Free Xeelee: Endurance by Stephen Baxter Page B

option might be to hitch a ride back with another spider.’
    ‘Right. Which would solve another problem,’ Poole said. ‘Which is to find a cryovolcano vent to the surface. The spiders know the way, evidently.’
    Harry said, ‘And even without the spiders I could guide you. I can see you, the vent mouths, even the GUTengine. This neutrino-radar technology was worth the money it cost. There’s no problem, in principle.’
    At times I felt less afraid of the situation than of my companions, precisely because of their lack of fear.
    Miriam fetched something from a pack at her waist, I couldn’t see what, and glanced at Poole. ‘Jovik’s not going to survive a descent lasting a day. Not in the dark.’
    Poole looked at me, and at her. ‘Do it.’
    ‘Do what?’
    But I had no time even to flinch as she reached across, and with expert skill pressed a vial into a valve in the chest of my exosuit. I felt a sharp coldness as the drug pumped into my bloodstream, and after that only a dreamless sleep, cradled in the warmth of my cushioned suit.
     
    So I missed the events of the next hours, the quiet times when Poole and Miriam tried to catch some sleep themselves, the flurries of excitement when strange denizens of Titan’s ammono deep approached them out of the dark.
    And I missed the next great shock suffered by our dysfunctional little crew when the base of Titan’s underground ocean, an ice floor three hundred kilometres beneath the surface, at last hove into view. The strange landscape of this abyssal deep, made of folded high-pressure ices littered by bits of meteorite rock, was punctured by vents and chasms, like an inverted mirror image of the crust far above us. And the spider we rode did not slow down. It hurled itself into one of those vents, and once more its limbs began to clatter down a wall of smooth rock-ice.
    Harry warned Miriam and Poole that this latest vent looked as if it penetrated the whole of this inner layer of core-cladding ice – Ice VI , laced by ammonia dihydrate – a layer another five hundred kilometres deep. At the base of this vent there was only Titan’s core of silicate rocks, and there, surely, the spiders’ final destination must lie.
    There was nothing to be done but to endure this extension of the ride. It would take perhaps a further day. So Poole and Miriam allowed the spider to drag us down. More tube-fish, of an exotic high-pressure variety, grazed endlessly at the icy walls. Miriam popped me another vial to keep me asleep, and fed me intravenous fluids. Harry fretted about the exhaustion of our power, and the gradual increase of pressure; beneath a column of water and ice hundreds of kilometres deep, we were approaching our suits’ manufactured tolerance. But they had no choice but to continue, and I, unconscious, had no say in the matter.
    When the ride was over, when the spider had at last come to rest, Miriam woke me up.
     
    I was lying on my back on a lumpy floor. The gravity felt even weaker than it had on the surface. Miriam’s face hovered over me, illuminated by suit lamps. Smiling, she said, ‘Jovik. Look what we found.’
    I sat up. I felt weak, dizzy, hungry. Beside me, in their suits, Miriam and Poole sat watching my reaction. Then I remembered where I was and the fear cut in.
    I looked around quickly. Even by the glow of the suit lamps I could not see far. The murkiness and floating particles told me I must be still immersed in the water of Titan’s deep ocean. I saw a roof of ice above me – not far above, a hundred metres or so. Below me was a surface of what looked like rock, dark and purple-streaked. I was in a sort of ice cavern, then, whose walls were off in the dark beyond our bubble of light. I learned later that I was in a cavern dug out beneath the lower icy mantle of Titan, between it and the rocky core, eight hundred kilometres below the icy plains where I had crash-landed days before. Around us I saw ice spiders, toiling away at their own