Chapter 2

When Anita woke up the next morning, it took her a few minutes to orient herself. Expecting to see the close walls of a field tent, the large-by-comparison apartment confused her. Blinking, she sat up. Right. Fieldwork over for a few months. Back at base. New suit iteration to work on. It was all coming back. Coffee would help.

“Coffee. Now.” The small kitchen unit beeped to life, and in a few moments, the welcome sizzle of the first percolations of the coffee machine. Better. Much better.

After a half hour of wakefulness and a cup of coffee, Anita felt ready to face the day. After slipping into a comfortable dress and leggings, she ran a brush through her thick dark hair several times and pulled it into a braid. Sometimes she cut it back for prolonged fieldwork, but braids usually did the trick just fine.

Jay was waiting in the cafeteria when she arrived, stirring a bowl of what might pass as oatmeal thoughtfully. “Hey. I heard about yesterday. A whole crew from Perses was making the rounds. How’re you holding up?”

Anita dropped into the chair across from them, and shook her head. “I don’t know. I’m still getting used to being back on base, which is a head trip in and of itself.” She glanced at Jay. “Did they try to hire you, too?”

Jay nodded. “I don’t know if they offered it to everyone, but it sounds like they at least made a passing offer to most of us. Mine was so high it made my head spin, but I’m not really interested in being on a leash.” They took a sip of coffee. “Or having my work used to destroy this moon, for that matter. I love this bizarre place. I’ve spent too long getting here to be ok with throwing it away. Sure, it might be fine for my lifetime. But that’s nothing in the planetary scheme of things.”

Anita nodded, taking another sip of coffee. “I came to the same conclusion. What I find distressing is how badly part of me wanted to say yes. With what they offered, I could have afforded one of the best rooms on base. I wanted to send money to some younger scientists and engineers I know who are just scarping by. Perses would have upgraded my lab from top to bottom. I wanted it so badly. But when it came down to it, I just couldn’t do it. But today I wonder if I should have. You know? Maybe the good I could do with the money would outweigh the harm. I know, I know, in the long scheme of things my life and comfort really aren’t that big a deal, especially not weighed against the destruction of so much knowledge. But it’s all so hypothetical, it’s hard to really feel sure.”

They sat in silence for a few minutes, breakfast rapidly achieving thermal equilibrium with the cool air. The base was heated against the utter chill of the moon’s atmosphere, but it was never enough to really feel completely warm. Thermal undergarments were popular with most residents. Anita finished her coffee and scooped up the last bit of yogurt from her breakfast, and stood to go. “Hey, I know your plate is always full, but any time you want to stop by the lab and take a look at the new suits, I’d really love your input. Nobody knows the wind here like you do.”

Jay grinned. “Count on it. I can only stand to be in my lab for so long before I feel the walls start closing in. You’d think I’d have gone for a scout job but nooooooope, I had to make things difficult for myself.”

They laughed, and Anita made her way through the grid of corridors to her lab. The new suit should be done printing by now, with the improved controls for the wings. It was what had first caught her attention about Titan: the combination of low gravity and thick atmosphere made it possible for human beings to fly under their own power, if provided with wings. Eventually, tholins had become her focus, but she never got tired of seeing humans soaring through the muddy skies like some evolutionary ancestor that had descended from avians rather than apes.

She unlocked the door with a swipe of her palm, and closed it firmly behind her. Even though Holder still had access, it was the princple of the thing. She opened the printer, and there was the new suit. The wings were in the other compartment, being too large to print on a single machine. She wrangled the suit onto an articulated manikin and locked the wings into place. A full test could only be done outside, but she could get a feel for the controls in here. She slipped her hand into one of the gloves on the suit, feeling the controls brush her fingertips. Turn, turn, brush, yes, the wings responded perfectly. No lag, no overcompensation, just clean movement. Good.

Who was on the docket for the first tests? Steven Rasul. An artistic soul, she thought, but good at scouting. His eye for detail and subtle shadings of color often helped him identify soil and mineral compositions that another scout might overlook. He was due in the suiting facility in two hours.

The wings were folded and locked tightly into themselves. The carbon fiber construction let her build very thin frames that could withstand any wind Titan might throw at them. Weight and space were always a consideration once one got away from the inner worlds. Scouts needed to be able to carry the wings in a compact form if they were grounded, as well as being able to pack them into the tents during sleeping periods. Yes, the new wings packed up securely, just as intended. That design could be considered locked in, unless something very drastic happened during testing.

Anita put the suit in a bag, carefully folded, though it was tough enough to withstand the uncovered surface of Titan and a short trip down the hall could not damage it. The wings went into another bag. She turned to go, then hesitated. She still felt uneasy after the interaction with Holder the day before. She might not be able to deny him access to the lab, but she might be able to keep tabs on what he was doing in there when she wasn’t around. She activated the standard security features—a keylogger on the computers, a basic camera above the door—but she knew Holder would be expecting those. Fortunately, she had always been a little paranoid about her lab, and had installed a seperate security system into her computer network that would have been nearly impossible to find even if he was looking for it. Anita wished she could do more to secure her work, but that would have to do for now.

After carefully closing and locking the lab door, Anita proceeded to the suiting area next to one of the airlocks. She hung up the suit and inspected it a final time, then did the same for the wings. Next, she woke her tablet and began getting it ready for the data from the suit, connecting it to the different transmitters within the suit, and a few that she would hook up to Steven, when he arrived. Heart rate, blood pressure, all the usual biological indicators.

By the time she was done prepping for the test, Steven had arrived. He was gangly and young, with skin the color of aged copper. He wore one of his usual flowy skirts, in a bright cobalt blue, paired with a tunic length top in a contrasting crimson. “Good morning, Dr. Sensharma! It’s good to see you again. I can’t wait to test the new design!”

“Me too, Steven. And I’m glad to see you, too. Go ahead and strip down and let’s get that suit on you.” Anita helped him remove and fold his outer clothing, and they worked together to slid the tight flight suit over his thermal underclothes without wrinkling them in places that might hurt later. When all was secure and comfortable, Anita snapped the wing components into place. Steven flexed and stretched, testing the fit. “All good. Everything feels secure, nothing loose anywhere.”

Anita nodded. Only one thing left now: the actual test. She pulled a standard exosuit off the rack by the door to the airlock, and pulled it on. With both suits secure, Anita and Steven stepped into the airlock and sealed the hatch shut behind them.

“Comm check, can you hear me?”

“Roger that, doctor. Clear as day. Speaking of which, we’ve only got a day of twilight left so we’d better take advantage of it. Ready to head out?”

Anita nodded, and hit the button to evacuate the air in the lock. The quick whoosh, the sudden silence, the rush of Titan’s atmosphere as the external hatch opened. For someone raised on Mars, Titan never sounded right. Mars was almost silent once you got out of the city domes. The thin atmosphere left sound fade away after a few meters, and there wasn’t much to create sound there in the first place. But Titan… Titan was something else. Sounds were loud and easy to hear, sometimes jarring. The winds that could be whipped up on the scarred surface were chaotic and overwhelming. The wind itself had a force that was lacking on Mars. Titan’s wind could blow you off course, something Martian wind never did.

Today was relatively calm, she noted. A breeze, in Titan terms, brushed the tops of the hills and stirred the dust around the rocks. Another thing that was hard to get used to: most of the “rocks” in sight were water ice, frozen hard as stone. On Mars, any ice of that size would sublimate in hours, leaving nothing behind. But here they might last hundreds, thousands of years. At least they looked like rocks, so that was something familiar.

The light was dim and unchanging. Sunset was yesterday, and today would be mostly twilight fading into dusk. A limb of Saturn’s rings arced over the horizon, providing some light even in Titan’s night period, but few tried to go out by such dim lighting. Just another thing to get used to.

Anita heard a clacking sound to her left, and turned to see Steven expanding the wings on his suit. The wings moved slightly, adjusting to the winds. Steven furled and unfurled the wings several times, testing the controls. “Yep, feels good so far. Need me to do any tests on the ground first?”

“Nope, we’re good. Let’s just get started. I don’t like testing this close to true nightfall.”

Steven nodded, and braced himself for a moment, testing the direction of the wind. When he turned into the prevailing wind, the wings began to lift. He sprinted across the surface of the moon, and the wings lifted him into the air. With a few flaps of his arms, he rose several meters higher. He turned into the winds and rode a draft higher still, wings twitching to adjust to every movement of the air. “I can’t believe this.” His voice came through the speaker in Anita’s helmet clearly. “This is even better than before. I barely have to touch the controls. It’s like the suit is thinking for me.”

Anita looked at her tablet: every bit of data from the flight was being captured without incident. Everything within acceptable ranges, no significant uptick in blood pressure or heart rate beyond moderate exercise.

“Good! Try skimming along the surface for a bit, like you would for a close scan.”

“Roger that.”

Steven banked and drifted towards the surface of the planet, then entered a controlled dive, flying along the surface of the moon just above the rocks, almost close enough to reach out a hand and send dust flying. “Controls good. Requires some concentration, but I don’t feel like I’m fighting the wings. Pulling up now.”

“Looks good from here. All the data still coming through fine. Let’s do a high flight and then I think we’re done for the day.”

“You got it. Here we go.” Steven pulled away from the surface in a gradual climb until the wings had plenty of room, then flapped a few times to move into an updraft. A series of banks, flaps, and other maneuvers soon had him soaring far above the surface, almost out of sight in the dense atmosphere. The wind speeds measured significantly stronger at that height, but the suit—and its pilot—seemed to be having no trouble with it. This is really it, Anita thought. We’ve finally got the design we need to explore this moon the way it needs to be. We can learn it without destroying it.

“Looking good, from what I can see.” Anita turned to see Jay standing beside her, motioning to the scout in the air above them. “You’ve got decent winds today, so if it can stand up to that, I’d say you’re pretty set for most things the scouts are going to face, and then some.”

“Good to get your vote of confidence. I was going to send you the data later anyway, if you have time to look over it, see if there’s anything I missed.”

“Please do. It’s way less stressful to go over someone else’s work than to do mine.”

As the three stepped out of the airlock and into the suiting area, Anita pulled off her helmet, trying to hold down a rising sense of elation. Gotta stay steady, she told herself. This is just the beginning, and the suits still have to go through the full field test. Her thoughts were interrupted when she was swept up in a bearhug from Jay. They spun her around and said “You did it! This is huge!”

“It’s just a preliminary test, we still have to do the full field test and we can’t even start on that until the sun comes up in a few weeks--”

“DON’T CARE. Seriously. Celebrate. Let’s go get a drink. Steven, you too. You’re both going to be in the history books.”

“Now that’s some pretty severe hyperbole. People like us don’t make history books.”

“The really specific history books. About the exploration of the Saturn system. Those history books.”

Anita rolled her eyes, but couldn’t stop smiling. “Ok. Fine. Drinks for everybody.”

Steven hung up his suit and said, “Did I hear somebody say drinks? I’ve got a few dozen toasts in mind. Let’s go.”

Several hours later, Anita walked down the corridor to her lab. She didn’t think she was drunk, exactly, but she was a long way from sober. She opened the door and locked it behind her, then leaned against it to survey the lab. Even with the recent invasion, it was still her space. Her favorite place to be. The lab is where things happened, where the future of exploration could be decided. In a weird way, this lab was the most important place on the whole moon… She shook her head. Stop being silly. There are dozens of people here, all doing important work. It’s a group effort, not a singular heroic genius. You hate that trope anyway.

Still, it was true that this was a special space. Especially now that the new suits were ready to be created. She could take the whole team out on the field test, get data about how the suits worked with different shapes and sizes. The other 6 suits could easily be printed in the week before the sun came back up.

Anita was overwhelmed with a desire to look over the suit design again, just to revel in the decades of work that had gone into it, the blood, sweat, and tears to make it a reality. How could anyone look at that kind of work and see only a potential for profit? It made no sense…

Through the haze of alcohol and good spirits, a thought pricked at the back of her mind. Hadn’t she set something…? Yes, yes, the security systems. She’d never felt a need to check them in the past, but she’d been away from the lab most of the day, and all sorts of data had come in, and Holder might…

Shaking her head to clear it and quickly ordering a cup of coffee from the nearby machine, Anita sat down in front of the main display and tapped in the commands to bring up all the most recent security information, syncing the information chronologically.

The footage from the camera over the door showed an empty room for about three hours, but then the lab lights came up and Holder entered the room. As expected, that camera shut down immediately afterward. A few seconds later, the standard keylogger also went offline. But the hidden system kept recording. Anita could see Holder going deeper into her data, looking at everything that had come in from the flight suit test that morning. And then she saw a stream of data that she didn’t recognize. It certainly wasn’t part of the system she had written. This was data about mining opportunities, ground deposits, everything that Perses had wanted from her work. And they were getting it without her cooperation.

She pulled up the final flightsuit designs and the information that the printers had been working from. Sometime before the final print was done, Holder must have instructed the printer to change the design, to add elements she had never designed, to send the data to a part of the computer system that she would never have seen. She couldn’t even be sure what all had been changed on the designs, at least not without weeks of work.

We can’t go ahead with the final tests, she thought. Not with the suits printing like this. I can’t risk having that kind of info in their hands. I don’t trust them not to land mining equipment and just start taking what they want. We don’t have anything here that could stop them, and going through proper channels could take months.

Her thoughts raced, and Anita braced her head in her hands. Think, dammit, think. You’re an engineer. You know how to work a problem. Where is this information being stored? Where did your designs back up to? There’s my system, my backup… and the base backup. It’s on the main base computers.

I have to destroy every backup. I cannot leave a single bit of my work for them to find and use.

Heart sinking, she scanned her designs one final time, to see if any of it was salvageable. Too many tiny changes, too many interlinked systems… no. It wasn’t safe. She would have to rely on what she knew, what she’d learned from the many different iterations, tests, failures. She could rebuild it, but it would take time. And she would have to be completely cut off from any contact with Perses to do it.

Her tablet beeped, and Anita jumped. The notification for an urgent message scrolled across the screen, and she tapped to accept it.

“Dr. Sensharma, I’m so glad I caught you.” Steven’s face was close to the screen, and his voice was low but tense. “I got a little lost getting back to my apartment, and I think I heard something I was not intended to hear. You’re in a lot of danger right now, and we need to get you out.”