Guardian Tempest

By Manfred MacCallum

Mankind's sole outpost beyond Earth resides deep beneath the icy surface of Titan, Saturn's largest moon. Within this hidden refuge, all is not well. Earth's neglect has led to a gradual deterioration and times are lean for the three hundred colonists now in the deep sleep of hibernation tiding them over the seven year winter upon the frigid moon.

Only a handful of individuals remain conscious, forming a skeletal crew in the vast expanse of Titan's inhospitable environment. These few must confront an unexpected shift, prompting profound questions about consciousness and the impending realization that the once-promising beacon of humanity's cosmic legacy is teetering on the brink of eternal darkness.

• Language: English
• Publisher: Manfred MacCallum
• Release date: Mar 7, 2024
• ISBN: 9798224275229

Book preview

Chapter One

Mica stood nose to the glass, watching clouds swollen with lightning strike over the mountains. The illusion of depth was so convincing that, for a fleeting moment, she could almost trick herself into believing she stood before a genuine window, momentarily forgetting the reality of being encased beneath twenty storeys of fractured rock.

The lights in the room flickered, and the 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.

Arran? How did you get in here? she asked.

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.

You're going under.

Is that a question?

Arran licked one paw in a study of detached indifference. You don’t have to, you know.  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, 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 again in the mote-thought 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. Mica found herself confronted by her own reflection upon the blankness; her white skin, flawless and pale, 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 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 signalled 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 anaesthesia 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.

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 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...

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 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 nothing but a passenger.

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 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 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