Quarantine by William Hayashi

Author:William Hayashi [Hayashi, William]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Cosby Media Production
Published: 2020-04-06T22:00:00+00:00

* * *

The Titan mission team was up early the next morning, too excited to sleep. When everyone was dressed and had eaten, Piper called the other jumper and led the briefing.

“We caught a break; the gravitational survey will be completed by midday. Once all the data has been transmitted back to the hab, I’ll notify the Ops team we’re descending into the atmosphere. Ben and I have decided to hold at fifty miles above the surface to begin a visual survey of the land. We’ll be looking for a spot on the shore of one of the lakes where we can collect as diverse number of samples as possible.

“EVA protocol is simple, no one ventures outside without a partner, and that you remain no farther than ten meters away from your partner. The gravity is less than that of the moon. Now that we’re here I’m a little pissed off I didn’t think to train in our suits under Titan’s surface gravity before we left. That was a stupid mistake on my part,” she said, shaking her head.

“Hey, we all overlooked it. Hell, I should have thought of it given how my dad was when they all first landed on the moon. Let’s shorten the distance we stray from each other to a couple of meters, I’ll feel a lot better,” confessed Benjamin.

“And under no circumstances will either jumper be without a pilot aboard. Since we’ve all had pilot’s training, any one of us can be on the surface, but even in an emergency, no one leaves either of these ships unmanned,” commanded Piper.

For the next few hours, while waiting for the gravitational survey to complete, both jumper crews were pouring over video of the surface, much of it obscured by the cloudy atmosphere. Lois was trying to correlate denser readings from the gravitational survey. Gravity readings showed parts of the moon where the density of the rock below the surface was greater, indicating where portions of the moon’s core were concentrated closer to the surface.

Ultimately, they chose a location on the shore of one of the hydrocarbon lakes not far from Titan’s south pole. There were some darker features that piqued their curiosity. Titan was full of unexpected anomalies, it had a nitrogen atmosphere, the other constituents were minuscule in comparison. Their second waypoint on the surface was a huge, five-hundred-kilometer river in the north, close to the other pole. Perhaps there would be some current flow erosion exposing many different layers of soil, saving them the effort of digging into the ground for samples, although they did bring a portable excavator modeled on those used to create their underground colony on the moon.

This was one of the first serious surface exploration missions the colonists had undertaken, to be followed by the mission to Jupiter’s moons. Peanut’s astrophysics team was on the verge of manned exploration of a dimension completely outside their universe.

What America squandered in its racism, in its misogyny, in its perpetual class struggles was incalculable.

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