Read an Excerpt

The Web of Titan

A Galahad Book

Tom Doherty Associates

The storm raged quietly along the surface, a swirl of colors colliding, mixing, weaving. Layers of gas clouds tumbled across one another, their brilliant shades of red and purple highlighted by short bursts of lightning. Winds galloped along at more than a thousand miles per hour, stirring the atmosphere and keeping the roiling chaos churning in much the same way it had for billions of years.

Above it all drifted the jeweled rings, chunks of ice and dust that varied in size between grains of sand and ten-story buildings. Their dense orbits stretched out hundreds of thousands of miles, occasionally sparkling like a crown in the dim sunlight while casting a thin, dark shadow across the face of the storms. The tightly packed debris in the rings rolled along, nudging and shoving, forever keeping watch over the unruly gas giant below.

Saturn toiled along.

Scattered near and far, its squadron of moons maintained their dutiful orbits, subjects kneeling before the majesty of the king, tossed about by the immense gravitational tugs and seared by the overwhelming inferno of radiation. Several dozen of these minor bodies drifted near Saturn's dazzling rings, themselves a product of an earlier moon that had been shattered by a rogue asteroid or comet, the pieces now trapped in a mindless dance that circled the giant planet.

Keeping a respectful distance, and shrouded in a cloak of dense atmosphere, the largest of these moons obediently tracked through the vacuum of space, cutting a path that kept it clear of the rings. Dwarfed by the Herculean planet, it still laid claim to its own cloud system and weather patterns. Rather than water, its rivers and oceans were pools of liquid methane, carving channels and shorelines that dotted the surface, a surface impossible to see through the screen of haze and fog. An eerie orange glow masked the surface, bathing it in a dull light that made the large moon seem almost alive, breathing.

Titan.

As it circled Saturn, a route that took it a little more than two weeks to complete, Titan had its own companion in space. Right now, in an artificial orbit, a metallic pod shot around Titan, spinning slowly as it navigated, the light from Saturn occasionally glancing off its sides, mixing with the orange tint of the moon to form a ghostly shade. The smooth steel of the pod was uniform except for two small windows on one end, and exhaust ports on the other. During its slow, deliberate trek around the moon, block lettering could be made out on one side, along with small emblems of flags that lined up under a window. Inside it was dark, quiet, waiting.

It would not be quiet, nor waiting, much longer.

Lita Marques sat before the mirror in her room. She deftly tied the red ribbon into a knot, pulling her dark hair into a pony-tail and lifting it off her shoulders. She eyed the end result with a neutral glance, then gazed past her own reflection to the smiling girl who sat cross-legged on the end of Lita's bed. "All right, Channy, what's so funny?"

Galahad's Activities/Nutrition Director, clad in her usual bright yellow shorts and T-shirt that made a startling contrast against her chocolate-toned skin, replaced her grin with an expression of innocence. "Funny? Oh, nothing funny." She uncrossed her legs and scooted them over the edge of the bed. "Just wondering why you bother to make yourself look so pretty every day and then refuse to let me set you up with someone."

Lita's eyes rolled. "Why did I bother to ask?" She made one final appraisal in the mirror, then turned to face Channy Oakland. "I appreciate your intentions, Miss Social Butterfly, but I'm perfectly capable of meeting a boy on my own."

Channy raised one eyebrow. "Uh-huh. And quite a great job you've done in that area, too. We've been away from Earth for, what, four months now? Not counting your lunches with Ruben Chavez, you've been out with. ... hmm, a whopping total of zero boys." She leaned forward and picked a piece of fuzz off Lita's shirt. "And we won't count Ruben. You only talk with him because he's from Mexico, like you."

"Hey, I like Ruben. He's one of the nicest guys on the ship."

"Of course he is. But you know darned well what I'm talking about, and it's not chatting over an energy block in the cafeteria."

Lita shook her head. "Channy, do you think it would be possible for you to go two days without trying to play matchmaker? When I'm ready to see someone, I will. Besides," she added, "I haven't seen you exactly setting the shipboard romance gauge any higher."

"That's because I'm still in advance scouting mode right now," Channy said, winking. "I'm compiling data, see? Give me another few weeks and I'll set the hook."

"Right," Lita said. "Compiling data. I like that." She smiled at the Brit, then stood up and walked over to the built-in dresser and rummaged for a favorite bracelet. The dorm rooms on Galahad were relatively small but comfortable. Each crew member shared space with a roommate, but the work schedules were usually staggered to the point that each person was able to have time to themselves, a valuable commodity on a ship loaded with 251 passengers. Lita, one of Galahad's five Council members, was responsible for overseeing the ship's Clinic, or Sick House, as it was lovingly referred to by the crew. Her roommate, an outgoing fifteen-year-old from India, was currently at work in the Engineering section. Channy had stopped by to accompany Lita to dinner.

Finding the accessory she wanted, Lita slipped it over her wrist and turned back to face Channy. "Let me ask you something," she said. "Are you as curious about our upcoming appointment at Titan as you are about my love life?"

Channy shrugged. "Of course. I'm just not sure exactly what we're doing. I asked Gap about this ... this pod thing we're supposed to pick up, but he was pretty busy at the time and never really explained it to me. And good luck getting a straight answer from Roc about anything."

This brought a laugh to Lita's lips. "Oh, he'll shoot straight with you eventually. What exactly do you want to know?"

"Well," Channy said, "if this pod is supposed to have been launched by the scientists on the research station orbiting Titan, how come we haven't heard from them? Nobody seems to be saying much about that."

"Yeah, it's a little creepy," Lita agreed. "Thirty scientists and engineers, all working for a couple of years on a lonely outpost near Saturn, and suddenly nobody can get in touch with them." She walked over to the desk across the room and called out to the computer. "Roc?"

"Hello, Lita," came the very human-sounding reply. "What's on your mind?"

Lita couldn't hear the computer's voice without seeing the short, lovable genius who had programmed the machine. Roy Orzini, one of the champions of the Galahad project, had been responsible for outfitting the ship with a computer capable of controlling the life-support systems, lights, gravity, and other crucial functions of the spacecraft. As a bonus he instilled an actual personality into the thing; his personality, it turned out, for the talking computer soon demonstrated the same wit and sarcasm as his creator. Roy's Computer was soon shortened to RoyCo, and eventually to Roc. He was indispensable to the five Council members, almost an older brother along for the ride.

"I'm trying to explain to Channy about the pod we're picking up pretty soon," Lita said. "About the research station that has gone silent. But I'm not sure I really know exactly what it's all about."

Roc remained silent a moment, then said, "Well, if you love mysteries, you should really love this, because it's not just one thriller, but two: the disappearance of the research crew, and this metal pod we're supposed to snatch out of space."

"What's the story on the scientists?" Lita said, sitting down at the desk. "Who are these people anyway?"

"A combination of biologists, medical researchers, engineers, and technicians," said the computer. "Maybe not the group voted 'Most Likely to Party in Space,' but all brilliant in their fields. The research station is a small space station in orbit around Titan, the largest moon of Saturn, and one of the most important bodies in the solar system."

"Why?" Channy asked. "What makes Titan so special?"

"Life," Roc said. "Or, at least one of the best chances at finding it off the planet Earth. Titan, you see, has an atmosphere, and oceans."

"Oceans?" Channy said. "You're kidding."

"Not the kind you'd want to surf in, my friend," Roc said. "These are oceans of liquid methane. But bubbling around in that poisonous soup are a lot of the building blocks that eventually led to life on Earth billions of years ago. This research station has been studying Titan for several years."

Lita picked up a stylus pen from the desk and tapped her cheek with it while she listened to Roc. Now she paused and said, "What have they found?"

"That's just it," said the computer voice. "All of their reports have been labeled 'Classified,' and 'Top Secret.' Nobody knows what they've found. But apparently, at about the same time Galahad launched, something happened around Titan, and all contact with the scientists was lost. The last message was pretty garbled, didn't make a lot of sense. But it mentioned a small pod that was jettisoned into Titan's orbit, waiting."

"Waiting for what?" Channy said.

"Us."

The artificial sunlight threw its blanket of warmth across the fields. Row upon row of scientifically modified vegetables reached up to greet the incoming light waves and rustled in the mild, machine-induced breeze. An occasional bee would linger for a moment around a flowering plant, touching down long enough to complete its mission of pollination, and then casually move on. The scent of nutrient-rich soil mixed with the vibrant smell of crops ready for harvest, crops with a heavy bounty of perfectly engineered food.

The two agricultural domes sat atop the spacecraft Galahad, protective bubbles over acres of crops that fed the 251 passengers. Steel spokes overhead were meshed with hundreds of light diodes that mimicked the sun rays found in semitropical zones on Earth, so that during Galahad's "daylight" hours the farm area looked — and felt — like a typical sunny day in Florida. When the lights dimmed, each dome became transparent, ushering in a view of starlight that was beautiful beyond description.

Separate zones within the domes allowed for variations in temperature and moisture, which in turn allowed the crew members to rotate different crops that required different conditions. So it wasn't uncommon to find tropical fruit growing just a few hundred feet away from more robust fare, such as corn or wheat. The intricate maze of "underground" irrigation pipes was computer controlled, recycling the proper amount of moisture to each zone. Water naturally evaporated from the plants, and was captured by special absorption vents in the steel mesh of the domes.

The life cycle of Galahad's farms was engineered and programmed to run automatically ... in a perfect world. But no matter how much planning and design was built in, it still needed human nurturing to truly hum. Bon Hartsfield was the unquestioned genius on board who made the farms not only work, but also thrive. Breakdowns were not, however, tolerated well.

The son of a farmer in Skane, Sweden, Bon had spent thousands of hours toiling in his father's fields, learning firsthand what it took to cultivate a strong harvest. Sweat, an aching back, and fingers that never really shed the grime were all ingredients needed to produce a healthy crop. There were no days off, his father insisted. No days off.

The perfection his father had demanded was instilled in the blond Swede, which tempered his personality, painting him as surly and sour. His tough outer shell had been penetrated only once: a brief, emotionally charged moment with Triana Martell, Galahad's Council Leader, shortly after their launch. Months had passed since then, with neither having the courage to address the encounter, or perhaps waiting anxiously for the other to make a move.

But Triana wasn't on his mind at the moment, at least not front and center. Right now his pale blue eyes were like ice on fire. Standing with hands on hips, surrounded by row upon row of grain crops, he stared at the small gray box tucked away in the plants. It almost reached Bon's knees, with a large plastic pipe attached on one side, and four smaller tubes jutting out the opposite end and disappearing into the soil. A small fan on top of the box kept it ventilated, while a digital display slowly ticked off numbers. An access panel on the side of the box lay open, revealing a complex mixture of circuits and wires. It was the contents of the panel that had captured Bon's attention for the last hour and fueled his temper.

Two of his assistants stood facing him, a boy and a girl, neither wanting to say anything. It had already been an ugly morning.

"Who was the last person to make an adjustment?" Bon finally said.

The boy shifted from one foot to the other. "Uh, me," he said, keeping his eyes on the gray box rather than Bon. "That was Tuesday afternoon, probably around, uh, one o'clock."

"And you didn't notice it then?"

The boy shifted again. "Uh, no."

Bon glared at him. "So for the last six days — at least six days we know of — this entire section has barely been getting a trickle of water. Six days."

The girl put her hands in her pockets and moved a small dirt clod around with her foot. "I was with him that day, and I ... I didn't notice it, either. I guess ... I guess we were so used to it being normal that we probably didn't think that it was —"

"Didn't think," Bon said, his voice rising. "It's obvious you didn't think, and now we not only have to get it fixed, we have to hand water this entire section, and fast. Starting right now."

Both assistants kept their eyes down but nodded.

Bon's eyes continued to rage as his scowl intensified. "From now on," he said, "new rule: all water recycling pump stations are checked alone. No teams, no pals, no gabbing. You guys are so busy talking and laughing you're not paying attention to your job. And now this crop is in danger." He pulled a plant toward him, streaks of brown beginning to show in one of the leaves. "Look at this."

The two workers glanced up at the plant in his hand, then returned their gaze to the ground. "Get the word out," Bon said. "Now. I mean right now. I want every recycling station checked twice, and no more teams."

He turned to make his way back to his office near the entrance to the dome, then stopped and looked back at the boy and girl. "And also let everyone know we're having a mandatory meeting this afternoon, four o'clock." He stormed through the field, onto the path that led to his office, leaving the two assistants to scramble away on their new assignments.

Before walking into his office, Bon stamped his feet a couple of times to shake the dirt off his boots. The room was small and cramped, with beige walls on one side and floor-to-ceiling windows on the other, looking out over the crops in the first dome. A desk sat along the back wall, covered in folders and data discs. There were no personal items on the desk or walls, no warm touches. The lights were low, complemented by the artificial sunlight that streamed in through the windows. Two ceiling vents whispered with the sound of circulating air.

Bon crossed to his desk and pulled up a file on his computer, flicking through the information on page after page, absorbing the data. He pushed his long blond hair back out of his face and scribbled a few notes on his work pad, his scowl never resting. After a couple of minutes he punched the intercom on the desk and waited for the connection with Galahad's Council Leader.

Triana Martell's voice finally came through the speaker. "Hi, Bon. What's up?"

"I'll tell you what's up," he said, his voice a low growl. "These water recycling pumps are crashing. Again."

Triana sounded weary. "Oh, no. How many this time?"

"Two that we found this morning. One that might have been down for almost a week. That makes four in the last two weeks. We're going to start some hand watering on a couple of sections until we get this worked out."

"What can I do to help?" Triana said.

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Excerpted from The Web of Titan by Dom Testa. Copyright © 2006 Dom Testa. Excerpted by permission of Tom Doherty Associates.
All rights reserved. No part of this excerpt may be reproduced or reprinted without permission in writing from the publisher.
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