Stephen Baxter - Xeelee - Endurance

‘Of course,’ Miriam said. ‘I should have seen it. I never even asked myself what the lilies were doing while they were lying around on the lake’s surface . . . Trapping sunlight!’

Harry was growing excited too. ‘Hey, if you’re right, son, you may already have paid for the trip. Silane-based low-temp photosynthesisers would be hugely commercially valuable. Think of it, you could grow them on those nitrogen lakes on Triton, and go scudding around the outer System on living solar sails.’ His grin was wide, even in the reduced Virtual image.

Poole and Miriam were smiling too, staring at each other with a glow of connection. Theirs was a strange kind of symbiosis, like silane lily and CHON sponge; they seemed to need the excitement of external discovery and achievement to bring them together.

Well, there was a happy mood in that grounded gondola, the happiest since we had crashed. Even Bill Dzik as he showered was making grunting, hog-like noises of contentment.

And then there was a crunching sound, like great jaws closing on bone, and the whole bus tipped to one side.

I had my helmet over my head in a heartbeat. Poole and Miriam staggered and started shouting instructions to each other.

Then there was another crunch, a ripping sound – and a scream, a gurgling, quickly strangled, and an inward rush of cold air that I felt even through my exosuit. I turned and saw that, near the shower partition, a hole had been ripped in the side of the gondola’s flimsy hull, revealing Titan’s crimson murk. Something like a claw, or a huge version of Miriam’s manipulator arm, was working at the hull, widening the breach.

And Bill Dzik, naked, not metres from the exosuit that could have saved him, was already frozen to death.

That was enough for me. I flung open the hatch in the gondola roof and lunged out, not waiting for Miriam or Poole. I hit the Titan sand and ran as best I could. I could hear crunching and chewing behind me. I did not look back.

When I had gone a hundred metres I stopped, winded, and turned. Poole and Miriam were following me. I was relieved that at least I was not stranded on Titan alone.

And I saw what was becoming of our gondola. The machines that had assailed it – and they were machines, I had no doubt of it – were like spiders of ice, with lenticular bodies perhaps ten metres long, each equipped with three grabber claws attached to delicate low-gravity limbs. Four, five of these things were labouring at the wreck of our gondola. I saw that they had gone for the wheels first, which was why we had tipped over, and now were making a fast job of ripping the structure apart. Not only that, beyond them I saw a line of similar-looking beasts carrying off silvery fragments – they could only be pieces of the gondola – and hauling them up the rising ground towards the summit of the cryovolcano. Some of the larger components of the wreck they left intact, such as the GUTengine module, but they carried them away just as determinedly.

In minutes, I saw, there would be little left of our gondola on the ice surface – not much aside from Bill Dzik, who, naked, sprawled and staring with frozen eyeballs, made an ugly corpse, but had not deserved the fate that had befallen him.

Harry Poole’s head popped into Virtual existence before us. ‘Well,’ he said, ‘that complicates things.’

Michael swatted at him, dispersing pixels like flies.

‘Dzik is dead,’ I said. ‘And so are we.’ I turned on Michael Poole, fists bunched in the thick gloves. ‘You and your absurd ambition – it was always going to kill you one day, and now it’s killed us all.’

Michael Poole snorted his contempt. ‘And I wish I’d just thrown you into a jail back on Earth and left you to rot.’

‘Oh, Lethe,’ Miriam said with disgust. She was sifting through the scattered debris the spiders had left behind. ‘Do you two have any idea how ridiculous you look in those suits? Like two soft toys squaring up for a fight. Anyhow, you aren’t dead yet, Jovik.’ She picked up bits of rubbish, rope, a few instruments, some of her precious sample flasks, enigmatic egg-shaped devices small enough to fit in her fist – and food packs.

Michael Poole’s curiosity snagged him. ‘They didn’t take everything.’

‘Evidently not. In fact, as you’d have noticed if you weren’t too busy trading insults with your passenger, they didn’t take us . Or Bill.’

‘What, then?’

‘Metal. I think. Anything that has a significant metal component is being hauled away.’

‘Ah.’ Poole watched the spiders toiling up their volcano, bits of our ship clutched in their huge claws. ‘That makes a sort of sense. One thing this moon is short of is metal. Has been since its formation. Even the core is mostly light silicate rock, more like Earth’s mantle than its iron core. Which maybe explains why every surface probe to Titan across seventeen hundred years has disappeared without a trace – even the traces of your illegal sample collectors, Emry. They were taken for the metal.’

I felt embarrassed to contribute to this dry discussion, but I referred to the blocky shapes I had seen toiling on the lake floor, in the radar images of the deeps. ‘As if they were quarrying? Maybe they were relatives of these spiders, after the metallic content of the meteorite that dug out the crater in the first place.’

Poole pursed his lips, clearly trying not to look impressed. ‘Sounds a good guess. The metal in a fair-sized space rock could take centuries to extract.’

‘Well, in any event, they left useful stuff behind,’ said Miriam, picking through the debris. ‘Anything ceramic, glass fibre, plastic. And the food packs. I’ll show you how to interface them to your suit’s systems, Emry, you can get at the food without opening up your helmet . . . We won’t starve, at least.’

Poole, you see, had homed in on theory, while Miriam focused on the essentials that might keep us alive. That tells you everything about the man’s lofty nature, and its flaws.

‘But they took the GUTengine, didn’t they?’ I put in sharply. ‘Our power source. Without which we’ll soon freeze to death, no matter how well fed we are.’

‘And, incidentally,’ Miriam said, ‘the identity-backup deck. We cached the backups in the GUTengine’s own control and processing unit, the most reliable store on the gondola. If we lose that, we lose the last trace of poor Bill too.’

I couldn’t help but glance at Dzik’s corpse, fast-frozen on the ice of Titan.

Not Poole, though. He was watching those receding spiders. ‘They’re heading down into the volcano. Which is a vent that leads down into the mantle, the ammonia sea, right? Why? What the hell are those things?’

Miriam said, ‘One way to find out.’ She hefted one of those ceramic eggs in her right hand, pressed a stud that made it glow red, and hurled it towards the nearest spider. It followed a low-gravity arc, slowing quickly in the thick air, and it seemed to take an age to fall. But her aim was good, and it landed not a metre from the spider.

And exploded. Evidently it had been a grenade. The spider shattered satisfactorily, those ugly claws going wheeling through the air.

Miriam had already started to run towards the spider. ‘Come on.’ You couldn’t fault her directness.

Poole followed, and I too, unwilling to be left alone with Bill’s frozen remains. Poole called, ‘What did you do that for?’

‘We want to know what we’re dealing with, don’t we?’

‘And why are we running?’

‘So we can get there before the other spiders get rid of the corpse.’

And sure enough the other spiders, still laden with bits of the gondola, had already turned, and were closing on their shattered fellow. They didn’t seem perturbed by the sudden destruction of one of their kind, or of our approaching presence.