Lore:Last Days on Kraken Mare: Difference between revisions

'''The Last Days on Kraken Mare''' is a lore book introduced with [[Shadowkeep]] in [[Destiny 2]].

"It's real," Mia van der Venne decides. "We evacuate. Citizens first, then the old guard. And we assume that we're never coming back."

Down beneath their meeting table, pouches of farmed salmon, beef en culture, buttered carrots, and bok choy drift in the slow turbulence of the sous-vide bath. On Mia's one hundredth anniversary as the [[New Pacific Arcology|New Pacific]] Systems and Facilities Administrator, she cashed in all (well, not quite all) her favors and installed a pocket restaurant beneath her table on the command deck. She liked the edible metaphor—the idea of watching your food slow-cook all day before the meal. Savor the future you're making.

She waits for Xiana to boil over first. Xiana's the water ocean expert. She has the most to lose.

Finch-tiny Xiana McCaig slams her fists down with not a tenth the strength that her chimp-splice muscles could summon. "Now? NOW? We can't leave now! We just finished the borehole—we're ONE DAY from a crewed expedition into [[Titan (moon)|Titan]]'s biggest secret! And you want us to just leave it all?"

Maury Yamashita, her lead diver, leaps in with the details she can always trust him to catch. "Boss, if we abandon the borehole and the water lock, all the equipment's down there bathing in liquid methane, hydrogen sulfide, carboxylic acid… Leave it too long, and we'll lose everything."

"There are almost three million people on this arcology and its rigs." Connectivity supervisor Ismail Barat's Zen-shura training distills his attention down to a single laser-bright point; he is here with Mia, even as his brain drifts on a hundred different data feeds. "If you're serious about evacuating, we'll need to slot people into SMILE pods and move them as bulk freight. It's the only way to get the population out. There'll be economic damage. There'll be deaths. If this is a false alarm—"

This voice Mia didn't expect, but only because he's the new guest at her table. David Miguel Korosec. A man who's literally never harmed a fly, who won't eat plants lest he destroy a sacred entropy pump. Poor David. He came here to make first contact with new life, the wonders that flourish not in Mia's ocean—the methane sea of Titan's surface—but in the enormous water world that lies below Titan's 50-kilometer ice shell. He is an ethicist. He wanted to help them do it right.

Everyone has had their say. Mia puts her hand down on the cold tabletop. "We are going to evacuate. Xiana, call Babatunde and get the Duiker up from the borehole. I want them moored in the submarine pen in three hours. We'll start podding citizens in the domes, then use local blue-water shipping to haul them out for orbital pickup." She likes to call the surface ships "blue-water," even though Titan's oceans aren't water, or blue. It reminds people she's old-fashioned. "Then we evacuate the ship crews. Then we go."

An alert detonates in her sensorium.

The alert scrolls through Mia's mind, in that hallucinatory screen space that matches but never impairs normal vision. "[[Traveler|TRAVELER]] DEPARTS [[Io|IO]]. TERRAFORMING INCOMPLETE. ACCELERATING TOWARD [[Earth|EARTH]]. BEHAVIOR UNPRECEDENTED."

The military dropships pierce the nitrogen clouds like bullets, plasma-hot trick shots through the evacuation fleet swarming over Titan. By the time Ishita Bhattacharya-Garcia has calmed down the panic in Traffic Control, there's nothing left for Mia to do except pace around the edge of her office in irritation and fire civil airspace protests at the intruders.

"I knew her."

"The woman on the radio. Crown Six." Two centuries of practice tell Mia there's heartbreak behind that calm voice. "Before she was uploaded."

"She's an [[Exo]] now. A troubleshooter for SOLSECCENT."

"The person you knew might have had time for this conversation," Morgan says, with vicious remove. The pronoun dance suggests shared personal history that Mia has no business asking after or caring about. "I don't. Administrator, my team will now proceed to Shanice Pell's lab to secure our objective. If you're with me, maybe it gets done faster. If not, maybe it gets done messier. Your choice."

"Who ordered this?" Mia demands. "On what grounds can SOLSEC impose some high-handed protocol on my Arcology?"

The beam kisses the rising shuttle and cuts through it, like a wire through a block of butter, as if the ship and everyone inside were as thin as the hydrocarbon sleet. Thunder booms, louder than Earth's, through heavy nitromethane air.

And down from the sky, swift and stealthy as the [[Warsat]] that fired it, came the invisible discharge of an X-ray laser to light the shuttle's propellant like a lantern. The beam path was hot-white, straight as poured silver, collapsing instantly: a crash of pure-tone thunder as the tunnel of burnt air closes in on itself. And the shuttle opening like a ghastly blossom, the shape of a thing going upward very quickly, no longer in one piece.

"Oh, no," Mia had gasped, not understanding at first: Was it an accident? Had the phantom disaster finally arrived on Titan and struck its first blow? This was the age of life, and governments did not, ever, use force against human beings. There were always alternatives. Every soul sacred. Every evil treatable.

Titan is deforming from a spheroid into an egg. [[Darkness|Something]] out there is pulling on Titan—a hand with a force greater than Saturn's entire mass. And the moon is answering the only way it can, by bulging outward: already fifteen meters, still growing.