Lore:Last Days on Kraken Mare: Difference between revisions

Line 236:

Nor reckon with the apocalyptic tidal forces of a second ocean, fourteen times as vast as Earth's oceans combined, buried 50 kilometers below the surface.

==SUNDOWN DISTRESS==

Mayday, Mayday, Mayday. All circum-Saturn stations monitoring GUARD, this is New Pacific Arcology, declaring a SUNDOWN loss of habitability event. We have 2.9 million souls aboard. We repeat, Titan is no longer safe for human life.

We are experiencing massive tidal forces of unknown origin. Our physics cluster detects mass growl, phaeton strikes, and sterile neutrino scattering. Possible origins include a compact dark matter object, a lambda-field influence, or a polarized gravity device.

Satellite lidar confirms a tidal bulge of 40 meters—400, repeat, 400 percent of ordinary tidal deformation and growing. We anticipate massive cryoseismic activity as the tidal effect recedes. Total crustal reflex will trigger a multiple hypocenter icequake swarm. Surface effects catastrophic.

We are attempting to decouple tidal anchors and loosen the arcology substructure. Blue-water vessels are now transporting frozen citizens to lifters. We require all available ships with interplanetary capability to receive refugees. Contact New Pacific Traffic Control on approach.

Be advised that we have no contact with any circum-Saturn ships or stations, and we are transmitting in the blind.

This message will now repeat.

Mayday, Mayday, Mayday. All circum-Saturn stations monitoring GUARD, this is New Pacific Arcology, declaring a SUNDOWN loss of habitability event. We have 2.9 million souls aboard. We repeat, Titan is no longer safe for human life.

==The Water Sun, Part I==

Maury Yamashita dives through bad water.

It's not water at all, but that's what the dolphins have nicknamed it—bad ocean—because it sucks to swim in it. At nearly -200 degrees Celsius, the methane is so viciously frigid that vacuum, the acme of pure cold, is actually keeping Maury warm: he wears a softsuit stuffed with microscopic layers of vacuum, packed in turn with crystalline nanostructures that prevent even light from crossing the gaps. This means the chill cannot get in… and his body heat cannot get out.

So, he is now baking to death in an ocean as cold as Dante's ninth. Of course, he could vent heat; the suit allows that. But the spreading warmth will force nitrogen out of the methane-ethane ocean, and the bubbles will slow him down. This is unacceptable for a lot of reasons, one of which is that he's already too slow. Liquid methane is about half as dense as water, so his huge fins and hissing thrusters struggle to push against it.

Another reason is that he will die if he can't get back inside in time.

"Maury," his sensorium whispers. He's turned the volume way down. "Come back. This isn't worth your life."

Sorry, Mia, he thinks. It has to be worth my life, or I'm worth more than them, and I know I'm not. I put them there. It's my job to let them out.

He's always loved the stupid little swarmers.

Dome 2's understructure crouches around him, a maze of ultralight support struts and twisting bundles of cable. The shadow of a behemoth supercarrier blocks the dim sunlight above: he feels the thin howl of the ship's thrusters, fighting to move out of mooring at Dome 2 and haul another load of frozen people to an evacuation lifter. If Maury looks down, his lights illuminate a dusty wash of azotosomic plankton, primitive methane life. If he looks back to Dome 1, he can barely see the sleekly fat form of the Duiker, the water-ocean research submarine, docked to the arcology's underside. E. F. Babatunde is in there now, probably begging someone to tell them what's happening.

He heads down. His dolphins are already safe in open water. He has to get the swarmers out of their research pen.

"Tidal anchors decoupled," Xiana McCaig reports. "Dome 1 substructure is as loose as I can make it. Dome 2 is showing temperature faults, but I've got drones on the way. Maury, please. We have no idea what'll happen when the quake hits. Get back in here!"

"I'll be back in a few," he promises. "I'm just going to cut the research pen open so the swarmers can get free—"

"Oh, Allah," Ismail Barat whispers. "It's gone."

"What's gone?" Mia demands.

"The tidal pull. The ghost mass. It just… left. The moon is collapsing back to spheroid shape. I'm detecting primary waves in the subsurface ocean—it's a quake. It's a quake! Maury, get away from the substructure! Get clear!"

Maury imagines 60-plus meters of bulging moon, Titan's mass hauled up into a teardrop pointed at the sky—suddenly released. Smashing and scraping and grinding back into equilibrium. Cracks in the ice spewing plumes of water and ammonia. Continent-sized shelves slamming and rebounding and calving like bergs. The whole vast inner ocean sloshing back into its shape.

"The swarmers," he says, and he jettisons his buoyancy tanks.

Without that lift he is so much denser than the bad water around him that he plunges like a skydiver toward the cross brace below, where the swarmer pen is anchored. Titan's gravity may be gentle, but even gentle acceleration adds up. He hits hard, and the spinmetal surface blasts the air out of his lungs. He gasps and gags. Scrabbles for purchase before he slides off and falls into the abyss. He's going over—no! No! He is not going over! He will not fall!

==The Water Sun, Part II==

The gecko-grip surfaces on his forearms catch—and hold.

"Whew," he says, and he has never meant anything so inane so deeply.

The swarmers seethe and pulsate in the perforated plastic sac. Not Titan's highest life, nor its lowest, they hive across the icy sea-bottom in enormous braided patterns that speak to Maury of intelligence. Not individually—not even at the hive level—but some kind of vast concert, conducted, perhaps, by leviathans down beneath the ice shell, communicating across the barrier by magnetic whisper that the swarmers receive via organic SQUIDs. An ecology spanning methane life and water-ammonia life. Why? How?

Maury wants so badly to know. But if his curiosity brought the swarmers here, only for them to be caught in the quake, dashed apart against the arcology struts, he'll never forgive himself.

He should've set up a remote release, but he was complacent. He gets a fistful of the pen's smart plastic surface and fires the "disintegrate" signal through his glove. The polymer shreds and the swarmers scatter, their tiny bodies siphoning liquid methane as they pump down and away. Safe. Safe. "I made it!" he calls, jubilantly. "On my way back up!"

The quake hits.

A hundred and fifty meters below, the icy basis of Kraken Mare rolls like liquid. The arcologies answer the low geological wail with a cacophony of groans and shrieks, joints flexing, tethers snapping taut, substructures soaking up unthinkable mechanical energy, trying to keep anything from—

Breaking.

Something must've frozen hard down in Dome 2's substructure. Something must've grown brittle. The snap is almost spinal. The smashed hulk of a drone tumbles past Maury as he tries to scull backward, away from the superdense arm of plasteel dropping like a guillotine through all-too-thin methane to strike him in the—

An absence.

He's on the ice seafloor, two hundred and forty meters down. Someone's shouting in his ear. It's Mia. She's always there in an emergency. Always there for her team. "Maury! Maury, you're awake! Respond if able!"

His sensorium tells him he's been in a medical coma while cytomachines fight to save his life. Massive blunt trauma. Concussion. The suit, as ever, tougher than the human being inside. Dome 2 has toppled partially; it's leaning toward the sea on damaged substructure. He should go help…

"Maury," Mia says, in a level voice he does not recognize. He's never heard her scared before. "Listen to me. The quake is over. But a shelf of ice collapsed into Kraken Mare. The displacement wave is coming in now and you won't be safe on the bottom. You must reach the surface and get above wave level. That will be at least 50 meters."

Surface? Wave? About 50 meters? Maury cues a blast of nootrope to clean up his thinking and grunts aloud in shock. He gets it. Oh, he gets it now, he has to RUN. "I understand. I've lost my buoyancy. Ascending on thrusters."

He makes it to the surface. He's up there in plenty of time. He can even see Dome 1, still intact, though a lot of the surrounding rigging is damaged. One of the creepy Exo soldiers stands outside, beckoning to him with a laser dazzle, guiding him in.

Maury opens his suit wings to their full membranous span. A single mighty stroke of paramuscle cups the air and hauls him up out of the sea. He's aloft! Titan air is thick, and Titan gravity is light, and like a huge bat he can fly. He puts his head down and starts building altitude, headed towards the beckoning Exo.

The Exo's laser blinks code at him. GO WITH GOD, YOU POOR—

Maury looks back.

First, he sees the supercarrier, tragically buoyant, tragically light, built for seas with gentle one-meter tides but now riding the greatest wave Titan has ever seen, directly into Dome 2's crippled understructure. In 152 kilopascals of air pressure, the pandemonium sound of the collision has the gut-mulching power of a rocket booster.

The entire arcology collapses down onto the ship, into the sea.

Then he blinks past the devastation and recognizes the sheer scale, the utter speed, the complete imminence of that unthinkable methane wave coming down at him.

"Oh, man," he says.

Lore:Last Days on Kraken Mare: Difference between revisions

Contribute

Recent contributors to this article

@@ Line 236: / Line 236: @@
 Nor reckon with the apocalyptic tidal forces of a second ocean, fourteen times as vast as Earth's oceans combined, buried 50 kilometers below the surface.
+==SUNDOWN DISTRESS==
+Mayday, Mayday, Mayday. All circum-Saturn stations monitoring GUARD, this is New Pacific Arcology, declaring a SUNDOWN loss of habitability event. We have 2.9 million souls aboard. We repeat, Titan is no longer safe for human life.
+We are experiencing massive tidal forces of unknown origin. Our physics cluster detects mass growl, phaeton strikes, and sterile neutrino scattering. Possible origins include a compact dark matter object, a lambda-field influence, or a polarized gravity device.
+Satellite lidar confirms a tidal bulge of 40 meters—400, repeat, 400 percent of ordinary tidal deformation and growing. We anticipate massive cryoseismic activity as the tidal effect recedes. Total crustal reflex will trigger a multiple hypocenter icequake swarm. Surface effects catastrophic.
+We are attempting to decouple tidal anchors and loosen the arcology substructure. Blue-water vessels are now transporting frozen citizens to lifters. We require all available ships with interplanetary capability to receive refugees. Contact New Pacific Traffic Control on approach.
+Be advised that we have no contact with any circum-Saturn ships or stations, and we are transmitting in the blind.
+This message will now repeat.
+Mayday, Mayday, Mayday. All circum-Saturn stations monitoring GUARD, this is New Pacific Arcology, declaring a SUNDOWN loss of habitability event. We have 2.9 million souls aboard. We repeat, Titan is no longer safe for human life.
+==The Water Sun, Part I==
+Maury Yamashita dives through bad water.
+It's not water at all, but that's what the dolphins have nicknamed it—bad ocean—because it sucks to swim in it. At nearly -200 degrees Celsius, the methane is so viciously frigid that vacuum, the acme of pure cold, is actually keeping Maury warm: he wears a softsuit stuffed with microscopic layers of vacuum, packed in turn with crystalline nanostructures that prevent even light from crossing the gaps. This means the chill cannot get in… and his body heat cannot get out.
+So, he is now baking to death in an ocean as cold as Dante's ninth. Of course, he could vent heat; the suit allows that. But the spreading warmth will force nitrogen out of the methane-ethane ocean, and the bubbles will slow him down. This is unacceptable for a lot of reasons, one of which is that he's already too slow. Liquid methane is about half as dense as water, so his huge fins and hissing thrusters struggle to push against it.
+Another reason is that he will die if he can't get back inside in time.
+"Maury," his sensorium whispers. He's turned the volume way down. "Come back. This isn't worth your life."
+Sorry, Mia, he thinks. It has to be worth my life, or I'm worth more than them, and I know I'm not. I put them there. It's my job to let them out.
+He's always loved the stupid little swarmers.
+Dome 2's understructure crouches around him, a maze of ultralight support struts and twisting bundles of cable. The shadow of a behemoth supercarrier blocks the dim sunlight above: he feels the thin howl of the ship's thrusters, fighting to move out of mooring at Dome 2 and haul another load of frozen people to an evacuation lifter. If Maury looks down, his lights illuminate a dusty wash of azotosomic plankton, primitive methane life. If he looks back to Dome 1, he can barely see the sleekly fat form of the Duiker, the water-ocean research submarine, docked to the arcology's underside. E. F. Babatunde is in there now, probably begging someone to tell them what's happening.
+He heads down. His dolphins are already safe in open water. He has to get the swarmers out of their research pen.
+"Tidal anchors decoupled," Xiana McCaig reports. "Dome 1 substructure is as loose as I can make it. Dome 2 is showing temperature faults, but I've got drones on the way. Maury, please. We have no idea what'll happen when the quake hits. Get back in here!"
+"I'll be back in a few," he promises. "I'm just going to cut the research pen open so the swarmers can get free—"
+"Oh, Allah," Ismail Barat whispers. "It's gone."
+"What's gone?" Mia demands.
+"The tidal pull. The ghost mass. It just… left. The moon is collapsing back to spheroid shape. I'm detecting primary waves in the subsurface ocean—it's a quake. It's a quake! Maury, get away from the substructure! Get clear!"
+Maury imagines 60-plus meters of bulging moon, Titan's mass hauled up into a teardrop pointed at the sky—suddenly released. Smashing and scraping and grinding back into equilibrium. Cracks in the ice spewing plumes of water and ammonia. Continent-sized shelves slamming and rebounding and calving like bergs. The whole vast inner ocean sloshing back into its shape.
+"The swarmers," he says, and he jettisons his buoyancy tanks.
+Without that lift he is so much denser than the bad water around him that he plunges like a skydiver toward the cross brace below, where the swarmer pen is anchored. Titan's gravity may be gentle, but even gentle acceleration adds up. He hits hard, and the spinmetal surface blasts the air out of his lungs. He gasps and gags. Scrabbles for purchase before he slides off and falls into the abyss. He's going over—no! No! He is not going over! He will not fall!
+==The Water Sun, Part II==
+The gecko-grip surfaces on his forearms catch—and hold.
+"Whew," he says, and he has never meant anything so inane so deeply.
+The swarmers seethe and pulsate in the perforated plastic sac. Not Titan's highest life, nor its lowest, they hive across the icy sea-bottom in enormous braided patterns that speak to Maury of intelligence. Not individually—not even at the hive level—but some kind of vast concert, conducted, perhaps, by leviathans down beneath the ice shell, communicating across the barrier by magnetic whisper that the swarmers receive via organic SQUIDs. An ecology spanning methane life and water-ammonia life. Why? How?
+Maury wants so badly to know. But if his curiosity brought the swarmers here, only for them to be caught in the quake, dashed apart against the arcology struts, he'll never forgive himself.
+He should've set up a remote release, but he was complacent. He gets a fistful of the pen's smart plastic surface and fires the "disintegrate" signal through his glove. The polymer shreds and the swarmers scatter, their tiny bodies siphoning liquid methane as they pump down and away. Safe. Safe. "I made it!" he calls, jubilantly. "On my way back up!"
+The quake hits.
+A hundred and fifty meters below, the icy basis of Kraken Mare rolls like liquid. The arcologies answer the low geological wail with a cacophony of groans and shrieks, joints flexing, tethers snapping taut, substructures soaking up unthinkable mechanical energy, trying to keep anything from—
+Breaking.
+Something must've frozen hard down in Dome 2's substructure. Something must've grown brittle. The snap is almost spinal. The smashed hulk of a drone tumbles past Maury as he tries to scull backward, away from the superdense arm of plasteel dropping like a guillotine through all-too-thin methane to strike him in the—
+An absence.
+He's on the ice seafloor, two hundred and forty meters down. Someone's shouting in his ear. It's Mia. She's always there in an emergency. Always there for her team. "Maury! Maury, you're awake! Respond if able!"
+His sensorium tells him he's been in a medical coma while cytomachines fight to save his life. Massive blunt trauma. Concussion. The suit, as ever, tougher than the human being inside. Dome 2 has toppled partially; it's leaning toward the sea on damaged substructure. He should go help…
+"Maury," Mia says, in a level voice he does not recognize. He's never heard her scared before. "Listen to me. The quake is over. But a shelf of ice collapsed into Kraken Mare. The displacement wave is coming in now and you won't be safe on the bottom. You must reach the surface and get above wave level. That will be at least 50 meters."
+Surface? Wave? About 50 meters? Maury cues a blast of nootrope to clean up his thinking and grunts aloud in shock. He gets it. Oh, he gets it now, he has to RUN. "I understand. I've lost my buoyancy. Ascending on thrusters."
+He makes it to the surface. He's up there in plenty of time. He can even see Dome 1, still intact, though a lot of the surrounding rigging is damaged. One of the creepy Exo soldiers stands outside, beckoning to him with a laser dazzle, guiding him in.
+Maury opens his suit wings to their full membranous span. A single mighty stroke of paramuscle cups the air and hauls him up out of the sea. He's aloft! Titan air is thick, and Titan gravity is light, and like a huge bat he can fly. He puts his head down and starts building altitude, headed towards the beckoning Exo.
+The Exo's laser blinks code at him. GO WITH GOD, YOU POOR—
+Maury looks back.
+First, he sees the supercarrier, tragically buoyant, tragically light, built for seas with gentle one-meter tides but now riding the greatest wave Titan has ever seen, directly into Dome 2's crippled understructure. In 152 kilopascals of air pressure, the pandemonium sound of the collision has the gut-mulching power of a rocket booster.
+The entire arcology collapses down onto the ship, into the sea.
+Then he blinks past the devastation and recognizes the sheer scale, the utter speed, the complete imminence of that unthinkable methane wave coming down at him.
+"Oh, man," he says.