Prologue

 

A brooding world adrift against the black infinity of space, Titan, largest satellite of gloriously ringed Saturn is like no other moon in the Solar System. A moon that would be a planet some have said; an analogue of Earth to those who favour analogues. Beneath a fog-hazed atmosphere of nitrogen suffused with layered hydrocarbon mists there lie continents. Continents with mountains, valleys, plains and vast dunes of organic grit. There are meandering streams and rivers, wind-rippled lakes and oceans touching the landforms with frigid kiss. There, too, in the perpetual twilight of this world, rain may fall and winds sweep across land and sea.

Like Earth? At minus one hundred and eighty degrees Celsius, water ice is granite-hard and forms much of the land. The clouds in the sky, the rain that falls to the seas below, they are not water but methane and highly complex hydrocarbons, some of which may in places freeze solid to form other landscape features.

What does this bizarre world, an alien place so far away, mean to the people of Earth, none of who had made the journey to witness first hand its forbidding realms? It is resources; resources of pressing desire to a sun-warmed planet hungering to replenish its own plundered assets. Titan reaches out. Titan beckons with a promise of largesse. Titan waits. But is this grim parody of Earth a world altogether devoid of life?

 

Chapter 1 - The Man from Mars

 

If you are familiar with the events leading up to the declaration of independence on Mars then you'll recall how close to disaster came the human colonies out here. And even if you didn't, the whole affair cannot have passed unnoticed anywhere on Earth. Either way it will do no harm if I hover briefly over what happened since it has a bearing on the events that were to come.

What some people thought of as a kind of unblemished Eden was hardly the mythical garden of greenery but a very cold, many-cratered desert planet with a thin, unbreathable atmosphere. But for myself and others it was a retreat from the clamour and the distractions of an overpopulated, over-regulated and polluted Earth, a place where you could feel you mattered more, often far more, than you might on the home planet. As for those born on Mars, the majority by now of our population, very few opted for a permanent return to Earth as their goal in life because virtual reality could help make that all but unnecessary. Like anyone else living on Mars I can sit back, hook myself up, so to speak, and wander through all the sights on Earth. I can smell the gardens, tread grassy fields, feel sea spray on my face, know forest and mountain breezes, spend my spare time in any museum or art gallery with or without other people around me. I can explore any town and city as if I was actually there and I can forget it's an altogether convincing illusion. Almost sounds like I really miss the home planet, doesn't it, but we do have our own comforts and diversions even if it's not possible to go out for a real time stroll to a neighbour's house.

None of the many permanent bases established on Mars could exist without its biodome. Each of these structures rests upon a great, circular basalt foundation, its bioplast shell grown organically over this solid base to form a vast, transparent enclosure, one large enough to accommodate gardens, modest woodlands and a wide variety of genetically programmed insects, birds and small mammals as well as our more discreet maintenance bots. All of these are devoted to the environmental upkeep of what are first and foremost the lungs of each base containing an atmosphere similar in composition and pressure to that of Earth, as well as places of recreation, somewhere for the kids to play and the nearest thing we have to Earth's outdoor cafés or restaurants. If you looked out to the desert from the perimeter path then you would see the true colours of Mars beneath a saffron sky but if you gazed upwards the bioplast shell had the sky looking as blue as you'd see it on Earth. A nice touch I always thought and most people would agree. Physiological adjustments have to be made for us all of course since on Mars we live in a gravity little more than one third that of Earth, but those adjustments are reversible should any of us return to the home planet.

Okay, so who am I and what am I doing out here? Well, I'm Commander Brett Anderson - just Brett to most people and no more than that for the purposes of this little tale. I was a pilot back on Earth but since most things that fly there have no need of a pilot I didn't have a great deal to do other than continue military duties that themselves were becoming obsolescent. My qualifications and experience in flying, however, got me out to Mars where pilots aren't essential either, but essential or no, they are wanted and they are in short supply. When cargo ships arrive from Earth, usually as containers entering Mars orbit rather than direct, their contents get distributed about the planet mainly in pallets carried by the kind of wingships it was my business fly. No other method for getting cargoes around is practical on our otherwise inhospitable world. For research teams, social gatherings and groups needing to move from one part of the planet to another, or to outstations where there is no runway, we have the smaller shuttlecraft. Like big insects, they can jump off, fly low altitude, go into orbit when necessary, and land just about anywhere.

Most of those travelling from base to base on wingship or even a shuttle want a real human presence up front, not an android or a virtual human allegedly in charge, but someone they could loosen up to with their complaints, their language and their away-from-base humour without what they say being overheard or recorded. Occasionally I'd take over the controls, just to prove to my passengers, or maybe more to myself, that I could be of some real use up there in our apricot sky. But other times I'd be flying alone with my thoughts and that I found truly satisfying because Mars was then my kingdom. At night, well used to the purr of turbines, I could consider my existence, dream my own dreams and admire stars undiminished by light pollution and shining in all their glory. In daylight hours I could make what I liked of those mountains, canyons and realms of cratered chaos, those immense volcanoes wingships had to skirt around because they were too high to fly over. Mighty Olympus in the northern hemisphere is over twenty-two kilometres from ground to summit and broad enough to cover the state of Arizona. And further south, on the Tharsis rise, a great bulge in the red planet's surface, a trio of volcanoes rise up to similar height, Ascraeus, Pavonis and Arsia. They stride across the planet north-east to south-west with Pavonis sitting dead on the equator. Then, dipping below the equator, a vast canyon system, the Mariner Valley, could reach from New York to Los Angeles and is wide enough to lose the Grand Canyon in one of its minor branches. All of this I find so fascinating that when I was approached some time back to quit flying and take instead a cosy position with the possibility of more elevated, official duties, I turned the offer down.

I was based at Novamerica One from the day of my arrival, one of the original permanent human habitations on Mars, though much expanded and modernised over the years - Martian years, that is, of six hundred and eighty seven days. Joe van Allen was, and still is, my base commander; in some ways a father figure yet also a good friend. He, too, belongs out here though he came initially on a five-year tour of duty. That was Earth years, by the way. The Martian year can make things a little complicated, though it has you sounding a lot younger for a while. Okay, so maybe from now on I'll stick to earth years. One of the longest established bases on the red planet, Novamerica One eventually became Joe's personal project and as base commander he saw it develop into what it is today. I'd not been on Mars very long when Joe, in considering what he thought best to serve my interests, and without me at first realising what he was about, manoeuvred me into the company of an undeniably desirable blue-eyed, blonde by the name of Karin. She was a planetary scientist, originally from Sweden and at the time was working for the Europeans at one of their own Mars bases. Despite my inner and sometimes verbal promises to others never to let it happen, I was soon hooked. We shortly after went through quite a lot together and I figure it's together we'll stay because that's what we both want.

As you may have guessed, bases with the prefix, 'Novamerica,' were once colonies of the United American States, just as other groups of bases once belonged to their respective power blocks back on Earth. That situation no longer exists but we never got around to changing the names. After the near total disaster I'm about to outline, the colonies decided to unite and go it alone. It had to happen some day and Joe, who'd been the colonies' chief negotiator during our troubles, was elected by all as president. Once independent there was no longer room for the kind of wasteful rivalry we sometimes had and we Earthlings were more than ever obliged to co-operate with one another. We had to be self-sufficient and trade with Earth, rare metals mainly, as well as research and manufacturing too difficult to carry out on Earth but not so in the wide-open spaces and lower gravity of Mars. We'd never do more than break even, though, because of shipping costs and the fact the powers that be on Earth no longer felt it necessary to go on supporting us to anything like the same extent.

As it turned out, Eden or no, and I'll just for now stick to old fashioned terms, there was a Devil who descended on us some four years back. His official function was to take charge of Frontier Mining and make it a more profitable concern for the shareholders and politicians back on the home planet. After bluffing his way over to Mars from Earth he almost brought annihilation down on us all. The guy in question, Virgil Hammond, had armed men, his own privately recruited little army, sent over in a space vessel driven by a totally revolutionary power source. Scientists back on Earth had tapped into so-called dark matter, that one-time mysterious gravity-related force that prevents the galaxies from flying apart. I was at the time told how the resulting propulsion system, which enabled the manipulation and reversal of that most fundamental of natural forces, gravity itself, would do to rocket power what steam once did to sail, only very much quicker. Yes, and we were soon to find how true that was, at least for dedicated space vehicles. The result was Aurora, and her like, a hyper-speed vessel that could cover in days what might take weeks by conventional means - rocket power, that is. Hammond intended no one in the colonies should stand in the way of his crazy plans - in particular, as it turned out, me.

But who helped us out in the end? Why, an entity we never dreamed existed or could exist; the incredible life forms that had thrived undetected deep beneath us, life forms that had the power to wipe the colonies off the face of our dusty little planet if they so wished. Our planet, we thought, but it was also theirs, the beings we referred to as Martians, though in their multiverse existence Mars was, to their seemingly infinite world, no more than a temporary stopover and we humans, initially at least, a curiosity, almost a source of entertainment. The Martians were a life form able to move through space and parallel realities and affect the present in a way quite incomprehensible to mere humans, though like we humans they were vulnerable to certain natural phenomena, including solar radiation and cosmic rays.

Initially, I said, until the bozo I just mentioned arrived with his private army to boost our mining operations and, using a part of the profits, set himself up as head of a new religious order on Mars. Extermination of the Martians went straight to the top of his list of things to do after his deep level drilling operations had gone through their kitchen ceiling and triggered a disastrous response that resulted in hundreds of deaths, by which I mean deaths of the colonists. If I have any claims to fame it could be my getting to know, as close as any mere human being could, the true nature of the Martians and for getting rid of Hammond personally, though I'll say no more about him for the time being. We newcomers from Earth now have at least one understanding with our cohabitants: we leave them in the voided regions they at present inhabit below the surface and they leave us to get on with what we think we ought to be getting on with upstairs.