To Deeper Fathoms, Through Darkest Abyss (PART 1)
1^(st) of September, 1855.
Saturn’s outermost ring, near the orbit of Enceladus.
I firmly believe Sir Newton's discovery of gravity, anti-gravity, and the colonization of distant worlds are as much a detriment to mankind as they are a boon. Sailing the seas, either on a sail or steam boat, brings many perils to whoever attempts it. However, I have come to learn that these risks pale in comparison to that of voyages like the one I find myself undertaking.
My name is Alphonse Withers, and I be a telegraph operator aboard the HMSS Iron Duke. Our ship consists of 600 feet of wood, glass and steel, with a skeleton crew of 42 veteran mariners, engineers, technicians, naturalists, and many other specialists and scholars. Yet, by the marvels of anti-gravity motors and the excellent and meticulous craftmanship of English engineers, we have now become the second ever expedition to brave the rings of Saturn, after the ill-advised French expedition to Titan of 1850.
I write this with a numbed mind, as I have recently woken from the vapour-chambers. Three years have I been in that dream-like stupor, briefly being woken up every ten weeks for food and drink. Never has such a long expedition been made, not at least by the scions of Earth, and as such, never has anyone been exposed for such a long time to the Venusian opium. The drug never lets us fall asleep entirely, yet as we experience its effects, our bodies enter a hibernation-like state, needing nearly no sustenance, and erasing most memories of time passed under its influence.
The ship’s surgeon suggested us to keep a diary, and to write even that which seems obvious, to ascertain if the drug has any lingering effects, like memory loss or hallucinations.
With all honesty, I have a hard time distinguishing reality from dreams, most of all when I look through the portside windows near the bow of the ship, where the great rings can be observed. Great lines of brown, beige and grey stretch into the… well, I cannot call it horizon, for there is none to speak of, but infinity itself stretches so vastly that the lines disappear in the distance, curving to the left as they bend to the gravity of the colossal, yellowish planet at their core.
I knew, in theory, that Saturn is may times larger than Earth. However, knowing this and seeing that titan of the solar system, second only to Jupiter, hovering into view, eclipsing the blackness of the void and the faint distant stars with its immensity, filled me with such awe and dread that many times I though I was still dreaming. Men were not made to travel this far.
Then, as we approached the plain of the rings I saw what lurked in the planet’s north pole. A dark, hexagon shaped could be partially observed, its sharp, unnatural edges holding inside a whirlpool as large as a smaller planet. The Hex of Chronos, they called it. The Mark of the Titan. I read the sensationalist stories translated from the French occultist Elphias Levi, but did so as amusement, never thinking that this dark hexagon could exist. Now, the rumours of a planet cursed by the abhorrent race of extraterrestrial gods that inhabited its largest moon all came back to memory. I always wondered why we chose Enceladus as our target, instead of the larger, easier to survive moon named Titan.
Maybe the stories had some truth, and maybe some of those old gods still hid under Titan’s dense clouds. Maybe, a frozen world with no atmosphere and plagued with volcanic activity was indeed safer.
“The view seems to me more hypnotizing than any drug” said a man, joining me to see that cosmic spectacle unseen by most of humanity. He was a naturalist by the name of mister Robert Carruthers, an older, eccentric gentleman that happened to be the ship’s most learned naturalist.
“Indeed, sir” I said. “Do you think we shall find life in this distant snowball?”
“I’m not sure of it, but it’s mighty conceivable. We have found life on the moon, Mars, Venus, and even in some places of the Jovian system. I think the Saturnine system should be no different.”
“But Saturn is twice the distance from the sun, compared to Jupiter. Surely nothing can survive in these frozen reaches”.
“Maybe, but we simply won’t know for certain until we set our boots on Enceladus.” Carruthers said. “There’s so much we don’t know, mister Alphonse. I happen to be acquainted with sir John Herschel, discoverer of Uranus via telescope, a man so intelligent that if I were to list all his contributions to human knowledge, we would still be here conversing until we returned to London. A lot of things I took for granted have been, for better or worse, metaphorically dismantled after my talks with sir John.”
“How so?”
“His methods of inductive reasoning demand us to find proper explanations for every phenomenon we study. And, when one seeks such explanations, one finds how many we don’t have. For example, how does an anti-gravity motor function?”
“By passing electricity through crystals of newtonium, generated by the means of a steam-powered Faraday disk.” I answered confidently.
“But how is newtonium able to generate such a powerful force as to break free of Earth’s gravity with nothing but a weak electric current?”
“I don’t know.” I admitted.
“Neither does anyone else. From the days of storm-tossed lunar galleons to the present, neither man nor extraterrestrial has found that answer. It works. We know it does, but we are not closer to knowing how it works than those primitives in the Americas throwing men to the sky as sacrifices to their gods.”
“I would venture to guess that the same is true on our knowledge of living things” I said, realizing that mister Carruthers was meandering towards some point related to his field of study, and I wanted him to get to the point.
“Indeed” said Carruthers. “Even on Earth, we discover many a species every year, and while in land we know of all if not most of the larger ones, and only smaller creatures remain hidden, in the sea, there are still many giants unknown to man. For example, I ready many a report on giant squids, over a dozen metres in length, yet I never managed to see one for myself, nor secure a dead specimen. I search for the beast on a bathysphere for years, and while I described many new creatures, the one I really searched for still eludes me.”
“Could be just a mariner’s tale” I posited. “I spent some time on the seas last decade with my friend Herman, on whaling ships that made port in New Amsterdam, and the tales related to me by the sailors were hard to believe.”
“I found evidence of said squids on their predators, the sperm whales. Scars from their fights, giant squid beaks on the stomachs of dead cetaceans… yet never have I seen the beasts myself. If such a creature hides from us in our own home, what could be hiding from us in such distant worlds?”
2^(nd) of September, 1856.
Gloomy and frigid is life aboard a space-faring ship. Air, water, temperature, light, all basic things taken for granted on Earth become precious commodities in the deep void. Most machines and processes we now use to survive have been invented in the last two decades, and like any new inventions, they come with all sorts of quirks that technicians and engineers must sort out.
Our ship has the appearance of an oceangoing steamer, only with a flat bottom and hermetically-sealed hatches to avoid leaking air. This of course makes the air we breathe thick with the vapours produced by men, machine and the process of hibernation. Air purifiers are installed in many points around the ship, but they must be manually pumped for hours at a time to properly work. As my job wasn’t needed in this moment, I was sent to the pumps as soon as the surgeon cleared me for physical activity.
Even so, cleaning the air will not make it breathable again, it shall only eliminate the miasmas that may sicken us. So, to give us more air, an electrolysis device has been fashioned that can transmute water into air. The results are a humid mix of never-quite-clean recycled air and steam, far from desirable, but we can survive in it.
As for food and drink, they are both stored frozen on the unpressurized lower decks, alongside with the coal reserves we need to keep ourselves warm. Indeed, most of the space on the ship is only dedicated for storage, and the properly pressurized and heated rooms are scant in comparison. Even so, most of these rooms are dedicated to one machine or another that allows us to keep on living, so no luxuries like sleeping quarters or mess halls can be afforded. We work, eat and sleep on the same places, and we use the pressurized storage rooms for crammed social gatherings.
At noon, or at the time it would’ve been noon in London, our navigator announced that Enceladus was visible to the naked eye, and that preparations should be made for landing.
To prepare for this, a team was sent to the outside of the ship after it deaccelerated, to check for potential damage to the hull and to ensure all outer systems were functional. I was sent on this team, with a telegraph integrated into the chest of my pressurized suit, and a wire that connected me to another such device on the inside. By this method, the captain could communicate to the outside team and vice-versa.
Our pressure suits were made of leather so expertly sown and caulked that it could take months to fully leak its internal air supply. Coal-fuelled heater units were strapped to our backs, for the temperature this far of the Sun was easily trice as cold as the coldest winter nights on Earth’s poles.
The crew communicated with sign language in the silent void, and while no damage to the ship was found, may men started to shake their hands, singing the words “wind” and “surprise”. Soon, I felt it too, and informed the captain. We were experiencing wind in the void. It was hitting us first softly, but soon it became strong as a tempest.
The captain told us that this was impossible, since there was no atmosphere to speak of, but we insisted that the impossible was happening.
It was there that we lost our first man.
Hit by a miniature asteroid, mister Stewart, our carpenter saw his leg pierced as if struck by grapeshot, and the rope that secured him to the ship was cut by that same meteor. Before anyone could help, his body flew away into the planet’s rings, leaving behind crystals of instantly frozen blood. From now until the end of time, in those rings he shall remain, forever preserved by ice and void, in a tomb so spectacular and long lasting that not even the pharaohs or Egypt could have ever conceived it.
I informed the captain. He ordered us to hurry back inside.
While machinists and engineers worked to land the ship, we had no recourse but to exercise our patience. The ship’s bow was reinforced in a way similar to the front of a locomotive, with a triangular steel rostrum that was designed to both stop and deflect incoming meteors. This became vital to our survival, since the repeated hits we suffered sounded like rifle volleys impacting an ironclad warship, creating an inescapable cacophony in all of the Iron Duke.
We were told that these meteors were likely debris floating near the rings, having either parted from them or moving to form part of the disks, and were most likely made of ice. Hard enough to pierce flesh and leather suits, but not enough to break one of the queen’s finest ships.
The captain chose as a landing site a valley formed by interconnected craters, each of them many miles in size, and a few in depth. The craters appeared as if someone dropped a stone in the water and instantly froze it, with hills on the middle and great concentric ridges the size of small mountain ranges forming like ripples on the ground. By the shade of cliffs as tall as the alps, the ship finally stood still, and descended vertically.
“We shall call this Victoria Landing, in honour of our monarch” said the captain upon touching ground. “And this hill in the middle of the crater upon which we stand shall be named Stewart hill, to honour the man we lost in this journey.”
Then, he told us we were to form teams and explore the outside. I was not chosen for this first wave of reconnaissance, but I was told that tomorrow would be my turn.
3^(rd) of September, 1856.
I had a long night of sleep, but hardly a good one. Finally, we are at a world with gravity. For most of our voyage, we had what’s called simulated gravity, with the ship spinning like a rifle bullet through space, as the force of inertia pulled us to the decks as if we were on Earth. However, as soon as we were woken up from the vapour chambers, this rotation was first reduced, and then stopped altogether as to make a safe landing. Now, we feel real gravity for the first time in years.
The moon’s pull is barely enough to give us a sense of up and down, and to prevent us from floating away, but it’s enough for us to enjoy the luxury of our sleeping hammocks. That, added to the 33-hour day this world has, meant that after the scouting parties returned at dusk, we had almost 16 hours to rest and sleep, only interrupted by some of the more menial tasks we had to perform to keep the systems running.
Still, sleeping wasn’t easy.
Strange dreams accosted me at night, of ancient cities like the ruins of old Mars, but taller and darker. Impossible towers rose to the skies among yellow clouds, and behind them I could see Saturn, with the Hex of Chronos plainly visible through cloud and smoke. A sibilant song, the echo of what once lived and now waited, emanated from beyond the void, somehow heard from whatever surface I was on.
Many times was I woken up, perturbed by this thing I wouldn’t know to define as dream or nightmare. As the night trudged forward, the dream never changed.
“You having them nightmares too, Alphonse?” asked Jonathan Blanche, a machinist born in the former moon colonies, a man that had never set foot on Earth itself. Tall, pale and with seemingly not enough flesh in his bones, he barely fit into his own hammock. “Nightmares about the black cities?”
“How…?” I managed to ask, before he interrupted me.
“It ain’t queer among voidsmen to dream about them. I reckon I’ve been doing this since the 40s, and the further out the solar system we go, the more it happens. It’s rare in the belt, and unheard of in Mars, but happens often enough in Jupiter’s moons.”
“I… I think I was on Titan. On the dream, I mean.”
“Tall towers, with the planet behind? We was on the same neighborhood, I reckon.”
Our conversation was interrupted by another man waking with a brief scream, that stopped as soon as he realized whatever horrors he just saw were all in his head.
After a quiet breakfast and a quick visit to the surgeon, who assured me these kinds of dreams were normal for those who recently came out of opioid hibernation, I was suited up and ready to leave the ship, on our second exploratory expedition.
The brightest day at Enceladus was akin to an overcast twilight, and the sun was but a tiny, glowing spec on the sky. The ground was ice and snow, so loose in places that we could have sunk like quicksand, were we not made lighter by the low gravity.
With a portable telegraph on my wrist, I was the only means of communication my team had with the crew. With reels of wire installed on my back, and additional ones carried by the other men on the team, we could walk for miles without cutting communications.
The ship’s lieutenant led the team, and with us were a geologist, mister Carruthers, and two mariners armed with repeater rifles. The lieutenant carried a revolver on his belt, and the rest of us were given harpoons, just in case.
“Are so many weapons needed?” I asked, using sign language.
“Better to carry them and not use them, than need them and not have them” the lieutenant signed. “Now, to the objective.”
The objective in question was a ridge where the first expedition thought they saw caves from a distance, but since it was late and dark, they decided not to approach. Our walk was more akin to a series of long jumps, always trying to gain as little altitude as possible, since falling in such low gravity was a long and boring process.
As we approached the ridgeline, with the caves visible in the distance as black spots on the cliff walls, the geologist made a gesture to stop. We obliged, and he pointed south, towards the plume of a distant volcano.
That mountain, many miles southward, seemed to expel water and ice instead of smoke and fire, producing a column of material so large that it could replicate the catastrophe of Pompei a hundred-fold. Lucky for us, gravity was so low that the clouds of material stood hovering above us, never falling, seemingly to dissipate into the void.
“Animals” signed mister Carruthers, pointing to the sky. Indeed, among the debris that was now floating into deep space, tiny serpentine shapes were made barely visible by light they themselves emitted. “They must be miles into the sky.”
“How big are they, if visible from this far?” I signed.
“At least many times the size of the squid I wanted to find.”
“Sad thing for such great creatures to be launched into space, to die in the void” signed the geologist.
“No. They live. Look.”
The creatures moved in lines, akin to men-o-war sailing to battle, riding the eruption of that cold volcano, using it to fly towards Saturn itself. Soon, they disappeared from our view entirely.
“They may be void dwellers, using the cold volcanoes to propel themselves into the saturnine system” signed Carruthers.
“That would be a one-way trip” I signed.
“Maybe. Like fish, leaving their spawning pools into the sea.”
“You say they are juveniles?”
“They could be full adults, or the larval form of something far larger. Can’t say without dissecting one.”
“Keep moving” ordered the lieutenant. “If there’s indeed a sub-surface ocean, you may dive to prove what theory is correct, Carruthers.”
When we arrived at the caves, the first thing I noticed was their unfathomable dimensions. Low gravity allowed for cavities of immense size to form without collapsing, the larger ones seeming to be so huge as to fit our ship inside.
We turned our electric torches on, and marched to the entrance. They were heavy, dimmer than real fire, and required expensive platinum filaments to work. For all this, I imagined traversing a cave with these would be almost as bad as going blind. However, the walls were mostly ice and packed snow, with very little that could be identified as stone, reflecting our light to reveal far more of the cavern than what rocks would have allowed.
Thus, they made it easy for us to find the footprints.
Someone got inside before us, most likely entering the cave through a different part of the entrance, for such was its width that it made it easy to miss something like this. I informed the captain of our progress.
“We found footprints in the snow” I telegraphed after giving the initial report. “The previous team said they didn’t go into the caves.”
“They haven’t” answered the captain. “Are they human footprints?”
“They are. And they only go in.”
“If it’s not us, it’s the French” wrote the captain. “Ready weapons, just in case.”
The British and French empires were allied when we left Earth, fighting together against the Tsar to take control of the newly founded Martian colonies. But, if rumours were true, the French expedition was infested by occultists that believed they could commune with Satan or Baal in Saturn. We may not find soldiers of Emperor Napoleon III, but men driven mad by visions of the black cities of Titan.
We descended deeper into the cave, guns and harpoons ready. A quarter mile later, we found the first body.
Wearing a pressure suit that looked like a knight of old, of clear French design, the dead man was frozen with his hands still reaching forward. He had bullet holes on his breastplate, of steel good enough to stop a knife or sword, but not a gun.
“He looks like he froze in but an instant” the lieutenant signed.
“He did” signed the geologist. “Bullets grievously injured him, but the breaking of heating systems and the extreme cold turned his blood into ice before he hit the ground.”
More bodies in similar states were found, and a few red crystals that were determined to be frozen blood. Some froze standing, with knife wounds in their necks, striking the pose of a man struggling against an attack from the back. Like statues in the lair of Medusa, the dead revealed the scene of a cruel ambush, where the frost killed faster than the bullet.
The first bodies were Frenchmen, leading us to think they shot each other, until we found a Brunswick rifle, of British manufacture. Near the rifle, we found pieces of a man, broken like a stone statue, in the remains of a suit that was identical to ours.
The English bodies were deeper into the cave, with a few more French alongside them. Two men stood together, striking each other with sword and bayonet, while beside them, another Englishman was shattered alongside blood crystals.
The last unbroken bodies were French, all kneeling in a line with their hands raised, frozen as they were executed. Beyond that, more broken bodies lay, this time from both sides.
“French and English bodies found” I reported. The captain’s answer took almost a minute to arrive.
“We need to find out how those Englishmen arrived here” the captain wrote. “Is the cave entrance large enough to fit our ship?”
“Yes.”
“Return to ship at once. This information merits a change of plans.”
As I was informing the captain’s orders to my companions, mister Carruthers waved at us to come to his position. He approached what we assumed was a large patch of dark ground from afar, revealing it to be a liquid, with a surface so still that it resembled a dark blue mirror. It was a few dozen feet in diameter, forming a near-perfect circle.
“This can’t be water, right?”
“If mixed with enough salt, ammonia, or other materials that prevent freezing, it could be” signed the geologist, as he tied some rope to his torch, and carefully lowered it into the liquid. The torches were made to withstand void and extreme cold, so if this was indeed water, it wouldn’t do much to it.
We all watched the light descend, and tied all the rope we had on hand to see how far it would go. We found no bottom, not even after the light was so deep that it looked like a distant, dying candle. Then, the light went out, and something gently pulled on it. Carruthers held on to the rope with ease, as whatever had grabbed the torch released it, most likely understanding the device was not food. When the torch was retrieved, it came coated with a layer of slime that had damaged the rope.
Carruthers took some samples in glass vials, and left the torch in the cave, arguing that he preferred not to touch something this acidic and risk damaging the pressure suit.
“In the ship we have diving suits like the ones used on Jovian moons,” said the lieutenant. “Let’s return. We can explore those waters with the proper equipment later.”