Racers of the Night: Science Fiction Stories by Brad R. Torgersen (27 page)

The Shadows of Titan

(with Carter Reid)

The sky was dim. Dimmer even than the Puget Sound’s on a rainy winter day. And there were no clouds. Just a persistent, dirty-yellow haze. As if the smog over Mexico City had thickened and dropped to ground level—only I was reasonably certain it had never drizzled liquid methane in Mexico’s Federal District.

The Celsius reading in my helmet’s field-of-view display said it was a crisp 179 degrees below zero. I could faintly hear the susurrations of my coldsuit’s circulation system as it piped reheated antifreeze throughout. The battery had been rated at twelve hours during coldsuit testing in Antarctica, where things only got to about 80 below. Judging by how rapidly the charge bar in my FOV was presently dropping, I guessed we each had about four hours before we had to get back to the
Gossamer’s
descent module; for a battery swap, and a break.

Which was fine by me. Titan kind of gave me the creeps.

“What do you make of it?” asked a voice in my ears.

Captain Bednar, playing it cool.

“No idea, ma’am,” I said honestly.

Clad in a coldsuit built for a woman’s physique, Bednar’s arm was pointing at the four-story-tall pyramid that thrust out of the heaped ice of Titan’s surface. We’d seen the artifact—on accident—as we’d come in to land. It didn’t show up on Doppler, nor infrared. And it had been too small to be seen from orbit. Only a chance look out a porthole had done the trick. We’d have missed it otherwise.

It had taken us ten minutes in a rover to get here from the designated landing coordinates. That the pyramid was not a natural landform had long since become obvious. Its sides were smooth and black like obsidian, and the drops of methane that precipitated out of the nitrogen atmosphere immediately ran down the pyramid’s sides—like it was coated in non-stick Teflon.

But who had put the pyramid here, and why, and for what purpose, were a complete mystery.

Captain Bednar’s arm slowly dropped to her side. I looked at her as she continued looking at the artifact. The expression on her face, as seen through her helmet’s clear face shield, was almost greedy with anticipation.

I felt a twinge.

Technically, she was a mutineer. According to the mission plan established years before leaving Earth, Bednar was supposed to have remained in Titan orbit with our two crew who were manning the
Gossamer’s
nuclear-rocket-powered return module. Instead she’d handily ripped that page out of the plan—upon our having entered Saturn space—and there’d been precious little any of us could say otherwise.

After all, what was Mission Control going to do? Fire her?

She was the captain. And this far from Earth, the captain’s word was law. Once her intentions had been declared we were more or less helpless to prevent her from going down. So we’d bundled into a craft originally built for three people—some of us gritting our teeth—and made our way down via parachute and, then, hot air balloon.

“Is somebody getting pictures?” asked another voice.

Specialist Majack—our other female on the descent team. She’d lingered back at the rover while the rest of us approached the pyramid in slow steps. I got the sense Majack found Titan as unsettling as I did. Visibility was only about a hundred meters or so, before things just kind of … faded out. The horizon was a murky blur in the distance, and the sun was a small, semi-bright disc that seemed too far away to give any comfort.

Specialist Kendelsen cursed, and remembered his media recorder dangling from a cord attached to his torso. All of the coldsuits had digital cameras integrated into their helmets, recording every second of our time on the surface. But Kendelsen had the high-res device that would get the good stuff our bosses back on Earth would want to see. No flash bulb necessary. The device had been designed to compensate for Titan’s perpetual low-light conditions.

Kendelsen held it at waist level and began a slow, steady reconnaissance around the pyramid proper.

Excited jabbering—from Pilot Jibbley and Engineer Gaines, above—told me that they were getting the recorder feed being beamed to the rover, then back to the descent module, then up to the return module.

“Historic,” Bednar said to no one in particular.

“That’s what you wanted, right?” I said.

Captain Bednar glared at me for a moment, then she went back to staring at the artifact.

“They’ll be talking about this discovery for decades,” she said. “Maybe even centuries. Nothing else like it in over one hundred years of probes and landings. And it was just … dumb luck that we happened to pass over it as we floated down. What are the odds, Chief?”

“Million to one,” I said. And meant it. I too was feeling more than a little impressed by the fact that if our landing zone had been even a few kilometers further in any direction, we’d have missed the pyramid completely.

“There’s something on the south side,” Kendelsen said with obvious excitement.

“What is it?” Bednar demanded.

“I might be wrong, but it looks like … a door.”

Majack, Bednar, and me all hop-trotted in the relatively weak gravity, our path taking us around the way Kendelsen had gone until we too could see what he was talking about.

And sure enough, it had the looks of a door, albeit buried halfway beneath the icy surface. I walked up to it and ran my suited hand along the door’s edges. I couldn’t tell if the material of the pyramid was hot or cold. My coldsuit’s fingertip sensors didn’t seem to register a temperature at all.

When I spotted the small circle in the door’s middle, and tapped it reflexively with a fist, I didn’t actually expect anything to happen. I fell back into the crumbled slush at Captain Bednar’s feet as the door rapidly slid up and out of the way: a ramp lowering into the black bowels of the pyramid proper.

All four of us were dead silent.

Then Captain Bednar sprinted past me and down the ramp, disappearing almost immediately into the darkness within.

“Chief . . ?” Specialist Majack said, half-questioning, as she and Kendelsen stared down at me.

I spat a couple of choice curses, stood up, and tapped the small control panel on the forearm of my coldsuit. My helmet lamps came on, throwing thick shafts of yellow-tinged white light into the air in front of me. The lamps would drain battery power even faster than the reheaters, but I reasoned there was no choice now.

“Kendelsen stays,” I said. “Majack, get back to the descent module. Grab as many spare coldsuit batteries as you can, along with the augers and surface sample lockers containing our smaller tools. I’m going in to see what our beloved commanding officer is up to.”

“You don’t want me to come with?” Kendelsen said, disappointed.

“No,” I said. “If neither myself nor Captain Bednar return, somebody’s gotta stay outside to help Majack. I’ll keep sending audio and telemetry as long as I can.”

Which didn’t seem like it would be too long. Already we’d lost Bednar’s feed. Whatever was blocking exterior electromagnetic examination was cutting off our suit-to-suit communications too.

“Understood?” I asked, looking from face to anxious face.

They said
yessir
in unison, and then I was off.

• • •

I couldn’t be sure, but the pyramid seemed far larger on the inside than it had on the outside.

Of course, with how the ramp spiraled rapidly down into the interior, the pyramid’s total cubic volume was increasing enormously with every story I descended. Just how big
was
the damned thing? A hundred meters tall? Two hundred? How far into Titan’s crust had it sunk? Or had it been deliberately buried? Or had unknown eons simply allowed ice to accumulate
over
the artifact, sliding down the sides and piling up at the base, one layer at a time?

I found myself huffing and sweating as I jogged along the ramp. There’d been no junctions nor forks, so I had to assume that as long as I kept moving, I’d find Captain Bednar eventually.

I practically ran into her when I hit the bottom of the ramp. She grunted as our suits
thunked
together, then I noticed what had made her stop short.

We were in a rectangular room perhaps fifty meters long by thirty meters wide by ten meters tall. Everything—the ramp, the walls, the ceiling—was made of the same seemingly impervious black material as the outside of the pyramid. But from a circular depression in the exact center of the floor of the room, came an unnervingly eerie, green light.

The captain began walking slowly towards the depression.

I followed five steps behind.

“Hell of a way to lead from the front,” I said, annoyed. “You’re proving to be very good at doing whatever the hell you want, whenever the hell you feel like it.”

Captain Bednar spun and looked at me, our face shields almost touching. Her eyes were hot with anger.

“I don’t particularly care if you’re still pissed at me for pulling rank. You’re not the one who got passed over for the Europa flight because you wouldn’t polish the Assistant Mission Director’s knob. I had to bust my ass to find a way to work around that lovely little problem, and once I got posted to the Titan flight I knew in my bones there was no way
anybody
was keeping me from coming down to the surface.”

“You broke the rules,” I said matter-of-fact.

“Chief, don’t be dense. Who cares about the rules now? Look at what we’ve found. This is
it.
This is the proof we’ve been searching for, ever since the dawn of the Space Age. No humans built this place. No humans even knew this place existed until now. Whatever it is—whatever it’s meant to
tell
us—is going to be of enormous impact back home. This changes everything. We aren’t alone. In fact, we were
never
alone. Ever. How long has this pyramid been here? How long has it been waiting for us to find it?”

“You make it sound like the thing’s a message in a bottle,” I said.

“Isn’t it, Chief? Why build a thing with a doorway sized more or less accurately for humans? Why create a passageway sized more or less accurately for humans? Why construct something that’s deliberately stealth-guarded against sensors, and cloaked from above by the atmosphere? Unless the point was to wait until we were here—in the flesh.”

“Sounds like you’ve got it all figured out,” I said. “So how about we retrace our steps to the surface and put together an actual
plan
before we do anything more rash than we’ve already done? Maybe
you’re
prepared to break rules, but I’m still the goddamned second-in-command on this flight, and I say we be methodical in our investigation of this—”

But I could already tell my words were useless. The light from the depression had entranced Bednar. She turned away from me and walked slowly towards the depression. I heard her quietly gasp when she got to the edge.

I took a few quick steps to catch up with her, then I froze as I saw what was in the concave bowl in the floor.

Was it alive? Had it been alive once upon a time?

I honestly couldn’t tell.

It was big. Bigger by far than a horse.
Elephant
big. A sinewy body with armored sections along its spine, lay curled numerous times; like a millipede. Only, each of the legs was tipped with what appeared to be three digits, and the head … the head was an unspeakable cranial collection of grotesque, melon-like lobes interspersed with darker-colored fontanels and punctuated with six oversized, albino-pink eyes—each wide open and seemingly staring at nothing. A mouth-like orifice was in the center of the head, studded with viciously sharp teeth, and disgorging three snake-like tongues that hung lifelessly to the floor of the depression.

The bowl glowed, if ever so softly. Like a weak chem light.

“Christ, what a horror,” I said, resisting the urge to put my hand up to my face. Getting sick in my coldsuit helmet at this particular juncture wasn’t a good idea.

“Horror?” Bednar said. “I think it’s breathtaking.”

“A
breathtaking
horror,” I said.

Captain Bednar turned to look at me, her expression most disapproving, then she turned back to the creature.

“A pet?” I guessed.

“Or the architect herself,” Bednar corrected.

“How do we know it’s a she?”

“We don’t. But I think we can be reasonably certain this place is
not
a galactic kennel.”

“The creature can’t be alive.”

“I believe you’re right, Chief. It is dead. Or at least in a state approximating what humans call death. Stasis maybe?”

Captain Bednar got down on her knees and reached a hand into the bowl to touch the thing.

She suddenly yanked her arm away.

“What happened?” I said.

“My arm went numb. Instantly.”

I got down on my hands and knees and reached hesitantly towards the creature. As soon as my fingers were over the precipice of the bowl, they went numb in a heartbeat. I left them there for a brief instant, a tingling sensation at my knuckles, then I drew my hand back. Quickly, feeling flowed back into my fingers as I flexed and moved them.

“
Whatever’s
kept the corpse from decaying, I wouldn’t try climbing down in there to find out. Your whole body might get short-circuited. If we’re going to examine the creature more closely, we’ll have to have equipment to pull it out.”

“What then?” She asked.

“I won’t be surprised if it blinks and jumps up after us, roaring for blood.”

“Silly,” she said.

“Yah, maybe. But tell me honestly that thing doesn’t make your skin crawl? I certainly wouldn’t want to see it revived. Though I wager you can add a Nobel to your name once the biologists back on Earth carve this thing up. The first extraterrestrial life form ever discovered, and it looks practically as brand new as the day it croaked. I wonder if it laid any nasty eggs in here for us to find? You know, like they always show in the movies?”

“I hardly think this race would have gone to all the trouble of constructing this place if their only goal was to entice us here for the purpose of impregnating or eating us. An alien civilization capable of traveling the stars is doubtless well advanced beyond our own. Their purposes are probably well advanced beyond ours as well. Imagine cave-dwellers encountering the mummy of an astronaut in his capsule. They’d be baffled too.”