Free Xeelee: Endurance by Stephen Baxter Page A

dark water. ‘You always were a realist, Harry.’
    I thought I saw blackness below us, in the outer glimmer of Poole’s suit lamps. I called, ‘How deep is this ice crust, before we get to the mantle ocean?’
    ‘Around thirty-five kilometres,’ Harry replied.
    ‘And how deep are we now?’
    ‘Oh, around thirty-five kilometres.’
    Michael Poole gasped. ‘Lethe. Grab hold, everybody.’
    It was on us at once: we had almost passed through this vent we had followed all the way down from the cryovolcano mouth at the surface, this passage right through the ice crust of Titan. I gripped the net and shut my eyes.
    The spider let go of the wall and dropped into the void. As we passed out of the vent, through the roof of ice and into the mantle beneath, I felt the walls recede from me, a wash of pressure, a vast opening-out. And we fell into the dark and the cold.

 
    12
    Now that the walls were gone from under its limbs I could feel that the spider was swimming , or perhaps somehow jetting, ever deeper into that gloopy sea, while the three of us held on for our lives.
    Looking up I saw the base of Titan’s solid crust, an ice roof that covered the whole world, glowing in the light of Poole’s lamps but already receding. And I thought I saw the vent from which we had emerged, a much eroded funnel around which tube-fish swam languidly. Away from the walls I could more easily see the mechanics of how the fish swam; lacking fins or tails they seemed to twist through the water, a motion maybe suited to the viscosity of the medium. They looked more like bloated bacteria than fish.
    Soon we were so far beneath the ice roof that it was invisible, and we three and the spider that dragged us down were a single point of light falling into the dark.
    And then Poole turned off his suit lamps!
    I whimpered, ‘Lethe, Poole, spare us.’
    ‘Oh, have a heart,’ Miriam said, and her own suit lit up. ‘Just for a time. Let him get used to it.’
    I said, ‘Get used to what? Falling into this endless dark?’
    ‘Not endless,’ Poole said. ‘The ocean is no more than – how much, Harry?’
    ‘Two hundred and fifty kilometres deep,’ Harry said, mercifully not presenting a Virtual to us. ‘Give or take.’
    ‘Two hundred and fifty . . . How deep are you intending to take us, Poole?’
    ‘I told you,’ Michael Poole said grimly. ‘As deep as we need to go. We have to retrieve that GUTengine, Emry. We don’t have a choice – simple as that.’
    ‘And I have a feeling,’ Miriam said bleakly, ‘now we’re out of that vent, that we may be heading all the way down to the bottom. It’s kind of the next logical choice.’
    ‘We’ll be crushed,’ I said dismally.
    ‘No,’ Harry Poole piped up. ‘Look, Jovik, just remember Titan isn’t a large world. The pressure down there is only about four times what you’d find in Earth’s deepest oceans. Five, tops. Your suit is over-engineered. Whatever it is that kills you, it won’t be crushing.’
    ‘How long to the bottom, then?’
    Harry said, ‘You’re falling faster than you’d think, given the viscosity of the medium. That spider is a strong swimmer. A day, say.’
    ‘A day!’
    Miriam said, ‘There may be sights to see on the way down.’
    ‘What sights?’
    ‘Well, the tube-fish can’t exist in isolation. There has to be a whole ammono ecology in the greater deeps.’
    My imagination worked overtime. ‘Ammono sharks. Ammono whales.’
    Miriam laughed. ‘Sluggish as hell, in this cold soup. And besides, they couldn’t eat you, Jovik.’
    ‘They might spit me out but I’d rather they didn’t try at all. And even if we survive – even if we do find our damn GUTengine down there on the ice – how are we supposed to get back out of here?’
    Poole said easily, ‘All we need to do is dump our ballast, our bags of ice, and we’ll float up. We don’t need to bring up the GUTengine, remember, just use it to recharge the suits.’
    Miriam said, ‘A better