Lakeside on the Via Australis

By Simon Petrie

HE HAD BEEN FOLLOWING THE dried course of a stream.

The streambed was a twisted ribbon that knotted its way around outcrops paled by past rainfall, through the canyon it had carved for itself—and would etch anew when winter’s methane rains began, a decade hence—among the rough hillocks and peaks of crud-tarnished ice.

It was a rugged place, and one which, Åke felt, gave the lie to the complaint that Titan was an unrelenting brown wilderness. (Admittedly, the world was a study in monochromaticity; but there were, after all, shades of brown, and of orange, and even of yellow.) Seen from the air—and why wouldn’t you, with Titan ideally shaped for flying?—the southern lakes region was like nowhere else on the world.

The opportunity for sightseeing was welcome. Pity about his destination. He had nothing to say to Gerta.

From a couple of klicks up, it had been the transporter’s grey rectilinearity, nothing more, that had marked it as incongruous against the dun polar landscape, competing for his attention with the dark oblong of Ontario Lacus starting ten kilometers or so towards the southern horizon. He had, at first, misinterpreted the vehicle’s shape as a building, a new outpost; rare indeed in this region, in these difficult times. His curiosity sparked, Åke brought the Featherblade in lower, spiraling down through the soft brown pall of midsummer twilight.

At this altitude, he thought he could just discern the slow, broad waves—a series of gentle corrugations—that the prevailing wind would be patiently sculpting across the lake’s dark liquid-ethane surface.

A childhood memory flared within him, unbidden. He’d been five, or maybe only four, and his father had taken him to a swimming pool. It must’ve been the public pool at Solà, a vast twenty-meter expanse of warmed water, in what seemed like the habitat’s largest chamber. He’d been standing on the steps at the pool’s shallow end, encased up to the neck flange by a small child’s T-suit (which must have been a rental; he’d recalled being considerably older, ten or eleven, not long before that disastrous holiday, before he’d had a T-suit of his very own). His father, similarly suited, was standing hip-deep in the tepid pool, holding both Åke’s helmet and his own. There was a sense of standoff—his father was almost as comfortable in a T-suit as in his own skin, while Åke himself was uneasy about something in the scenario, though at this remove he couldn’t clearly work out whether that had been distrust of the liquid up to his own knees or some kind of claustrophobic resistance to the idea of pulling the helmet on.

He couldn’t exactly remember how his father had tackled Åke’s reluctance at the pool-test. But he did remember the immersion, the fear and then the wonder at the suit’s ability to contain him safely against the water which enveloped him completely when he did, ultimately, step off into the deep end ... and after that, it seemed like he’d pestered his father every break-day for the next six years, to take him exploring in the raw Titanian landscape which stretched around Solà.

***

Closer, and it became apparent there was something wrong in the vista below.

The transporter, a Mitsuda Longhaul from the look of it, lay upon its left side, nearly parallel to but not on the raised Via Australis trackway. The vehicle’s cargo hatchway gaped open, dark. Two T-suited figures—no, three—were sprawled on the mucky ice around the Longhaul, motionless, their suits stained almost to camouflage by what had to be months, if not longer, of exposure to Titan’s grimy precip. Which made, all up, for a puzzle: Via Australis was as sparse-traveled as any Titanian road, particularly since Atreya had cracked, but the transporter was close enough that it would certainly have been spotted by one of the first few mining, freight, or personnel-transport vehicles to have passed by. (He’d seen the white headlamps, blue tail-lights of a couple of small vehicles heading this way, just an hour or so ago.) For the crashed Longhaul to have lain undetected for anything beyond, at most, a day or two was scarcely conceivable.

It occurred to Åke only once he’d committed the nanothopter to its final semi-automated landing approach that there was an alternative explanation for the scene. An explanation which took better account of the wreck’s still-glowing navlamps, of the lack of tholin-darkening of the transporter’s light-grey paneling, of the extensive damage now discernible to the vehicle’s front tracks. The T-suited corpses had not been stained by months’ exposure, from their ubiquitous visibility-blue hue; rather, they had from the outset been coloured for camouflage. Which basically permitted two possibilities, both implying conflict, both presaging trouble.

What might have been carried by the transporter which could have drawn the attention, and it appeared the fire, of southern cantonment mil forces? How had they died? And if the figures of the dead weren’t mil, but others for whom the donning of combat gear was dictated ...

He should boost, he should push on to the arcology at Yelle, where Gerta would be expecting him. But the diorama of the transporter, and of its apparent ambushers, was static; the terrain was clear and devoid of obvious hazard. He had time, and Åke didn’t feel any form of loyalty towards Gerta. Quite the reverse, in fact, for all that his mother, striving so hard to be even-handed—and was that through guilt, or remorse, or genuine affection?—pushed the relationship between him and his father’s lover. She’s the last link you’ll ever have to him, Åke’s mother had said; he’d want the two of you to get along.

Yet where in “get along” did hatred fit?

***

Åke landed with an anticlimactic slow slide on the smoothest terrain he’d been able to spot, twenty meters or so on the eastern side of the fallen transporter. The road was a dark ridge that stretched straight, an artificial horizon ten to fifteen meters farther west, behind the transporter; the bodies he’d seen from the air, strewn between road and vehicle, were currently eclipsed by the latter’s blocky bulk. He felt safer for having landed out of sight of the carnage.

You don’t have to be here, he reminded himself, pressing the controls to collapse the nanothopter. You could be back up in the air right now, just a couple more hours to Yelle. But he’d done a lot of time in the airframe today already. Some time spent exploring the wreck was still a confinement, of a sort (the sole attraction of Yelle, right now, and insufficient to overpower his enmity of Gerta, was that it would allow him to finally shuck the suit for a few days), but his legs would welcome the exercise. While he stretched, and sought to work out the kink that had caught at his neck, the ’thopter compacted itself down, folding itself into the suitcase-sized, squat-tripod-supported “standby” mode that minimized heat loss to the chill environment. Machinery didn’t function well at Titanian temperatures, and the standby geometry served to conserve battery power and thus maximize range. Moving the origami’d Featherblade close in to the lee of the fallen transporter’s roof would keep it out of the slow but steady wind, and further reduce dissipation. He still had plenty of juice to reach Yelle, but there was no point in running a risk.

(So why was he here?)

***

This first one had died quickly. A slick-frozen, crimson-brown blot of blood had bloomed across the ground around the prostrated figure’s T-suit, encroaching on and besmirching the long-barreled firearm dropped by its side. Against Titan’s atmospheric overpressure, a suited figure didn’t leak blood unless the wound, and therefore the puncture, was broad. So: a few seconds, not more. Åke fought the softly-scraping sensation of gorge rising in his throat. He’d seen death before, and death unshielded in any manner by a T-suit’s protective cocoon—anyone who’d assisted in the grim rescue effort at Atreya could scarcely have avoided it—but that had nonetheless been at a remove, through the grainy wraparound visuals of a remote recovery drone. This was immediate, purposeful, brutal.

A second, smaller assailant, sprawled on his (her?) back a half-dozen meters from the first, near the transporter’s southward-pointing cab, would have perished even quicker. It took Åke just one hastily-averted glance to indicate that it had been a head shot, the helmet’s polymer visor crazed, scorched, and partially imploded on the left side. (Scorched? A flare-gun, then, perhaps?) He dared a second look. The blood-encrusted contents framed by the visor’s mortal breach refused to resolve themselves into recognizable facial details. Bio-stat patches still glowed ruddily across the body’s T-suited chest, confirming the obvious. A businesslike, thick-barreled weapon with an oversized pistol-grip set somewhat behind its midpoint, and a drum-shaped casing around its back end, had fallen a meter or so away from the woman. Was this what a personal missile platform looked like?

If that’s really a PMP, Åke mused, no wonder they went for the head shot.

Steadying both his attention and his stomach, Åke moved forward around the wreck, to check out the Longhaul’s cab. The vehicle’s front was a mess, its windscreen shot in, two blue-suited figures slumped together, motionless, where they had fallen against the driver’s-side airlock. Suited: so they’d been expecting trouble. Suits looked intact, though in all likelihood there’d be breaches from bullets or shrapnel.

Carefully skirting the dead woman and the missile launcher, he moved back along the muck-sprayed wall of the vehicle’s tracked undercarriage to where the third assailant was propped, seated, splay-legged, against the front of the long median set of treads. This one had probably lasted longer, his posture speaking of some effort at minimizing discomfort. The visor-enclosed face was contorted, frozen (by now, perhaps literally) in an anguished, angry grimace. The T-suit’s casing had cooled sufficiently, since death, to allow the accumulation of a hydrocarbon frosting along its more wind-sheltered surfaces. The gloved fingers of the man’s right hand still gripped his left forearm: futile effort to staunch a puncture? No blood, no more obvious damage to his camo-skinned suit: a small wound, then, not immediately fatal, and death most probably by Titan’s patented combination of asphyxiation and poisoning. (Atreya. Åke bit his lip, blinked, hard, and forced himself to breathe evenly.) This man, too, had been armed. A rifle lay on the ground, a few meters farther back, at the far end of the transporter’s median treads.

He wouldn’t have thrown the rifle, he’d have let it drop. So why was the rifle at the other end of the treads from the figure? There was no logical reason to move from one point to the other, except that at this point the latticework of the capsized transporter’s underside made for a better climbing frame. Åke looked up. Four meters, max. And plenty of glove-holds.

It wasn’t a difficult climb.

***

Viewed from above, the cargo hold was a mess. Åke wasn’t game to climb down into the hold, for fear of difficulty in re-emerging. Nets designed to isolate flimsy cases of provisions from heavier, rather brutal looking items of machinery had failed to provide protection when the transporter had tipped. The Longhaul’s climate-control system had evidently failed also. Some of the canned foodpacks (those that had not burst) were probably still secure, but the sight of so much Titan-spoiled produce (real vegetables and fruit, breached cartons of synthetic milk, a myriad fragments of shattered packaging) sparked disturbing memories. In Atreya, just before they’d found his father, Åke had been piloting a troupe of semiautonomous rem-recs through the sector-three foodstore. The foodstore, three levels below the geochem lab suite which contained his father’s office, had been in that wedge of the arcology which had subsided with catastrophic result when the unsuspected frozen-methane substratum had asserted itself as a fracture plane in the settlement’s ice foundations. A failure of the initial surveying, a fault of the hab’s waste-heat engineering, a fundamental flaw in construction, a shortcoming in the arcology’s crisis-management system: three years on, and the finger-pointing had not yet let up. It had been Titan’s worst tragedy. Sixteen hundred dead so far, some quick like his father (anoxia), some agonizingly extended. Amongst those who had survived the atmospheric toxins’ more immediate effects, the carcinogenicity was beginning to bite. (And Gerta? A clean bill of health ...)

He shook himself back to the present. What amongst the transporter’s cargo had been worth killing for? The foodstuffs? The unidentifiable machinery? That small, bulbous, vehicular-looking object in the gloom towards the rear? He doubted that any of it was particularly valuable: it was all, one way or another, carbon-based. Carbohydrate, protein, polymer, diamond. Nothing that looked like steel, no titanium, no iron ingots, nothing that counted as precious on a world where the very air snowed soot, and where any useful mineral deposits were entombed below at least several kilometers of dirty ice.

And how had the attack happened? The ambushers presumably had been lying in wait, but they were dozens of kilometers from any settlement that Åke knew of. Even if, as seemed likely, they’d stationed themselves a few hundred meters back along the roadway, they still had to have some means of getting there. The Longhaul was the only vehicle here ... he should check back along the road a way. Not too far, though; he should be getting airborne before much longer, but these people wouldn’t have walked in pursuit of the transporter if they’d needed to travel any particular distance. If they’d left vehicles, they shouldn’t be far away.

Acting on a whim, he picked up the PMP.

***

The marks left by the transporter were clear enough, for backtracking purposes. The Longhaul had apparently tipped as soon as it had left the trackway. It had then skidded, uncontrolled, across the dirty ice, scraping off the ground’s sepia-toned topcrust of organics as it went; the runoff-smoothed terrain, and the absence of any traction the treads would have afforded, had conspired to prolong its slide. But the ambush had occurred almost a hundred meters farther north, back along the road, at the end of a long sloping right-hand curve as the Via Australis bent itself south towards the lake. The two skid-bikes—Hainan Icemasters, Åke noted, bywords in speed and raw power—were parked just off the road, in a natural dip which in winter’s grip a decade or so hence would likely be one of many seasonal methane puddles and ponds; currently dry save for a boot-heel’s depth of squelchy organic detritus, the pocket gully would have provided excellent ground-level concealment for the waiting attackers. Camouflaged as they were, and sufficiently far away from the crashed transporter, the Icemasters would very probably have eluded Åke’s detection from the air, regardless ... but unless he missed his guess, those incongruous-shaped dark canopies (which certainly did not seem to fulfill any identifiable aerodynamic purpose) must be stealth caps, designed specifically to evade aerial surveillance by radar or IR scanners. Mil stuff, proscribed from civilian use, jealously guarded.

And yet ... the canopies had a rough and distinctly worn appearance to them, where from everything Åke had heard they were the kind of tech that took careful maintenance or lost function quickly. So, in all probability, ex-mil, which would fit also with the discarded rifle (plastic and diamond, home-printed, disposable in appearance) to be found on the ground between the two bikes. Plus, while the Icemasters did not display the kinds of alphanumeric ID markings that he would expect of mil vehicles, there was a prominent blue stencil-print of a splayed-finger handmark on the pannier casing of each bike. The handprints had a rude and inexpert look to them: likely they were gang marks, or (the suspicion firmed) pharmhands.

His gut tensed.

Pharmhands would not be convinced by explanations of innocence, of curiosity. Pharmhands would not be subject to any constraints of engagement. Didn’t the scene which must have played out here demonstrate that? Never mind all of the stories that got passed around, of pharmhand atrocities among the smaller habs and mining settlements. Even if merely one-tenth of the apocrypha were true ...

He really should get out of here. Gerta would be expecting him. There were worse things than staying with people you didn’t care for, people you resented.

A shifting pattern of light caught at his eye. Headlights. There was a vehicle approaching around the bend, still some distance away. With a shock, he remembered the traffic he’d seen while still airborne. Two small vehicles, then; they’d looked most likely to be two-seaters. He could seek to hide, but if his suspicion was correct, any attempt at his concealment would be inadequate. Whoever was en route would very probably know the skid-bikes were here, and there simply weren’t any other places to hide within easy reach. (Plus, blue T-suit, brown landscape, sore thumb ...)

He could attempt to ambush them, to lie in wait with the PMP and blast them as they approached along the road. Judging by the damage sustained by the transporter’s tracks and windshield, the missile-launcher would likely make mincemeat of a smaller vehicle. But Åke mistrusted the idea of bravery: he knew nothing of the weapon’s operation, did not know even whether its atmosphere-shielded magazine still contained any rounds, and was insufficiently foolish to risk the danger of shrapnel, in an environment where any suit breach might as well be an unquenchable arterial wound. There was also the small matter that he didn’t know the approaching vehicles to be hostile. For all he knew, they might be a family of miners, or a group of neo-Scientol missionaries. Unless or until, that is, they opened fire ...

And if they did open fire ... the pharmhands had apparently come by at least three major items of mil gear, as represented by the Icemasters and the PMP. It was a fair bet that this acquisition had not occurred in an entirely amicable and open-handed fashion. Pharmhands who could, by force, divest the mil of such equipment were not likely to be bested by a lone opponent wielding a weapon entirely unfamiliar to him.

He looked back towards the wreck of the transporter, thought about the time needed to run back, to unfold his nanothopter, to allow the Featherblade sufficient time to warm up that its rotors wouldn’t simply shred or shatter as they attempted to rotate. Then he looked at the waiting skid-bikes.

It had been a long time since he’d ridden a skid-bike. (Why crawl, when you can fly?)

***

The idling Icemaster was noisier than he had expected, a persistent strong whine that resonated disconcertingly with his T-suit’s neck-flange, and he couldn’t find the controls to switch off its running lights. The bike’s taillights would severely increase his visibility; and right now, that wasn’t what he wanted. He climbed across the battery cowling, stirruped his boots as well as their spiked soles would allow, and canted the PMP so that the front of its magazine pressed against his suit’s left hip, the barrel’s business end balanced across the bike’s handlebar. Holding the weapon in place with his left elbow was going to hamper his control of the Icemaster, but on the other hand to leave the PMP behind, with the other skid-bike, could be handing his notional pursuers a free shot. Flexing the bike’s glove-grips, he gunned the batteries, increasing the pitch of the lightweight electric motors by the best part of an octave. The skids’ traction belts sprayed up muck, and then bit into the packed ice beneath. He turned the front skid to climb over the lip onto the trackway.

The Icemaster refused to accelerate as rapidly as he’d hoped, but it seemed to handle well enough. And he got fifteen seconds’ advantage—not enough, not nearly enough—before the lighting from behind him changed from diffuse to direct, telling him that at least one of the vehicles behind had already cleared the bend. The bike’s rear-view monitor wasn’t steady enough to get a good look at the class of vehicle following him, and he was nowhere near game enough to turn around in his seat, but he suspected he was only four hundred meters ahead of it. He was, at least, still picking up speed.

Past the transporter, now. They must see it. Would they stop, when they drew level with it?

It seemed not. They were intent on pursuit.

The first gentle curve—on Titan, all bends were gradual—almost undid him, as he lost his grip on the PMP. It slid, tumbling from its awkward perch, hitting the road surface with sufficient speed that it bounced and spun off over the road’s edge, onto the slope of the streambed. Åke barely managed to retain balance on the Icemaster. At least the bike would be easier to control now.

There were a lot of curves on this next stretch, where the road kept roughly parallel to the meandering course of the dry streambed as it made its way to Ontario’s northeast shore. This suited Åke’s purposes, for now: he was fairly sure that the bike was lighter and more manoeuvrable than whatever was following him. But the road would not keep bending—

A harsh plak interrupted his chain of thought, and the bike’s power diminished markedly. A small round hole had suddenly appeared just below the top of the forward motor cowling. I guess that answers the question of whether they’re hostile, he told himself. His gloves maintained their hold on the skid-bike’s handlegrips, though his palms felt suddenly slick, his fingers weak and half-asleep.

He toggled the slider of the bike’s master control one-handed, keeping his eyes firmly focused on the road. By switching all power to the rear-mounted motor, he could almost maintain his current speed, but at the loss of much of the Icemaster’s road-handling. The road’s bends were no longer a feature to his advantage. Plus, the battery indicator was showing an alarming rate of power drain. They’d have him, soon enough.

After easing around the latest lazy corner, heart still racing, he chanced a look behind him. He thought he had maybe two minutes’ lead on them now, not more. And then he’d reached lakeside—or rather, that stretch of the road which hugged the lake’s winter high-liquid-mark. This far into summer, the shallow lake had receded several hundred meters back from the road.

It would get worse from here—fewer protective curves, fewer obscuring hills and headlands. If his pursuers were hoping for a clear shot at him, they wouldn’t have long to wait.

Åke forced himself to think, to find some way to shake off his followers. If there’d only been time to get back to the ’thopter, to get himself airborne, to buy himself a whole extra dimension to play with ...

But maybe there was.

A crossroads, or at least a K-intersection, lay a few kilometers ahead, just past the last substantial curve. The road led on past the lake, almost straight for many kilometers further; but there were two subsidiary roadways radiating off to the left, one heading northeast up the valley that led to Soderblom, the other east-southeast to Yelle. Both roads, at least initially, were far from straight, the valleys narrow and steep-sided. If he turned at that junction, it would not be immediately apparent which road he’d taken ...

But they would see that he was no longer on the Via Australis, at any rate. So they’d know he’d taken either the Soderblom or the Yelle route, and they had two vehicles. The tactic would divide them, but it would not save him.

There were skeins of alkane fog ghosting across the road, drifting in the breeze. Ontario Lacus had crept in closer against the road, which here dropped away almost sheer for several meters at its edge, down to the lake’s winter shoreline. The liquid’s surface, ruffled by the wind into rows of low, lazy waves, was deep brown beneath the dark orange sky of late afternoon; haze robbed its further reaches of clarity. Now the hydrocarbon shore was just twenty meters from the trackway’s edge; now fifteen; further ahead, before the curve that marked the road junction, the lake was virtually abutting the trackway’s skirt, nuzzling at it. He struggled to review what he’d learnt of this region through geography, and through the frequent—and at the time, unappreciated—comments of his father, back when the three of them had still been a family, of sorts. Before Gerta, before those two, final, unreclaimable years.

The landscape around him brightened anew, and highlights and contrasting shadows spread and shifted along the bike’s handlebars. He tensed, waiting for the impact at his back which would end all this (whether quick or slow), and willed the approaching curve closer.

The lake was deepest, in places up to fifteen meters deep, near its eastern edge, he seemed to recall—something to do with sedimentation and the prevailing westerly wind. If the liquid continued to hug the road’s edge after that curve, over that rise ...

He bent into the curve, rode it out. Then he killed the Icemaster’s engine and coasted to the trackway’s shoreside lip before dismounting. Ahead, the long straight that marked Ontario’s northeast shore. Across from him, leading into the hills, the narrow routes to Soderblom and Yelle. He had a minute, maybe less. The bike was heavy, unwilling to shift, but with an anguished push he felt it tip forward, away from him, and then tumble ponderously into the lake. The splash was larger than expected, but with luck the ripples radiating outwards across the lake’s hydrocarbon surface would be masked by the broader wave activity. He noted with satisfaction that the bike did not protrude above the surface at all. Deep enough—good. Now comes the hard part.

There weren’t enough handholds, and the trackway’s bank was almost sheer. The climb down was necessarily quick, but by no means graceful. He skidded down for most of the five meters, and arrested himself barely above the liquid’s dark surface, perched on some unseen pouting of ice, clinging precariously to the tholin-crusted slope he was pressed against.

How terrified had he been, those fourteen years ago, at the edge of the pool at Solà? This much, or more?

He wished his father were here, now. But he must face these depths alone.

It occurred to him, belatedly, that Gerta hadn’t entirely been the problem, that he’d allowed himself to be swayed by loyalty to his mother’s initial enmity to her replacement. The family had moved to Atreya before the breakup, before Gerta. It wasn’t her fault she’d survived.

Gerta would be living with her memories of Åke’s father, same as he was. Different memories, of course, but still ...

A part of him once again four years old, he relinquished his grip, pushed down, and allowed himself to slide into the lake’s chilled, fizzing, enveloping depths.

The light from above the surface brightened, flared, then ebbed. He waited, ignoring the lake’s hyper-cold grasp on the suit’s limbs, the spreading patches of frosted condensation on the visor’s inner surface, until he judged that the last traces of vehicle-light had gone; then, digging his gloved fingers into the lake-bank’s mucky detritus, he pulled himself stiffly out of the liquid’s embrace and clambered back up to the now-deserted trackway. The chill of his brief immersion still clung to him.

Idiots, he thought. Sometimes it pays to look beneath the surface.

It’d be about a ten kilometer walk back to the Longhaul, to retrieve the nanothopter. Call it two hours, though he hoped he could cover it more quickly than that. Another hour further, and he could be at Gerta’s, trying to work out where he stood on the thorny issue of allegiance ...

He was surprised to note that he was looking forward to describing, for her, his escape. It would be something to tell, and something more, too. A laurel branch, or whatever they called it. Or at least an icebreaker.

He hoped the ’thopter would still be there, concealed, back by the wreck of the transporter. 

Simon Petrie lives in Australia. His stories have appeared in “Redstone Science Fiction,” “Murky Depths,” and elsewhere. He is a member of the Canberra Speculative Fiction Guild, and has twice won New Zealand’s Sir Julius Vogel Award.