

Guardian Tempest

By Ronan Frost

Copyright 2017 Ronan Frost

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Chapter One

Mica stood nose to the glass, eyes focussed into the distance, hues of the spectrum shifting across her face. Roiling clouds massed over the sere landscape, bellies gorged with lightning. Such was the illusion of depth she could imagine she was looking out of an actual window and forget for the moment she was under twenty storeys of fractured rock.

The lights in the room gave a flicker, and the ever-present background hum of airflow stuttered. Mica's gaze shifted focus; behind her, in the reflection from the glass, the open maw of her pod waited.

Something warm and soft brushed up against her leg and she jumped, flustered and suddenly embarrassed.

"How did you get in here?"

The cat seated himself calmly upon the carpet, tail wrapped around his legs. His tiny jaw remained firmly closed, yet it was obvious from his aspect that he spoke the words sounding in her head.

"Are you going under?"

"Do I have a choice?"

Arran licked one paw in a study of detached indifference. "There's always a way."

Mica laughed, then instantly regretted it. She could practically feel the haunches rise on Arran's back; no cat likes being laughed at, even those ones that are just a bunch of wiring, silicon chips and servo motors. Mica dropped into a crouch, bringing her face-to-face with the creature, cupping her hand tenderly beneath his chin.

"I've done all I can."

Arran shook her hand away, walking a slow pacing circle around Mica, evaluating her from all angles. Satisfied, he sat again, and said in that voice in her head:

"Stay with me."

"For the entire winter?" Mica gave a laugh. "There's no way _she_ would allow it."

With eerie co-incidence the wall-screen displaying the stormy landscape shrunk to a pinpoint and vanished, as if their words were overheard. Mica found herself confronted by her own reflection upon the blankness; her white skin, as flawless and pale as a geisha, stretched tight over bones at her shoulders and neck. How long had it been since she last slept? Unnerved, she drew the neck of her gauze gown tighter and put her back to the apparition.

"Time for me to go." Mica closed her eyes and heard the blood in her ears.

"Goodbye, Mica."

The sound of her name, spoken with such tenderness, caught her hard in some vulnerable spot deep in her chest and her eyes sprang open. She reached down and caught Arran about the midsection, lifting him so that she may look deep into the yellow moons of his eyes, searching for a glimpse of the ghost within those slashed pupils of night.

Was this just Arran, or something more?

Her tongue felt suddenly dry and thick in her mouth. Arran continued to stare implacably back at her.

No. She'd run enough tests. She was fooling herself.

With firm resolve she carried Arran, hanging with limbs extended, towards the door.

"Take good care of yourself while I'm gone," she said as she put him down. "When winter is over, we're going home."

Arran stretched, forelegs out and claws raking the carpet, tiny mouth yawning, his attention seemingly elsewhere already. Mica hesitated, then caught herself, shutting down that fluttering feeling deep and low in her gut. She stepped backward and closed the door between them before she could have second thoughts, then crossed the carpet in two long strides in a gait well practiced in the low gravity. Her pod waited upon its rails, contoured to her form like a well-worn pair of shoes, hood hinged open, a gleaming capsule of glass and silver.

Mica sat upon the lip of her pod, hands in her face, feeling the visceral enormity of her loss wash through her, the pain hitting her like something very real and very physical. In the dimness there was no sense of the passage of time as she breathed, expanding her chest against the weight that threatened to crush it.

She became aware of a soft beeping and shook her head, drawing her from her reverie and bringing herself back to the present. She straightened and reached a hand behind and lifted the tangle of plastic tubing from the bed of the pod, holding the strap in one outstretched hand and letting the rest dangle like some rubbery sea creature. She strapped the device about her forearm, with the mechanism that would fire the needle poised just inside the crook of her elbow, and the beeping noise stopped.

With stiff motions Mica swung one leg and then the other into the pod, remaining sitting upright, fists clenched tight with the strength of her loss and guilt, raised to her temples as if she could wrench the gossamer thread of thought from her mind. Her mind continued to swoon into the cloying mire, working way deeper and deeper yet not going anywhere for all its dodging and linking and nagging. She marvelled, in a kind of dread fascination, how a jump in the flow of life can shift everything, the course of the river downstream now running along an entirely different bed. She felt herself a weakened husk, alone and floating, the very beating pulse of her thoughts a scarlet salt dissolving into that liquid vastness.

Who was she, now that it was all over?

Suddenly, the humming of air conditioning ran down, and the new silence that fell was suddenly unsettling; ominously heavy and infinitely lonely. Her skin rose in a rash of goose-bumps all over her body. Mica lay back into the chill cushions that pressed her shoulders inwards, as snug as a coffin. The needle shot into her forearm and the trailing plastic tubes filled in arcing dance with the bright red flow of arterial blood. The lid eased closed, and the pod withdrew into the rear wall along rails with a gentle side-to-side railway car sway.

Through the partially transparent hood Mica saw the carpeted room cupped by the void, a framed window of reducing light, as her pod drew back into the silo. A brief twinge from her eardrums signaled the rising air pressure within the pod. To reduce psychological stress, the process had been designed to be fast, and before she could even process the discomfort in her ears, the spark of her being folded into velvet nothingness.

Chapter Two

Deep sleep was a misnomer; it was nothing like sleep. Regaining consciousness felt like the silver scissors of anesthesia had been taken to the timeline of her memories, some indeterminate length removed, and the two ends of the spool, slightly mismatched, spliced together. What remaining between was nothing, no fading pieces of dreams, no sense of time passed; it was falling hard into reality.

Gathering together wretched shreds of sensation she became aware of the damp press of cloying material under her skin, tacky with old sweat, and a bright light that screamed rusty nails inside her skull. There was an emptiness in her chest, that feeling of a missed step in the dark. No matter how many times she woke from deep sleep that feeling of a lack of heartbeat never got any better.

Thump.

She could have sworn she felt the treacle of her blood squeeze through her circulatory system with the strained beat of her awakened heart, long emptied, now filling with blood.

_Thump_.

The sound boomed from inside her head, against her eardrums, throbbing against her temples.

Thump... thump...

Her heartbeat was accelerating now, picking up pace like a flagging runner at last spying the finishing line and trying to find stride. She lay there for some time, eyes squeezed tight against the acid-whiteness of the lights that some genius had programmed for the wake cycle of the pod.

With a soft electronic chime, the plastic hood of her pod slid popped, the rubber seals making a sucking crusty sound. She waited for some time before opening her eyes, laying there and tasting the stale heaviness to the air, and the studying feeling that somehow something was not right.

She directed her mote-thought into the nearby space. Soft relays clicked overhead in response and the silence of the room lifted. The air moved, cool at first, but warmed within a span of seconds. The blaring white lights in her pod faded and the room lights bled into gentle, natural daylight hues.

Mica took in vital stats from her mote-feed. The base was quiet. So far, only a handful of people were awake. Yet something in that silence felt wrong, out of joint, as if she had peeked behind the scenes of a puppet show and seen the wires hanging slack.

Eiji.

The urge to vomit came upon her suddenly, her body reacting at a primal level that overrode conscious thought, guts twisting into a ball clawing up the constriction of her throat. Mica tore the strapping and needle from her arm, discarding it in a heap towards the foot of her pod, and stumbled out like a loose-limbed corpse, her bare soles flattening lightly against the carpet, barking her shin against the doorway into the adjoining shower room. Her whole body convulsed as she doubled over into the stall, yet all that came from her hanging jaw were strings of spittle and the foul taste of stomach acid. In that space of thought-emptying dizziness she felt she were merely a by-product, a means to an end to her enteric nervous system. Her mind itself was nothing but a passenger, helpless and useless.

The tiles of the shower room were cool beneath her hands. The spasms eased, and Mica pressed her fingers to her temples, trying to centre herself, to place the facts in her mind.

Seven earth-years had passed. Winter was over. The thought gave her some consolation; sooner or later the Governess had to relent and let her go, even though the trip to Titan was theoretically a one-way ticket.

The shower activated automatically and she walked into the rising clouds of steam, dropping her light gown at her feet, the fine jets of water slicking back the jet black bob of her hair, eyes closed in forced relaxation.

The flow suddenly spluttered, weakening, and then came out ice cold. Mica jumped away cursing, switching off the tap with a mote command and retrieving her gown from where it had fallen. There was no denying it - something was not right.

Returning to the pod room she hoped to find at least two or three people defrosted, yet oddly all was as she had left it. Her pod remained open, the carpet at the base stained with the growing puddle of water condensing as it warmed. It should have retracted by now, giving room for the next pod to emerge and thaw, yet nothing stirred in the vast machinery behind the wall. The veins on the sides of her head gave an aching throb and the room started sway, forcing her to close her eyes until the dizzy spell passed. Her stomach gave a twinge, diaphragm muscles feeling like overstretched elastic. She drew the collar of her gown tighter as she leant forward over the top of her pod. With the flat of her hand against the back wall she stuck her head into the small space leading back into the vast space of the silo. The chill ached in her lungs as she breathed a hint of the cryogenic air within.

"Hey!" she croaked, slapping her palm against the wall. "Hey! Wake up!"

She called up image enhancements, saw the unstirring outlines of the three hundred other pods within like berries upon a stem within that heavy, frigid air, all as silent and unmoving as corpses. She gave a shiver, and a feeling came over her that this was all somehow a strange dream.

She withdrew her head and strode to the centre of the room, issuing a mote-thought, and the full-wall display flickered into life. In stark contrast to the colourful vista of the landscape she had witnessed before going into deep sleep, this time there was nothing but racing shadows of black upon heavier black, beads of wet vapour carried by fierce winds jumping in stop-start motion across the screen.

By chance, Mica saw the date, and her attention doubled back, focussed in.

Four months, two weeks, one day and seven hours since she had gone under.

Titan's seven-year winter was only just beginning.

A graph appeared offset from her central line of sight, fixed to her vision like an afterimage of the sun, displaying several spiked traces signalling confusion and rising panic in her brain chemistry. Mica forced herself to calm, focussing on deep breaths, a conscious relaxation before rising stress levels triggered the automatic procedure that would flood her bloodstream with neutralizing chemicals. It was old-fashioned of her, but dammit, at her age she was entitled to her quirks; she did not want to be calmly sharp and alert, buzzed up or wound down as the program saw fit - she wanted to be herself.

She called for a feed from Earth. The channel was disconcertingly empty, the silence of a bucket of binary zeroes.

A distant shudder echoed through the structure, transmitted through the carpet and the soles of her feet, a thrumming up her spine. Instinctively she drew her mind back into herself, her own body somehow feeling alien to her, her ears stuffed with cotton wads, senses dulled. The walls in her room suddenly felt claustrophobically close, and more than ever she felt their vast, impossible distance from Earth.

Mica checked the status map, saw Galen's trace, and called the laboratory.

The room lights dropped and a low hum sounded in her ears, a small grey sphere appearing in the centre of the room, spinning with pulsar rapidity, a chink in its core emitting a lighthouse beam of light that strobed the room. In a moment it resolved itself into the acronym of Fujino Heavy Industries, glowing with a surge of emphatic and granite-carved boldness before fading away into a three-dimensional image of a man seated upon a long desk that ran outwards, fading into ethereal nothingness out of the camera's view.

Robin Galen looked up.

"Dr Fischer?"

Mica composed herself and forced a smile. Her first attempt at speech faltered and she coughed and tried again.

"Good morning, Galen."

"What are you doing awake? I was informed that not scheduled for thawing until after winter."

"I know. My pod, something happened. A malfunction, I think."

There was a moment's delay, Galen's brow furrowing.

"I see. I hope everything is okay."

"I'm not sure. Galen, is there something wrong with the Guardian Tempest?"

Galen's reply was a long time in coming.

"I'm sorry, you did retire, Mica. As such, you are no longer classified as operational staff of this lab. I can't give you any information."

You snivelling little sycophant. Mica bit down on the sudden acidity, withholding her anger lest her thought bleed into the mote-channel.

"It was my lab."

"Not anymore." Galen smiled indulgently and a little condescendingly.

"And you are welcome to it. But one favour, just this one, for everything that I've given you."

"Given? I worked just as hard as –"

"Galen, just tell me. Is there something going on?"

"Something? Like what?"

"Something... a little off."

Galen drew in breath and chewed on his lower lip as he shrugged. "Nothing particularly unusual. We've lost contact with Earth a little earlier than expected."

"Even the long range sensors?"

"Everything is under. The storms have become extremely strong."

"And the power? What's going on, why is it so unstable?"

"A couple of days ago the fusion plant suffered a damage from a wind strike. It's going to be offline until the Icarus gets here."

"And when is that?"

"Come on Doctor Fischer, you're wasting my time."

"You've lost it, haven't you?"

"Look, even if the Icarus doesn't show, we can still make the base work – we have planned for exactly this scenario. We have more than enough food to last decades, plus we can grow proteins to last indefinitely. We have a team working on jury rigging a backup fission plant. This place was designed to handle everything short of a direct meteor strike, and even then it would probably keep on limping along until help could come along. Wait a moment." Galen's eyes switched focus, watching a projection off-screen. His mouth moved and he gave a brief nod, then his gaze switched back to Mica. "Look, I'm getting a message from the Governess, she's been eavesdropping. She wants you to go back on ice immediately."

"I was just about to," said Mica, unable to keep the curtness from her voice. "Sorry to disturb you."

"Oh, and Doctor Fischer?" asked Galen. "Please, don't call here again. This is no longer your lab."

"Goodbye Galen," said Mica, and terminated the connection, the image dissolving into particulates funnelling into a central vortex.

"You bloodsucking parasite," she said into the empty room.

Mica sat for a moment in the freshly silent emptiness with her eyes closed, then shook her mind of the mystery. Whatever was going on, she wanted no part in it. She hugged her gown tighter about her chest, staggering back to her pod where it still sat waiting, humming quietly to itself like an old-fashioned refrigerator. A display panel lit across the board with a row of green. Whatever had caused the malfunction appeared to have been rectified.

Mica let out a breath and steadied herself upon the hood of the pod, feeling the vibration through the palms of her hands. She opened her eyes, head still hanging between her shoulders, and noticed something at the base of the pod, near the manufacturer logo. Her eyes narrowed as she leant forward, tucking strands of her bobbed hair behind her ear, studying the handwriting scrawled in a tight bunch in blue marker pen. She resisted the instinct to upload the image to the mote network for image enhancement; it hadn't been mote-fed to her, so someone had gone to the trouble of keeping it out of the eyes of the Governess.

Meet me in HC-3, she read in a quiet whisper to herself. She knew right away what the letters referred to. One of the surface airlocks.

The message was written low upon the hood, as if, she thought dryly, a pen had been held within the awkward forepaws of an android cat standing upon hind legs. She gave a sharp exhalation and dug her fingers into the corners of her eyes. Well, the 'pod malfunction' was explained now \- that flea-ridden piece of mech garbage had woken her!

What the hell was he thinking?

It wasn't in his programming to panic when things started to go sour, but lately he'd started take fuzzy adaptive logic to the extreme. She laughed sourly, thinking that even his handwriting had gone to hell.

If it was really computer logic, and not something... other?

Mica shook her head savagely, telling herself it was a false hope, but she couldn't help but cling to it.

She closed her eyes and called up the mote feed for an active map of the entire base. It appeared in her mind's eye, a wire-framed schematic of the Guardian Tempest; two great bores straight down into the rock of Titan. At the base of the larger bore, surrounding the docking bay, was a ring of tunnels and habitation rooms, with only a handful of markers indicating active personnel. Below the hab levels spread the exploratory roots of the mining tunnels branching like the roots of a tree, empty for the moment save for automated and remotely operated diggers. Running parallel to the central bore was the sleepers silo; self-contained and at minus one hundred and eighty degrees, all was quiet within, a cluster of pale blue personnel markers. Mica twisted the map in her mind and zoomed topside. Sure enough, she found a marker near an upper airlock with his ID tag switched off.

Did Arran seriously expect her to go running off after him?

She had to let it go. One thing was for damned sure, she thought, there was no way in hell she was going.

Chapter Three

She stood before the stencilled lettering of the airlock door, drawing together her strength as she inhaled and held the breath. One minute, she promised herself. One minute for the Arran to explain himself.

This close to the surface, nothing was designed for aesthetics: exposed piping, grease-stained where it had leaked around joints; elevated catwalks over spools of tangled wiring; broken equipment sulking in the shadows, awaiting repairs that never came. Over a score of years, the corridors had taken on a patchwork of serviceability of their very own, devolving to bare functionality, a form documented in no manual. The air rang with fury of the gale now thrashing so very close; a canned banshee howl eerie in this lonely place. The entire floor under her boots bucked and shook despite deep affixing bolts plunged into the soil.

She shivered, the slimline battery pack of her helicasuit on near-maximum power, and her face, the only flesh exposed, felt that painful chill. Her breath came out in thick clouds of vapour that rose to the ceiling like some over-boiled kettle, the air heavy with oils and exhaust.

How she had found the strength to fit her helicasuit, strap on boots, and navigate through the labyrinth was beyond her; she was a walker among the sleepers, and did not belong. It had seemed like crawling through the abandoned appendages of some a gigantic insect shell, the echoing shell of corridors with lights humming on at her approach and dimming in her wake like dancing phosphoresce. Even the rise up the inside edge of the central bore had chilled her, for the windows of the elevator looked out upon the yawning blackness marked only occasionally by a strip of guide lighting. Everything had been locked down and secured for winter, and no more spacecraft would be lowered down to the hangers for years.

Now, standing here in one of the radial arms of the upper corridors, one hand upon the wall for support, she couldn't tell which was worse; the shaking of the tube tossed about by the storm, or the weak trembling in her legs. It had been a long time since she'd eaten anything. Months, in fact. The foreboding bloated her mind, the guilty knowledge that she should not be here, and for a moment she almost turned back for her sleep pod. It was only Arran's words that came back to her and held her, and again came that thought that perhaps they were not the actions of a mech.

She looked around, feeling like a sleepwalker suddenly awakened, not knowing how long she had been standing like a zombie, staring at the closed airlock. Her lips felt alien and apart from her, dry and cracked as she breathed the frigid air. Mica found herself hitting the squat red button to the side of the airlock with the flat of her hand in a moment of dramatic finality.

Nothing happened.

She hit it again, harder. This time it blinked green, and the door sections split into four and retracted like the jaws of some metallic kaiju. The blast of noise was a physical force, a dumping wave of Brownian motion. Her helicasuit thrummed as it kicked in another useless notch as the temperature plummeted.

She expected to find Arran, sitting neatly with tail wrapped about his legs waiting. Instead, there was a man of squat and powerful build perched upon a crate with his back to her, bent over some task, in a helicasuit that was clean but well worn, scuffed around the seams. The hair on the back of his head was close cropped, greying at the temples, despite the anti-aging procedures he had retained that, perhaps by choice, perhaps thinking it lent him some air of maturity. He peered over his shoulder as the door opened, his eyes sparkling without the least trace of surprise.

"Doctor Fischer!" the man exclaimed, smiling. "At last! Do come in, come in. Please excuse me for not standing, I'm in the middle of something."

Mica stepped into the confines of the airlock. Dimly lit, the walls were painted in a dark green hue, with a row of gaunt helicasuits dangling like larvae from pegs upon the wall, and matching plexi-helmets hanging over them. It was not a big space, made smaller by the stacks of metallic cartridge crates and seemingly haphazard wiring tracing across the floor.

The empath mote feed was patchy here so Mica had to raise her voice to a hoarse shout over the swell of noise. "Who are you?"

"Sebastian Thaler. We have met." His lips raised in the slightest of secret of smiles as he spoke.

Mica shook her head. She knew him, as she must, but only in passing, a face in the crowd. There was nothing memorable to his features. "I'm not good with people."

Thaler laughed once. "Oh, we've met, believe me. And Arran did mention you would come, but I'm afraid you've just missed him. He really couldn't wait any longer and roped me into this."

"I don't understand, what's going on?"

Thaler had his back to her again as he tapped away at the tablet he had propped up upon a makeshift desk of stacked cases. "Please, come in," he said.

Mica took another step forward and the jaws of airlock closed at her back, a symbolic severance from the safety of the base, and she was suddenly aware that only a single door separated her from the atmosphere of Titan.

"Where is he?" She couldn't help it, but her words faltered and cracked over the last word.

"He didn't tell you?"

Mica clench her jaw into a firm line, irritated beyond reason by his clipped and ostensibly polite tone.

"No," she said.

"You know the power is failing?"

"Answer my question."

"Without power, the drilling operation will have to be scaled back, pushing back the timeline for at least three or four years."

"I know the fusion plant is out, but we have the backup."

"True enough," nodded Thaler, tilting his head, his deep-set eyes dancing. Somehow, that made her nervous.

"What is it? Dammit, would you look at me? What the hell is going on?"

"There's something the Governess isn't letting on. The backup isn't enough. We need repairs. Repairs only the Icarus can bring."

"And soon enough we'll have her. Now tell me where the hell Arran is!"

"We have no comms beacon to guide her down. The mainframe computer has deduced the problem is a physical – the dish is out of alignment. If we can't get the Icarus down soon, there'll be a power shortage and possibility of delaying the wake cycle until next summer. The Governess already has the plans in place. Please, if you will excuse me..." Thaler returned to his tablet, tapping at the keys, occasionally bringing up something visible only to his eyes via his retinal implants and swiping this way and that.

"What are you talking about? A shutdown for an entire Saturn year?"

"Everyone will be kept on ice... Without consent," added Thaler.

"Twenty-nine years?"

"There are number of issues still up in the air, nothing is decided yet, and so far, there's nothing to say she'll do it." Thaler spared a quick glance up at her. "Yet."

"So what is Arran doing?"

"He decided to try the beacon in the Haustorium. It's got better range and –"

"The tunnel is blocked. The landslide."

"Indeed. And will be for some time I would imagine."

"Then how can he possibly get there?"

Thaler simply raised his brows and with a darting of his eyes indicated towards the airlock. Mica's eyes traced the slender white tether cord that led from the boxes and out through a sealed outer port. She felt a moment of sudden knowledge, and in her shock couldn't help her voice from rising to a shrill curse.

"It's winter!"

Thaler nodded and gave her a limp smile that did not reach his eyes. "He calculated the timing, it gave him fifteen minutes between peaks of the storm. Forecasts are only set to worsen, he feared this was his last chance."

The tether cord snaking through the sealed port in the hull gave a shudder and fed out a few more metres.

"The Governess –"

"Would never allow it, that's right. Arran has been running in stand-alone mode, independent of the mainframe and of the Governess. He needs someone to rig the airlock and coordinate the console, and when he couldn't get you in time, he called me in, told me that you might be coming along later." Thaler's attention was still on the console but she could see his lips rise in a smile. "So here we are."

"You goddamn fool! There's no way you should have let him go!"

Thaler shrugged. "He's rigged himself up into a TIG. He's mobile enough." Then, as a sober afterthought, he added, "Although without the data link to the mainframe his inbuilt control chips don't provide much in the way of fine motor control skills..."

"I don't get it. Why did he go? So what if we have to sit tight a little longer? The models predict the storms peak at the equinox, if we wait –"

"We only have limited statistics. If it's anything like last winter, then things will only get worse."

"It's not worth the risk!"

Thaler stopped and looked hurt.

"It was his idea. He wants to do this, before we have no other choice." His eyes softened. "Look, I know you two may have formed some... relationship. But as soon as you were on ice, he has other responsibilities. He's just a mech."

"You know nothing."

"He's doing fine so far." Thaler indulged her with a warm smile. "The short-wave comms have been washed out, but he's almost to the Haustorium. I've got a land-line. Would you like me to patch him through to you?"

"Damn right I would."

"You'll need to give me access to your mote." Thaler glanced significantly towards the corner of the airlock ceiling. "Don't worry, precautions have been taken. You won't be picked up here. Not yet, anyway."

She did so, and a moment later the feed into the auditory processing part of her brain crackled into life, a shower of white noise that, with her eyes closed and mind focussed, sounded like the sound of rain lashing against stone.

"Arran?" she tried.

"Give him a minute," Thaler said, feeding out a little more of the tether like some fisherman playing out line to a game fish.

There was a break in the static, a few clicks, then silence.

"Arran, Arran, is that you? I can't hear you!" said Mica, her voice almost breaking. "Get back, I repeat, get back!" She turned to glare at Thaler. "If it's a landline, why is it so crappy?"

Thaler hunched over the tablet, his hands busy pushing and flicking away commands visible only to his eyes. "Precipitation static. Flying ice and dust particles creating an electrical charge on the line, discharging, swamping the signals. Should have used a cable with thicker shielding..."

Mica glared at Thaler. "Bring him back, haul on that line and drag him if you have to."

"He's doing okay," Thaler said, so softly Mica barely heard him. "Look, see, I'm starting to get a signal."

Mica ignored him, grabbing a loop of the line. "You've got thirty seconds. After that, I'm going to start bringing him in."

Thaler did not answer. She tensed herself, bracing her feet against ridges in the airlock door, the tether in both hands, high under her right arm as if she were about to face off in a tug-of-war. The wind continued to shake and roar, the floor at her feet vibrating.

"TTM pings starting to come back..." Thaler said, holding up the flat of his palm.

Mica checked the elapsed time on her retinal display, exasperated that only a handful of seconds had crawled past.

"No more. That's it Thaler, time's up!"

"No wait, not yet. You'll put him out of balance. Wait... Wait..."

"Arran," Mica shouted, not sure if the mic link was still on, suspicious that Thaler had switched it off. "I'm pulling you back now."

The audio feed was static in her head.

"Give him a few more seconds, please."

She held on, holding that pose, swooning in fear and desperation. And then a familiar voice, nebulous yet as clear and private as one's own thoughts came into her mind.

"Mica. You came. Thank you."

"Arran! Thank God! What the hell are you doing?"

"I can fix the dish."

"Forget the goddamn radar. Get back here, right now. That's a direct command."

"It's close. It won't take long, please, don't worry. I've got it under control."

"No, get back here, right now! Hey, do you hear me? Arran?" She glanced over at Thaler's open console, watching the darkening regions upon the display.

Thaler raised the fingers of his hand in warning.

"I'm picking up something. A big gust. Hold tight!"

The line in Mica's hands suddenly tautened and yanked her forward and Thaler along with her, spilling his makeshift desk and console, both of them tangling together as the tether line slipped through her gloved hands with a rapid zipping noise, spooling out so rapidly it thrashed and writhed like a thing alive.

Just as suddenly as it had started, the line went slack, limp and dead in their hands. Mica moved without conscious thought. A series of quick darting steps and she was at the rack by the wall and somehow a helmet was in her hands, working and flipping it over. Her feet, she was surprised to note in some far off corner of her mind, were steady beneath her as she jammed the helmet over her head in a double-handed overarm action. Sounds became muted within the helmet, the world removed a step. Seals locked into place and the faceplate steamed momentarily with the puff of compressed air.

With quick steps she crossed to the far side of the airlock, hearing Thaler give some wordless cry of alarm and scrambling for his own helmet as she palmed the outer lock pad. The lock triggered a shrill alarm, Mica's focus pared down into a tight beam such that she hardly noticed it, the doors parting and a stinging rush of clumped hydrocarbon polymer particles that made up the atmosphere of Titan flooding into the airlock, shoving her backwards a score of paces like a firm hand upon her chest.

Thaler, now helmeted, lurched about like a drunkard, shouting some mangled words of warning that came through the mote feed. Automatic seals hissed and red strobe lights launched with alacrity into a mad flashing upon the walls, the siren now completely drowned by the roaring wind. Mica fought towards the airlock and did not even pause at the threshold, throwing herself out from the base and into the blackness of Titan's surface.

She couldn't see a thing. Sleeting methane rain smashed against the visor of her helmet, the fibrous bundles of her helicasuit automatically tightening, compressing protectively against her flesh. In the light gravity she weighed only one tenth of that on Earth; it was only because she hung tight to the railing by the airlock that stopped her from being swept away by the furious eddies and vortices of wind, feeling her feet being lifted away from her, struggling to put them to the ground as if she were fighting to stand in a swift river. The rain glinted in long streaks in the light projecting from the open airlock, closing her into a tiny world, like an actor in a spotlight upon a stage. The tether cord whipping away from the railing and into the storm gave no clue as to which way to go as it flung about in all directions.

"Arran!" she shouted into the confines of the helmet, the noise ringing in her ears. "Arran!" She tried to walk, shuffling along the grating of the catwalk, sliding her hands along the railing.

With a mote-command she tried to call up a map of the base, something to orient herself in relation to the outbuilding where the antennas were located, but her mote feed was blank. No link here. She closed her eyes, forcing concentration, and tried to placing herself in the rough sketch of a map in her mind. She would have to let go of the railing, strike out across the openness. She took a hold of the umbilical line where it passed through the railing. It was as thick as her wrist, fat with bundled lines encased in a rubberised sheath. Should she go back into the airlock and get a clip-belt? No time, she decided. She wrapped her arm about the tether, and stepped from the catwalk and onto the surface of the moon.

She felt the press of stones through the soles of her lightweight boots. She stumbled forward, bent low to the ground, using her gloved hands to grab at rounded stones the size of dinner plates to keep her from being flung by the wind. All the while the methane rain lashed against her helmet, smearing her vision so she saw only a confused blur, and heard only a magnificent roaring that drove every thought from her head. The place did not want her.

The line snagged at her arm and she felt herself being dragged, circumscribing an arc with her feet in the stony surface, her boots scrambling for purchase. She stubbornly made ground, every step hard won, total focus on pushing forward. Ahead, through the blur, was that a light? She dared not pause, dropping her head again, firm belief driving her that she could make it to the Haustorium. Once there, she could hook in. She just had to make it. One step at a time.

Her inner ear speaker seemed to whisper something. Mica stopped and clasped her hands to the side of her helmet, pressing hard, as if it could shield her ears from the drowning roar of the wind. A mote-thought and the volume driven to maximum, she heard a voice.

"Arran?" she screamed inside her helmet. "Arran, Arran!"

Still with her head down and shielded from the brunt of the wind, she crawled forward while looking backwards between her knees. There seemed to be lights back there moving along the umbilical line, dancing and picking up arcs of flying rain.

A huge gust of wind reached beneath her waist, bodily lifting her from the ground despite frantic kicking and flailing. Blinded as if inside a coal black bag, it was only her sense of balance that told her she was spinning madly, arms and legs outstretched. And then she hit the ground again hard, bounced, and dragged upon her back. She felt the tether line slip quickly through her hands and she realised it had unwound from her arm. She made a grab for it but it was too late and flew off into the darkened sky. She lay upon her belly with a curious lightness of thought. She was now a small speck of light in the darkness, parted ways with that tiny cupped glow of mankind, and now in every sense alone as very few had ever been.

She had wanted this, she realised. To be swept away, as if it could wash away that dread stain of guilt on her soul. She would get her wish; the wind was pulling at her again and this time she did not resist.

A light slashed across the ground and she looked back just as a heavy hand grabbed at her ankle, clamping her to the ground. The gloved hand led back to a forearm enclosed in a rib of struts and armatures.

The wind gusted and through the brief clearing in the rain she saw the man in the TIG, his head but a silhouette behind the glare of a bright light affixed to his helmet. He pressed himself low to the ground and drew her close with brutal force, the mechanical linkages boosting his strength by articulated brackets. Mica twisted upon her back and threw her hands out upon either side, rocks catching and flipping over in her hands, others bruising her ribs, yet unable to stop herself from being hauled in.

"Damn you, let me go!" she cried into the echoes of her own helmet. "Arran! He's out there!"

Mica pounded her fist but struck only the heavy plating of the TIG chest plate, the man's attention focussed upon some point in the distance, keeping them both crouched low against the wind, reeling in his own tether line with a steady but rapid pace. Mica sagged like a rag-doll, her head lolled backwards, hoping to catch an impossible glance of Arran.

The airlock suddenly appeared as if they had ascended to the surface from great depths. Blinding lights were everywhere, and she had to squeeze her eyes shut and look down into her chest until her eyes adjusted. Thaler was there, backing away and allowing room for the pair to enter the airlock.

The outer hatch rumbled and snicked closed, and quite suddenly all was still. The wind still roared yet it was a distant thing now, powerless and thwarted of its prey, leaving Mica reeling with the shock and nausea of the sudden stillness.

Chapter Four

The recovery gurney was cupped like a soap dish, pushing her shoulders in and restricting her movements. She still felt lightheaded from the repair work to her cells, bundles of automated surgical appendages hanging limp by her side.

The anaesthesia faded and her mote feed kicked in, widening her mind to her surrounds. Someone else was in the room, loitering by the door. Her gaze blurred when she raised her head and she blinked hard, seeing two silhouettes standing side-by-side, then realized after a moment it was the miner who had pulled her from the storm, standing alongside the emptied man-shaped shell of his shucked Northrop Grumman TIG. The exoskeleton was of minimalist design, having only struts around the arms and legs, and plates on the chest, shoulders and back, yet it loomed in the close quarters of the medical bay, hollowed head bowed yet almost touching the low ceiling. Mica guessed that the suit had once been dayglow orange, but the years had been unkind to it and the paint had long since worn away, leaving only flecks and a mottled cicatrix of chips and stains. The left arm was red and looked newer, obviously commandeered from another suit.

The miner was similarly tall, and looking just as filthy and mismatched. He held his head erect, gaunt cheeks beneath a thick beard that seemed to have been lavished with more care than any other part of him. His skin was a hue that suggested middle-eastern roots, his eyes bright beneath heavy dark brows. His helicasuit was a patchwork of stains and repairs, and condensation still clung to the material, and water pooled on the floor about his well-worn boots. He had obviously been there for some time, and was shifting his weight from foot to foot. Strangely, she'd never seen him on the base before. With only a few hundred people for company for the past eight years, it was unusual to come across a stranger. Running a rapid check of his public ID via mote and she found his name: Mubarak, A. M. (Capt.).

According to his feed, he'd been stationed here from the beginning, so their circles of movements and interactions simply hadn't intersected. Mica dropped her head back and closed her eyes, wishing only to be away from the man. He made her skin crawl. She fancied she could smell his body odour from here. They'd all, every man and woman on Titan, had had some degree of transgenic gene splicing, it was pretty much mandatory for survival; yet Captain Mubarak's was far from subtle. He looked part gorilla.

Her mote chimed and, weaving its deft magic, superimposed images in a flowing stream into her visual cortex. Mica's heart sank as she watched the brief display of the whirling lighthouse beam and familiar company logo and then the projection of the Governess herself appeared, standing whip-tall in grey uniform, hair tied back behind her head, lifting her chin and using it to point as if it were the sharpened bow of a ship.

"Doctor Fischer, what you did was against all regulations."

The Governess's words jolted shards of ice through Mica's heart. She felt angry unbidden tears lurking just upon the inside of her eyes and fiercely drew them back and hardened herself as if she were bolstering a failing dam.

"We have to get him back. We have to –"

"Database records show exactly what happened. Mr. Thaler might have disabled the mote feed, but we are not as stupid as you might think. Doctor Fischer, you are to be returned to suspended animation immediately."

"What? No, I have to get back out there! Arran, he's still alive, I know it. He made it to the Haustorium, he can hold out there until we can get to him."

"Then Arran must hold out until the storm – the storm – the storm – "

The room lights faded and flickered, and even some of the electronics by her side gave warning beeps with the power brown-out. The Governess's projection vanished for a split second, until a moment later all was restored. Reappearing, the Governess's projection broke out of the stuttering loop and continued to speak as if she hadn't noticed the disturbance.

"– situation is well outside my operational parameters; we will have to wait until Earth-side communications are re-established before a decision can be made. That is all."

"No, wait!" cried Mica.

The Governess's face remained impassive. "This conversation is over."

"Like hell it is!"

Her hand grasped around the bulk of tubes about her forearm and gave a mighty jerk and the needles came free with an ugly spray of blood. She lurched from the bed, legs still weak beneath her, finding herself fighting against Captain Mubarak, who had somehow crossed the room in the time it had taken her to rise. He pinned both of her arms in a bear hug, his breath and bristles of his beard in her face. Deep revulsion coursed through her, the man's arms bulging with muscle. It was like being bound in iron. Mica had a fleeting derisive thought of all the protein wasted into keeping this behemoth fed as she twisted to free herself.

"Get off me you stinking brute!"

His breath was warm against her cheek as he replied:

"We can do this the easy way, or the hard way."

To Mica's surprise he did not speak with the harsh rigger's accent she assumed he would have, given the degree and manner of his gene manipulations. Rather it had the measured, even intonations of the well-educated.

Mica sagged, then suddenly reared up, butting her head and catching him on the point of his jaw. The miner reeled backwards into a tray full of silver instruments that went flying, launching on strangely flat parabolas in the low gravity. Using her hands as much as her feet, Mica launched at the Governess, her wild swipe pure animal instinct that swished through empty air.

Pain burned a hot cattle-brand into the soft patch of brain behind Mica's eyes and she instantly loosened, folding like a marionette without its strings into an awkward heap, sliding along the polished cold flooring, spinning limply and coasting to a stop. There she lay, totally immobilised, only her eyes moving, darting with deep rage.

The Governess's projection stood over her, looking down with a calm acuity.

"I am authorized to use any means necessary to subdue violence," she said.

Mica gritted her teeth, her limbs still without strength, as Mubarak returned and lifted her by the arm, lopsidedly dragging her trailing heels, his other hand still pressed to stem the flow of blood from his nose. Her pod had already been delivered and primed.

"Start the procedure," the Governess said.

That familiar smell greeted her, this time stronger; there hadn't been time for a scrub-down since she had awoken, and beads of dew heavy with body odour still clung to the inner fabric. Mubarak arranged her limbs a little too forcefully than strictly necessary, and started to lower the hood of the pod.

Mica fought against the block upon her nerves, using the roiling pain and guilt within as a black fuel, and managed to twist her head.

"Captain Mubarak. Please, look for him."

"Captain," warned the Governess from where she stood. "Without any further delay, if you please."

Mica forced away her distaste of the man and tried to warm her words with a shade of compassion via the empath mote link. Mubarak's lips formed a hard straight line as he rejected the empath transmission, bouncing it back unread into Mica's feed.

"I'm sorry about your nose," she said, forcing the words from her iron-bound chest.

The nanobots in his bloodstream must have stopped the bleeding but his voice, naturally low in its measured tones, was still nasal.

"Go to hell."

"The rovers. They were designed for winter." Mica tried to catch his gaze again, imploring him with every ounce of her being. "Please, this is very important."

Mubarak stiffened, his face hardening behind the thicket of his beard and he glanced furtively in the Governess's direction.

"Doc, you don't realise how lucky you are that I was on-shift at the time you decided to go for your little stroll."

"Dammit, I was –"

"You think I went out topside wearing just a TIG for shits and giggles? The rovers are shot. I put my life on the line out there, and there's no way I'm going back out again, not for you, and especially not for a mech."

Mica found strength to lift her hands, fingers clenched on the inner rails, her steel-grey eyes narrowing.

"He was no ordinary mech. You wouldn't understand. He was trying to help all of us..."

"Goodbye, Doc."

Something vital inside her heart crumpled. A drunken giddiness – a movement that was not a movement – took hold of the sagging bag of memories in her mind and swept everything in a flash-flood down the river bed of fate. With every jolt and sway, parts of her sense of self dislodged and were lost to the flow. Her eyes closed, and the sounds of the world merged into the surf roar of a hollowed shell. She hardly noticed the movement of air as the lid of the pod came down and the seals compressed. The air pressure ramped, the needles already in her veins.

Any moment now, all would be gone.

In unconscious catatonia, no thoughts would spark in her brain until she woke years from now, when everything was over, when there would be no need to think anymore. When Arran would be long gone...

A soft warning buzz followed by a whirring noise woke her, then a louder, shriller buzzing. Within the walls came the reverberating thud of retracting machinery.

"What the hell was that?" said Mubarak, his voice reaching Mica's ears muffled through the plastic pod. Then the Governess's voice, clear in her head through the mote-link.

"Stop the procedure at once."

"What?"

"Stop it, immediately."

Mica heard a tapping, and then some more words lost into muffled discord, and a confusion of footsteps; Mubarak strapping into his TIG and stomping away down the corridor. Mica did not raise her head, her eyes closed, refusing to be drawn, refusing to give up the belief that in any moment she would disappear into sleep, and for a time nothing happened. Then, with a wet crack, the seals on her pod separated and the Governess's voice spoke in her ear.

"Dr Fischer, we have an update on your situation. You'll be awake for the foreseeable future. Consider yourself lucky to be here. I suggest making yourself useful."

Chapter Five

A profusion of dark shapes hung from plastic plates, each suspended by wires from the ceiling far above, arranged in narrow rows of leaves melding with perspective at the far end of the cavernous room. Most of the overhead lights had failed, and the air recycling filters had long since clogged. The only motion in the room were occasional soft, gentle drips from the upper stacks where untended protein steak plants grew, filtering downwards to those leafier layers beneath. Mica moved through the rows of abandoned plants, where broken railings spilled out into tangled confusion. This place had once been a refuge, a place of relaxation, where one could see greenery and real growth, breathe air touched by photosynthesis. It had been one of the first places to be culled with the budget clampdown: why maintain such a facility when a mote-feed to all sensory inputs could do everything equally well, all within the comfort of ones' own capsule.

Mica's stepped over a pool of water, its peripheries marbled with ice and surface rippling with a standing wave of concentric rings set up by the constant vibration running through the floor, each peak picked out in the orange glow of aging lights. Mica closed her eyes against the reminder that the storms raged one hundred and fifty metres overhead without surcease, driving and swirling winds searching with hungry fingers for a way in, to sear this blight of humanity burrowed into the surface.

She checked the time on her mote-feed. Nearly twenty hours had passed since Arran had gone outside, and she was exhausted. It was only her mote, feeding chemicals and forcibly resting portions of her brain, that kept her on her feet. She had spent almost the entire time going through and discarding options, pursuing ways to get Arran back. It hadn't taken long to discover Captain Mubarak had been right; the rovers were manufactured by Bosch, and with the German's out of the consortium, essential replacements hadn't arrived with the last shipment. She had wasted three hours chasing down leads that met with dead ends in an attempt to locate spares. She had then looked at the storm forecasts, but things seemed to be only getting worse.

How long could Arran hold out?

With every passing hour her fatigue grew until her whole body ached. And all the while, breathing a chill prickle down the back of her neck, was the fear that the Governess would call her at any moment, tell her that the deep sleep systems were back on-line, the command to go back on ice. Every moment she had left was precious, yet finally she found herself squandering them, unable to think of ways to do any more. Finally, she had closed all mote screens and her feet had taken her to this place.

Her mind felt like a raft bobbing upon a vast sea, and it was only by degrees she became aware that her eyes were fixed upon the pale white tendrils in the cupped container before her. She reached out and gave it a tender tug upwards. The small root-bound plant lifted, the tangled ball of its roots had grown to the limits of the container, packing outwards even though there was nowhere to go, becoming denser, tighter. Suddenly it were as if she looked inside her own skull; the pale packed nest of roots like the mote within the blood-brain barrier, filaments of ultra-fine titanium wire intimately wormed into every millimetre of her brain, privy to every thought, every impulse, and also able to masquerade as real input; sight, sound, touch. Yet at the same time, in a strange metaphysical bent, the mote extended her mind, able to call upon a vast network of information throughout the entire base. Was there a reconciliation between oppressor and liberator?

"That's not necessary, you know."

Mica startled, dropping the plant back into its pot, then hating herself for giving Thaler the satisfaction of her fright. She should have been paying more attention to her mote feed.

"I'm not doing it for the plants."

Thaler grinned, and lowered his head, perhaps realising his childish game was out of line, but his abashment did not last long.

"You still sore at me?" he asked.

Mica turned and started back towards the exit, Thaler quickly following in little skipping steps, talking at her back.

"Have you considered perhaps going back to your work?"

"No."

"You might be here for a while."

"My research is done."

"Oh, but hardly!"

"What would you know?"

"The reports are underplayed, but the incremental gains are undeniable. You must have been so close! Until everything stopped, that is."

Mica swung about, her pulse rate increasing, a thudding in her ears. Jaw muscles firming, she spoke between gritted teeth.

"You stay out of my business, I'll stay out of yours. Deal?"

"I can pull some strings, get your old work privileges back."

"No."

"Hey, where are you going? Slow down! Come on, it's amazing work. We have a chance to rise above the accident of our existence."

Mica stopped and turned to face Thaler.

"Why this sudden interest? I'm not looking for a new friend, or anything else, if that's what you're angling at. So get lost, I've got things I need to be doing."

"I did some research, after what happened with Arran, I..."

He stopped as Mica's face darkened. He gave a small shrug.

"I'm sorry it didn't work out. He was a brave little mech. I really thought he could pull it off."

"How could you have let him go?"

Thaler was silent a time. When he replied, his voice was low, his words carefully considered. "It was his idea. His logic circuits were independent -"

"Because he was alive!"

"Come now, let's put this in perspective. He was a machine, fuzzy logic giving the illusion of sentience."

"Don't speak about Arran like that! You know nothing!"

"Hey, easy!" Thaler was standing tall again, all indignant five-foot of him. "I tried to stop him. Maybe if you had been there, as he told me you should have been, this could have worked out differently!"

Immediately, Thaler realised he had said the wrong thing as Mica's face turned into a mask of icy hate.

"I'm sorry," he said, bowing his head again. "I didn't mean that. I should have done more. He came so close to pulling it off, I really thought he could. Another minute of luck, and the Icarus might well be here, supplies that would put this whole operation back on track." He gave an exhausted, melodramatic sigh. "He told me he had run the statistics, and I trusted his calculations that it would be safe. But I was wrong, I should have waited for you. For the record, I have spoken with the Governess and claimed all associated costs and responsibilities. It could be enough to get your laboratory back."

"Sebastian, enough already of the eulogising. I have spent my entire life in the lab, and giving it up wasn't something I did on a whim. Don't you get it? I'm nothing, absolutely nothing, without it. What, you think that I don't constantly dwell on the sacrifices I made? Every second of my life I wonder what to make of those countless years of work? You think I just let everything go just for a laugh? God! I thought I was scratching a legacy into the stone tablet of humanity, but it's nothing but foolishness and noise. So don't preach its virtues... Your layman's bloody ignorance is insulting."

Thaler lowered his head graciously, his fingers steepled into a little triangle. When he looked up again Mica saw a mischievous gleam had come into his eyes, glinting tiny reflections of the skeletal strips of overhead bulbs.

"Then tell me, what is it that I don't know? Why was the whole project halted?"

"The concept was ill-conceived. It can never work."

"Ahh, but you must have tried something!"

Mica found it hard to draw breath all of a sudden, and spoke in a short constricted burst.

"This is not a conversation I am going to have with you."

Thaler moved after Mica as she strode along the narrow rows, the dew-soaked leaves so close they brushed against the sleeves of their helicasuits.

"How did you get away with it?" he asked. "There are no reports on the mainframe of any experiment."

"There was no experiment," said Mica, her voice holding a firm resolve.

"Doctor Fischer, we don't belong here. You know that, don't you?"

Mica stiffened, her steps slowing. Thaler overtook her, brushing past the narrow space between the leaves. Shorter than Mica, he had to tilt his head, cocked like a sharp-eyed bird, unblinkingly appraising. "You, me, humanity. We don't belong."

He raised his finger as if to brush something from Mica's cheek, but thought better of it and withheld his hand, poised mid-air. "Titan is too cold, our presence here is simply temporary. Maybe in a billion years when the sun is a red giant large enough to swallow Earth, only then could life be given a chance on Titan. But by then humanity will be long gone, it will be the turn of single celled organisms that we hope to find below our feet to come to the surface and thrive, but whether it be in the water core of Titan or scattered through the stars, life will remain microbial. There is nothing in the universe to drive complexity; trapped in an energy barrier, it is impossible to grow beyond that single cell. We are freak chance." Thaler seemed to suddenly recall himself and lowered his hand. "One single accident in four billion years. Two different types of cells colliding and actually fusing in a way that works, from which the entire tree of life has spawned. And since that one freak accident four billion years ago it has not happened again. Oh, you look overhead, you see the stars and the galaxies, an incredible number flung across the night sky. More stars than there are grains of sand on all the beaches of Earth. Yet still that multitude is annulled by the time scales of the universe; billions of years and distances where light itself takes a lifetime to reach our eyes. Our physical forms, so fragile and so fleeting, are in a prison with vast distance serving as unbreakable bars. There are no warps in spacetime, no shortcuts across the chasm, simply no mechanism exists, for the universe does not exist for our benefit. Even though it is a painful barb to that hope we cradle deep in humankind's heart, we have to accept the fact that even in the enormity of the cosmos we will never find solace, never meet another race to share our existence, and that lack is infinitely worse than any war or conflict. We need to cling to our consciousness and preserve it, for we are the only spark in the dark."

"Earth isn't a spark, it's a goddamn fireworks factory."

Thaler's pale blue eyes held an odd intensity. "You've seen the last reports? The faction wars have escalated. Who knows what we'll wake up to when our winter is over. It is imperative that you continue your work. It's your _responsibility_. I can get your husband clearance to come out of ice too, the work you've done together –"

"No!"

"Come now, it's what he would want."

"Sebastian, don't you ever, _ever_ presume to know what Eiji wants." Mica snapped herself to full height. "Who the hell are you to question what I do?"

In that held moment of tension the overhead lights flickered, so quickly that at first Mica couldn't be sure if it was just her own blink reflex rebelling, but then she saw Thaler react, casting his eyes upwards. He spoke slowly while still looking up, as if divining their end.

"Whatever it is, you can't keep running from it forever."

Mica turned on her heel and strode away down the row, flinging aside dripping leaves, her vision constricting.

She would not let it take her.

Not again.

She focused on her breathing. She vaguely heard Thaler calling something at her but she was beyond hearing now. Her pace lifted and she was running, breath coming out in hard pants, and her mind's eye cast back to that inexorable stretch of time, which surely must have only lasted seconds, every moment burned in her memory with vivid clarity. She had tried to hold Eiji down, but in his spasms he was too strong, thrashing about on the gurney as if his spine had become a wound up elastic band.

Mica shook her head violently from side to side to cast away the memory, until suddenly the triggers fired on her mote and her mind blanked and she fell back into herself, finding herself on the floor, looking at the spread of her hands upon the grating.

She was aware that Thaler was there, touching her shoulders, asking her something but his voice sounded very far away. She shook his hand away.

"Get out! Just get out!"

Thaler straightened, hesitating for so long that Mica feared she would have to shout at him again, but finally nodding and taking a step backwards. Mica felt the world still hued by the colors of that memory and did not fully rouse herself from it, for although it caused pain, it was a penance that she would never give up. A thorn she could prick herself upon to remind herself of her place.

Thaler had turned his back and disappeared in quick little strides down the rows of plants. She waited until she heard the click of the outer door and saw on her mote feed that he had started descending to the hab quarter before calling up the list of the active personnel and requesting a private call. Her feed faded to black while the call was processed, the status signal blinking to indicate the poor quality of the connection to the tunnel network far below. Mica waited, and while she did she had a sudden thought that was she was doing was pure folly, and was just about to terminate when the call picked up, voice only.

"Doctor Fischer?"

"Captain Mubarak.... I... I need a favor."

Chapter Six

The digging crew rode the clanking and rocking elevator as it rose from the depths, swaying as they unstrapped the braces and linkages joining their TIG linkages to their helicasuits. A green light illuminated upon one of the walls at the same time as Mica's mote feed chimed, and with the signal each of the four crewmembers snapped the fasteners and ran back the bubble of their helmets. The air inside the elevator was cold and stung of sludge and antifreeze, yet was infinitely better than the recycled air of her suit. Mica ran a hand over her forehead and tucked a strand of her bobbed hair behind her ear before realising the unconscious action had spread a line of grease across her forehead. She found that finally, after an entire day of working, she was simply too tired to care anymore. Mica bent her head, her lips compressed in a tight line of self-control in an effort to suppress the shivering that threatened to overtake her body; her core felt like a block of ice, and she longed to get back to her bunk, peel off the damp helicasuit, and dry herself.

Captain Mubarak paced the four walls of the elevator, his boots crunching the ice that was fast turning to slush underfoot. He inspected each of them as they sat on benches lining each side. When he passed Mica she pretended she did not notice his heavy-handed observation, instead ostensibly absorbed in removing the last of the buckles and shucking the last TIG linkage from her right leg. Mubarak gave a solemn little nod as he strode past.

A small mech gave a yelp, spinning about on hind legs as it chased a twisted limp rag held by one of the crew, a thin man with a dishevelled mop of black hair. He tossed the rag to the far side of the elevator where it landed at the feet of another crewmember, who gave it a disdainful nudge aside with the edge of her boot as the dog came barreling in hot pursuit, paws scratching on the metal flooring.

"Cut it out, Mitch," she said. "It's smarter than you, you should be the one doing the fetching."

"Ah, come on Chi-ling." Mitch gathered the dog up in his arms; programmed to appease, it squirmed appropriately and made playful snaps at Mitch's hand. "He likes me, don'cha boy?"

"He's all alone there."

"I can spot your secret desires a mile away. Anytime you're ready, baby. I'm here."

Chi-ling blew Mitch a kiss and then turned the gesture into a middle finger salute. Mitch gave a delighted squawk and delivered a solemn bow. Mica couldn't help but finally look up, and yielded to her instinctive impulse to mote-probe for the public IDs of the crew. The mote-net had been patchy in the tunnels, limited only to audio chatter over the short-range comms, and she hadn't had a chance to actually see anyone all day. Mitch was quick to spot Mica's mote-probe.

"Ah, the good doctor, so you are human! I don't believe we have been formally introduced."

Mica gave a cold smile that reached only the corners of her lips and allowed Mitch mote access to her public ID.

Mitch gestured expansively to his side.

"This, of course, is our good friend Chi-ling. You probably recognize her."

Mica pressed her fingers into the bridge of her nose, knowing her irritability was a frayed edge, and instead forcing herself to attention to give a wan smile.

"I thought your face seemed familiar."

"She was picked up by the networks a few years back, had quite a following before Earth lost interest in her."

"Shut it Mitch. I kept ratings longer than anyone else in this shit bucket."

"Must be tough, to be back with us after having your moment of fame."

"At least I had a moment. I'm true to my roots, and I've never denied that."

"Still, reality is a bit different when you live it every day isn't it?"

"Loving every minute of it."

"It's a pity they cut your show. Guess that's the Chinese for you, always quick to renege on a contract."

"Mitch, cut it out," barked Mubarak, standing hands upon his hips in the center of the elevator. "You'll be on double-shift tomorrow if you're not careful."

"Hah! Like we're not already on double shifts. No way man; in a few days, as soon as _Icarus_ is down, I'm going on ice."

Chi-ling's voice dropped low and level, all levity gone.

"What have you heard?"

Mitch spread his hands and his mouth pulled down at the corners in an exaggerated shrug.

"A little something along the grapevine."

"Bullshit," growled Balahoskin, the final crewmember who had so far been sitting upon a bench by himself, unmoving and unresponsive as a stone gargoyle. The burly Russian hawked and cleared his throat, a horribly heavy and greasy sound. Mica shot a surreptitious look in his direction: he had thick eyebrows and a smarmy half-smile plastered across his face in an expression that hid whatever it might be that he was truly thinking. As she watched he worked his fingers together, thumb to forefinger, in a motion that made Mica decidedly uncomfortable; as if he were working something dredged from his nose into a sphere, and at any moment might flick it off in some random direction.

"More likely they didn't even bother to send it this time," said Chi-ling. "Someone is feeding you shit, Mitch. Six and half more years. Hey, doc, you'd know. You heard anything?"

Eyes swung in Mica's direction and she lowered her head, wishing the lift would hurry up as it swayed gently like an ambling cow on its agonizingly slow rise to the upper levels.

"Latest reports aren't good," she said. "The storm is much bigger than the model anticipated."

Chi-ling laughed. "The same model that told us Titan had no winds at all?" She danced her fingers. "Just a gentle soot forming on the dunes. Let's all set up shop and have a cozy old time."

"That was thirty-eight years ago. Things changed."

"Brilliant work, just brilliant work."

"I say hell yeah!" cried Mitch. "The bean-counters don't know jack shit about what we're up to, so let's go crazy. We're in our own little bubble of reality here."

Chi-ling gave him a sour look. "Jesus, Mitch, keep your lid on."

Balahoskin gave a grunt. "I bet my hairy heavy balls that the ship wasn't even sent. I reckon war's finally started, I bet those factionist bastards slipped a nuke."

Mitch clapped his hands together. "Now you're thinking!"

In her corner of the elevator Chi-ling glowered and her thin brows knotted as she drew breath to retaliate but Mubarak held up his hands, palms extended to each side.

"Enough!"

Mitch gave a sloppy salute to Mubarak's back.

"Yessir, Capt'n."

Mubarak spun but Mitch had already dropped his hand to his side, an innocent grin on his face.

The lights in the elevator suddenly switched off and in the darkness everything jerked and clanged to an abrupt stop. A moment later the lights turned back on in time to see everything not strapped down in elastic webbing lofted in the air, hanging for a second before floating slowly back down to the floor. There were a series of distant clunks and, from somewhere far down the end of the elevator shaft, the sound of a turbine winding down.

"That's great," said Chi-ling, throwing up her hands. "Fantastic. Great job on the power boys."

Mitch exchanged a glance with Balahoskin, as if hardy believing what he had heard. He then swung back to regard Chi-ling with narrowed eyes.

"We did the best with what we had. Ain't no way the fission reactor will match what the fusion plant could put out."

"Just relax. It'll come back in a moment," grunted Balahoskin.

They all sat in a moment of silence as they heard a continuation of the clicks, growing louder as relays closed, working their way up the elevator shaft. There was another jerk, and the elevator started moving again.

"See?" Balahoskin said.

"This is unacceptable," Mubarak mused. As Mitch opened his mouth to protest Mubarak swung to Chi-ling. "I want you to double-check the inventory."

"We've already double-checked."

"Then triple check. Everything, including the archives."

Mitch gave a snicker as Chi-ling's eyes widened, both knowing how much time she would need to spend dredging through the records.

The elevator wound down to a gentle stop and there was a heavy noise of the docking claws locking, then the doors split open and marginally cleaner air of the crew quarters wafted in. With base-wide heaters on emergency power mode, it was barely a promise of warmth.

There was a flicker in the air at the exit of the elevator, a moment of refraction like a heat haze, and then that familiar lighthouse strobing light of the Fujino Heavy Industries logo signalling an incoming transmission, and then the group-wide mote feed image of Robin Galen morphed into solidity, standing with arms crossed over his chest.

Chi-ling's almond eyes narrowed and she raked her hands back through her jet-black hair. "No man, not now."

"This won't take long," said Galen with an imperious raising of his chin. "The Governess has advanced the timetabling."

"Like we don't have enough to do?" said Chi-ling.

"All of you are required to reduce your rest time by half, as mandated by extreme situation protocol."

"Half? Jesus, what the hell has gotten into her?" Mitch leant forward with his elbows upon his knees; it had the effect of raising his scapula from his scrawny body, visible under the tautness of his helicasuit like hacked-off angel wings.

"We need to hit the water table by the end of the week, no more excuses," said Galen.

"Why, so we can dig up ET before everyone else wakes up? What's the hurry?"

"Even when we do, we ain't gonna find nothing," said Balahoskin, who had not moved, and spoke facing only the empty air before him. "Titan is a frigid mother-of-a-whore."

Galen held up a hand for silence. "Enough! We need results. Performance has been sub-par the past few weeks."

"I want to know what we're doing busting our asses in the middle of winter." Mitch said. He suddenly stood, and waved his arms at the crew as if proffering them something while twisting his head towards Galen. "Hey, you tell these guys about the news on the Icarus."

"There have been no updates, I would advise that you focus upon your work. The drill probes are coming back positive; the liquid water layer can't be far off."

"Come on, you know something. Spill it, dude!"

"There is nothing more to say on the matter of the supply ship, crewman. I suggest you concentrate on your work."

Captain Mubarak took a step forward. "Bring in more heavy drilling bots. You have a problem with progress, take it up with the Gov."

"I'll worry about the bots, you just need to keep what we have going down there moving efficiently."

Mubarak shook his head from side to side as he advanced another step, his bulk and beard giving him the aspect of a lumbering bear shaking away flies that stubbornly persisted. "We are a winter team. Skeleton duty. Leave the heavy work until summer, fix the fusion plant, and then - and only then - can we ramp up operations." He now stood face-to-face with Galen's projection. "You are risking the lives of my crew. If you really want to continue, we need to be replaced."

"I'm sure your crew appreciate your show of brash preciousness, but there is no other choice." Galen's wandering gaze picked out Mica and he raised his brows pointedly. "Until the deep sleep issues are resolved, there's no way we're thawing anyone until we know they can go back under again. Every mouth we wake now is a hungry mouth for the whole of winter. So shelve that little pipedream, and let's make what we have work."

The projection vanished.

"Son-of-a-bitch," cried Mitch, casting the mech dog callously aside where it slid along the entire length of the bench, now switched off and servos in freewheel. It pitched off the end of the bench and landed in an awkward articulated bundle to the floor. Mitch spun to Mica, brows heavy over his eyes, his already thin face drawn thinner. "This is all your fault!"

"How the _hell_ can it be my fault?"

"The way I heard it, the system broke down the moment they tried to put your skinny white arse under. You got bad luck riding all over you."

Mica fought down red flame of temper that cupped the base of her brain, the blood pounding now in her temples, and she spoke softly without looking up. "It was nothing to do with me."

"No? Well, we all know why you put yourself here. You might think it's some big secret, but we all know."

"Shut your mouth, Mitch," Mubarak said, his voice hardening.

Mitch glanced around the elevator, taking in the gazes of his silent crewmates, his humorless little smile tightening as if tendons were being ratcheted by some mechanism at the back of his head. "You want to dig the slide out, right? To the access tunnel. Get to the _Haustorium_ , pick up that little mech pet of yours? Well, it's not worth my neck, so get back to your-"

"That is it! For the last time, shut your mouth." Mubarak levelled a finger at Mitch, looming over him, edging within his personal space. "Nobody wants to hear it."

"Yeah, well _Captain_ , someone's going to hear it!"

Mitch launched to his feet, knocking Mubarak backward. They both tumbled in the low gravity. Chi-ling tried to restrain Mitch but he attempted to shake her off and they both fell back, and a dirty scuffle broke out, a crate overturning, flipping almost full circle before cascading to the ground; wrenches, sockets, belts and spare parts flew towards the walls, hitting with a discordant clamour, skidding and bouncing away in bizarrely majestic shower of silver across the polished floor. Mitch finally tore himself away from Chi-ling, feigned, then made a lunge for Mubarak's midriff. The crew leader sidestepped the clumsy blow and caught Mitch with a deft twist and flip that Mica could only identify as some kind of martial art manoeuver, sending him crashing to the wall where he lay defeated and exhausted.

"That's it for today!" Mubarak bawled. "Get to your quarters. I suggest you rest, I want an early start to the shift tomorrow."

Balahoskin and Chi-ling took up their bundles and left without a word, passing by Mubarak who held his arms outstretched in a shepherding pose. Dishevelled and sulky, Mitch followed, shooting a surly grimace as he stalked past Mica. Mubarak did not presume to interfere with Mica, simply pausing at the door, waiting until the rest of his crew were well down the corridor and out of earshot. He looked back at her as she sat alone now at the bench, a small speck of huddled humanity in the grimy dark.

"Six months I've had this crew," grunted Mubarak, his voice pitched low for her ears alone. "And for six months I've made it work. Get your act together \- if you screw us up you're out of here."

Something cold stiffened Mica's spine, her steel grey eyes flicking up to meet Mubarak's gaze. Finally, Mubarak lips twitched beneath the spines of his beard and he was the first to look away.

Chapter Seven

Mica stood in the cool shade of a tall pine tree, the air buzzing and the sky a washed out summer blue, her nose heavy and beginning to itch with fragrances of thick black dirt and pollen. She stood from the fallen tree log, absently brushing the seat of her pants, and took a few paces forward, hand reaching up to feel the needles of the pine tree run through her fingers. As she moved the dappled sunlight alternated heat and cool across her face.

She drew up short of the shaky line drawn into the sand; the line that formed a rectangular box around her of the same dimensions as her room. From here, she could see where the land dipped away, revealing mound upon mound of rolling hills, trees of different species occupying varying patches, forming a motley patchwork.

She sneezed suddenly. Recovering, she shook her head: hayfever was taking things too far. She concentrated, and the landscape vanished, the lighting becoming white and artificial, the air now having that cool, low humidity tang of air conditioning. Through the large windows upon all sides of the observatory box, mounted high like a guard post upon a prison wall, she could see the cityscape lights below. A sound made her turn, and there was Eiji.

"No. I didn't mean you to be here," she said, startled.

Eiji stood in a fluid motion and flexed his shoulders, as if he'd been sitting for some time. He approached, an arm extended, an easy smile on his face. Mica switched off the mote-simulation, but in the fraction of a second she hesitated Eiji had lain his hand upon her shoulder.

The next moment, he was gone, and Mica found herself back in her room, shivering with gooseflesh raised all over her body. She pressed her hand to her shoulder, as if she could somehow trap that feeling that yet lingered there.

Mote-sense trickery. A deception.

Mica squeezed closed her eyes, and found that Thaler's words had been ringing in the back of her head.

It is imperative that you continue your work.

The words scared her. They scared her because they were Eiji's words.

It's what he would want.

Mica shook her head savagely and knuckled her eyes, returning to sit upon her bunk. Suddenly, she wanted to talk to him, she would trade her whole being if only for one minute with her husband: the real Eiji, not some simulation patchworked from old recordings.

Thaler was right; records showed he still lay on ice, but there was something he didn't know: it was simply a body the pod maintained.

She cinched the robe tighter about her waist, her body feeling as taut as a piano string.

They said it would get better with time, but it wasn't.

She'd been working on the drilling crew for six days, and in that short time the sallowness had left her body, leaving it lean and hard. Every day she worked herself into physical exhaustion, yet every night she returned to the same nightmare, waking dry-eyed and emotionally exhausted; the yawning chasm of grief that engulfed her did not allow the release tears might bring.

Her initial drive to rescue Arran had slowly faded, rubbed away until it had become but an idea in her mind. Still the deep-sleep issue was unresolved, the Governess remaining mysteriously silent about estimated repair times that lengthened by the day, leaving her in a strange kind of limbo, dreading to go back on ice and with that action abandoning all hope of finding Arran, yet at the same time enduring every passing hour unable to do anything, knowing in her heart that it was too late.

She found herself wishing for the thousandth time for a decent hot shower, the shower that she had longed for since first waking up from cold sleep. Only the steam cleaners remained operational in the shower booths, and there was a strange rationing of water that the Governess would not explain. She had a sudden, disconcerting thought.

What if the sleep systems couldn't be fixed?

The prospect of enduring a winter of seven Earth years, with things only getting worse, dizzied her mind. The Guardian Tempest was truly a miserable place now. More miserable than it had ever been, and even at the best of times it had lacked a certain vitality... Perhaps it was absence of children, she thought. There were none, nor would there ever likely be; the population did not need constant replenishing, nor could the base logically bear the burden of child-raising. The upper limit to the natural lifespan was yet to be determined with improvements in gene-therapy, and passing along the baton of life to the next generation was no longer necessary nor economical. She herself was one of the first generation to be leading that charge to the receding finishing line of life, where everyone began to look the same age, where the only way to tell old from young was by the degree of bitterness they begrudged and disillusions they harboured.

She stood, discarding the robe and snatching her helicasuit from the floor, pulled her legs into it as she walked, shooting her arms into the sleeves as she took long paces to the door and palmed the handle.

No more.

She had to see him. She had to try one last time.

Her mind was spinning through what she could do, there must have been something she hadn't tried yet. She would start with repeating the obvious tests first, and then perhaps in the course of her work something would spark in her mind. That was the way of research, to set off down a path using known guideposts and strike off into unknown territory.

The route to the lab was one she and Eiji had taken together hundreds of times, yet now, so very different in the darkness. Only a row of orange lights ran along the floor, a dim glow turned what she had always regarded as simply a corridor now into something more like a tunnel, reminding her they were deep below-ground, in a cave. As she walked the lights overhead sometimes gave feeble flickers, some of them buzzing like trapped bees, as if rallying their strength, but all failed. Where brightness had forced stark reality, this gloom held some ephemeral spell of the ghosts of the departed.

She sped her gait.

Her mote unlocked the door to the lab automatically and the heavy blast doors retracted. She stepped through the hiss of compressed air that cleaned the dust from her clothing and into the darkness of the foyer. She took a step forward and here the lights must have been on a stronger power circuit, for they powered on smoothly, and suddenly guilt swamped her.

This was a mistake.

She should go back to her bunk, get some rest before tomorrow's shift.

She raised her head, knowing that this may well be her last chance to rescue him. She had to try, she simply had to try.

She trod down the corridor, placing one foot before the other, treading that familiar path. So much had changed in the few weeks she'd been away, equipment had been shifted, replaced by crating and half-unpacked boxes, yet here and there lay vestiges of her old life, hidden in the shadows, bittersweet reminders of what had been. Although Mica opened herself to it, inviting the pain, there only that empty raw space deep in her chest where emotion should be.

She came to the door to her experimental facility and quickly drew up short. Through the frosted glass she saw the shadow of a moving figure. She did not hesitate, opening the sliding door with a jerk.

"Galen? Jesus! You scared the crap out of me. What are you doing here?"

Mica ran a check. No wonder she'd been surprised, Galen had his mote on local. Now that she looked closer though, she saw that they were not alone.

"Vicki is here?"

Galen's eyes narrowed and he straightened from his task.

"Where are you going, Dr Fischer? You know you're not authorized to be in here."

Mica gazed around the half-gutted room, shock making her pause and regain her bearings. What equipment remained had been powered down; she'd never heard the space so still.

"I wanted... I need to... It's too soon."

Soft footsteps, the creaking of plastic pads upon the polished floor, signalled Vicki's approach. She was in her heavy-lifting body.

"Hi, Vicki," said Mica, peering around Galen.

Vicki returned her smile via mote-emote.

"Hi Mica. Long-time no see. We were just talking about you."

"Really?"

"Actually, you've come at a good time, Dr Galen and I were discussing what to do with the PK7 vats –"

"I'm sorry, Vicki," interrupted Galen. "I'm going to have to ask you to continue your work. Dr Fischer was just leaving."

"Please Galen. I can't sleep. Christ, just look at me, I'm a wreck. Have some pity. I'm so tired, tired of just trying to keep myself together" – she gave a sour laugh – "tired of even breathing. Please, just let me walk through and see everything one last time before.... Before it goes."

Galen sighed and spread his hands, his voice softening. "Having second thoughts? I told you that you don't belong down in the mineshafts with those imbeciles. You do reasonable work. I could use you on my team."

"Your team?" muttered Mica, her hackles rising with the look he gave her.

"Excuse me?"

"Eiji did more to build the group than you ever did."

"He's gone, you reneged, and here we are."

"Exactly. Look what you're doing."

"Taking an entirely new research direction requires a fresh start, and the first step is cleaning away the garbage of past mistakes. By the time everyone is thawed out for summer this place will be entirely different."

Mica's fingers pressed against her temples, feeling anger and loss bleed out. She couldn't help but let her bitterness twist her tone.

"Yeah, well good luck with that."

"On seconds thoughts, maybe you're better off with the drilling crew."

"At least they have half a brain between them."

"You'd better smarten yourself up. Just who do you think you are?"

Mica felt a prickle of nerves along her forearms and running up to the base of her neck, a kindling of something deep inside, tiny licks of the flame of self and identity. Galen spoke before she could gather herself.

"You're nobody, that's who you are."

"Nobody," repeated Mica dumbly, testing the word on her tongue and feeling it reel in her mind.

Galen's eyes narrowed and he regarded Mica with a humorless smile.

"Has that friend of yours Captain Blowhard told you about his divine experience?"

Mica's blank look was all the answer he needed and he gave a brief laugh. "When he was first put in charge of the drill team he told me his story, he thought it placed him in the high graces of God. I didn't have the heart to tell the dull sod the inner workings of a space suit that would shatter his delusions. Ha! Maybe you can break it to him when he deigns to spread his words of wisdom to you." Galen turned his back and tossed an absent hand over his shoulder. "Take a one final look if you like. It'll be your last. I don't want to see you in here again."

Vicki half-turned to follow Galen, yet her robotic feet did not move. Even without her mote-message, Mica knew how she felt.

"It's okay Vicki. I'm alright. Thanks."

Vicki turned on her heavy heel and clanked away after Galen, head ducked low between steel plated shoulders.

Mica took a step backwards, letting the sliding door close in her face, and she was alone in the corridor. For a moment she simply stood trembling, feeling weak and suddenly directionless, staring at nothing - the resolve that had seized her in her cabin crumbled. As before, through the frosted glass, she saw the shadows of Galen and Vicki moving inside.

Mica dropped her head and clenched her fists and turned away, slowly walking past a few more doors, her surrounds growing darker the further she went, the light impinging from the laboratories coming slantwise, picking up the shadows into long angular projections upon the walls and floor. She focussed her thoughts internally and felt a familiar buzz of energy rise in the back of her mind, her mote spiking her bloodstream with her own special selection of dextroamphetamines and ephedrines. With each step she felt her inner strength returning until it fanned stronger than before, turning her frustration into a hard ball inside herself and using it to drive her forward. A large glass door confronted her, demarking the research facility proper and the sleepers silo.

She stopped and listened, tilting her head to hear the sounds of Galen and Vicki moving further up the corridor, out of view now. She made sure she was alone, then turned off her mote broadcast.

Without the mote-net, the most immediate impression was the drop in fidelity of her vision; suddenly lacking vitality, without automatic contrast and image enhancements piggybacked onto her visual stream. Mica raised balled fists to her eyes to press herself together in that strange long moment of emptiness, her mind shrunken and still feeling the strange tingle of those phantom limbs of now silent information streams.

And it was more than that. She felt oddly transparent, a nebulous jellyfish unable to impart influence upon the world; if nothing were recorded, shared, communicated, then it couldn't really exist, feeling as if she were in a darkened room, reduced to a single particle unobserved and simultaneously everywhere and nowhere.

Mica shook her head. She hated going off the mote-net, but for what she was about to do, it was necessary. Besides, she told herself, she didn't depend on her mote to be here. She was reality.

Heart beating faster now, she palmed the lock, and the great double doors hissed open.

Chapter Eight

The airlock before the sleepers silo was just big enough to manoeuvrer a pod. It was cold, with minimal heating, the air sharp and catching in Mica's throat. If she was following regulations she would have a heavy duty helicasuit and helmet; as it was, she wore only her standard issue helicasuit and battery pack. She didn't even have a bubble helmet – if the doors into the silo should open she would last barely a handful of seconds before the intense cold savaged her lungs – but she didn't plan on staying long.

A stencilled array of orange stripes painted upon the ground indicated a caution zone, but for now the machinery was idle; rubber conveyer belts, feed pulleys, and great clawed hands big enough to sling entire sleep pods hung silent in the shadows. A second set of double glass doors, identical to the ones she had just passed through, reflected back light from where she stood. Inside the silo the darkness was deep and total.

Mica stepped closer, breathing shallowly now, afraid of the noise that her suddenly rasping breath made. She had that uncanny feeling of being watched, that child-like fear of the dark, of just knowing something is lurking with malice in mind. She steeled her will, telling herself it was ridiculous to be afraid, and forced herself not to spin about and look over her shoulder, to not give in to irrational fear.

A light sheen of frost coated every surface; the walls glinting in the half-light. A single tiny red light on the otherwise blank console screen was flashing, a speckled halo around it, dazzling her night-vision. Sooner or later, in a week or two at best, the scheduled review of the logs would show she'd been here, and she was sure to get a dressing down by the Governess; nobody was allowed in the silo without clearance, but she could claim emotional distress. But the quicker she was, the less footprint she'd make, and the more chance she'd have in getting away with it. She didn't have long, she had to make her time count.

She raised her hand to a panel set high up upon the wall, then paused. The ice around the panel wasn't so thick, and Mica leant closer. Someone had been in here in the last few days. It could only have been Galen, but he had no business here. More than ever she found her distaste and distrust of the man grow. She scowled and brushed the frost away with the back of her glove, then pulled the panel, revealing a yellow handle big enough to fit all of her fingers into. She pulled it, and it gave with a satisfying clunk. Everything began to rattle around her as the machinery whined into activity, running through automatic warm up procedures and self-checks.

Mica clutched her arms about her chest, withdrawing into the centre of the airlock, even more sure than ever now that she was being watched. The outer door, the one leading into the laboratory, hummed closed, and she was sealed within the airlock. She tried to keep her motions calm despite the trembling that snared at her extremities. The console blinked into life. This was not a mote-linked display, instead it was a physical screen, independent of the mote-net. Her gloved finger pushed against the screen in a series of quick commands, then she inhaled and held her breath as the console then asked for what number pod she wished to withdraw.

She pushed slowly and deliberately the numbers 347.

The console illuminated green and there was a deep thunk as heavy machinery moved within the walls.

Mica moved to the inner doors, raising both hands, placing them upon the cold pane of double-glazed glass, forming a cup to shield the background light, peering into the vastness within to see a robotic hand moving back into the bundled buds of the sleepers. Shadows cast by the faintest of light were hued blue, like moonlight through sluggish heavy clouds on a winter's night. Each pod was mounted upon the central stem, arranged in a spiral all the way to the top of the silo. Inside she could sense a special quiet, the temperature within near that of the ambient temperature of Titan; minus one hundred and eighty degrees, a mere ninety degrees above absolute zero, cold enough to liquefy oxygen into fat slow droplets from supply lines. The pods did not need heating, operating most effectively in this intense cold.

Machinery clunked against the walls and she stepped backwards, giving room to a clawed hand that dropped from the ceiling just over her head in the airlock. The first hand within the silo meanwhile had delivered a pod into the wall, fed into a specially shaped hole, and in a few more seconds it was passed into the waiting claws of the second robotic hand within the airlock that spun it and placed it upon a long bench upon the wall where it sat, bathed in fluorescent light, tendrils of frost flowing from its surface in a cascading ethereal torrent. The robotic hand folded in upon itself, retracting into the ceiling with smooth silence like some gigantic bat, and Mica was left alone, suddenly feeling as if she were viewing a casket at a funeral.

The lights reflected from the glass panel of the pod's window, fractals of fern frost rimed around its edges, veiling the interior in a dazzling white glare. Mica took a step towards it, hands before her, trembling. Mica knew she had to decide quickly; if she were to run the tests again, she would need violate the Governess's directive and thaw Eiji.

Mica squeezed her eyes closed hard, feeling the dryness ache from them. When she opened them again the world spun and she shook her head, and took a determined step forward, her hand wiping away the frost from the panel. She looked into the pod window, past her own reflection upon the glass now streaked clear.

It was empty.

It must have been a mistake.

She hadn't slept properly in weeks, and suddenly every minute of that loss came rushing upon her, swamping her mind.

It has to be mistake.

She leant down and rubbed at the side of the pod with a furious desperation, looking at the name written there.

No doubt that it was Eiji's pod.

She tore at the emergency release clasps, pulling the pins, letting them drop to the floor where they tinkled and danced, wrenching the levers. The readout upon the pod started to flash in response to the premature breaking of the seal.

Mica threw back the lid with a wrenching cracking of ice and rubber.

The pod was empty. The cushions where Eiji had lain gave no clue.

Maybe he'd been moved. She moved to the console and ran a search, and a scrolling list filled the screen, and in seconds everything became clear. The Governess had sent the body to be recycled for base level nutrients, diverting levels of Cr2-OH to where they were most needed.

Recycled.

It was a sucker punch of betrayal straight to the gut. The Governess had promised to spare his body, to reship them both once winter was over. Technically he was brain dead, but the plan was that maybe Earth-side facilities could bring him back. She'd been a damned fool to trust her.

Suddenly everything seemed too much, a snowballing of emotion that finally rolled upon itself to gain so much weight it would crush her, and her guilt channeled to rage. She threw her hands up in the air, not knowing where to direct her fury, muscles tensed and ready to lash out at anything. Finally, Mica slammed her palms back against the console, fingers clinched so tightly about the edges of the display she felt the plastic creak.

Then she stopped, and caught herself.

No. She had nobody to blame but herself.

That old guilt came back stronger than ever. She was the one who had started everything. How had she been so stupid? She had been dosed up on sleep-skip meds for weeks, but that was no excuse.

They had been arguing. She'd saved the conversation on mote, had played it back so many times that even now, without it, it came rushing back to her. He had been so confident, so excited... perhaps she should have taken a harder line, dammit, of course she should have taken a harder line.

"We simply can't do it," she had said, reaching out a hand, placing it atop of his. "The Governess keeps rejecting human trials, what can we do?"

She remembered that Arran had been pacing silently between them, a black shadow of haughty indifference. Eiji's eyes softened as he smiled, his lips not parting.

"What the hell are you smirking about?" she had said, snatching her hand back.

Eiji had given a laugh and sought for her hand, his eyes dancing. When Mica withdrew even further he gave another laugh. As he straightened he instinctively opened his arms, sensing from the corner of his eye Arran tensing and leaping. Cradling the mech, Eiji had stroked the hair back upon his head, his ears flattening against his tiny skull.

"I'm sorry, but I know you, Mica. I can read your thoughts better than your mote can."

"Oh yeah?" Mica had paced away.

"Come on, we both know she's overly cautious."

"For good reason. Look what happened on Earth a thousand goddamn times."

"We've got something new here! Come on, it's everything we have worked for, and it's brilliant!"

Mica shook her head, refusing to won over by his blatant ego massaging.

"No. There's no way."

"We've got to act now," Eiji had said, all lightness gone from his voice. His pale blue eyes held Mica's. Mica had taken a breath, held it, feeling everything fade and distance. She closed her eyes as Eiji continued: "Winter will be here in a few weeks, do you think this junk is going to survive the cold-shutdown? Even if we lose just one-"

"Okay, I get it, okay! But we can't risk the mainframe," she had said, eyes still closed.

"I've thought of that. Arran, my little buddy, has agreed to help out."

Mica's eyes had snapped open. "Jesus, you pair of clowns are serious." Mica pinched the bridge of her nose.

"Just a low voltage feed," promised Eiji. "Just a trial. It'll be perfectly safe."

And Mica, fool that she was, had agreed.

And now he was gone.

One moment was all it had taken, one single mistake. How was it possible, how could such fraction of time permanently alter the entirety of her life, shifted her into this nightmare from which should could not awake? Who was she, what had become of her? She felt removed from her memories, as if someone had artificially planted them, and she was an imposter in this body.

She had on occasion held the human brain in the palm of her hand. Once, so recently deceased that it had been practically still warm. She had been so awed and terribly frightened, feeling the sum of that person's life that had once been bound within the gelatinous mass that hung in heavy folds like hot butter between her fingers. And now she felt herself contained in that weak mass of flesh, her memories and her sense of self twisted and stacked into flimsy layers of chemicals and synapses like an old spider's web. All so fragile and fleeting.

The rage had left her feeling weak and she lowered her head, resting it upon the console. As her mind emptied she grew more aware of the nagging sensation that she had overlooked something important.

And then she had it.

How could the Governess have done this? Violated her own word? How could levels of Cr2-OH be low, for there was a vast reservoir of the stuff. Mica raised her head and punched commands into the console with a rigid forefinger.

All the readouts were on zero.

"Piece of crap," she said, for it didn't make sense; it was simply impossible. She ran checks again, then rapped a knuckle against the display showing the gauge, as if it were an analog instrument with a stuck needle.

Someone had been messing with the life support systems, the plumbing tanks. This system-wide drop in supplies meant there was only one possibility.

"What the hell have you done to everyone?" she whispered to herself.

Her suit heaters stuttered and a wash of cold air chilled the sweat that had sprung from her skin, making her flush into a panic. She slung her head in her hands, raking her fingers through her hair.

She had to get out, get out quickly.

She raised her head and blinked back to reality, fingers moving across the console, shutting everything down. Suddenly, she heard noises, footsteps approaching. With her mote net switched off she had no idea who it was, but if their mote was on broadcast, the Governess would find her immediately. Mica accelerated her movements and ran through a flash of screens upon the console, killing everything. The lights in the room faded and the background humming of idle machinery wound down. Within seconds, all was quiet and dark.

Through the glass of the airlock she saw the lights in the corridor switch on and a shadow leapt up upon the opposite wall. Before she knew herself what she was doing she leapt into the empty pod, the chill coffin of her dead husband, and away from the pool of light spilling through the glass.

The footsteps came closer then stopped, directly before the door. From her perch Mica could only see a backlit silhouette as the figure peered into the airlock. Everything was still swirling in her mind, the sudden loss of Cr2-OH, and what it meant for everyone. How long did they have?

Mica held her breath as she heard the door panel give a long beep. Just then, she saw a glint of silver laying directly in the middle of the airlock, as if centre stage at a play; one of the pins from the emergency latch. It lay passive and quiet yet glaring incongruous; if the pin were noticed, whoever was out there would surely investigate.

There was a grunt, then the footsteps pivoted, and then receded. Seconds later, the lights switched off and all was silent again.

Mica exhaled and felt a wave a giddiness wash over her. She placed her hands upon the lip of the pod and braced herself to stand.

Suddenly, to her horror, the pod began to move. Still in shock, she was knocked down flat as the lid of the pod closed upon her head.

She was being taken into the silo.

In a burst of thought she knew that being inside the pod in the silo was not an option; with her body still full of blood she'd burst every cell in her body as it froze, exploding like a bottle of water in the freezer.

The robotic hand cradled the pod now, spinning it in a quarter circle. Mica pushed upwards against the lid but the fingers of the hand held it down. Panic coursing through her veins now she got her feet upon the lid, pushing with all her might. The pod swayed as it rattled upon rails.

The lid opened a crack. Mica worked her arm into the gap, and in a quick writhing motion somehow managed to squeeze out and dive to the ground, just as the pod disappeared into the slot. She saw seconds later through the glass the shadow of it being taken upwards into the silo.

Mica got to her feet, panting and dizzy, and palmed the outer door. The lock disengaged from the double door with a heavy shifting and then hummed open with a rush of warm air. Mica staggered through into the corridor, head reeling and feeling more than ever that she was in a terrible and strange dream, and hoping that she could somehow wake herself from it before she spiralled into nothingness.

Shuffling furtively through the corridors she took a circuitous route through the minor passages around the back of the laboratory, waiting until she was well clear before switching on her mote-net.

Almost as soon as she did so, she heard it chime. It was time for the start of her shift.

Chapter Nine

If one wore the TIG correctly, one didn't feel it at all, testament to the adaptability of the human brain; like the stick used to probe into an animal's burrow, one felt what the stick was probing upon the far end, and not the sensation of the stick in one's hand.

That was the theory at least; reality, however, was different for Mica. Despite the mote assisted rewiring of axons in her brain, she still lacked the finesse that came only with practice. Each movement of the TIG was amplified via muscle strain sensors and complicated fobs held in the hand for fine motor movement. Each jolt and jar and jerky acceleration served as constant reminders that she was out of place, that she did not belong encased in an articulated frame of metal inside the corkscrewing shafts deep in the bowels of Titan.

Although the recycling pumps of _Guardian Tempest_ were a long way away, added activity in the enclosed space raised the temperature enough to melted hydrocarbons that churned underfoot with dirt to form a slick and greasy mud.

Mubarak spoke over the group-line mote chat, his voice artfully parsed into her mind so that it appeared to originate from his direction, even though he was well out of sight around several bends of the tunnel.

"Come on, the sooner we get this feed in place, the sooner we can get out of here and run these suits in remote."

"Hallelujah," came Mitch's voice. "Running in manual sucks balls."

Chi-ling, in some other offshoot of the main line, said:

"We all know why you like to run remote; you just love working the stick."

"Jealous, eh Chi-ling?"

"Practice makes perfect; I'll give you that."

"Cut it out," said Mubarak's. "Doc, what's going on over there? You done?"

Mica blinked hard to bring herself back into reality, having fallen into a kind of lull with the chatter buzzing in her brain. "Switch gear is in place, Captain, just waiting on your word."

"Stand-by."

The connection clicked silent.

Mica turned off the harsh light of her suit beam and closed her eyes, tilting her head back. It seemed like the last few hours had been a dream. There was no way out of it, she had to tell someone. But who? The loneliness pressed ever deeper and again she wished Eiji were here.

Her mote alerted her of movement and she knew before turning that it was Balahoskin, yet she still gave a start when he stepped into her line of sight.

"Looks like we have a little time to kill, little lady."

Mica turned her back and busied herself in stacking equipment, trying to ignore the feeling of Balahoskin's eyes. The big Russian wasn't moving and she could sense his sly grin as he shifted from foot to foot. A long minute later, she couldn't bear it any longer. Mica stood and took a quick step towards him, jabbing her finger at his chest.

"Back off, jerk. Isn't there something else you should be doing? Keep hovering and we'll see if I've got a handle on this welding jet."

"Hey, easy there." He smiled again, but only took a single step backwards when Mica triggered her flame into life, but his smile intensified. He was enjoying this game.

"Captain?" called Mica over the short-range comms.

"You do know he's not a real captain, don't you?" smirked Balahoskin. "A stint in the reserves, but holds himself like a right stuckup sonofabitch."

"Captain!"

"He's been watching out for you so far, but down here, accidents happen."

Suddenly the group-mote crackled into life with Mubarak's voice:

"You guys done over there? Come on, we're clearing out."

He threw a huge shadow on the wall of the tunnel as he approached with the spotlights at his back, jouncing with every low-gravity moon-like stride. Balahoskin turned towards her and said in a stage-whisper:

"Be careful, Miss. We've had enough risking our arses for your little game, so I'd suggest getting out while you can."

With that, he turned his broad back and started lumbering away up the tunnel. Mica, her heart still tremulous, took a breath to steady herself as Mubarak drew up alongside.

"What the hell was that about?"

Mica shrugged and suppressed her trembling anger. "Nothing."

"Didn't look like nothing. You alright, Doc?"

"Just a little chat, that's all."

"Yeah?" Mubarak's eyes narrowed as he watched Balahoskin's retreating shadow. His mote switched to privacy mode; person-to-person.

"He's had some run-ins in his past, but he's had his psyche work and been cleared. He's not such a bad guy, right?"

Mica's eyes narrowed as she searched Mubarak's face for hint of irony.

"Sure."

"He worked on one of the biggest Russian deep-bore projects, he really knows his stuff. Got caught up in some mafia scandal, and sent up here. But hey, we'll all got our skeletons in the closet, right? That's why we're here." Mubarak paused, was about to add something more and then reconsidered, and simply nodded briefly. "Come on Doc, let's move it out."

"Captain Mubarak? I have something I need to talk to you about."

"Please. Not this again. We've gone over it a thousand times, we can't divert any drilling bots, but you have my word that –"

"No, it's something else. Something very important."

"I'm heading topside." Mubarak was already on his way. "Tell it to me as we walk."

The mote link clicked.

"No, wait! Stop!" Mica took a few skipping low-gravity steps to close the gap to Mubarak, touching his shoulder. In her eagerness she pressed a little too firmly on the fob, leaving little finger shaped dents in his TIG shoulder-plate.

Mubarak spun, shaking off her grip and peevishly inspecting the damage. The indents popped out, leaving only tiny scratches to add to the network of daily abrasions. He gave it an exaggerated brush with the palm of his glove.

Mica raised her chin.

"I have something to say that I don't want the Governess to hear. Can you keep this just between us?"

"I'm in the employ of Fujino Heavy Industries, and right now I'm on the clock. If it's one principle that's kept me out of shit, it's to keep everything _on_ the record."

Mica did not reply or move.

"Dr Fischer, did you hear me? Don't test my patience, I've been fourteen hours in this hole. My battery is redlining, it's freezing, and the Governess is going to get the heavy bots in here in five minutes, and if we're not out by then we're the filling for tomorrow's pies."

"Captain," she said. "Please. Trust me, this is very important."

Mubarak held a deep breath and released in through pursed lips in a long sigh. He met her gaze squarely through the dome of her faceplate. "Make it quick."

"I..." Mica caught herself, feeling giddy, that heart-in-throat feeling of a missed step on a staircase. She shook her head and exhaled. "Who do you see her as?"

"Who?"

"The Governess."

Mubarak did not speak and Mica looked up and spoke into the awkward silence. "I'm sorry, that was too personal, of course. I see her as a stern, pale skinned, almost bleached white. Fit, slim. Nordic origins, perhaps. I'm not sure why, I guess the program saw that was the best model of authority for me."

Mubarak gave a grunt but offered nothing further.

"Sometimes I wonder how she presents herself to others. It's funny to think that we all see her differently, that maybe –"

"Doctor Fischer, is this going anywhere?"

"I... I want to shut her down."

"Christ on a stick! Have you lost your mind?"

"Is it possible?" she said, her voice stiffening. "A full system shutdown, put the base on manual?"

"Technically possible, but there's no way you can pull it off. Why would you even think of doing that?"

"I think that... Everyone is..."

"Yes?"

Mica drew a breath but hesitated. Mubarak threw out his hands.

"Come on, the suspense is killing me."

"Look, no, wait don't go! Give me a moment."

"You've got five seconds."

"The Governess is killing everyone."

Mubarak cocked his head within his helmet. "Oh yes?"

"I know this sounds crazy, I feel like I can't even trust my own thoughts, but I've seen the proof myself."

"Proof?"

"The whole business of nobody going into or out of deep sleep. I checked out the logs, I saw them with my own eyes."

"What?"

"Supplies of Cr2-OH are gone. Totally gone."

"Crow-two-oh-what?"

"Cryo fluid, essential for deep sleep. Causes reduction in heartrate, drops the urea-creatinine ratio, among other things.

"Then what's that mean, without it?"

"Irreversible brain wastage. Death."

"Everyone?"

Mica swallowed the dry lump that had caught in her throat. "We're talking a decay rate of months. There's no way any of the sleepers will last until winter's end."

Mubarak took a step back towards her and looked straight into her eyes. His brows came together and it was obvious he distrusted her. "How the hell could something like this be kept under wraps? Surely there's someone who was notified?"

"Alarm systems are all muted, security for the logs restricted. Nobody on active duty has clearance."

"But you found a way in."

"As I said, my lab has direct access."

"Word was you'd retired." Mubarak exhaled and bowed his head in thought. There was a clack. Suddenly she became aware they had moved so close to one another that their helmets touched. They both withdrew hurriedly, Mubarak giving an awkward little shake of his head as if waking from a strange dream.

"Come on, this is a big call. Maybe you made some mistake, you have to have. I mean, the Governess, she's a bloody watertight computer program. Are you saying she's gone rogue?"

Mica gave a humorless laugh. "Computers a lot more sophisticated than the Governess have yet to gain consciousness. Sure, she's got DNA logic gates and quantum processing, but consciousness has never arisen in even the biggest computer arrays on Earth. No, there's simply a screwy line of code in there somewhere, a crossed-purpose command that has led her to the decision to let the sleepers rot, and then kill us off too."

"I don't buy it. First law of AI is to do no harm to humans, second law no harm by lack of action, and all of that."

"She was programmed by man, and as capable as she might seem, beneath the surface she's just an adding machine."

"It doesn't explain why she's got us so drilling double-shifts."

"No, but it explains the loss of comms. She must have blown the alignment servos, pushed them beyond range and out of spec until they fried. Sealed off from Earth, we can't call for help, and despite all their equipment, nobody on Earth can see through the storm and see what's happening. Sure, it's convoluted, but those are the lapses in programming that are the hardest bugs to find."

"So then who woke you? Who brought you out before everything went to hell?"

Mica bit into her lower lip, sucking it back into her mouth, her face screwed up. "Arran. He was trying to save me. Save us all."

"Arran? You mean the cat?"

"Arran was our lab assistant mech. But that's not all he was. I can't explain it to you, but believe me, he was no ordinary cat. He put his life on the line trying to get the beacon back on-line to get the _Icarus_ down. He wanted to save us."

"Jesus, well, okay, so the little fellow is a saint. But we can't serious oppose the Governess. I mean, there are only a handful of us still awake. My team, and yourself, Vicki, and that genius Galen. Let's get them on board."

"I can't trust them. If the Governess finds out that I know what she's done, who knows what steps the program would take now to preserve itself. "

"But you trust me?"

"The best of a lot of bad choices."

"That's comforting. I guess I'll take that as a compliment."

Mica gave a smile. "Don't let it go to your head."

Mubarak gave a bark of a laugh and shook his head. "Let's say I believe you, what do we do?"

"I was hoping you would be able to help. Switch her off."

"I was on the team that installed the data banks, I could get access... but it's not as simple as just flipping a switch. Life support functions, heating, ventilation, everything, is all routed through her."

Mica turned away, her heart feeling light and useless in her chest.

"Maybe I've got it all wrong. I'm not thinking right, my thoughts are going around and around in circles. I haven't slept properly in weeks." Mica took an abrupt staggering step backwards, feeling the press of the darkness and the cold and isolation. "What the hell am I even doing in this goddamn hell-hole? I've killed him! I should have stayed on Earth, I knew it. I just knew it!"

"Hey, take it easy. Easy, I said. Look, a bit of mote work, and you can be rewired to vanilla configuration in no time. It will be like all of this never happened."

Mica's eyes widened until she saw the wry grin Mubarak's face gleaming in the half-light.

"You're not funny," she growled, giving a weary smile of her own and a rueful shake of her head.

"Well, at least it made you smile," he said. Slowly the levity bled from his face, his brow furrowing in thought and the wrinkles around his eyes deepening.

"What are you thinking?"

Mubarak shook himself from his reverie, the hairs of his mustache and beard rotating like a curling porcupine as he sucked at his lower lip. "I just had a thought... That perhaps this is no accident."

"What do you mean?"

"Perhaps it's not a bug in the Governess's coding. Look at us; still dependent on supply ships from Earth, when by all accounts we should have been self-sufficient years ago. We're a burden."

"Wait, you think someone on Earth set this up? To wipe us out?"

"Yeah, well, that might be one way to deal with the situation."

"Christ!"

"Come on, let's get back topside. I wasn't kidding about those heavy lifters moving in."

Mica hesitated, then followed Mubarak along the tunnel, the walls slick with mud and half hidden in shadow. At the last, just before they were about to step out into the bright lighting of the lift station, she caught up and stood in front of him, making him stop.

"No word," she said, indicating with her eyes to the sensors upon the wall. From here on, every part of the base was monitored. "Not yet."

Mubarak gave a small nod.

Behind her, the industrial elevator doors rumbled open, and they both stepped in. They stood on opposite corners of the box in silence as it accelerated, effectively quadrupling their body weight. Mica's knees give a warning buckle, and she only then realised how close to the limit of physical endurance she was. The rise from the depths seemed to take forever, and there were no more words between them, only strange silence. Mica kept her eyes darting over everything, but she was careful to keep her eyes away from Mubarak lest she accidently meet his gaze.

Had it been a mistake to tell him?

She shook her head to herself, knowing that it was too late now. Things would take their course.

The elevator gave a clunk of gears and began to slow, and they were in free-fall for a moment as it decelerated, arms wrapped into straps into the walls to keep from lifting to the ceiling, and then jerked to a stop. The doors gave a snap and then rattled back upon the lower levels of the hab sector. Mubarak put a palm against the sensor to keep it open, indicating for Mica to step out.

They clanked to the storage locker and sat upon benches upon the side of the room to remove their TIG linkages. Mubarak gave a stamp of his feet, flecking the flooring with mud, and he socketed his TIG into the wall mount with a solid shove. The mount gave a click and a red light illuminated. Mica stood, feeling that relief of lightness and freedom whenever she stepped out of the TIG, arching her back and working her arms to restore blood flow. She dragged the empty skeleton of her TIG to the chargers and with arms weak with fatigue pushed it into its recess.

"Got to push it all the way in," Mubarak said, starting to lean in past her.

Mica pushed his hand away. "No. Leave it. There won't be a next time. Not for me."

Suddenly, now that they were both out of their TIGs, his hulking presence felt intimate. She couldn't explain it, but a sudden sadness had come over her, feeling more than ever the height of that wall around herself she had erected. A wall that even Eiji had been outside.

"Are you alright?" Mubarak asked, turning towards her, his hands raised as if he were about to catch her.

Mica squirmed away, tucking into herself yet at the same time longing to throw herself open, to release the logjam of emotion that throttled her throat. Mubarak, misinterpreting her discomfiture, withdrew a pace.

"Things might be going to hell in a handbasket, but remember, nothing worth doing comes easy. Don't worry, Doc. Leave it with me."

Chapter Ten

Mica awoke with hands shaking her shoulders. She shot upright, withdrawing back in her bed, and Mubarak straightened.

"What are you doing here?" she snapped, instantly on edge and suspicious.

"I couldn't get you on the mote network, you've been shut out. Come on, get dressed."

"What's going on?"

"I don't know, but my crew has been scrambled to the loading dock. Something big is happening. Come on, get dressed. There's not much time."

Mubarak stepped outside her room while she slipped into her helicasuit and boots, and when she emerged he impatiently started walking quickly towards the central bore to the personnel lift, this one much smaller and warmer than the mining elevator. Its inner was lined with padded material. Mica blinked in the bright lights, still feeling the lingering tendrils of sleep in her mind, strangely unsure suddenly if this was all somehow a continuation of a dream.

The doors closed with a gentle hushing and accelerated quickly. Mica glanced sidelong at Mubarak.

"Where are we going?"

"Observation deck. Everyone save my crew has been called there." Mubarak gave a rueful shake of his head. "Let's crash the party."

"I'm not so sure that's a good idea."

With a chime the elevator stopped. Surface level.

Mica stepped out into the corridor, the walls curving over her head. Immediately she had to splay her feet against the swaying and buckling. Mubarak, stepping out behind her, seemed unfazed by the movement, and simply indicated that she precede him down the narrow walkway. Mica kept her eyes dead ahead, concentrating on not losing her balance.

The corridor radiated out from the central bore, and ended before a solid metal door. Mica palmed the switch but the panel flashed red and the door remained closed. Mica turned to Mubarak, who reached past her and calmly placed his own hand against the panel, and the door opened.

"You're not in the good graces of our fearless leader," he said.

Mica's slowly kindling anger grew, and she was first to step through the door into the observation dome.

Despite her mood, it was hard to not be taken aback, to give awed pause and be humbled by the view. The observation dome overhead, arching ten metres overhead in radius, was a facetted tent constructed not of screens but actual windows made of unbreakable sapphire glass ten centimetres thick. Furious winds whipped and skipped overhead, the outer surface speckled with spray and droplets. Arrays of antennas and signalling equipment, sometimes obscured, sometimes visible during breaks in the storm.

The Governess strode the raised central walkway, pausing and turning towards them. Her black hair, streaked with grey like insignias of rank, was pulled back into a high bun, her skin glowing a sheen of perspiration, as if she had been interrupted mid workout, her tight fitting grey high collared jumpsuit showing slight pit stains. Her brows raised in surprise at their entrance.

As if she didn't know she were already coming, thought Mica bitterly. So much fakery and pretence.

Thaler sat in one of the sunken monitoring pits, glancing up briefly at Mica before returning to the far-away stare of one deep in a mote-sensory field. At the next station she saw Vicki's brain compartment plugged directly into another control bench, her ambulatory body standing slump-shouldered and headless nearby.

"What's going on?" she said through clenched teeth, striding towards the Governess. Behind her she felt Mubarak move forward half a step and place a restraining hand lightly upon her shoulder. Mica ducked her shoulder angrily.

The Governess gave a slight smile and shake of her head. "Doctor Fischer, I'm afraid you are not an authorized member of scientific staff any longer. Doctor Galen is standing by in case we need any advice."

Through the mote-net Galen made his virtual presence known to Mica. She ignored him.

The Governess strode further away and said: "Officer Thaler, reports from your station?"

"What's going on?" Mica asked again.

Vicki took mercy upon her, and spoke through the mote-net.

"The Icarus is about to hit atmosphere."

"The Icarus? I don't understand, how could she-"

"Looks like Arran managed to get the antenna on-line after all. She'll be in range in two minutes. Glad you could make it."

Vicki enabled Mica's feed, giving her access to the updates. Mica's mote lit up, and she saw a fuzzy radar image, the blip of the unmanned resupply ship, and her head filling with information detailing the Icarus's current speed and position, current weather and forecasts; so much influx that she felt giddy and had to close her eyes.

The Governess said: "Thirty-three seconds until the Icarus is in range of short range sensors. Stand by..."

Mica exchanged a glance with Mubarak, who simply extended his palms upwards and shook his head in confusion. The Governess remained perfectly motionless, then said:

"Four, three, two, one. I'm hooking in with the autopilot now."

"Ma'am, are you sure you can bring it down?" said Thaler. "Weather is heavy. If we can keep it in orbit until after winter... There's nothing we need so urgently."

"I'm aware of the weather, but that is not your concern and not a matter for current debate."

When Thaler spoke he was exceedingly careful not to meet Mica's gaze.

"Ma'am. I... In my opinion, it is not safe to attempt a landing."

"Not safe?" Mica said. "Thaler, you were the one who booted Arran outside so he could do just this, and now you want to send it away?"

"Let the records also show objection to attempted landing from Deep Imaging Officer."

"Ma'am, primary coding is to do no harm. We have to abort!"

"Opinion noted, Officer Thaler. Need I remind you this is not a democracy. In lieu of communication Earthside, the decision is mine. Shall I quote the directive to you?"

"No, Ma'am."

"I am detecting spikes of negative neurological activity; are you sure you have no further objections?"

"No, Ma'am."

"Good."

The Governess' expression sudden froze. Her projection gave a flicker and jerk.

"Calculating... Calculating..."

Mubarak shook his head slowly and said: "I've got a bad feeling about this."

Mica linked in her mote to general broadcast. "Vicki, we need to –"

"Calculation complete," said the Governess. "Proceed."

Mica swallowed the hard lump that had built in her throat.

"Heavy wind blast detected," called Vicki. "In five, four, three..."

"Taking measures," said the Governess, her back straight, her face expressionless. "Readjusting..."

"A hit, force twelve, gryo's are out!" Thaler called, and slammed the palms of his hands against the desk. "Lost the trace, she's on an unstable trajectory!"

The blip on the radar leached away, fading into background static of the storm.

"Comms failure," came Vicki's voice through the mote feed.

Mica felt the floor beneath her feet give a shudder as winds lashed against the thick plastic. The Governess shook her head. "Seven twenty-eight. Uplink lost."

"The beacon?" asked Mica. The beacon that Arran had activated, she thought. The one thing that may save them all.

"Beacon is strong," said Vicki. "Autopilot may still be able to keep a lock."

The control room fell silent. The radar display projected into Mica's field of view was but a swarm of shifting densities in the heavy atmosphere, empty of the solid ping of the ship.

"I'm getting something. Low but powering strong."

"I see her," said the Governess.

"Another wind blast coming," warned Thaler. "Big one. We can ride it out if we get her higher."

"Negative," the Governess said. "I've got a remote lock on it now."

"It's coming straight in," said Thaler.

"You're trying to beat it?" asked Vicki.

"There is enough time," said the Governess with surety in her voice.

The radar blip grew strong and close. On the monitor display Mica saw a stream of stats and predicted flight paths swirling in a complicated mathematical dance. Suddenly she knew with ice certainty what was about to happen.

"Stop it! Vicki, take back control! Don't let her, she's going to crash it!"

Mica raced forward, batting at the projection of the Governess, her mote telling her mind that her hands struck something solid, but they simply moved through the empty air, palms tingling with the sensory input. Vicki's empath feed lit up with query and Mica poured every ounce of pleading across the network.

"Stop her, stop her!" she cried.

Hands were grabbing at her and Mica flailed for a moment, unsure why she could no longer move forward, realizing that Mubarak had grabbed her from behind, pinning her arms by her side.

Mica thrashed against him. Thaler was on his feet, eyes darting from Mica to the Governess, whose projection had simply relocated a few metres further down the bridge. In the mote feed Mica saw the Icarus continue her descent, riding upon a nose cone of burning fire, the fire of its braking jets roaring as it slowed.

"Vicki, don't trust her. Go manual!"

"Doctor Fischer, I mean no harm."

Mica switched to general broadcast again, speaking to everyone base-wide who was awake. "The Governess is lying to us! She's trying to kill us all! I know why we can't sleep, she's sabotaged the whole thing! They are all dying!"

Galen's mote-feed replied first in the silence that followed. "Do you have evidence?"

Mica flung as much as she was able into her mote-feed, realising as she did so her proof was startling flimsy: her mote recording had been switched off in the time she had seen the reports. She made up for the lack of data by filling the empath line, feeling like a fool as she did so.

"That's it?" came Galen's voice through the mote-net. "You've got to understand that we can't just take your word for it."

Mica gathered herself and tried to reply, to build her argument, then suddenly blinked, realizing that she had been blocked. Nothing more she projected could get through into the mote-net. The Governess approached Mica at a casual stroll, her projection closing the distance between them more rapidly than classical mechanics would have allowed. She stood straight, a head taller than Mica, what was intended to be a consolatory smile on her face as she said:

"You are drawing some hasty and dangerous conclusions from insufficient data, Doctor Fischer. It is hardly scientific. I expected better of you."

"You can't block me from the feed," she snarled between gritted teeth. "That's a direct violation of every code in the book."

"I act only within my operational limits, and I do all I can to keep the integrity of this base." Her steel grey eyes held a myriad of tiny details, of very real human-appearing motions. "It is unfortunate you found out, I was trying to save panic."

"Panic? People are dying, and you're just letting it happen! Damn right it would create panic." On the monitors Mica saw the Icarus descending lower and lower, and counting down number indicating the altitude. There wasn't much time left.

The Governess's lips pursed. "I have nothing but the best interest of every soul in this colony in mind. For now, you must trust me. We have more immediately pressing matters."

Chemicals flooded Mica's mind. She clenched her jaw. She reached out, took hold of Mubarak's forearm.

"Help me," she cried, hand raised to her temple.

"What the hell? Hey, Doc? Doc?"

"Mode mood suppressants, injected straight into my amygdala." Mica blinked hard, trying to cling to that remnant of blazing emotion, harbouring it, trying to blow life into it, but it was fading. She knew she had lost something vital, but couldn't quite put her finger on what it was. She became aware that she hung limp in Mubarak's arms, feeling his iron strength and the trembling of anger building in him.

"Are you okay?"

"Just making me lose the edge of my aggression."

The Governess returned Mubarak's stare.

"Company policy," she said.

Mubarak narrowed his eyes and opened up his own feed to the group-wide net.

"We've got to shut her down," he projected, parsing along his own feed to Mica so that she was able to hear despite the block. "Doctor Fischer may not have all the facts, but something stinks about this whole thing. Shut her down, let's go manual, and figure this out."

"The Icaraus?" asked Thaler.

"Hold her off. Put her in orbit. Let's deal with one thing at a time."

"Sensible," said Thaler. "The path of no harm. We can switch her back on if need be."

There was a brief pause, then Galen chimed into the net with his grudging support. The crew, from their station down in the lower landing deck, were privy to the entire exchange. They unanimously backed their Captain.

"Thaler, can you do it?" asked Mubarak. "Turn her off?"

"Give me one second –"

"No, wait!" interrupted Vicki. "It's too late! The Icarus is already past the point in her trajectory for abort."

"Just turn her around."

"Like it or not, she's coming in now."

"How far away?"

"Close. Fifty k."

Mubarak cursed. "Can we bring her in without the Governess?"

The Governess spoke over them all in a tone of command.

"I have taken control of the Icarus. You must trust me, there is no time. Trust me, I will bring her in safely."

"Ten k," reported Vicki. "Five. Three, two, one, mark!"

And suddenly there it was. The primal physically arrested Mica's heart within her chest, her head tilted backwards in a fraction of a second frozen into eternity, the ship seen through the windows overhead as a hot streak of red and yellow hydrocarbons. An instant later the entire dome thrummed.

The flare of braking jets faded, leaving bright afterimages as smaller manoeuvring jets fired, bringing the ship to a standstill, hovering over to the side of the dome, hull glowing incinerator red. The Icarus was battered from a lifetime of use, yet whole and strong, rocking gently like a ship at dock as compensation jets fired against the gusts of wind.

"Hatch is open," said Vicki.

Mica watched as the Icarus descended gracefully into the open maw below, where the long bore of the central shaft would deliver it deep safely into the bowels of the Guardian Tempest.

"Systems check complete," said the Governess. "She's down, and safe."

The projection in Mica's retinal display switched to a feed of the central bore. The arrow-shaped vessel had touched down upon its three landing struts. The deck shuddered and began to descend downwards. Massive hatch doors closed above, two half-circles rumbling from either side of the bore and sealing with a satisfying shudder that Mica felt through the soles of her boots. Every single light lining the inner bore was on now, illuminating the Icarus in stark detail from all angles so that she cast no shadow as it dropped the twenty storeys of rock, down into the central hanger space.

The Governess strode to the centre of the dome and spread her arms, her smile enigmatic. "In light of current events, perhaps it is best I step down from command, at least temporarily. As highest ranking crew, I hand over all controls to you Doctor Galen."

Galen's mote feed took a moment to react, and it was devoid of emotion.

"Temporary command accepted. Officer Thaler, take care of the Ithaca."

"Got it," said Thaler, hunched over at his panel, lower lip caught between his teeth, eyes and fingers moving rapidly.

Mica dismissed the mote-feed images and felt all strength leave her, palpable relief washing through her limbs. The Icarus was in. There would be no more supply problems. They could save the sleepers.

"Drill crew, I want the ship and inventory checked as soon as possible," said Galen.

Mica brought up a mote feed of the lower deck, the main landing platform. Chi-ling, Belahoskin and Mitch, all in their TIGs, moved in and out of view and a few hydraulic bots in the background. Chi-ling took several large strides towards the Icarus and tapped her gloved hand against the rapidly cooling hull as if to confirm its reality.

"Have you ever seen something so ugly?" she said, projecting her own point-of-view into the mote-net.

"Excuse me," said Mubarak to Mica. He closed his eyes and fell into the head-slumped posture of mote-immersion as he sent his own projection down onto the docking bay. Mica saw him stride about, ghostly insubstantial as he breezed through obstructions.

"Balahoskin, Mitch, get the struts lashed down. Chi-ling, get inside and make sure the cargo is intact. We need the Cr2-OH that's in there, don't let anything happen to it. Our lives depend on it."

Mica closed the feed in time to see Thaler stand from his console pit.

"Where are you going?"

"There's some docking ports I want to make sure get connected properly that can only be done in person. I'll be in touch." Quick and lithe, he launched himself with a few well-placed kicks through the door and was gone.

The Governess turned to Mica and spread her hands graciously.

"Doctor Fischer, believe you and I have some issues to discuss."

"If you've got something to say, you'd better start talking, and quick."

The Governess's eyes narrowed and she gave a sharp warning glance, and with careful deliberation began to study the nails of one hand, scrapping away some imagined blemish. "It was not my doing," she began, finally raising her eyes to look at them. "You must understand the situation. It is the fundamental premise of my programming to keep everyone alive, and I am doing all I can to uphold that core principal."

"You're a goddamn computer program, what do you care about life?"

"I care just as much as you. Let me set the record straight. Please, let's go somewhere more comfortable."

Mica glanced at Mubarak, who still stood with his head bowed, eyes flickering as if in a dream. She edged a little closer to him. "No thank you. Here is fine."

"Very well. The summary. At approximately fifteen-twenty hours on day four-thousand ninety three a leak in the reserve tanks of Cr2-OH was discovered. In two minutes, ninety-nine point eight percent of reserves were vented outside the base before the problem was discovered. Initial reports indicated a failure in one of the relay valves. Owing to the emotional distress this was predicted to cause, the issue was kept from all operational crew, especially in light of the further development."

"Further development?"

"Yes Doctor. The wa" – her voice suddenly rose in pitch and squeaked out a series of high pitched tones, then dropped to normal timbre again – "– the water, Doctor, Doctor, Doctor –"

The projection of the Governess stuttered sideways, realigned, then froze.

"What the hell are you playing at?" said Mica, just as the Governess vanished altogether, taking the entire mote feed with her.

The floor at her feet gave a shudder.

"What the hell was that?" cried Mubarak, feet splayed into a staggering crouch, back into his body and looking dizzy at the sudden return. To have everything disappear so swiftly was like plunging into an ice bath, or the heavy drop of a guillotine blade; the action itself too quick to have sensation, only in the moments that followed could the mind grasp the entirety of the situation. This was entirely different from being blocked from the communications network.

"The entire feed has gone," Mica said, wide-eyed and blinking.

A second rumble followed close on the heels of the first, this one strong enough to knock them both from their feet, as if they had been standing upon a carpet and it had been taken away from beneath them. She met Mubarak's gaze, and saw reflected back her own confusion.

Then the walls of the control room breached, and the winds of Titan rushed into the room.

Chapter Eleven

Sudden acceleration forcibly squeezed every last breath from Mica's chest, casting her along with everything else not firmly secured to the floor across the room as if flung by some giant catapult, the gale force wind sweeping everything in its path into a tumult of debris. A banshee shriek of wind howled at her ears, and she could do nothing but ride it out, be flung where the wind may take her. It was like being rolled through surf, pummelled by a breaker running over the sand into shore, dragging her with it, tumbling and turning and filling her every sense with such an overload of noise that she found herself in an odd state of Zen.

Mica's head spun, her lungs still collapsed to totality such that it was impossible to draw a breath, the screaming need for air thrusting her mind suddenly from that mediative accepting state and into one of panicked clawing for life. She could not figure what was happening, everything focussed only on air, on breath, to fill the deflated Chinese lanterns of her lungs. Finally, she did so, a quavering, heaving, shuddering inhalation. She tried to focus, to determine what had happened. She saw Vicki in her pit was gone, her headless ambulatory body crushed and trailing wires like a gutted piñata. The lights in the room were out, only a pale ghostly red light filtering from somewhere behind her. The intensity of the screaming wind had eased now, no longer explosive, as pressure imbalances restored. Somewhere along the line something had clouted her across her left ear, making everything ache and roar inside her head. She could only look around, stunned, her mind unable to make sense of the utter confusion of devastation.

Then she pieced together where she was and her mind balked.

Every single pane of glass had blown into shards, leaving only jagged remnants clinging here and there to the domed shell of scaffolding over her head. She lay looking straight upwards through the wreckage, stunned at the blasphemy to all that was proper. The wind tugged and a spray of cryogenic methane slicked her hair against her face. Her lungs worked uselessly at the rapidly cooling air, her mind entranced by a curved surface of the metal where the rain struck with such force and rapidity it looked like it was boiling. If she defocussed her eyes she could see it made shifting patterns of beauty and complexity, darting first one way and then another like schools of silver fish. In a brief moment of clarity, she realised she was one of the very few humans ever to have breathed the atmosphere of another world straight into her lungs. The temperature of liquid nitrogen, it seared her chest and stung her eyes, hitting the back of her throat with a rich and pungent punch. It was only her helicasuit, fibres contracting and stiffening into an impermeable armour, that saved her from instant death.

She had to move: Titan's atmosphere of nitrogen and methane would be just as deadly as its intense cold. It wouldn't take long for nitrogen narcosis to drop its insidious hood; there would be no warning signs of shortness of breath or light-headedness, but simply a silent and sudden shutdown in brain function.

She was able to haul herself backwards, stumbling over her own feet. Through rents in the roof overhead the sky was lit by stroboscopic flashes of lightning between the clouds, washes of vivid purple brightness dazzling her night vision. Mica moved away from the walls and from the intense cold, trying to stand against the whirlpools of debris filling the air, her arms held protectively over her head; able to lofted in low gravity, some of the larger pieces carried considerable momentum, as she discovered when something large slammed into her side, bruising her shoulder and sending her spinning. Realizing her folly, she dropped to a crouch, feet scrambling for purchase and heading for whatever shelter she could find. Her head was starting to ache now; she'd been holding her breath, but with all the exertion she was quickly feeling the savage need to breathe.

The floor dipped, and she slipped into the shallow depression, seeking passage between ruined equipment. Water in the air had begun to crystallize and her eyes stung and watered and she struggled to make out where she was. Then she recognised Vicki's recline chair, crumpled as if it had been nothing but foil, Then, startling close, practically under her nose, she Vicki's brain compartment, the white plasteel cracked and black lubricant gel leaking from the brain cradle, already frozen into a sluggish flow rimed with thick static bubbles rippling in the wind. The brain case lay beneath one of the support beams that had fallen from overhead, a huge block of metal that rested against another piece of wreckage, but the gap was not big enough for Mica to reach in and rescue it. In her panic she took a great gasping breath at the cold slammed deep into the tissues of her lungs, making her gag.

"Help!" she cried, at last collapsing into a protective huddle, the sound of her own voice sounding uselessly weak in her own ears.

Mica tried to call up a mote map, and it filled her mind's eye in three-dimensional fullness, but without the network the map showed only flat random lines of noise. She dismissed it before the disorientation overwhelmed her. With her eyes closed she felt the world take a step away, the noise suddenly muted as if her ears were stuffed with cottonwool.

Then a hand grabbed her wrist and drew her upright and planted a mask over her nose and mouth, and with her next inhalation the air carved a clear stream of thought through the mire of her head. She exhaled, then gasped in a lungful of the deliciously warm air again before opening her eyes.

"Captain!"

Mica clung to him, enclosing her arms about his broad torso. He wasn't even moving in the wind, his bulk standing as a rigid against the force as if carved from stone. His mouth moved but she couldn't hear.

"We have to help her!" she called, herself aware that something was missing from her own voice, aware that without the mote net she couldn't project her thoughts as she usually could.

His eyes signalling his intent, he withdrew the mask from her face. He held an emergency canister by the handle at his waist, the bright red cylinder looking like a fire extinguisher, and breathing mask in his free hand. He took a breath from the heated mask, the barrel of his chest expanding, and then passed it back to Mica again.

"What...the hell.... happened?!" he shouted, expelling his pent breath. His hands were about her shoulders as he looked directly in her eyes.

What had been bugging at the back of her mind about the shutters in the observation deck finally made sense. They hadn't been breached from without, but rather buckled from within.

Mica simply pointed a finger downwards into the floor and mimed an explosion with her hands.

Mubarak shook his head unbelievingly as they again exchanged the air mask.

"My crew!"

Mica remembered seeing the monitor screen, frozen in that last frame, the odd surprised look in Chi-ling's face with the fireball enveloping her. Mica felt her heart fill with a sick lead feeling.

"Vicki," she shouted. The whistling of the storm winds redoubled, a buffeting that tugged and pushed like a belligerent child. They leant up close to the block of fallen metal, in the lee of the wind. Here they could stand without being pushed to the ground, and hear each other speak. "She's hurt; we've got to get her out."

Mubarak's eyes moved over the destroyed pit and the remains of Vicki's brain box and the line of his mouth hardened. As he was about to reply the floor gave a lurching heave, the huge spikes drilled deep into Titan's surface tethering the corridors and domes had given way, lifting and shifting like a poorly staked tent in a storm. Triangular shards of glass began to fall and the rumble and shaking increased, everything bouncing as if in an earthquake.

Mubarak's grip tightened upon her shoulders, shaking her, bringing her gaze away from Vicki and back to his.

"We've got to get out of here. We've got to get off the surface, get deeper. This place won't hold on much longer."

"We can't leave her." A memory came flooding back. Eiji, lines of blood running from his ears, staring somehow through her. She had fled and left him, alone. And now again, forced by fate to repeat her actions.

Mubarak took the mask, held it over his nose and mouth, and turned aside as he surveyed what little remained of the dome overhead. Mica noticed that the flesh on his cheeks above the neat line of his beard glinted as the moisture in the skin froze, and she knew that tingling sensation on her own face was her own flesh freezing.

Mubarak turned back and ran his hand over the large block of equipment that trapped Vicki. He removed the mouthpiece, handed it to Mica, and said:

"We can't waste two lives to save one that is was almost certainly gone. We have to go, right now!"

"No," Mica said within the mask, shaking her head fiercely. She took a deep breath then shoved the mask back into his hands. She turned and dropped into a crouch, fingers spread over the lip of the heavy bench and trying to lift. Her feet slipped, and she fell.

Mubarak lifted her by the upper arm and put her back on her feet.

"I can't stay here with you," he warned.

"Just go!" she barked, slapping his hand away. From the corner of her eye she saw him retreat a step. Her back to him again, she again tried to lift the block enough that would give her access to slip beneath. She strained, her breath leaking through her teeth, but nothing budged. She knew then the fear of death, the closeness, and a flash of panic ran over her skin and she almost collapsed in weakness.

The air mask pressed over her mouth and nose again, the warmed stream of air coursing into her lungs. She felt the gentle pressure of the elastic as the strap was looped over the back of her head. The weight of the cylinder was in her hand and when she opened her eyes she saw him in a squat, lifting at the block, head thrown back and tendons standing out in a tight line at his throat.

The block moved. Mica dropped to her knees and reached beneath, but despite the extra clearance, her shoulder stuck, and her hand came just short of reaching the football shaped box of Vicki's brain enclosure. She pushed further, and her fingertips succeeded in brushing up against the silvered surface and it spun upon its axis, leaking black fluid, tracing out an arc as it rotated. It was now too far away for her to reach.

Mica withdrew her arm and stood, taking the block alongside Mubarak, her legs splayed as she took the weight. She tried to convey to him in gestures that she couldn't reach, and joining him, starting pushing the block further up, pivoting about the edge that lay upon the ground. Mubarak just looked at her, a slow shaking of his head. An icy sheen lay over his face, his eyes glassy. Mica narrowed her gaze and stubbornly put her back into the lift, every fibre in her body pinging with tearing fire. From her periphery she saw Mubarak bow his head and put everything he had into the task, and together they moved the block fractionally higher.

Suddenly something snapped, and the block fell like a guillotine. A rod of metal caught between bent and sprung like an arrow and Mubarak cried out and threw himself backwards, spinning. Mica was too stunned to react as the edge of the block slammed a millimetre from the toe of her boot. With fatalistic slow motion her eyes crept to the far edge of the block, staring with wide-eyed horror at the liquid mess of cerebral mush and black fluid leaking from small gaps beneath the block that now lay flat upon the floor, forming twisting rivulets as they drained in a thick pool. Mica looked blankly at her fingertips, which she noticed were stained with smears of the same black fluid. She closed her eyes, but the image of Vicki's crushed brain flashed into her mind. Was there solace in a quick end? Was it possible for her to suffer, to observe her own descent into death? Mica took a staggering step back, throwing her head side-to-side as if that could cast out the grisly image, fearing that if it wormed into her heart she would quickly start down a slippery slope of panic.

Mubarak was back at her side, and slipped the mask from her face. He sucked from it with a ragged heave and gave a wracking cough. When he handed it back, she noticed the inside of the transparent cup was flecked with blood. She took the bloodstained mask and pressed it to her mouth, inhaling a succession of quick breaths, not caring that it stuck wetly around the seals. The mind had a way of prioritizing, and the demands for oxygen overwhelmed any queasiness.

"You're hurt," she said dumbly.

Mubarak turned half-aside from her, hiding his right side from her view, one hand clutching at something at his abdomen. He grabbed her arm.

"We have to go."

This time she did not fight as he led the way, stumbling and falling as they headed straight for the lifts that would take them deep into the Guardian Tempest and to safety. The entire structure of the corridors had been swept away and they moved in the darkness and stroboscopic flashes of lightning.

They came to a dead stop at the rim of a great blackened pit and stood swaying in awe.

The Central Pillar had been funnelled clean like the bore of a massive cannon, the metal surfaces ticking and pinging as they cooled. Downwards, was darkness. Drifts of smoke rose and were caught by eddies and were taken away overhead.

"We have to jump," said Mubarak.

"One hundred metres to the first level. Gravity is ten times less than on earth..." She tried to concentrate on the numbers, but everything was spinning inside her head. She cursed and wished she had access to the simulation software on the network.

"No time to think," he replied, seeing her hesitate. He took the gas cylinder from her hands and lifted it high above his head. Mica noticed – in the split second he held that extended pose with his arms above his head – that a grimace twisted across his face, betraying the stab of pain from the injury upon his right side he had been concealing from her. Before she could speak he brought the end of the cylinder down sharply upon the ground as if it were an axe chopping at wood.

The regulator gave a sharp crack.

"Have you lost your mind? What are you doing?"

"With any luck, the air down there will be breathable and we won't need this." Mubarak brought the cylinder down again, and this time the regulator snapped off completely and gas began to shoot out in a narrow jet. Taking her hand, he pulled her to him and without hesitation started running, the cylinder under one arm, still rocketing gas. At the lip of the ruined crater they did not pause, and without a break in stride he took a massive leap, pulling Mica close, and she felt the edges of the lip give way as they sprang.

Beneath her feet now was only void.

They accelerated, flapping and kicking, the smoke that blew upwards helped buoy them but it also created a shuddering updraft of uneven pockets of air. Mubarak twisted the still roaring gas escaping from the cylinder, pointing it downward, slowing their flight. It danced and fought beneath him and he had to keep his bodyweight over it and Mica clung to him, feeling the pressure slowing their flight. Her heart beat rapidly, hardly believing that it was working. She guessed they had descended maybe twenty, thirty metres - it was hard to tell - but the bottom must be coming up soon.

The cylinder, bucking and weaving, at last got the better of Mubarak, yanking sideways and flying out of his hands. Suddenly they were both tumbling over backwards in free-fall, Mubarak's body somewhere to her side, everything going black, and she tensed and could only wait for the impact. As she fell it took so long that she realised she had been holding her breath. It must be soon, she thought. She was going fast now, too fast. It certainly felt she was asymptotically reaching terminal velocity. She had been holding her breath so long now she was starting to feel faint.

Then something very hard caught her lower back and whiplashed her head and the back of her skull cracked against something with a resounding thud.

Instinctively, before even raising her head, the first thing she did was run her tongue over her teeth, expecting to find jagged edges and gore, waiting for the pain, waiting for the metallic taste of blood in the back of her throat, but there was nothing but stillness and the drowning weeeee of tinnitus ringing in her ears.

On her knees in the darkness Mica struggled through the uneven footing, fighting against the weakness, her fingertips splayed and extended. Amazingly, she was able to stand, flexing her arms and legs, hardly believing that she had fallen without injury. She kept expecting pain to hit her, but although her whole body ached, the sharp pain of acute injury never came, and at last she was able to direct her thoughts to where they were.

She knew that they must be in the vast space of the docking bay, but all that remained now was blackened and scorched ruins. Debris lay everywhere, radiating heat like slag raked from the furnace, casting a strange red glow and shadow over all. She felt the heat through her gloves and heard a creaking, ticking noises like Styrofoam being broken as the ice coating her helicasuit melted into steam. She became aware of a steady wind rushing silently upward, venting oxygen, and a counter current of cryogenic fog creeping down the walls like the knuckled claws of a witch's fingers. She hoped enough of the Guardian Tempest's air remained down here, or else she'd simply drop into unconsciousness. She had to hold the crook of her elbow up to her mouth to breath in an attempt to modulate the temperature of the air as it blistered into her lungs.

Such a narrow range of temperatures the human body can bear, she thought, her mind starting to wander. The range was pitifully small, and even with the helicasuit, her body was not meant to survive outside that preciously narrow window of temperatures and pressures found upon Earth's surface.

Her mote sensors had been sounding a warning in her inner ear and Mica finally addressed it, her heartbeat fluttering as she read the display.

Radiation. The place was glowing.

The helicasuit fibres would only protect them for a limited time, and she wondered if the lightness in her thoughts could be due to radiation. She muted her mote warnings, closing down the display in the periphery of her vision showing the rapid accumulation of dosage; there was nothing to be done about it now, and she simply didn't have the strength to confront the reality of what it meant for her life expectancy, even if she could get herself out of here.

Then she saw something huge in the flickering red glow, taking form before her from the jumble and looming so large that she wondered how she hadn't noticed it sooner. It was the Icarus, split open along the axis of the carbo bays, the entire shell ruptured outwards. Jumbled, fused by white-hot fire, everything had merged into a waxy jumble of shifting shadows, here and there distinguished by materials designed to withstand the heat, yet whose function was now lost to randomness. She straightened and moved closer, stepping carefully. The remains of the Icarus had been crushed up against the far wall, its nose rammed into a jumble of twisted metal, and she studied it for several seconds, knowing there was something there that she was missing, something it was telling her.

She then saw a piece of a TIG, and a collapsed sleeve of a helicasuit. Mica took steps towards it and dropped to her knees, her hands spread as if in benefaction, her heart beating a rapid thud in her ears, simultaneously repulsed and somehow drawn to the piece. She saw text upon the severed TIG linkage and she knew it immediately as Chi-ling's. Nothing remained of the arm that had been within, vaporized into blackened soot that ran out from the opening like a spilled sack of coal. Her head turned in a slow half circle, recognizing other pieces of TIG similarly twisted. She couldn't stop herself as she traced her eyes over the wreckage until she saw three distinct TIG shells.

So, they had all died.

She turned, and there at her feet she saw something then half buried and wedged upside-down between two blocks of concrete. A skull. One side had been flayed completely to the bone, an empty eye socket, the bone polished unnaturally smooth by what must have been a wash of plasma. She recognized it was Balahoskin only by the other half of his head, the side that wedged into the blocks and had had some protection, looking like some twisted mockery of a roasted side of beef, thick hairs singed and flesh blackened and cracked.

A buckling nausea swept over her, twisting her guts. Doubled over, she felt everything empty from her stomach. Her body continued to convulse long after the contents of her stomach had been emptied.

From somewhere in that hellish glow and gloom, she heard a groan.

Mica spat and wiped the strings of spittle from her lips with the back of her glove.

"Captain?" she said. She spun about, narrowing in on the sound, stumbling over herself in that strange red light.

"I'm here. Over here!"

"Captain, are you okay? Keep talking, I can't see you."

"Here, I... I can't get up..."

Mica saw him, lying unmoving upon his back, and hurried to crouch by his side.

"Are you hurt?"

"Just give me a moment," said Mubarak, his tongue thick. "Give me a moment to catch my breath."

"Let me see that."

"I'm fine. No, I'm fine."

"Let me see."

Mica lifted his hand away from his right side, revealing the injury he had taken earlier. A neat fist-sized hole punctured his helicasuit, just below the ribcage. The nanobots in his bloodstream had formed rapid clots but the wound was too severe and they simply squirted out like half-formed jelly, hanging from the edges of the helicasuit in globules in the weak gravity. Mubarak returned his hand, pressing uselessly against the flow of blood. His mote must have triggered to control the pain, for he had the softened, drunken aspect to his features of neural anaesthesia.

"I just need to rest a moment," he said again, offering her a weak smile.

She forced a steadiness to her own words that she did not feel.

"Captain, the mote has loaded you full of uppers to get you this far, pumped you with short-term strength, but there's no more your body can give."

"I've had my share of post-buzz crashes. Don't worry, I'll be fine in a moment."

"Your helicasuit was punctured. You've been exposed to too much already."

"We're here now, we made it down. My crew, they can't be far away. But Doc, what you said before. That can't be right. The entire mote network..."

"It's down," she said, lowering her head and closing her eyes, the overwhelming hopeless reality of their situation sinking in.

Mubarak grunted. "That's impossible. It would take a nuclear shitstorm to blow through the container walls of the mainframe."

"I found it."

"You found what?"

"The cause of the blast. It was the Icaraus." Mica nodded her head in the direction of the shadow of the wrecked ship.

"Someone planted a nuclear bomb?" Mubarak's rising voice choked and he coughed. "Jesus, someone Earthside trying to take us all out, once and for all?"

"Not a bomb. The engines had fired." Mica shook her head to clear her thoughts, realizing now what the wreckage had been telling her. "Powerful interplanetary fission engines that drove the craft up against the wall, until back-reflections caused meltdown."

"Christ, you're saying we're sitting at ground zero? We're both going to be toasted to hell."

"I guess."

"The transgenic splicing, that protects us, right?"

"To a degree, yes, we have modifications that improve our resistance to high levels of radiation. A normal human being would be dead by now. But resistance is not immunity, sooner or later..."

"We've got to get to the med-bay. You know how to work those machines, right Doc?"

Mica was slow to respond, for that world of hope and order seemed impossibly far away from where she sat now, upon the slag of ruins and death.

"Sure."

"The lab has its own backup power network, entirely self-sufficient. Clone us up both some new bodies. It's about time I renewed this one."

"As long as our brains don't fry," said Mica.

"As long as our brains don't fry," he agreed. "The one thing we can't clone, eh?"

"It's not that we can't clone the brain," replied Mica vacantly. "It's just that it wouldn't be you. It would have the mind of an infant."

"There's got to be a way somehow, right Doc? To shoot all that stuff I have up there across?"

Mica didn't respond. Mubarak gave a grunt and returned his attention to the vast hulking shadow of the Icarus.

"So why did the engines trigger? You think...?"

"It was no accident. The Governess did this."

Mubarak shook his head doubtfully.

"Not her style. Maybe the boffins Earthside didn't rig a bomb, but they did the next best thing..." Mubarak stopped as a wave of wet coughs overtook him, heavy with the sound of phlegm and blood. "Maybe they pre-programmed this."

Mica blinked as pieces fell together in her mind. "You might be right, Captain. The engines didn't fire until she was completely docked. The explosion was meant to destroy the mainframe, it's just below us. They took out the Governess."

"So they weren't trying to wipe us out, but save us? Some rescue."

"Yeah. Genius move." She shook her head, feeling that somehow they were pushing pieces of the puzzle together that did not quite fit. She grunted. "I'll work on the wording to our reply so they know exactly how we feel about it."

Mubarak gave a rueful laugh and shot Mica a glance, nodding slowly.

"We're getting out of here, Doc. My crew, they're coming. We've just got to hold on."

Mica found herself squeezing the bridge of her nose, fumbling in that emptiness to find herself in the sudden blankness, as vanishingly small that might be; finding her centre of self, the loom to which the thread of reality is spun into the weave of the past. She felt then that her weariness was too much, that this was as far as she could go.

"Maybe, Captain. Maybe."

Mica sunk deeper into her squat, her head lolling backwards. Her eyes were dry and stinging from the radiating heat, watching the swirls of smoke vanishing up overhead. An incredible weariness came over here and all thoughts started to bleed from her mind. It wouldn't be long until they both succumbed.

Although his voice was quiet, almost as if he spoke to himself, Mubarak startled her when he spoke.

"Did I tell you I was on the first construction teams to touch down on Titan? Lying here, kind of reminds me of when I first jumped from the lander, and after my feet hit the ground for a few seconds I just stood there, listening to the sound of the lander rockets cooling, and everything was stark light or shadow in the floodlights, the sun only a pinprick... Then everything hit me, the incredible achievement of what we had done. The boldness in what we were doing."

Mubarak twisted his upper body towards her, his eyes twinkling in the red light. "On the flight from Earth, during the period of inertial coasting, I was sent out on a spacewalk. Minor repairs, micro-meteorite strikes that had punctured the solar foils. We were about halfway, the ship had spun on its tail and we were preparing for deceleration, and the Earth was so tiny as to be almost invisible, and you could have botted out the sun with an outstretched fingertip. Just the incredible vastness of space around me. Then suddenly I could feel it, you know, just feel a presence of something, and be damned if when I looked around I was surrounded, I mean surrounded, by these glowing orbs, just hanging there, glinting in the light, moving as if they had a... a will. They had just come from nowhere, I mean, we were in deep space, and I was on the outboard wing, a long way from anything. One second there was nothing, the next, there they were. I know it sounds crazy, but I could sense something" – he shook his head and gave a self-deprecating laugh – "spiritual. Hell, what am I saying? I sensed something vast. Some hint of the grand design. What, what's wrong?"

Mica hid her smile.

"Nothing, Captain. Nothing."

Mubarak smiled hesitantly. "So I've said something dumb, I can tell."

"No. Thank you."

"For what?"

"For trying to inspire me. It is a beautiful story, I appreciate it."

"But..?"

"I... Well, I can guess what those orbs were." Mica hesitated a moment, then sighed. "In deep space, a suit is programmed to vent."

"Sure, okay. But I don't get it."

"Purge the waste tank."

Mubarak's eyes darkened in thought.

"Are you saying it was... piss? But I've been telling that story for years. Did anyone else figure it out?"

Mica shrunk her head into her shoulders and gave a half-hearted shrug. "Galen, at least. Probably more."

Mubarak surprised her with a roar, and for a moment she recoiled before realizing it was laughter, a huge grin lighting up his face.

"Now that's a story! God, what an idiot! Well, at least I've made a name for myself if nothing else!"

He laughed again, but then was overcome by another coughing fit, forcing him to turn aside, spitting phlegm that splattered in an ugly crimson spray.

Mica swallowed and sunk further into her crouch, drawing her shoulders closer. Mubarak reached over, his hand upon her knee, forcing her to look up and meet his eye.

"I don't want that to be my epitaph." He then cursed loudly into the red glowing darkness, and shouted: "Hurry it up, get us out of here you bastards!"

"The crew, they're gone," Mica said blankly, suddenly.

Mubarak shook his head. "They'll come."

"I saw them. What's left of them."

"Christ." Mubarak tried to raise himself upon an elbow but collapsed onto his back. "You're only just saying this now? What the hell have we been doing, just lying here waiting?"

Mica could only shrug.

Mubarak shook his head and blinked hard, gathering his strength. "Don't you want to live?"

Mica dropped her eyes, feeling her insides twist and bit her tongue before her voice wobbled and betrayed her own rising panic.

"This isn't the end," Mubarak said. "I'm not ready to die here."

"No. It's the end for me. I'm tired. For too long I've been shoved along in this course, thrown about like a stick down a river, always reacting, always fighting, but to no end. Look what it's gotten me."

"Dammit, then don't just react! Act!"

Mica raised her head and finally found the courage to meet Mubarak's gaze.

"I can't. Not anymore."

Just then something slammed the ground, impacting with a sharp whack and glancing aside through the darkness like a bullet. Mica looked around, confused and wondering if someone was shooting at them. A moment later, something else fell, a black shape in the gloom, larger and closer this time. It did not bounce when it hit, simply crushing heavily into the ground, creating an impact crater in the sheet of metal it fell upon. A jagged rock, at least two metres in diameter. Mica raised her head, tracking upwards to the rapidly expanding cracks in the wall of the central pillar. The eerie silence was broken by a solemn groan like a giant awoken, and in that moment she felt the incredible tininess of her being as the mighty walls of that scorched bore began to move.

"It's collapsing!"

Mica dragged Mubarak's head into the curve of her back, protecting him from the raining blows of smaller stones that had begun with the suddenness of a summer rainstorm.

"Get us out of here," Mubarak cried. When he looked up at her his eyes were sheened with tears. "Mica. Mica, please."

Mica got her hands under his arms and lifted his inertial mass; it was a good thing he weighed ten times less on Titan. Mubarak swayed in her arms, choking back his cries as she moved through the debris. She began stumbling backwards over uneven footing, dragging Mubarak with her. It was awkward and slow, the rocks from above growing larger, and one hit her shoulder, barking her brain with pain, and for a long handful of seconds she simply stood, rocking slightly upon her feet, reeling from the shock.

At the edge of the bore the wall was fused into strange bubbles of warped and distorted plastic. She ran her hand over it, trying to find an outline or weakness, but found nothing. In desperation she bashed the base of her fist against it, her hand buzzing with the shock.

"There!" cried Mubarak, his arm lifted and pointing.

Mica's eyes shifted focus and saw a crack. It was narrow, where two sections had once joined but had ruptured. Darkness lay within. It was tight, but she judged it would be wide enough to edge into if she pressed herself flat and turned her head to the side.

"Captain. It's too narrow."

"Get us in there!"

Mica shuffled into the crack, side-stepping, trying to drag the dead weight of Mubarak behind her. The walls were hot and she flinched away from them, her cheek touching and sizzling. The mote alarms chimed in her head, her helicasuit fibres buckling and popping and splitting apart at the seams. Grimly, she pushed deeper within the crack and into the darkness, not knowing if she were pushing herself into a sealed coffin but knowing there was no alternative. Somewhere in the confusion her hand had slipped from Mubarak's collar but she couldn't turn her head and so instead simply staggered deeper with mounting panic.

Then with abruptness she fell into an intact corridor, a narrow service way wide enough for only one person to walk, lit by strips of pale blue emergency lighting along both sides of the floor, following the corridor as it ran into the darkness, converging with perspective until vanishing around what must be a corner. The glow was strong enough to show stencilled alphanumeric codes upon the walls indicating her location, and she recognised them, and she blinked as she placed herself, knowing they were not far from her own hab quarters. The calmness and order were momentarily disorientating, and she felt as if she had awoken from a nightmare; that if she only waited a moment, everything would clear and her aches would melt away and the saneness of reality return.

The crack in the wall shifted and narrowed and from within she heard Mubarak cry out. The gap was half of what it had been and she had to drop to her knees, reaching her hand into the opening, fingers opening and closing, searching blindly. Mubarak's hand found her own and she gripped it, shaking her head to try and bring her mind back into focus.

She hauled hard, Mubarak's arm and head appearing through the hole and into the service corridor. Mica leapt to her feet, grabbing his arm in a two handed hold, legs against the wall as she pulled. Again he moved, his chest appearing through the inexorably closing gap, but unseen, something had caught him.

"Come on Captain, help me here!"

"I'm... I'm stuck." Mubarak's eyes rolled upwards. His pupils had shrunken to tiny dots as he sought to find some promise of solace in Mica's face, the whites of his eyes incredibly wide, marbled and shining, networked in tiny red veins. She could see the pain building up, stiffening his spine, his face breaking as he lost all semblance of self-control, the calm possession and direction of authority that Mubarak had clutched to so firmly so quickly washed away in the mudslide of raw agony, the fresh exposed slopes of his soul begging for help.

Out of pure exhaustion Mica slackened her grip upon Mubarak's hands.

"Don't leave me!" he suddenly cried, trying to stretch his arms down to where she stood. His eyes locked onto hers, his breathing shallow and quick, each gasp flecking blood into his beard. "I'm not ready to die. Please. Mica, please," he called, and it hit her hard. It was the first time he had called her first name and it struck at something deep in her.

Mica met his eye, her voice firm and level and loud and false in her ears.

"You have my word. I'm not leaving you."

Mubarak's face suddenly slackened of all expression and a thick cloud mushroomed from the gap. The roar of the avalanche was everywhere, her senses shaken loose of the moorings of reality as she was thrown away, trying even as she fell to get her feet under her centre of gravity. The noise was everything, a terrible grinding, shifting noise of glaciers colliding that shot needles into her skull and vibrated the cavity of her lungs. The entire corridor shifted, buckled, and for a time Mica felt as if she had been dumped by a breaker.

When she came to, she was on her back, dust swirling in the air. Mica threw herself back at the pile that hid the crack and began to plough handfuls of dirt to either side, attacking it with furious mindless abandon. Her breathing laboured and sweat beaded upon her brow and ran into her eyes and she blinked away the stinging, unpausing in her task.

After some long minutes she stopped, her arms aching tight coils of steel, and stumbled backwards until her back hit the wall. She sat for a moment, then shook her head. The TIG lockers – they weren't far from here.

New life surged in her veins as she took to her feet and started at a run down the corridor, in the dim blue light twisting her ankles on the tumble of smaller rocks until she was far enough down the corridor where the way was clear.

She broke out into a wider area, the industrial elevator hidden off to one side, the lockers dead ahead. She hauled upon the mesh cage door and flung it open, and with two hands upon the shoulder plate hauled her TIG from its mount. She turned around and stepped backwards into the linkages and drew the straps tight about her legs, then straightened and tucked her arms into the loops and hands into the actuators affixed to the ends. Helmet linkages extended from the collar at her neck, the flexible bubble inflating with a small hiss of air from the inbuilt scrubber. In moments she could breathe again, her head clearing with the oxygen and she became aware of the extent of her physical distress. Her lips stuck together and cracked, and she wondered just how much toxic air she had been exposed to.

Then the TIG heaters rattled into life and her feet and hands shot with agonising pain. She'd heard of the hot aches, but this was the first time she'd really experienced them; a debilitating burning pressure of neither hot nor cold that twisted her visage into folds of agony that mounted wave upon wave. She held herself in check, ten seconds, twenty, and eventually the pain began to recede, and she could breathe again.

She hadn't realised how dark it had been, and when the auto-sensors on her suit triggered the shoulder mounted torch everything lit up in blindingly bright white. The white cone of light twisted as she moved, playing the length of the corridor and casting huge shadows upon the walls. Mica stumbled back towards landslide, and with the aid of her lights was able to step easily through the litter of smaller rocks staining the clinical purity of the corridor floor. The gloves of the TIG scooped into the mud and she gouged deep furrows, the mud steaming and slick with evaporating methane, yet for each armload of dirt she cast aside, prodigious as it might be given the strength of her TIG, an equal amount grew to take its place.

Slowly her efforts began to fade, the time of rest between each sweep of her arm growing until finally it was a languid and pathetic drag of each gloved hand, taking no more than a handful each time. Seven minutes, she told herself. She had at least seven minutes to save Mubarak's brain after oxygen was cut off. Probably more, given the low temperature. She just had to reach him.

She worked, refusing to surrender, the time passing as a counter on her mote display, until it was almost impossible to see through her helmet with the rising condensation of her steaming breath. Twenty-three minutes passed. The corridor was filled with the dirt of Titan now, with more spilling in, and still Mubarak lay buried within.

At some point while she worked the blue-tinged lights lining the walls of the corridor faded to blackness. She hardly noticed, sparing time only to straighten, glance the length of the corridor, her torch beam now the only light in the darkness, before returning to her task.

Finally, she slumped down, her head dropping into the tent of her legs. The battery pack on her helicasuit had run down, and the shoulder mounted light had faded to a dull orange glow, TIG power warnings flashing in the corner of her vision. She found herself looking upon the two scarred and blackened sleeves of her gloves within which her hands lay supine in her lap. Her breath puffed condensation upon the inside of her helmet. No tears marred her cheeks, there was no depth of crippling emotion; just a splitting headache where she felt grief should be.

Mica knew there wasn't much time left for her. With the battery emptying, the scrubbers in her suit would stop working entirely. Helicasuits were designed to collect, filter and recycle bodily fluids, yet Mica knew something had gone wrong with hers, for her helmet was filled with the odour of dried sweat.

She continued to sit for a time, simply unable to move, the magnitude of her profound solitude dulling her mind into an empty shell, her eyes gritty. When she closed her eyes the floor felt like it was moving underfoot, as if she sat upon a boat rocking in the waves. Mica was only peripherally aware that she now lay in a foetal curl, her neck cricked sideways within the bell of her helmet, her TIG like the husk of some huge and strange insect. Within her mind she felt the last tattered shreds of her being sheering from the amalgam of humanity. Nothing more than the sum of memories in constant flux, as impermanent as patterns of dust driven by the storm, she knew now what it meant to live without the scaffolding of self. Finally, after all those months since the accident, she had achieved dislocation from her past, a final easing of that twisting ache of guilt that had for long tortured her gut.

A tiny part of her mind gave a cry, alerted to the sunken hooks of sleep and the deep cold of her surrounds. Fearing she would never wake, Mica rallied her thoughts to fight, but could not resist that overwhelming drive originating deep from the primal fibres of her being, shutting her brain down, and Mica at last fell into a deep and dreamless slumber.

Chapter Twelve

Mica's heart gave a giddy thrill of a disorientation in the birdcage of her chest. Awoken abruptly, her mind was working before her body had unlocked itself from the rigour of deep sleep, and she suffered a terrifying few moments of paralysis, horrified and startled until, at last, sensation returned to her limbs. The crumpled shutters of her eyelids ratcheted back and she drew focus with conscious effort, as if she worked the levers of an ancient scope, yet she could see nothing, eyes open or closed. For a moment she thought had been blinded, perhaps because of the chemical cocktails that had seared her lungs, but then realised that her battery pack had ran its last sluggish flow of remnant electrons, leaving her in a coal-darkness. While she had slept it had grown bitterly cold, her fingers and toes numb like stubs of dead flesh, her core aching.

What had woken her?

A vague memory within the fog of her dreams...

And then it came again – a shout weakened by distance. Angry and wordless, echoing down at her from far away down the labyrinth of corridors.

An irrational fear of the dark suddenly overtook her mind.

Her breathing started to quicken and she spun her head to either side, imagination populating the darkness with ghouls and ghosts. She lurched to her feet, fighting for balance in the darkness, her whole body feeling as if it had become like a ravaged doll repaired by loops of careless thread, the sudden movement making her pulse beat strangely in her eardrums, as if they had been tautened, so that any vibration translated up her bones and rattled deep into her skull, where even the movement of her eyes felt like creaking orbs.

"Galen?" she said, her voice quavering into the utter darkness.

He must still be alive. He hadn't been in the observation dome, nor anywhere near the Icarus's dock. She refused to think that she alone, of all those not already half-dead in cold sleep, had survived. If she found him she would be no better off in surviving, but at least she would not be alone.

"Galen!"

Her fear, risen to the surface, gave panicked strength to her shout, her voice bouncing back deafeningly within her helmet. Without the mote network, the Guardian Tempest seemed a much larger place. There was nobody here, and her yell rung down in slow degrees in the empty drum of her ears.

She was immobilized by fear, in a darkness and silence so complete to be as like the end of time and space itself. Yet she knew at some intellectual level, a level that strove to override the monkey part of her brain that screamed at her to shrink into herself and be still, she knew that she had to move.

She had promised she would not leave him.

Her knees buckled, and if it weren't for the wall she would have fallen. Leaning heavily upon one arm, her head bowed, she started to cough wracking sobs of fear. Once it had started it became almost impossible to reign in; a cough that seemed to lurch over itself like waves lapping over and atop another wave. The roots of her upper teeth felt as if abscesses had suddenly formed, exploding into her sinus cavity. On her knees now, Mica felt that she would never stop coughing, that these would be her final breaths.

Somehow she managed to crawl forward, one hand upon the wall to orientate herself, shuffling along inch by inch, head still down between her shoulder blades. Slowly the coughing started to ease and Mica kept moving, however incrementally, and in minutes she found she could breathe again, and her crawl became a little faster. She would shuffle her knees, stab her left hand out, move her weight forward, and all the while keeping her right hand pressed against the wall, dragging her palm along the cold smooth surface as if it were a tether cord keeping her from flinging off into deep space. She did not stop to think, simply keeping moving, focusing on that rhythm; shuffle her knees forward, left hand, weight, drag right hand...

Her pulse rate slowed from the frantic panic and after some time she paused and cocked her head again to listen. There was nothing, and the suspicion grew that she had imagined the shout she thought she had heard. She was moving to her death, and many times she almost stopped with the mental image of Mubarak in her mind, screaming at her to help him.

She couldn't leave him.

Mica shook her head savagely.

No. She couldn't stay.

Her knees were beginning to hurt now, the TIG linkages making tiny little metal-upon-metal scrapping noises with every tiny crawl forward she made, but she ignored the pain. Her hand, within its glove, felt every small stone that had rolled down the corridor.

Mica froze, her breath caught in her throat. This time there could be no doubt; the sound of raised voices from far away, tin-can hollow, words incomprehensible through distance, rising in volume before suddenly silencing with the echoing clang of something metallic.

Mica rose into a crouch, her feet unsteady beneath her, straining to catch further sound in the velvet silence. There was a massive shift and Mica almost fell as the false floor beneath her rattled what sounded like some long axle shaft suddenly set into spinning motion. From the way it droned through everything it sounded like it extended the entire length of the corridor and she could only imagine what purpose it served.

Then, just as suddenly, it stopped.

Mica thought of calling out again but some prickling sense warned her to silence, and instead she began to edge forward again. Now that she stood upright, it felt as if she took huge strides, covering vast distances with each step. The lack of light aided her, for she could see from far away a tiny glimmer of reflected light, growing as she staggered towards it, without perspective unable to tell if it were near or far.

The light grew slowly and turning a corner it almost dazzled her, a tiny pool of yellow before the doors of the laboratory, a man in a standard-issue helicasuit. His back was to her, yet it was obvious who it was from the way he stood.

"Thaler?" she said, then again, as loud as she was able. "Thaler!"

He spun at the sound, obviously startled.

"Dr Fischer? You're alive, thank God!" His voice, muted through the plastic of his helmet, was flat and colourlessly devoid of mote-feed hue. He straightened his stout little body, and then recoiled slightly as Mica moved within the range of his glowing lights. Mica glanced down at herself, seeing for the first time that her helicasuit and TIG were smeared in blood. She stopped, afraid to step closer, afraid to startle him away.

"I thought I was alone," she said, a lump rising unexpectedly in her throat and making her voice rise suddenly in pitch. Somehow ashamed to show such weakness, she disguised it with a cough.

Thaler's smile was nervous, his reluctance obvious, as he closed the distance between them, reaching out a hand and laying it atop her shoulder, yet stopping her with a subtle shift of his body before she could embrace him. Mica caught herself, clutching her arms to her sides and drew back that raw emotion, contained it within that seething little ball within herself.

"I... I thought you were dead," she said. "The blast, you were heading there. Your suit, was it damaged?"

"No. Well, a little, yes." Thaler brushed at his torso, where a black mark smeared across his helicasuit. "It's nothing." Thaler shook his hand absently, indicating his confusion. "My mote feed, it's out...What happened?"

"The Ithaca ..." Mica's mouth moved, but her shoulders began to shake with wracking sobs and she couldn't form the words.

"Doctor Fischer, we've got to get into the laboratory. Galen, he..." Thaler paused, bit at his lip as if to call back his words. "I've been trying to hack the code, but with the network failure, the door is in lockdown..." Thaler raised his hands as if to rake his fingers through his hair and then remembered the helmet, and turned the gesture into a palming of the plastic. "I thought I'd screwed up everything, but you're here just in time - your access code, key it in."

She moved mechanically towards the panel.

"Galen is alive?" she asked. "You saw him? I thought I heard something... Shouting."

"The access codes," reminded Thaler gently.

"Access codes?" Mica's eyes dazzled at the contrast, staring into the blue light of the panel, taking a moment to adjust, to recall her passkey. It wasn't often she had to use it. Eight digits. She punched them in.

A green light appeared and Thaler moved like an oiled shadow to the threshold.

"Sebastian, what are you doing? Don't close it!"

Then in a sudden moment of clarity her ears cleared, like a swimmer surfacing and shaking the drum of the deep like plugs of earwax. Everything connected, imparting a sense of supernatural calm. It hadn't been the Governess, or anyone Earthside. Not at all.

"Sebastian-motherfucking-Thaler. It was you. All along, it was you!"

Thaler's eyes narrowed for a moment, his little chest heaving an exhale, and when he looked up again his face was composed, a hint of a smug smile plucking at the corners of his lips.

"I'm sorry, Doctor. And thank you for the access code."

And then he stepped backwards into the laboratory and palmed the switch.

There was no time to hesitate and Mica's mind was moving quickly now. She lunged at the rapidly decreasing space of the sliding heavy blast door, yet it was closing too fast, she too slowly in the treacherous low gravity that foiled the soles of her boots as she launched. She saw it as if in slow motion; the door biting upon her outstretched arm, yet she refused to pull back and away, instead driving herself into that trap as it closed upon her wrist, crushed between door and wall.

The normal flow of time resumed, and her momentum carried her bodily into the unyielding plastiglass.

"Thaler!" she screamed, pounding with her free hand, whipping her body to and fro as the constrictive force increased. Her wrist, a pale twig of fragility, lay within the cage of the TIG linkages, but already the latticework was buckling.

The panel. She spun about, dizzy in the low gravity, her free hand trembling as she punched in her access code once again, but her finger slipped, skipping a number. She drew herself together, tried again, but was only two numbers in when a red icon illuminated, indicating a manual override had been placed on the door mechanism. She refused to believe it, put in her code again, and nothing happened. She repeated the process, each stab deliberate. Nothing.

"Thaler, open the goddamn door!"

Mica worked her other hand into the gap, her feet up high against the wall, and screaming with agony and effort pulled until it felt like she would turn herself inside-out. The push against the placid heavy weight defeated her; it simply would not move. Her breath came out rapidly in pants and huffs as she switched position, rapidly wearing out the oxygen in her suit, the scrubbers unable to account for the sudden increased load. She heaved again, bug-eyed but unable to create even the slightest budge.

She collapsed back, hanging by her arm.

The door closed fractionally as the TIG linkage caved a little more. Now that she had exhausted herself, the world seemed to expand again, the darkness taking her. What she had thought to be the sound of blood in her ears she now noticed was actually a hissing noise of escaping gas. For a moment she felt a stab of panic, fearing she'd punctured her suit, but then realised the hull of the laboratory must have retained its integrity, and it was air bleeding outwards through the gap in the door, drawn and mingling with Titan's gases. She felt at peace all of a sudden, her mind finding that one-way street of increasing entropy all around her oddly calming.

Then she heard footsteps.

She thought she saw a shadow on the wall, hear a distant whine and clank of TIG and then a looming shadow, huge against the curved wall. Mica shouted, and as the nebulous congregation passed in dancing shadows she heard the susurrus of voices talking in soft tones, individual words impossible to make out, yet she knew the speakers.

"Mubarak? Mitch? Chi-ling? Balahoskin, you fat bastard! Help me, I'm here!"

With a swirl of shadow upon shadow the shapes were gone, vanished straight into the wall, and with it the voices disappeared entirely. They were leaving her. Leaving her. God-damn it, they were leaving her!

Something deep within her chest sparked, and the fuel of rage sloshing in her gut was suddenly afire. Mica got feet back up against the wall. She worked against the strength of the blast door, vision tunnelling.

The door yielded almost easily, jumping away from its rails as it slammed back far enough to allow her to slip through, curling her legs through behind her just as the powered door hummed closed. For a moment it sang in a strange exponentially rising pitch as air was forced through a smaller and smaller gap of the closing door. Finally, metal meshed against rubber seal, the door was closed, and the wind stopped. The howl that had driven up inside her head became only a ghost of muted crashing in her reeling mind.

She became aware that her breaths were loud and ragged, her lungs working furiously. Her suit oxygen was out. She didn't know if the air inside the laboratory was good, but she simply had no choice.

Mica triggered a switch at her throat and the bubble helmet of her TIG fell away. Upon hands and knees she gasped wretched lungfuls of air, head feeling as if it had been split in two with a chisel right into each temple, whole body shuddering. After some time, her breathing slowed, and she held it in her chest, tasting it on the back of her throat. It was achingly cold, but she retained consciousness.

The torch on her TIG was useless. She saw only by the pallid glow of far away lights as she stood and searched left and right, seeking a target. Second-hand reflections mixed with strobing and eerily silent alarm lights, the mixture casting wildly dancing shadows over surfaces that had become alien and unknown in the darkness.

Mica made a loop of the labs, opening every door. All was empty.

Stymied, she spun in a slow circle.

Her breathing slowed, and at last she could place what felt missing. She had expected those familiar traces that hung upon the air, that faint hint of mustiness imbued by the humidity of the filtration systems, but already, within hours of the systems failure, they had vanished, frozen out of the air. It was if her lungs worked against nothing.

In a shuddering chill moment of awakening, she knew then the true nature of Titan. She had always thought of it as somehow youthful, yet now for the first time in her life, standing utterly still in the heavy silence, Mica felt impossible age. Nothing could live here, her body would not decay into the richness of Earth and soil. Her body would mummify; shrivel and warp and lay forever within this barren womb.

The corridor to the central silo drew her eye, and she saw in the flashbulb lighting the outer door to the airlock into the sleepers silo lay open. She drew closer, and stepped inside the small space of the airlock. That familiar warning sign was stencilled into the flooring in stripe of safety orange and black: CAUTION: HEAVY MACHINERY. It was here, back in that epoch seemingly belonging to another lifetime of warmth and stark white light, she had been able with a push of a few buttons to call mighty robotic hands into action. They would run upon slick rails and fetch any sleeper pod of her choosing into her laboratory to interface with her equipment. She stepped further into the airlock, feeling the presence of the grappling hands hanging oddly silent upon either side of the wall. It felt as if they merely slept, invisibly twitching, and she felt if she spun her head fast enough she could catch them in motion.

With the only lighting now at her back she kept the mental image of the layout in her mind's eye and raised her hands, walking forward until she felt the touch of the double doors to the silo.

Mica raised herself upon her toes and cupped her hands to the glass, her breath steaming the surface in a growing cloud of fog. In the darkness the rods of her vision reduced the world to shades of black and white. Within, she saw the vague outline of the column, sleeper pods arranged upon it like buds from a vine, spiralling upwards into the gloomy chill she knew to be not much above Titan's ambient temperature.

Mica rocked back to her heels. Shivering now without her suit heater. Subconsciously, she licked at her cracked and painful lips, her hand tucking frozen strands of hair behind her ear, that, in her reflection, she saw spring out again as soon as she lowered her hand.

Then, against that darkened pane, superimposed against her own reflection, a face lurched from the turbid depths, flashing upon her field of view, eyes wide like a corpse, lingering there a moment, a palm slapping against the glass and disappearing as quickly as it had come. Mica made a strangled noise of surprise, hands clasped to her throat. Her legs bucked beneath her and arms pin wheeling she fell backwards, trying to reclaim her balance, her brain taking long seconds to process the image.

Galen.

And now, smeared against the inner pane of plastiglass, illuminated in flashing strobes, was a bloody handprint.

Nothing moved for a long time. Then there was a heavy click of something deep within the walls and the floor began to vibrate as the broad double-layer of doors rumbled open, and Mica felt the cryogenic air spilling over her like a wave. The TIG suit helmet triggered automatically with the sudden temperature drop, articulated linkages ratcheting over her head and the near useless suit scrubbers activating.

Rocking slightly upon her feet, her shallow breath suddenly loud in her ears, Mica confronted the abyss.

Chapter Thirteen

From her first step forward into the silo she felt resistance against her boots, and she knew something had been leaking. Looking down, she saw waves ripple from her boots, and realized she stood in a shallow inky pool, each tiny crest and trough radiating outwards with preternatural slowness in the low gravity, glinting like the winks of stars in the faint traces of ghostly light. Mica raised her head. The central pillar extended upwards into the faint blue glow, attached to it three hundred sleeper pods. The walls above were studded with doors that led into awakening rooms that had once, when things had been sane and ordered, been carpeted and warm.

She made for the central pillar, lifting her feet high to be as silent as possible, stepping toe-first to ease quietly into that languid pool, now deepened to her booted ankles as she ventured further within. Everything was still, only the hum of pumps providing a modicum of background camouflage noise against the tell-tale swish-pause-swish of her footsteps. Her shoulders were shaking and her breath, achingly cold despite the suit heaters, fogged against the inside of her helmet. The sole of her left boot must have sustained damaged at some point, for she felt the cold ingress of liquid pinprick against her flesh.

She squinted in the dim light and shadow and saw a hump, half submerged in the pool. She stopped attempting to conceal her movements, now racing towards the shape, swishing broad arrows in her wake. On her knees, hands shaking, she turned the body over. He did not have a helmet on. The whites of his eyes stood out like beacons in the darkness, frozen into ice-hard spheres, his jaw wide, the flesh of his face glinting and as hard as rock.

Mica's shakes intensified and she quivered Galen's body away from her, giving a half-swallowed scream. Her lips seemed to instantly turn hard enough to crack like fractured stone.

"Sebastian!"

Her voice was loud within the claustrophobic confines of the helmet.

"Sebastian! You miserable goddamn freak, what the hell did you do?"

And then, a voice from the dark, up towards the central pillar.

"I'm sorry, I'm in the middle of something. One moment, if you please."

Then she saw him, standing at the console on the first raised deck like a conductor stands upon a podium, his motions given to little prissy flourishes as he worked, the light from the touchscreen illuminating his features from beneath.

"You've found your way in, for which I must give you credit." Thaler wore only a standard issue helicasuit and lightweight bubble helmet against the extreme cold. "I didn't expect it, I must admit, although it does ring of a kind of symmetry. It's only fitting you are here, at the end, for after all it was you that started everything."

"What the hell are you talking about?"

"Your experiments, your life's work!"

"My experiments? Are you out of your mind?"

"If you will give me a moment to explain."

"You're a murdering son-of-a-bitch!"

He paused in his task and deigned her with a smile. "I'm working towards something so much larger than every single of us put together."

"You think this is a game?" Mica's hands clenched into tight balls and she took a step closer to the pillar, measuring the distance between them. Thaler stood above her, but in the low gravity she'd be able to jump that far without much problem, even in her current state.

"Please, Doctor Fischer. Aggression does not become you."

Mica shook her head savagely, anger and confusion a seething ball in her chest. "You've got ten seconds before we see if I've got enough of a handle on this TIG to be able to rip your spine right out of your body."

Without taking her eyes from Thaler, she worked the fob controls of the TIG. A spark and flash, and a blue-green arc of plasma projected a short distance from her right wrist.

"Your research, Doctor Fischer. The only viable path if mankind is to survive. Analysing the entirety of the human brain, reading every neuron, every synapse, and decoding it into silicone."

The cutting jet still burned upon her wrist, her finger tight on the trigger. The fuel cell was nearing empty and already it was starting to sputter.

"I'm not in the mood for this," she snarled, tensing to leap.

"Ah-ah-ah!" tutted Thaler. "I'm linked to the sleeper mainframe here, it would be most unfortunate if I were to slip and terminate them all."

Mica hesitated, eyes narrowing as she realized he was right; from his console, he had absolute authority. She forced herself to take a breath, trying to keep a lid on her anger.

"Don't be a fool Thaler. It's not that simple. You can't possibly understand the complexity of the wetware of the human brain – nobody can. Come on, shut that down, get down here, let's talk."

"But your experiments, they made such progress!"

"Brute force techniques, but it is impossible to know every turn. One hundred billion neurons with one hundred trillion connections - a tangle of connections, of local circuits, of layers and columns and distinct functional areas."

"Exactly my point! Our code is wired from thousands of years of evolution; it is a seething, depthless maze. All the better! Even if we don't know the meaning of that code we know how to transcribe it exactly into silicon."

"Flaws and all?"

"Flaws and all. The human mind is resilient and extraordinarily malleable."

Mica took a slow step towards the ladder, reducing the distance between them. If she could just leap fast enough, she knew she could take him off-guard. She kept talking.

"You're right, we had success in copying the brain's form and structure, but what about everything else? Where do I even start? The glia, which has a chemical language all of its own? Temporal coordination at the ensemble level? We still don't fully understand the dynamic processes that result in the emergent property of thought."

Thaler's eyes sparkled. "We have the mote, my dear, which has answered so many of these questions for us."

"The mote is nothing but a readout. We are defined by that very real kilo and a half lump of the organic brain. You are missing the entire point: you can't change the science, no matter how hard you wish."

"Oh?"

"There's no transition from one existence to another. It's not transferring anything of your real self, it's simply a copy, a footprint. There is no transfer of consciousness."

"And what is consciousness? A fleeting thing indeed. We lose it every time we go to sleep, and regain it every time we wake."

"We will no longer be ourselves."

"Ah, the sense of self! No Doctor, I'm afraid we differ in opinion there. The self is nothing but an illusion, a construct of the mind."

"Don't you get it? We've tried!" Mica's voice fell, and her breath hitched as she drew breath, speaking again with a heavy lump in her throat. "We've failed."

"Eiji's unfortunate and most untimely end is no reason to abandon all hope."

Mica hacked a coughed in surprise. "That's....! That's restricted information! The Governess made sure -"

"The Governess is only a program."

Mica felt the muscles on the sides of her jaw tightening. "How much do you know?"

"I've complete access to your laboratory notes and results." Thaler raised a hand, pre-emptively cutting off Mica's rebuke. "Oh, please, don't look so indignant. I've been following you for a very long time, Doctor. Longer than you think."

"Then you know it's impossible."

"I know you'd succeeded in your work. Overnight, Eiji Fischer vanishes from the mote feed" - Thaler clapped his gloved hands together and the darkness swallowed the sound without echo - "and the whole affair is declared an accident...But that's not what it was. If he was confident enough to put himself into the machine, it must be perfect."

"There was no response to any stimuli. Nothing. The copy, it was perfect... But he wasn't there."

"Oh, but of course I know your results, we wouldn't be here if I wasn't certain that I had a solution to your problem. The way I see it, our consciousness is like an island surrounded by the sea, and that sea defines our limits and defines ourselves. But what happens when that water drains? I'm lost, boundless. No one man is enough, no mind broad enough to encompass the vastness confronting a mind without the limits of a physical body. But what if we populated a system with three hundred minds, each and every one a reject from their home but in their chosen field of specialization brilliant. Pariahs that have already signed on the dotted line for whatever course dictates the survival of the colony. What then? Then when the water drains the islands will connect, we will not be lost."

Mica looked around with slow dawning realization, her voice rising and cracking in incredulity. "That's what this is all about? You've rigged all of this shit-storm, just to jack everyone into a grid?"

"Every mind has its own partition, able to communicate with other cells, but in itself contained. I've been working on the structure and have been wanting to show it to you for some time. Each cell has the only read-write privileges for itself, and indeed the write privileges encapsulate self-erasure, should such measures been deemed necessary; there is no root supervisor, simply links between all other cells in the honeycomb."

Mica's brows furrowed as she mentally shifted gears, feeling as if reality were slipping away from between her fingers. "It won't work."

Thaler simply laughed. "It's been done before. A network of mice brains linked up to electrodes can learn to pilot a spacecraft."

"And where is the individual? The self?"

"Again with the self! Doctor Mica, don't you understand? That has only led to grand delusions and a society mired in narcissism. Well, I think it's high time to knock us all down a peg or two, don't you?"

"Well, I happen to like being myself, and I'm not going to let a bastard like you take it from me, or anyone else."

"Is that a threat?"

"Damn straight it is."

"Odd. You don't seem to be in a likely position to make threats. You'll soon change your mind, I'm sure, when you are part of the ensemble." Thaler turned his attention back to the console.

Something within her snapped. She leapt for him then, her foot striking the rung of the stair perfectly to launch her bodily into the air with furious murder in her veins. She flew, mid-flight and airborne in the low gravity, and she noted with satisfaction her measure had been true; her broadly arcing trajectory would carry her straight into Thaler. Then came a mechanical whirring of fast spinning finely meshed cogs, and primal instincts triggered by the sense of movement in her periphery made her turn her head, instantly aware of a mass running fast on rails from the side of the silo directly at her. Suddenly, something hard grabbed her about the waist, all breath expelled from her lungs with the impact, her arrested forward momentum whiplashing her neck.

She twisted and bucked with the force of the TIG, trying to determine what held her. It took long moments of thrashing for her mind to piece together that it was one of the manoeuvring hands used to shift sleeper pods, three claw-like fingers wrapped entirely about her chest. Mica thrashed her arm about in a desperate attempt to get the cutting beam jet into the joint of the claw. Her head was spinning from lack of oxygen as TIG linkages pressed inwards upon her torso. Something cracked – she wasn't sure if it was metal or one of her ribs – and intense shards of pain bloomed like nails driven into her forehead. She couldn't twist the cutting jet of her TIG far enough and had to let go of the trigger.

The flame died away.

Her feet, which had been thrashing uselessly upon the air, began to go limp as she faded into unconsciousness. Through the slits of her eyes she saw Thaler watching with a clinical acuity, his voice coming from a long way away.

"There now, there was no need for that. I just wanted to talk to you, although we can make it quick, right now, if you like? I don't need you for this, you know. I am simply extending professional courtesy."

The manoeuvring hand tightened.

Mica bowed her head, defeated, her limbs without strength. She tried to nod her head.

"Well then, let's hope we can be more civil," said Thaler, and the manoeuvring hand eased and she slipped through and fell into the pool of liquid with an awkward and noisy splash. It was deeper than before, shin deep now. A thin hairline crack ran like a crooked meridian down her helmet.

Mica rolled to her hands and knees and gasped for breath, trying to speak as soon as possible, her voice hoarse through shallow panting.

"Sebastian, please. Think this through. The current required for the read. It burns everything. The brain is a very fragile thing."

"Ah, this I know all too well! I was a surgeon, you know, back on Earth. Back before somewhat... unfortunate circumstances... arose that forced a change in my vocation."

"Then you must understand. The scan is lethal."

"So what? Who needs a chunk of organic material after that? We're not talking some wetware hybrid! God knows we've pushed that technology as far as it'll go. Which reminds me, how did our friend Vicki fare?"

Mica returned his look with a cold stare and Thaler shrugged at her silence.

"Ah, a pity. Of all the ones who I would have pegged to survive, she would have been it. But it only serves to highlight my point: we've done all possible software updates to the lump of organic matter we evolved into; it's time for a paradigm shift into a completely new hardware. We must go into the realm of the electron and qubit, a vessel of our own design, where we will finally be unbound, our possibilities limitless. The hunger and drive of avarice will be forgotten, for what need is there to obtain more than your peers when all is in abundance, when the primitive nervous system of our intestinal tract no longer clamours, when toil does not ache our flesh? Our sensors will be legion, our limbs and manipulations multitudinous, we will thrive and flourish in the ambient cold of Titan, and the chill of intergalactic space."

"You had this planned from the very beginning. The whole of Guardian Tempest was the fruit."

"Yes, I pulled plug on the Cr-OH2 to speed the decision along. That pressure alone of dying colonists should have been enough to get the Governess to fire up your old work, finish what you had begun, but she wanted to keep the meat and marrow of humanity. Even when I polluted the water supplies she didn't yield, instead she re-doubled her efforts to drill to reach the liquid ocean."

Mica slowly shook her head. "All this time, she was trying to save us..."

"And then that damn mech cat actually succeeded in getting the ship comms going. I had to take somewhat" – he tilted his head in a strangely cadaverous gesture – "extreme measures." The smile that hesitated across his face belied the glinting sheen in his eyes.

Mica shook her head. "You want immortality but don't want to dip your toe in the pool alone. At least Eiji was brave enough to do that."

"You can't talk of bravery - this is your life's work, but admit it, you are afraid. Horribly torn between your own fears and desires. I am simply giving everybody the push needed to launch humanity into the next stage of evolution. The Guardian Tempest's purported 'search for life' is but a diversion to entertain the media; oh, Titan's rich chemistry does provide a heady promise of a rich trove of scientific discovery. Who doesn't love the proposal for the search for methane-based life deep within the water core? A discovery that would radically change the way every single human being would think of themselves henceforth! But no, let's ground ourselves now, for such discoveries are in reality trivial, who can get truly excited by microbes? No, the real reason we are here is adaptation. It's no accident we have computing systems far in excess of what is necessary, why each and every sleeper pod is directly wired to the secondary quantum mainframe, no accident why your research project so well-funded, as well as Galen's gene-mod labs. One way or another, human beings are going to be moulded to suit, and sooner or later, everyone here is going to die." Although Thaler spoke rapidly now he did not lose control of the deliberate canter in his tone; it was not a rabid breathlessness, but rather as if a smoothly oiled machine had picked up easy speed. "But now we can all take the leap together. We will have free reign to expand, to explore, to develop. There will be no limit to the number of copies we can make of ourselves, we can fling thousands upon thousands of versions of ourselves into all directions of space, a vast wave of intelligent thought travelling at the speed of light, seeding the stars!"

"I'll never help you."

"Oh, no, it's far beyond that, my dear. I gave you so many chances for us to work together but you refused them all. Even to the last I tried to keep the Icarus away. If I had been successful, no doubt you would have incited a mutiny, a bloodless coup that would have removed the Governess and given me unfettered access to the mainframe." Thaler spread his hands, indicating the console before him. "Quite a stroke of brilliance to pull it off at the very end, despite everything, even if I do say so myself."

"You're a meddling fool. There's one thing that I kept from my lab books. One key piece of deliberate misinformation we gave the Governess."

Thaler paused, mouth slightly parted, his tongue darting out to touch at his lips. "Oh yes?"

Mica drew breath and her voice was ice. "Eiji's brain scan. He isn't in the mainframe. He's in Arran. And you sent him into the storm."

Thaler's brows rose upward as if some invisible hook had tweaked the centre of his forehead. His smile faltered. "Arran? The mech cat? He was a lab tool, a-"

"His entire being – memories, emotions... Everything."

"That's not possible."

"You said it yourself, he was showing independent thought."

Thaler gave a sad slow smile and shake of his head. "I'm sorry, but that I can explain. It is the most basic of tasks to program an imperative into a machine. Your little mech cat was programmed to love you, I simply re-wrote his primary coding."

"What?"

"I knew it was the only thing to get you out of deep sleep. I'm sorry Doctor Fischer, but any independent thought you think you saw in him was entirely my doing."

Mica squeezed her eyes closed. A trick. All her hopes were based on a trick. The world hummed in her ears and Mica felt herself crumbling from within, a sand castle collapsing with the incoming tide, leaving a hollow gap yawning in her heart.

She surprised herself when a short bark of a laugh escaped her lips, shattering the shards of Thaler's weave. Something caught on the tender cold-blistered flesh of her throat, quickly escalating into a cough that mounted in strength like waves lapping upon a beach until it became a wracking raw thing that seemed to shake the flesh from her lungs. Mica pressed both hands over her face, forcing herself to calm, feeling quite suddenly so tired. She found herself wondering how long it had been since she had slept, for despite the careful manipulations of her mote, her body chemistry had taken over, shutting down her thoughts to a dullard fog, demanding rest in a voice that was impossible to ignore. She slowly raised her eyes from where she had doubled over, finding her gaze drifting upwards, to the silo stretching far overhead, the pods stack over stack lit by an ephemeral glow, tapering into darkness and distance.The fading lights were a mirror of the sleepers own tenuous grasp upon existence, and Mica suddenly felt the presence of the near-dead sending a chill trace running over her flesh, the emptiness in the rarefied air causing a hollowness and silence that tripped her mind, glazing her senses with the odd surrealism of a dream.

A thought thrilled through her, making her swoon in her already weakened state.

A bulk transfer, it might work... They were dead anyway.

For her entire adult life Mica knew the strength within herself; her knowledge a bastion against craven beliefs, refusing the crutch of an afterlife to salve metaphysical aches that rose from the corners of the mind when times were blackest. She was strong enough to face the reality of the coldness of the universe, knowing there was no creator, no flow of souls.... Yet now, something shifted deep inside her gut, the feeling of some karmic grand jury watching and judging, and in an instant of clarity the very thought of destroying the brains of every person sleeping above her became infinitely revolting, despite their imminent and inescapable end. Their hearts might be beating glacially slowly, but she would not be the one to end them.

Mica dropped her eyes back to Thaler, her voice bereft of hope.

"You've killed us all. Arran held the only copy of the source code required for the upload."

Thaler slowly shook his head, his tongue flicking out to wet his lips again and he swallowed before his spoke. That smug smile habitually pulling at his cheeks glazed into an ugly rictus.

"The source code?"

"The sequence will not work without it."

"You're lying." His smile came back again. "You're trying to delay me."

Mica's lips pursed, her throat constricting so much she couldn't breathe anymore. She gave a slow deliberate shrug. Thaler's eyes narrowed and he knew at that instant she told the truth.

Thaler threw back his head, fists clenched in balls at his sides, the tendons in his wrists standing out in profile. He pivoted upon his heel as if to shield his emotions, raising his clenched fists to his temples. When he opened his eyes, his chest was rising and falling with each controlled intake of breath and he spoke over his shoulder. "Why in the hell would you put the only copy on a goddamn cat?"

Mica simply closed her eyes. That dreadful fatigue seemed ever so close now. It would be so much easier just to relent, to let her head loll back, to close her eyes. To rest. Sleep had never sounded so good, so rich, so desirable.

Mica opened her eyes and wearily drew herself to her feet, and started walking with an unsteady gait through the pool of water towards the outer radius of the silo. Thaler spun in her direction.

"Where in the hell are you going?" he demanded.

"To the Haustorium. We have to get Arran back."

Chapter Fourteen

"This is insane," said Thaler.

"Jesus, Thaler, grow a pair."

Mica wound out a strip of duct tape with that distinctive sticking noise, wrapping it a few times around the junction of glove and helicasuit where the material had torn.

"There is no way you'll last even ten seconds out there."

Mica inspected the seal. "I'm not going up against hard vacuum, it just needed to be enough to keep the toxic gas out."

"Your TIG looks like it's been to hell and back, plus it's not designed for topside use. And that's saying nothing of your total lack of navigational radar."

Mica did not look up from her task of tightening the buckles, ratcheting the bindings with quick sharp tugs and tiny little business-like clicks, sounds that vanished into the darkness of the silo.

"I found enough dry-packs in the labs to get a half charge. It'll keep my air scrubbers and suit heaters active for a while. Have any other bright ideas?"

"I have given it some thought, but at the current moment I'm afraid -"

"Then I'm going out. Emergency hatch is right above us." Mica stepped back from Thaler and turned aside.

"Don't be so hasty. We have to think about this."

"We?"

"It seems we have a common goal now, you and I."

Mica paused, shaking her head. With the knuckle of a gloved finger she activated a recessed switch upon the wrist of her TIG and the heaters gave a stuttering vibration against her back before fizzing into reluctant service. Welcoming warmth began to seep from the back plate, raising goose bumps and a painful ache. She drew in breath and paused, and had a fleeting thought that perhaps it may be prudent to hold her tongue. For a moment she did, but then she shook her head savagely. Her eyes lit with an inner fire. "You sabotaged the base. You killed everybody not on ice, and those on ice you dangle before me as bait. You are a white bellied, cold blooded murdered, Sebastian."

Mica took a stride closer to Thaler. A pressure against her belly stopped her; a robot arm had shot from the darkness between them. Mica looked down at it in derision, but Thaler simply smiled.

"Please, remember your manners. What I did resulted in regrettable collateral damage. Come now, let's put the past behind us and move forward. My interests are very much aligned with yours, my dear Doctor."

Mica glared. "If you want to help, come outside."

"Without a TIG? Hah! I'm afraid that's asking rather too much."

Mica's lips tightened into a hard line and she started for the ladders mounted on the sides of the silo, her boots splashing in the shallow pool.

"Then so long, Sebastian. Wish me luck."

She turned, and didn't look back over her shoulder, but knew from the silence that Thaler did not move. Maybe he watched her go, she thought, but then again, maybe not. Hand over hand she climbed the ladder mounted at the core of the silo, large boots and TIG linkages over her arms and legs awkward upon the rungs, so that at first she had to peer down between her knees, feeling bulky and ungainly, until she gradually picked up a rhythm. She weighed only a fraction of her Earth-side weight, but she had been so long on Titan that her muscles were that much weaker.

She stopped for breath and looked down over her shoulder, feeling the pressure of a headache building like a festering lesion in her forehead, blooming with a sudden pain sharp enough to break her from the fugue of fatigue.

The ladder was vibrating. She came to, suddenly unsure at how long she had been standing there. Minutes? Had she slept on her feet? She shook her head and blinked hard, trying to force herself back to the present. Why was everything shaking?

With a start she realized it was her own palsy causing the tremor. She tried to calm herself and took a deep breath.

She had to keep moving.

She locked her eyes straight ahead upon the ladder as she climbed, trying to ignore the cloying presence of the sleeping colonists as it seemed they watched and silently judged.

Her arms were aching as the minutes dragged on, and she continued to climb. The silo was more than one hundred and fifty metres tall, and her entire being was quivering with exhaustion by the time she crawled up and lay flat upon her back on the catwalk mounted low to the ceiling of the silo.

She lay for a moment breathing hard. It was brighter here, almost as if she had ascended into the clouds. Blue-green light filtered from the meshed roof and a bass hum of circulating pumps rumbled overhead.

She closed her eyes and waited.

"Come on, you bastard," she muttered.

She counted her exhalations, forcing herself to breathe slowly, straining her ears for sound of movement from below. Again, she whispered to herself:

"Come on, come on."

Nothing but the whirring of the fan overhead to disturb her rest.

Then her eyes shot open at the sound of a heavy mechanical clack from the base of the silo. She sensed more than saw the rush of movement, as something large displaced the air with its ascension. She looked down through the diamond shaped gaps formed by the meshed wires of the catwalk, and saw a faint tiny light growing larger like a train barrelling through a dark tunnel. The mechanisms shifted gears and the thing decelerated and came to smooth stop. She blinked. It was Thaler, riding upon the open palm of the grappling hands.

With calm aplomb he stepped off and onto the catwalk beside her, his lips curled in what might have been a smile.

"You're one strange bastard Thaler," she muttered, raising herself to her elbows.

"Thought I'd come and at least give you a hand getting out," he said.

"You might have saved me the climb."

Thaler shrugged away her remark and peered upward, the shining, darting pencil-thin beam of his torch bounding across the close grey angled surfaces, finding the dome and hatch mounted overhead in the roof of the silo. They moved closer. It was not unlike would be found on an old-fashioned submarine. Spray painted in stencilled orange text was the ominous warning; EMERGENCY ACCESS ONLY. ALARM WILL SOUND.

Thaler raised his arms over his head and spun the wheel. He was caught awkwardly by its inertia as it fell open upon hinges and Mica almost laughed. Not surprisingly, no alarm sounded, the only noise a tiny tick-tick-tick from a strobe light that began to rotate inside the chamber above them. Thaler exchanged a look with Mica.

"Ladies first," he said.

Mica gave a grunt and pushed Thaler out of the way, her hands gripping the edges of the hatch and hauling herself upward. It was a small airlock, dizzying in the strobing light, and she had to feel with her gloved hands along the surface to be sure it was clear. Thaler's head popped through the hatch he clambered in after her. Once within he reached down, fumbled for the handle, then lifted the hatch with a grunt of effort and sealed it closed with a spin of the locking wheel.

"What are you looking for?" Thaler asked, his voice echoing with the empty drum of the airlock.

"A tether line," she said rummaging through the supply shelving. "When I find Arran you want me to come back, don't you?"

"Oh yes, indeed."

"Then start looking."

They found a tether line and the bracing harness that clipped onto the TIG and fastened one end to the railing close by the outer lock. There were two more tether lines in the racks, each bound up neatly into white coils. She freed a length of both ends of the coil and lifted it onto her back, using the free ends to place the weight of the tether over her shoulders, the rest around her waist, trapping the coil tight against her back, fingers working at the knot, the shaking in her hands betraying her fear, quickly turning her back upon Thaler and drawing her shoulders up.

"We can use the mote and tether link for landline comms," said Thaler. "It's what I..."

Mica's lips pursed into a hard line. Although Thaler had cut himself off, she knew what he had been going to say. Deja vu shivered her hackles: alone in an airlock with Thaler, yet now instead of Arran it was her that was to be fed out into the storm. Before she lost her nerve she turned to the outer airlock hatch, hands braced about opposite ends of the large handle.

"Don't you think-" started Thaler, but Mica was already leaning her weight into the wheel. She watched as it spun in a blur of greased bearings, her heart racing, and the one-metre diameter hatch popped open.

And what they met stunned them both into awed silence, for Titan was strangely, eerily, still.

Mica lifted a foot up and over the lip, placing it carefully down upon the ground as if she might wake a sleeping giant. She transferred her weight across, bending her back through the hatch, then straightening as she emerged.

The taut wires of the overhead guywires shed singing high pitched whistles of vortices in the weakened but strangely portent wind. One could sense the baited power in the air, just like that before lightning strikes, a power that could be unleashed at any moment. Wispy, wraithlike mists scudded low across the ground, overhead clouds blotting out all starlight, but somewhere harboured in those clouds was some suffusion of faint orange hued light, and as the shadows of dark upon dark moved across the sky she thought she could see something huge hanging close in the sky.

She tilted her head all the way within the confines of her bubble helmet. She saw only hints of an outline through the dense fog, but there could be no doubt.

She exhaled in an awed whisper: "Well if that's not something..."

Far bigger than she had ever imagined, Saturn and her magnificent arc of rings hung directly overhead in the very definition of otherworldly. Deeply humbling, filling fully half of the sky overhead, it created a knot of emotion that twisted in a tight line from her mouth down into the deepest aching pit of her stomach. Her mind sidestepped, slipping from her incredibly tiny form like a squeezed watermelon pip, and she was in some removed place, zooming outwards, leaving her body down there, shrinking to a tiny dot upon the tiny moon of Titan, cast into perspective by the looming mass of Saturn, a planet seven hundred times the size of Earth.

Saturn, that cast a massive shock wave from the bow where the solar wind met its magnetic field, a protective bubble extending far enough into space that it encapsulated Titan's orbit, protecting the tiny moon's atmosphere that its own mass was too weak to hold.

A tiny rock in the crook of the elbow of a giant.

A dash of Thaler's flashlight from where he sat in the hatchway destroyed her night vision.

"You okay out there?" he called, bringing her attention snapping into close razor edged defined focus. Mica shook her head, her vision doubling momentarily, a little scared of the vividness of the daydream that had taken her. It was like awakening from a strange dream that yet lingered, the rapture of the deep slowly fading.

"I saw Saturn," she replied, her voice still a little dreamy.

Thaler paused. "Well yes, I would expect so. Orbit and rotation mechanics - Saturn does not rise and fall in the sky. It's always there."

"Always there..." she echoed to herself, gaze swivelling back up, but the fog had increased and the view disappeared. She shook her head and forced concentration, gathered a handful of the silky white tether cable that trailed from the opened airlock. Each footstep plumed strange globules of mud and shadow, she had to be careful not to tread upon the dinner-plate sized stones that littered the ground, for they were slippery with methane-ice. In her hood each breath was loud and mechanical in her ears.

Her steps slowed as she came out from the shelter of the top of the silo, as she saw the devastation in the upper structure of the Guardian Tempest. The entirety of the surface tubing had been swept away, those blackened supports that remained looking like splinters of teeth, or the remnant pylons of a jetty that fire had destroyed. The dome of the observation room had been blown open, latticework structure shredded. Still something burned within, smoke lying flat against the ground, driven by the gentle hand of the wind.

"I see it!" Mica exclaimed, seeing a squat shadow in the near distance. It was hard to gauge distance in this strange haze, but Mica guessed the Haustorium to be no more than a few hundred metres away. At a run, in normal conditions, it would take only a minute or two to get there. She shook her head to herself. In normal conditions.

"You ready?" she called out.

"All set this end," came Thaler's reply through her speaker in her helmet.

She checked her tether line, then moved in short, bounding strides, trying to keep from launching too high. Although well practiced in moving in Titan's low gravity, here, in the open, things seemed entirely different, and the power of the TIG amplified every movement. There was no roof over her head; it felt as if one powerful jump and one could attain escape velocity. She kept close to one of the railings that had held a radial tunnel, ducking at regular intervals to thread the tether line, a zigzagging path of Hansel and Gretel. She worked by the faint illumination reflected from the clouds above and the darting beam of her TIG light that grew orange now as the batteries on her helicasuit started to fade. Too quickly. She shook her head as if to dislodge the thought, so the fear would not get a hold. But it would not matter soon enough.

She hardly raised her head, keeping her gaze a metre of two ahead of her, only making cursory attempts at securing the line now, moving rapidly through the gloom.

Every step drew her further from the shelter of the Guardian Tempest, a shelter that was more like a tomb. Walking now upright, her mind cleared and empty, free of thought of future or past. She didn't pause at the end of the railings, where the outermost tendrils of the base reached their end. A darkness had moved in now and the Haustorium was no longer visible, but she knew it lay somewhere across that vast, unknowable space. A place without marker or guidepost, so she struck out, like a diver plunging into a bottomless, featureless ocean.

A score of steps in and the tether coils started to run down to the last few in Mica's hand. Casting a look towards the horizon now hidden in darkness she judged she was halfway across the empty wastelands, her pool of light shrunk as the mists slowly grew thicker, visibility dropping to a few hundred metres. The wind was starting to pick up, coming from the side, driving her off-course, and she attempted to compensate by driving a little into the wind, but then had a sick certainty that she'd overcompensated. She stopped. Her pulse had slowed and allowed her to hear something that had escaped her notice. Something was rumbling, far away, yet growing closer.

"Thaler, I'm in trouble."

His voice came back quickly. "What's wrong?"

"I'm stuck, dammit." Mica's stood stock still, her eyes upon the white umbilical cord snaking its way back into the Guardian Tempest. She found it easy to put despair into her voice. "The line, it's caught up, I can't move."

"What? It's stuck, I don't understand, Doctor, if you can just –"

"Thaler! I'm... I'm stuck. Quickly, get out here, I need your help. A storm, I think a storm is coming!"

"No, wait, I can't. Doctor, can you come back?"

The ground began to shake, and a sudden mist swept over the land and the first droplets of liquid methane began to form on her visor. She knew of something sensed only through primal instinct, something that loomed massively into the sky and rapidly approached, a wall of impenetrable black sweeping over the ground, roiling and rolling.

"Thaler! Right now, right now!"

There was a moment of hesitation. Then: "Okay, I'm coming."

The comms clicked closed and Mica turned in a slow circle, hands outspread as if to welcome in the approaching storm. So lost in the incredible display she almost didn't notice his approach, suddenly appearing from darkness, crouched low in his helicasuit looking fragile and weak and fighting against the wind, moving along the thrumming tether line drawn out in the wind into a broad catenary curve.

Mica did not hail him, but simply waited until he had drawn up alongside her. When he reached her, she flipped the clasp on her belt and the tether line tore away from them both, thrashing into the void.

Thaler's eyes bulged. He crouched low, head swivelling almost comically to the spot in the sky where the tether had vanished and back to Mica's face. To his credit, it only took him a moment before realisation struck. Without the tether, they no longer had voice pickups, but she heard him clearly despite their helmets.

"Arran never had any vital source code."

Mica gave a slow nod.

The storm was coming quickly now. Thaler looked at the approaching wall of dust, and she could see his muscles tense, his gaze flicking in the direction of the Guardian Tempest, but it was all too obvious that there was no chance to run. A strange calm came over his face and he tilted his head in appreciation of the move.

"Well played, Doctor." Thaler opened his hands to the sky. "So this is it, we both die here?"

"No. Just you. I'm going to find Eiji. I want to be with him when I die."

"I thought you said it just a copy."

Mica's lips firmed and her eyes narrowed, but she didn't reply.

Thaler cast another look over his shoulder, his chest rising and falling with his increased respiration rate as the storm-front drew closer. "I'm sorry that you could not understand me. I was only working to fight against hubris of humanity's over-inflated narcissism. I never told you" – his brows furrowed and he exhaled brief rueful sigh, packing as much into that simple gesture than a full bandwidth of emote-feed could have done – "my life was marred by tragedy... The death of those closest to me." When he raised his eyes she saw they gleamed with sadness. "I only wanted to elevate us all above that."

"You're a murderer."

Thaler lowered himself into a crouch with the first tugs of buffeting wind. "In the TIG, you have a chance. Save yourself! You know what needs to be done."

And then the storm hit them, and something in Thaler's eyes made Mica snatch out and grab at Thaler's hand in that instant he was about to be swept away. They came together; his hand about the bulk of her TIG enclosed forearm, her gloved hand about his wrist. Both fought to stay on the ground as within moments visibility dropped. Mica could see her hands before her face only as shadowy forms. Without the extra weight of a TIG, Thaler was completely off the ground now, lifting Mica with him.

"Let me go," Thaler shouted.

His fingers released from her wrist. It was just her grip now that kept them together.

"Let humanity remember me as a man who had vision."

His eyes meet hers through the bubbles of glass and flying debris between them, then Thaler twisted his wrist, folding his fingers like a crumpled cocoon of a bird and slipped through Mica's grasp, leaving it suddenly cupped and empty, as too late her fingers snapped closed upon her palm, Thaler's body already far away, lifted high and disappearing like a whip-crack into the storm.

"Thaler!" she shouted. "Thaler, you son-of-a-bitch!"

Mica dropped to her stomach as the twisting buffeting winds threw out of her sense of direction. She spun about on her chest in a slow circle, hands outstretched for balance, telling herself not to panic. The strange calm certainty of suicidal thoughts had vanished, replaced with animal drive to survive.

Mica's gloves scratched at the ground, arms working, scooping out armloads of rocks and mud, casting them aside, as the tension in the air escalated. Despite the workings of her TIG empowered limbs, her excavation into the hard ground was only shallow pit, the edges starting to cave in and Mica angrily thrust the rocks away that tumbled in.

It was pointless to keep digging, it seemed the hole was filling in faster than she could deepen it. The lights on her TIG gave a stutter and inside the hood Mica's hair started to stand on end and an almighty crack lit up the sky in flashbulb clarity, the ghostly afterimage lingering far longer than the actual flash. Then came the sonic wave of thunder, shaking every particle of her being, a physical force that thumped hard at back. She lay as low as possible, face forward where she had fallen, the hole just deep enough to conceal her against the plane of the ground, waiting fatalistically to be lifted and borne aloft, taken away by the storm. The bubble of her helmet echoed as the rain pummelled her head and shoulders.

Another stab of lightning lit up the air and she braced against the concussion of thunder and she knew she was trapped and directionless, and suddenly it was impossible to keep a lid on her panic. And then, through the whistle of the wind, she realised she had been hearing something, the muted, clanging of something metallic that had begun with the wind and had now picked up in intensity, now ringing furiously in the heightened gale.

Mica drew herself to hands and knees, cradling as much of the soil as she could into her arms to draw herself downwards in that frustratingly low gravity, feeling as if she were a free diver upon an ocean bottom, buoyancy dragging her upwards, a mighty current dragging her sideways. She strained her ears, trying to pick out the sound of that bell obfuscated by the stochastic pelting slugs of rain against her helmet.

Clang, clang, clang...

There. That direction.

She clambered forward, moving and shuffling, yet blind to her progress she felt suddenly uncomfortably aware that perhaps her eyes were deceived by the flow of wind-driven sand; perhaps she wasn't moving forwards at all, but rather being dragged backwards. The hopelessness of her situation drilled deeper and deeper into her soul and she felt the energy draining from her limbs. Everyone she had known was dead, they were all just spiralling particles of increasing entropy plunging towards the inevitable conclusion. Why fight anymore?

With a shift in the wind the steady metallic clanging stood out in the sea of white noise, centred her, giving her the focus she needed to keep doggedly moving forward, for it seemed to be getting louder, clanging with self-destructive fury, calling to her like a schoolyard bell with the manic urgency of a torn sail of a ship lost in a storm.

She moved in a void of memory and timelessness, her helmet rippling and shaking, in a world without constant form or reason. At times, the ground snatched away from beneath her, her arms and legs spread-eagled in freefall. In those moment her thoughts detached into idle speculation, simply observing the immutable play of Newtonian mechanics, each time landing upon the ground totally disorientated, and she would have to pause and strain to hear that tolling bell to place her again.

But then suddenly she found she was close. The sound was loud, right over her head.

Her helmet struck something hard with a resounding jolt. Stunned and confused she reeled back, long seconds passing until her eyes could refocus. At first she thought she had come complete circle, and was back at the Guardian Tempest. It was only when she retreated a step did she see the domed structure, and realised it to be the Haustorium.

The thing that had been slamming against the panelling shifted with the fickle wind, and for an instant something small fled through her line of sight; just a blink, yet her mind had taken in the snapshot and seared it into her brain.

Arran.

An eerie wash of a supernatural presence dashed over her skin, the tiny hairs on her forearms and nape of her neck pressing against her helicasuit. She lay frozen and unblinking, watching the darkness over her head, unable to move, the clanging noise retreating now further up the wall.

She began to doubt herself.

It had to be a hallucination.

But what if it had been real?

Her hands moved across the domed wall before her, finding nothing but smoothness, the tips of her gloves bent into claws as she sought for purchase. She would have to stand...

Fighting against the current, she slid the body of her TIG up the wall, hands casting broad sweeps yet finding nothing. Suddenly, her fingertips met the handrail ringing the perimeter and locked in with a grim steely force. Both hands about the railing now she drew herself to her feet, still pressed in close to the wall.

Near her hand was a knot of faded white. A tether line. Her eyes traced its taut length, at the end about two metres away was a hard, silver mass that flailed and battered against the Haustorium wall. Mica's right hand came away from the freezing metal of the rail with a ripping noise, the fabric of the glove ruptured, her palm instantly cold through the holes. She grabbed at the tether line, and, tucking free lengths under one arm, slowly drew it in, a battered ball with a few scraps of fur remaining in the joins of the stumps of his legs. She tried to free the tether cable, but it had twisted into a hopeless tangle that had frozen as solid as rock. Her fingers moved achingly slowly, each flex had to be made with forced concentration, the small tears in one of her gloves seeping in the cold at an alarming rate. The frozen knot may well have been cast into steel.

Mica pounded upon the knot, her whole body trembling, then started yanking upon the tether, yet even with the power of the TIG it did not break. She would perish here with him, she thought.

She remembered the burner.

Mica fumbled at the fob controls in the palm of her hand, the fingers of her gloves creaking as they bent double. The burner flicked out from the back of her hand, the lighter giving a brief, useless spark.

"Piece of crap," Mica muttered, triggering it again. As before, the ignitor sparked near the gas outlet, but was quickly extinguished by the wind. She tried three more times in quick succession.

The wind gusted and knocked her, and for a moment she almost lost her grip. Drawing her free hand in close to her body to shield the burner, she held her breath, then triggered the flame again.

This time the burner hissed into life, the flame of the cutting torch extending a tremulous few centimetres from the back of her hand, the gas reservoir running on fumes. Holding it to the frozen knot it took only a second to part the fibres and an instant later Arran was liberated, lifting in the wind.

Mica instinctively lunged and grabbed, by luck more than design pinning him down and dragging him close, at last, finally, in her grasp and held in a vice-like grip close to her waist. He was almost unrecognisable, just the bare core of the unit, yet she hugged it tight no matter how it burnt with searing cold.

"Arran, hang in there you little bastard."

Chapter Fifteen

She stood swaying in the darkness, stunned and breathing heavily, eyes wide open but not registering anything, her mind still in a state of pure reactive instinct of survival. As her pulse slowed, rational thought returned. She raised her head in a quick survey of her surrounds; the beam of her torch picking up swirling vortices of dust and ice. The Haustorium was a small domed structure, ten metres in diameter, the roof beams exposed scaffolding upon which the outer shielding was affixed. The Haustorium's heaters had long since failed, and rows of instrumentation along the walls were silent, casting strange shifting shadows upon the curved wall. It held the air of an abandoned Antarctic shack, the winter winds and snows slowly reclaiming the small space of serenity. The storms rattled against the bindings, and in places had been successful in raising tiny flaps that now buzzed like trapped insects as the winds gusted. The hatch she had fallen through was still open and the outside air gusted and roared, everything within creaking and groaning like over-inflated bellows. She reached up with her one free hand and hauled closed the hatch, and the wind and sound dropped with sudden finality that made her head spin. She fell to her knees, her precious cargo cradled in her lap, and felt her mind drift away. All hunger had fled, and thirst was a distant thing, her mind on some strange alter-level of consciousness of low blood-sugar levels, her body feeding itself now by breaking apart her own muscle.

At last she became aware that her TIG sensors were indicating the atmosphere inside the Haustorium were adequately filtered, and with an effort drew herself back to reality and raised her hands to her helmet, pressing inwards and hearing the click of the catch. A bubble of warmth spilled from the helmet and trace of the toxic gasses of Titan filtered into her nose with her first cautious breath, her eyes filming and smarting, yet it seemed breathable. Only then did she take the time to truly look at the weight of the thing she had retrieved from the storm, and dismay caved a massive hole in her heart.

There was very little left of Arran. He was an unevenly shaped football of metal, stripped of the outer layers of false fur. Only indentations remained where his legs and neck had been, one side had been completed caved into a dish-shape, and the other side dented with a million impressions overlaid upon one another until they had formed an oddly smooth surface. It was difficult to tell what order the damage had proceeded, but if she had to guess, she would say something large and fast had struck him, tearing away his TIG linkages, severing his return tether. For weeks he must have endured the tempest, winds and dust wearing away metal, polishing him like a river washed stone.

It only made her hold him ever tighter, clinging to his presence, refusing to let that chill hand of solitude seep into her core; here in the Haustorium she was entirely alone, without even the cold company of the racks of sleepers in the silo. Not that it mattered; they were unable to wake, heartbeats already glacially slow, grinding down even now and would eventually cease altogether when the power finally ran down.

In the far side of the room she saw, already half obscured by further layers of ice, were the scuff marks of Arran's earlier passage. She found the energy to stand, stumbling as she walked, her boots trailing a line of smeared commas in her weaving wake.

So this was the console where Arran had been, where he had activated the beacon that drew the Icarus. To find these last traces of his activity made her heart swell almost to the point of bursting and she clutched him ever tighter, feeling against all logical thought that it hadn't been Thaler's programming that had feigned independent thought; she tried to believe in her heart that it had been Eiji, stored deep within, who had acted to save them all.

Mica fumbled and almost dropped Arran, somehow managing to lay him down gently before her strength gave out entirely, falling heavily upon her elbows, her weight upon the benchtop, her mouth pulled into a tight line, fighting back the quivering emotional turmoil in her soul.

"I miss you, Eiji. I miss you so much."

Mica forced herself to take a deep inhalation and hold it, slowly exhaling through a slack mouth, her arms and legs trembling with exhaustion. She tried to swallow, but her throat was too dry.

Her eyes flicked back into focus, at Arran's body laying before her. She knew with absolute certainty that these were the last few hours she had. Death was close, and it was nothing like what she had expected. From countless stories those confronted with their ends lapsed into a kind of resigned acceptance, a surrender to the undertow, comforted that they were on the circle of life, yet Mica felt nothing but fear. Cold, hard fear that shocked like a steel bolt through her spine and worked the muscles in her face. Her brief time as a conscious being in this universe would be forever gone; there was nothing left but the nothingness and absolute finality of death, and what had she left as a legacy? Someday, would another ship be launched from Earth? Would they be able to piece together what had happened to the colony, digging through the dust and the mud to re-enact her last moments from the fossilized prints she now lay down? Or would all this be destroyed, all traces erased by the forces of entropy; nobody ever to know she had come, and nobody to know she had gone?

Mica clutched the Arran to her chest, looking down at her own her distant hands, feeling dislocated from the world and blinking hard to force herself back. She wasn't ready to go, she told herself, and the fear and the fight made her weak.

"Don't leave me alone Eiji. Don't let me go. Don't let me go now."

Her trembling fingers found the socket panel in Arran's side. The joint was sandblasted smooth but opened with a creaking pop. The interface was standard, but when she tried to power them from the switches from the benchtop they simply gave empty clicks, screens remaining blank. The Haustorium battery bank had long since drained. If the network was operational, she could have used her mote to interface directly with Arran's drive, but even that most basic of facilities was lost to her, as crippling as the loss of her eyes and hands.

She'd have to go back to basics.

Mica fumbled over to a workbench and cleared away the clutter with a sweep of her hand. There were a tools mounted upon the wall, and a few that were self-powered and still operational. Returning to Arran with a digital logic probe it didn't take long to find that the circuits containing the AI construct of the mech cat that had been Arran had been irrevocably damaged.

"You're gone, little buddy. I'm sorry."

She squeezed away the blurriness in her vision, yet what she sought lay deeper than the artificial programming; Arran's outboard memory cell. It had been the logical place to transfer the data after the Governess had expressly forbade them to conduct the experiment with the mainframe.

The upper circuits buckled away under the palsied strokes of the blade of the logic probe, revealing the casing of the drive. Although covered in a fine talc of dust, it seemed intact. Her lips set in a hard line, and Mica did not allow herself to raise her hopes. Hunched over double, she made a little transmitter to feed into audio circuits and earpiece of what remained of the AI interface, casting the tiny lens of focussed light to solder makeshift connections, fumbling with fingers that felt like blocks of wood. She brought her cupped hands to her mouth and exhaled a warm breath into them a few times then flapped her arms to drive blood into the ends of her numb and aching fingers.

Stillness of absolute focus lay upon her world while she wired up a signalling circuit. It was a fool's quest: she had tried this a thousand times before, with vastly superior equipment: the data was there, in Arran's memory banks, but they had messed up, there was no activity in the sector most crucial, the area where they had tried to replicate the role of the thalamus, the core of the brain that governed the sense of self. Where there should have been pulsed feelers like an electrical heartbeat, there had been nothing. The data of Eiji's mind was there, but he was without that ephemeral concept of consciousness.

"The self is an illusion," she said aloud, testing Thaler's words on her tongue. She knew the hard scientific facts: the construct of self was formed from the very real stuff of the brain, from the interaction of physical neutrons, chemicals swirling in the brain; not some mystical life-force. Yet Mica found herself toying with the notion of the soul, and wondering where that vital essence of Eiji was right now.

With the tiny speaker hooked into one ear, cracked and broken but resiliently operational, she connected a power lead. The speaker started to hiss and crack, and, holding her breath lest it break the gossamer spell, she closed her eyes and listened hard. With a rush of quivering thought her mind picked out what could be words hidden in the static, but as she listened she realised they were little more than the words one can hear in the rush and boil of river current.

Mica tilted her head and leaned in closer to Arran's spilled innards. "Eiji, talk to me." She could not help the sudden and unexpected single tear that rose in the inner corner of her left eye, beading and quivering.

The static flowed in her ear, a lulling rise and fall.

"Eiji, if you are in there, do something. Thaler, he was right? Let me know you are there. Anything. Just don't leave me here all alone." Mica felt her pulse fluttering in her throat and took a steading breath. "We never talked about... I guess we thought about it, but never in words, never a conversation that can be had... What it would mean should... should one of us go."

The single tear dropped from her cheek and fell in low gravity slow motion onto the surface of the outboard drive, where it splintered, the remnants forming high hemispheres bounded by surface tension. She brushed them away with the back of her hand, leaving smears in the grime.

"I should have done so much more. I should have done. I'm an idiot that it's taken me until the end to realise it. There were always more important things, but really, it was all garbage. Eiji, eighty years we were together. I guess we got complacent." Mica bit at her lower lip and gave a rueful smile, fingers tracing down the metal of the casing, holding her breath to better listen to the static that rained in her ear from the tiny speaker. Hope rapidly bleed from her chest and again that darkness of fear made her mind skitter. "I shouldn't have let you do it."

She sniffed, raised her eyes, looking around the Haustorium. Frost lined the banks of instruments; deviously clever constructions waiting to serve men who would never return. A withered branch of humanity's outreach.

"It's all gone to shit. Everything's gone. You're gone now, your beautiful body..." Mica's voice lowered even lower, now just a soft whisper into the cold hardened surface of dismantled mech. "And Earth too, sooner or later."

She closed her eyes and felt the world swimming as she stood there leaning heavily at the benchtop, legs that suddenly felt as if they had turned into overcooked noodles splayed for stability. Only the physicality of the outboard drive in her hands grounded her, stopped her from losing herself in the depthlessness.

"I think about you every day. I truly do. And every day I curse myself for my stupidity, I curse myself and get so angry at everyone. It was all my fault. After the accident I looked into the code." She gave a brief exhalation that was a half-laugh and wiped the back of her hand across her dripping nose. "Oh Eiji, you would have laughed at how stupid it was. It was my coding, my mistake. My mistake. The pre-encoding batch file in the primary sequence. A mistake that caused the loop to iterate, ramping up the scan voltage within microseconds until it got a successful read. I knew it. I just knew I should have checked it before you threw yourself in, you clown."

Her lips curled into a sad smile and the sound that came out of her tightening throat was strangled and strange. She realised that somehowshe had lowered herself to the floor, sitting with legs still enclosed in the TIG linkages, splayed awkwardly to either side, the outboard drive in her lap, the wires on the tiny speaker twisted and the hastily made connections only just holding. She sat for a long while like that, simply breathing slowly in the shower of the static.

"The self is only an illusion," she said again. "A deception of the flesh. But I couldn't do it. I couldn't let what happened to you happen to the sleepers. Eiji, Eiji... Please forgive me. Please."

Then there was a stutter in the susurrus of static, and then the noise of the static ceased entirely; an absolute silence that spoke volumes to her ears. It spoke of a presence.

"E... Eiji?"

The silence stretched, one heartbeat, two, three, and in that span was her entire life; the inverted cone of her future meeting with the cone of her past, intersecting at the pinpoint of the present.

And then the static returned.

Her fingers cradled the outboard drive and blood roared a shush-shush-shush in her ears. Her vision blurred and for a moment thought she was passing out before realizing she had started crying, rivulets of tears streaming unchecked and clear, coming only now, at the very end, an assuage to the layers of her guilt, and with its passing draining her strength as if it had been the only thing propping her up. A strange lightness came over her, a surrender of ego to something larger, something unknowable. At the very knife edge of her strength, she knew this would be her last few hours before death took her, before her body became nothing but a decaying scaffold. She spoke in a low croaking whisper through the tightening of her throat.

"All my life I have been hiding from death. But now... Now, I think I get it. Maybe we have to simply take life for what it is – an ephemeral moment, a flash of light in eternal dark. Maybe the trick is to simply accept the good and bad, and not try to hold onto anything."

Mica got her feet with the awkward staggering movements of a crudely animated puppet. She wiped the back of her hand across her cheek; in the cold and near zero humidity her tears had evaporated quickly, leaving cold stinging streaks. With careful deliberation she plunged the outboard drive that was Eiji into the leg pocket of her helicasuit and pressed down upon the seal. She then cast about the dimness, taking a few steps and peering and blinking until she at last found her gloves that she had discarded earlier, upturned and hollow upon the floor, glinting like shed chitin carapaces of some bizarre bugs.

"Eiji. I need you... I need you to do something for me. If you're in there, you know best what to do."

With a small smile she raised an arm to the base of her neck and flipped her helmet over her head, then raised both hands to the hatch, filled her lungs with breath, and twisted.

Chapter Sixteen

A body lay in the darkness of the silo, motionless save for the barely detectable rise of fall of languid breath, slowed now almost to a stop, and the flickering of REM beneath thin eyelids. The storm above pounded at the walls, yet the air inside held still, broken only by the occasional drip of liquefying oxygen as it formed upon metallic surfaces and fell in fat slow globes to the pool, ripples spreading in slow interfering fringes into the darkness.

An outboard drive lay upon the wireless interface pedestal in the center of the pillar. Scratched and beaten, a comma of blood across its surface, it lay as still as the body sprawled beneath.

A long time passed and layers of frost started to gather around the figure, forming on the metal struts linkages of the suit of metal it wore. The buzz of the lights in the silo gave a flicker and for an instant all was plunged into darkness as the power circuits began to yield to the forces of destruction. The walls gave another creak, and the feeble lighting returned, but much weaker that before, no more that the light of the stars on a moonless night. A flurry of fog and dust worked its way into the still air of the silo where it billowed outward and spread like the ocean refilling a tidal pool.

And then, quite suddenly, came the sound of hundreds of clicks, like the underwater snapping and cracking of tiny shrimp. Somewhere far above there was a sound, like the gears of a large piece of machinery spinning and meshing. The fetal form half submerged in the shallow pool gave a reflexive twitch, head moving as if it had caught the sound, and then it, too, lay forever still.

THE END

### About the author:

Raised on a diet of Tolkien, Star Wars and everything in between, Ronan was first inspired to put pen to paper in primary school after being awestruck by a classmate's hand-drawn comic book. He would spend hours after school penning his own comic, complete with lots of red ink for blood on axes and swords. Fast-forward twenty years, and his interest in science and the stranger-than-fiction world of the quantum and relativistic has led him into a career in research. In his spare time Ronan still loves to write fiction.

Thank you for reading this book! Please take a moment to leave a review and rating, it really does mean the world to an author. More information about Ronan's other work can be found at

ronanfrost.weebly.com

smashwords.com/profile/view/ronanfrost

And he can be contact by email

ronan.frost@gmail.com

