The Web of Titan, page 1
The
Web of
Titan
Tor Teen Books by Dom Testa
GALAHAD
The Comet’s Curse
The Web of Titan
The Cassini Code (forthcoming)
The Dark Zone (forthcoming)
A GALAHAD BOOK
The
Web of
Titan
Dom Testa
A Tom Doherty Associates Book
New York
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Table of Contents
Title
Dedication
Acknowledgments
Chapter 1
Chapter 2
Chapter 3
Chapter 4
Chapter 5
Chapter 6
Chapter 7
Chapter 8
Chapter 9
Chapter 10
Chapter 11
Chapter 12
Chapter 13
Chapter 14
Chapter 15
Chapter 16
Chapter 17
Chapter 18
Chapter 19
Chapter 20
Chapter 21
Chapter 22
Chapter 23
Chapter 24
Chapter 25
Chapter 26
Chapter 27
Chapter 28
Chapter 29
Chapter 30
Chapter 31
Chapter 32
Chapter 33
Chapter 34
Chapter 35
Chapter 36
Chapter 37
Chapter 38
Copyright
To my son, Dominic III
You’ll never know how much
of an inspiration you are to me.
Acknowledgments
So many people have gone the extra light-year to support the adventures in these pages, and they have my deepest appreciation.
Helisa Levinthal was such an avid believer and gave The Comet’s Curse the boost it needed to leave orbit. Heli, you’re the best!
Heather Duncan, Beth Wood, and Judy Bulow treated me like J. K., and an author never forgets that. I know I won’t.
Judith Briles and Mike Daniels took Galahad on its first road trip. Thank you!
Matt Lindsey taught me quite a few things about planetary science, keeping me—and the ship—on track. It’s so handy to know a rocket scientist.
Special thanks to Jen Byrne, Dorsey Moore, Jacques de Spoelberch, and Debra Gano, as well as the incredible people at Tor, including Kathleen Doherty, Susan Chang, and Dot Lin.
And last, but certainly not least, a huge thank you to every young person around the globe who got lost in the first adventure. This one’s for you.
One common trait people have carried through the years, with a few exceptions, is fear of the unknown. Humans need a comfort zone of the familiar, and when that’s shattered the automatic response is often dread, anxiety, or downright terror.
Take our good friends on the spacecraft called Galahad. Their entire mission is a voyage to the unknown, and it’s unfair to think that an ample dose of fear doesn’t ride along with them. Each day they move farther away from the warm embrace of Earth, and deeper into the infinite void of space.
If you missed their exciting first adventure, my obvious suggestion is to stop right now, find it, and read all about it. But if you want to wade in right here, I’ll try to catch you up.
What appeared at first to be an ordinary comet, named Bhaktul, instead turned out to be a killer. As Earth passed through Bhaktul’s tail, microscopic particles contaminated the atmosphere, leading to a grisly disease that would ultimately take down every adult on the planet. Kids were mostly immune from the ravages of the disease until around age eighteen, and nobody knew why. Worst of all, there wasn’t time to find out; Bhaktul was not only deadly, it was quick.
So when Dr. Wallace Zimmer, an eminent scientist from America’s West Coast, proposed building a large ship that could safely transport a few hundred kids to another world, most people supported him. A few, however, were violently opposed. They believed it was wrong to break families apart, even though that separation meant the sparing of hundreds of lives. In the end Zimmer’s project was successful, and an international crew consisting of 251 of the world’s brightest kids—all of them either fifteen or sixteen years old—launched in the ship christened Galahad. Its destination: two Earth-like planets circling a star called Eos.
The trip would be made in five years, but soon after the launch it seemed the crew would never even make it as far as Mars. An intruder aboard the ship threatened to destroy Galahad, and . . .
But wait. For the sake of those of you who have skipped the first adventure, known as The Comet’s Curse, it would spoil the excitement to tell you everything now. Read it, quickly, and then rejoin us, please.
Of course, if you’re new to our tale, and still reading—stubborn, aren’t you?—then you are probably curious about who I am. My name is Roc, and I’m the only nonhuman crew member of Galahad. To refer to me as simply a computer would do me a grave injustice. That’s like calling the Amazon or Nile Rivers “streams.” Or calling Mount Everest a “hill.” Or taking a fudge brownie, buried under a scoop of ice cream and ladled with chocolate syrup, nuts, whipped cream, and a cherry, and calling it “a snack.”
I’ve never had a fudge brownie, obviously, but I’ve seen your reactions when you eat it, and no snack ever caused that kind of ecstasy.
I oversee most of the basic operations of the ship and provide guidance to the ruling body known as the Council. Those five crew members, as diverse as the kids they represent, do a fine job on their own, but who would pass up advice from a mental wonder such as me?
The one thing I can’t advise them on is this other pesky emotion that seems to raise its head when teenagers are thrown together. You probably know exactly what I’m talking about. I’m aware of the drama that is taking place between several of our Council members, and I certainly don’t mind commenting on it. Who wouldn’t? I just hate to see these kids get their hearts trampled on, even though history seems to suggest that it’s going to happen, regardless of what you or I or anyone else says to them.
That pretty much sums up things to this point. As our latest adventure unfolds, Galahad is four months out from Earth, past Mars, past the asteroid belt, even past the orbit of Jupiter. The giant gas planet Saturn lies dead ahead.
And so does that nagging feeling I’ve had for quite a while. You wanna talk about fear of the unknown?
1
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
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.”
2
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.
