Titan

18 February 2096: Morning

Tavalera walked toward the simulations laboratory like a little boy reluctantly trudging his way to school. This is all crazy, he said to himself, as he passed the administration building. People were hustling in and out, the place looked like a beehive of activity. That puzzled Tavalera; normally the admin center was as laid-back and quiet as a collection of snails. Then he realized that Eberly had kicked off his reelection campaign last night and now he wanted everybody to think he and his people were hard at work. Yeah, sure, Tavalera said to himself. Until he gets himself reelected.

He had watched Eberly’s speech on TV, just like everybody else. Holly hadn’t called him about it. She hadn’t called him about anything, not since he’d walked out on her. And the one time he’d called her he’d let his temper get the better of him and messed it up. That was a stupid thing to do, Tavalera told himself bitterly. The one good thing in your life and you screw it up.

Yeah, he argued silently, but all she wanted out of me was to use me for Wunderly’s flight to the rings. She never cared about me. Not really. Not for myself.

Then what about the times you spent together before Wunderly decided she’s going to the rings? he asked himself. What about the nights in bed with her, way before all this crap about going to the rings started?

Shaking his head, Tavalera made his way up the four steps of the sim lab’s building and headed down the central corridor toward the laboratory itself.

Holly’d never go back to Earth with me, he told himself. Hell, now she’s running for chief administrator; if she wins she’ll never leave this habitat. If I wanted to go back home she wouldn’t go with me. He grunted as if struck in the heart. The way things are now, she wouldn’t even cross a street to be with me. I’ve screwed things up pretty damned well.

He felt a jolt of electricity streak through him, though, when he opened the door to the simulations laboratory. Holly was standing there by the row of consoles, with Wunderly and her sister, Pancho. The three women seemed to be deep in heated conversation.

“It’s my problem, Pancho,” Wunderly was saying. “I can’t let you take the risks for me.”

“Try and stop me,” Pancho replied, grinning. “I’m lookin’ forward to this. Haven’t had any real fun since I was runnin’ from a bunch of Jap security people at the Yamagata base on the Moon.”

Wunderly turned to Holly. “Tell her she can’t do this, Holly. Make her understand—”

“Nadia,” Holly interrupted, “it was my idea for Panch to fly the mission.”

Holly looked … Tavalera couldn’t fathom the expression on Holly’s face. Was it fear or guilt or just plain stubbornness? He decided it must be some of all three.

A big, hard hand grabbed his shoulder. Tavalera spun around and saw Jake Wanamaker towering over him, the expression on his face perfectly clear: grim determination.

“Stay out of that argument, Raoul,” Wanamaker said in a husky whisper. “It’d be like stepping into a trio of laser beams if you try to get between ’em. They’ll slice you to ribbons.”

“What’s goin’ on?”

“Pancho’s going to make the run into the rings,” said Wanamaker, looking totally unhappy about it. “Wunderly’s relieved but she doesn’t want to admit it yet.”

“And Holly?”

“It was Holly’s bright idea.”

Glancing at the three women intently arguing across the room, Tavalera asked Wanamaker, “Should I power up the equipment or not?”

A hint of a smile snuck across Wanamaker’s craggy face. “Power it up, I guess. They can’t stand there bickering all day. But don’t get within ten meters of them if you can avoid it.”

Tavalera almost tiptoed to the master console and began to activate the simulator’s various systems. The excursion suit, standing empty in the corner where two hologram screens met, seemed to twitch slightly as Tavalera powered it up. He could see a glow of light inside the suit through the open hatch in its back. The wall screens came up with a seamless three-dimensional view of Saturn’s rings: a bright gleaming expanse of glittering ice particles—flakes, pebbles, chunks as big as boulders—shining as brightly as a snow field that went on as far as the eye could see, slim twisting rings twining around one another like living vines made of ice. To Tavalera it looked like an infinite swirl of sparkling diamonds, except for the streaks of darker material here and there, dust or soot, that broke the stunning display. Somehow the dark streaks made the ice particles seem brighter, even more dazzling to the eye.

And the particles were dynamic. They shifted and moved, weaved in and out around one another, twirled and fluttered in an endless dance of dazzling complexity. Tavalera knew he was watching a real-time view of the rings, what the cameras outside the habitat were observing at this very moment. In the distance he saw a darker area, like a spoke radiating from the inner rim of the rings toward its outermost edge.

Wanamaker nudged him, then silently pointed at Wunderly. The scientist had stopped arguing with Holly and her sister and was staring at the holoview, raptly watching the rings in their intricate, fascinatingly beautiful ballet as they swirled around the mammoth planet Saturn.

“It’s settled,” Holly said, suddenly as hard as steel. “Pancho’s doing the excursion. Jake will fly her to the rings and pick her up afterward.”

Wunderly shook her head, but she was still staring at the holoview and there wasn’t much force in her refusal.

“It’s settled,” Holly repeated.

“Right,” said Pancho. “Now lemme get inside that suit and see what it feels like.”

At that moment the overhead lights went out and all the consoles went dark. Tavalera heard the sickening whine of electrical motors powering down. The sim lab was plunged into darkness.

Urbain was straining his eyes staring at the satellite cameras’ three-dimensional image of Titan’s surface. There is something there, he told himself. The ground is slightly smoother along a straight line across the ice, as if the tracks made by Alpha have been smoothed down, paved over. Ghost tracks, he thought. Or perhaps I am merely seeing what I want to see, things that don’t actually exist. He thought of Percival Lowell, spending his life squinting through telescopes at Mars, drawing maps of Martian canals that were in truth nothing more than eyestrain and wish fulfillment.

The control center was fully manned. Da’ud Habib was sitting at the console where views from several satellites were overlapped to produce the three-dimensional images.

“Dr. Habib,” Urbain called. “Come here for a moment, please. I want you to see if—”

Suddenly all the wall screens went out: every console screen turned blank, and the control center was plunged into darkness so complete that Urbain could not see the console in front of him. Before he could do anything more than drop his mouth open in shock, the backup emergency lights turned on. But the wall screens and consoles remained dark.

“What’s happened?” Urbain shouted. He heard other voices muttering, grousing.

The overhead lights flickered and then steadied. Urbain heaved a sigh of relief. The consoles came back up.

“A power outage,” someone said.

“Have we overloaded the system?” a woman asked.

“Did we lose any data?” Urbain called out.

Habib pecked at his console keyboard. “I don’t think so …”

“How could there be a power failure?” Urbain demanded. “Half the villages in the habitat are unpopulated. We have more electrical power than we need.”

“Something went wrong,” Habib said.

“That’s pretty damned obvious,” a woman’s voice replied sarcastically.

Urbain shut out their bantering and returned his attention to his console screen. Ghost tracks? he asked himself. Could it be? And if it is so, can we use them to find Alpha?