thin and cold, faintly blue all around us. Still a thousand kilometres above the ground, I could feel the first faltering in the gondola’s headlong speed. Titan’s air is massive and deep, and I was falling backside first straight into it.
The first three minutes of the entry were the worst, as we plunged into the air with an interplanetary velocity, and our speed was reduced violently. Three hundred kilometres above the surface the deceleration peaked at sixteen gravities. Cushioned by Poole’s inertial field I felt no more than the faintest shaking, but the gondola shuddered and banged. Meanwhile a shock wave preceded us, a cap of gas that glowed brilliantly: Titan air battered to plasma by the dissipating kinetic energy of the gondola.
This fiery entry phase was mercifully brief. But when it was over, still we fell helplessly. After another three minutes we were within a hundred and fifty kilometres of the surface, and immersed in an orange haze, the organic-chemistry products of the destruction of Titan’s methane by sunlight. Poole tapped a panel, and a mortar fired above us, hauling out a pilot parachute a couple of metres across. This stabilised us in the thickening air, our backs to the surface, our faces to the sky. Then the main parachute unfolded, spreading reassuringly.