IC - 19 - Surface of Titan - Everyone except Kiara

[Mephistophilis]

Day 2
12th March 2189
15:38 Earth Central European Time
Plains of Titan

Once they're fully suited up they seal the access door to the colony and release the oxygenated air from the garage to be replaced by the thick, orange-tinted mixture of nitrogen and methane that serves as the atomosphere of Titan. The pressure is greater than Earth standard and it feels like walking through water. With so little gravity only the weighted boots are drawn to the ground, resulting in an unstable and ungainly progress across the metallic floor.

With the pressure equalised the translucent plastic door that comprises the whole end wall of the Garage slides open, giving direct access to the metallic loading platform beside the hulking surface rover. With their magnetic boots they're able to keep a firm purchase on the platform and start to load the rover with some difficulty.

It takes Moses and Isabella a good fifteen minutes to get the rover fully prepared and its systems initialised. Jojo finds a rudimentary medical pod and loads it into the hold, easily manipulating the bulky piece of equipment with his enhanced cybernetic strength in the limited gravitational pull of the moon. Nicole loads a couple of spare surface suits, some oxygen tanks, spare fuel tanks for the cutting torches, a few lengths of rope, and some cable ties.

Starting up the rover's methane power unit the engine belches out smoke as the vehicle shakes and judders to life. Slowly at first and then more rapidly it rumbles out, crunching through the methane snow. The mountains and sea are not visible through the hazy orange fog, nothing but miles and miles of methane snow stretch in all directions, the smooth transparent reinforced plastic tunnels of the maglev train network flanked with metal pipework providing the only indication of direction.

Moses and Isabella sit at the front of the rover cabin, controlling the unweildy vehicle with a myriad of dials, handles, joysticks, and buttons. Nicole, Jojo, and Sam sit behind them, gazing out of the large windows into the haze. Everyone remains in their surface suits, no room to remove them inside the cabin, but they connect the suits directly to the rover's oxygen supply.

Moses and Isabella manage to maintain a steady pace across the orange surface but occasionally they strike a hidden rocky outcrop and the rover seems to lift dangerously from the surface and careen uncontrollably through Titan's atmosphere, twisting disconcertingly, but before it can fully turn over and lose any semblance of control, the weak gravity eventually brings it back down to the flat surface again.

The initial talk fades to silence as minutes turn into hours, the same endless orange methane dunes filling the viewing windows. Isabella warns they are approaching deep canyons filled with methane and they are forced to turn away from Ligeia Mare, losing sight of the maglev tunnels that gave the only sense of what direction anything lay.

Inside the suits it begins to become overly warm and sweaty, despite the homeostatic controls. Crammed into the cabin, close together yet separated by the absolute physical barrier of the surface suits, it starts to feel oppressive. Like the surface of endless methane snow is pressing down on each and every one of them, the thick atmosphere slowly choking them. The relentless hum of the engine the only sound apart from the occasional barked communication between Isabella and Moses who seem to be tolerating each other at best. Now and again there is a flash of something, movement or just a thicker patch of methane fog, but it just adds to the feeling of oppression, like there is someone or something out there, watching them from a distance. Occasionally the radio clicks, the static goes silent, like someone is transmitting, but nobody speaks.

Anyone looking out the window roll a hard Spot Hidden

So weapons - this is my understanding:
Nicole - Pistol, only 2 rounds left in the magazine and no further magazines on her, shotgun, stun baton
Jojo - Cutting torch (9 charges), stun baton
Moses - Incinerator (1 shot left), shotgun, stun baton
Isabella - Shotgun, stun baton
Sam - Incinerator (2 shots), cutting torch (8 charges), shotgun, stun baton

The shotguns are all loaded with 5 shells. There are loads of spare shotgun shells (riot rounds only) - seven boxes of 20 shells. The cutting torches have ten charges each then the tank needs to be changed.

Any other equipment you might later want but aren't sure if it is loaded then that sounds like a luck roll.

pHdd40%-HdLLd% LLpHdd45%HdLLd%

[Mr. Handy]

Sam can't see anything but methane out the window.

Spot Hidden roll (55% / 2 = 27.5% skill) looking out the window:
d%

[Starspawn338]

Spot Hidden 50 (Hard = 25)
1d100

Jojo is sitting in the middle and going through his diagnostic routines to isolate bad sectors and isn't paying attention to what is going on around him.

[aine]

Nicole stares out at the depressing landscape, looking for anything that might liven up the scene.

Spot hidden 60 roll:32

[Mephistophilis]

You can spend Luck or push if you'd like. Pushing might involve trying to use an instrument on the rover, failure maybe disabling something important.

[Mr. Handy]

I wouldn't recommend pushing, considering the low chance of success. Most of us failed by too much to spend Luck, but Nicole only failed by 2.

[aine]

Sorry- I’m not used to 7th Ed rules. I’ll spend 2 luck please.

Nicole leans over Moses shoulder and points at a screen,
“What’s that light on the scanner mean?”

[Mephistophilis]

'Shit!' shouts Moses as he slams on the brakes and turns the wheel hard. The rover tips up onto one side precariously, before settling back onto the surface. He taps the scanner, 'There's something out there. We'd have hit it if you hadn't noticed it on the scanner. It's small, smaller than a vehicle. But it's not moving.' He points out the window into the obscuring haze. There's something up ahead, difficult to make out, it looks like a figure.

[Mr. Handy]

"Can we get closer to it for a better look without hitting it, now that we know it's there?" suggests Sam.

[Starspawn338]

Jojo looks up and braces himself as the rover tips precariously.

"Please watch out! We need to get there in once piece."

[Mephistophilis]

Isabella turns to Jojo, 'Thanks for the advice, next time we'll just plough into whatever it is.' Moses gives her a weak smile.

Sliding the gears down Moses gently depresses the throttle and the rover creaks and groans, very slowly inching across the snow towards the figure. Out of the haze the shape begins to resolve itself, the bulky outline of a surface suit standing in the snow. Visor turned away from them, looking out into the endless orange wastes.

[Mr. Handy]

"Some of us will need to get out and take a closer look," says Sam.

[Mephistophilis]

As they stare out the window at the immobile figure the radio splutters into life.

'Huh, hello. This is Science Officer Keira Khan. I have conducted some research on the alien organism. I am transmitting my files on all data frequencies.'

Checking the files they show that Kiara has developed some of Jojo's research to try to find any vulnerability or way to reverse the infection. In short, it finds that visible and ultraviolet light seems to accelerate the extrusion of the filamentous green mold from the superficial infected cells and ultimately this destroys them. Heating the cells speeds this up but also accelerates the spread of the infection to other cells. Cold slows down or even stops the infection or any of the other 'alien' biological processes like the green mold.

Kiara accessed Jojo's memory dump to obtain details of the research he had already performed.

Macroscopically the cells from Montrose were unremarkable but at higher magnification they looked very odd indeed. Some, labelled as skin and subcutaneous tissue, reminded her of Earth grasses, where silica phytoliths are deposited within the cell body, making it tough and inflexible. Other cells, labelled as internal and subcutaneous tissues, were reminiscent of algal diatoms, where the cell wall itself is made of silica. She reports that Jojo thought this explained some odd artefacts he found when imaging the body, dense inorganic material in the tissue interfering with the x-ray and magnetic resonance.

Jojo also noticed that the grass-like cells were photosensitive and Kiara confirmed this. They extrude inorganic material when exposed to high intensity visible and ultraviolet electromagnetic spectrums. Jojo noted that this extruded inorganic material looked very much like the green powdery substance with a slightly filamentous surface they found on the skin of Montrose's body. It does, however, differ from the scaly material in the subcutaneous tissue which seems to be more due to the diatom-like silica-walled cells.

Jojo compared Montrose's DNA record to that extracted from the cells and found no evidence of abnormal sequences or methylation. His conclusion was that this was an extraterrestrial pathogen with a biology that is not purely carbon-based.

Initially Kiara followed the obvious path of bombarding the cells with various wavelengths of electromagnetic radiation. The ultraviolet spectrum in particular seemed to cause the cells to extrude the filamentous material that comprises the green mold and eventually the cells ruptured and were destroyed. UV didn't affect the diatom-like deeper cell samples.

Infrared radiation had no deleterious effect, in fact, if anything, it potentiated the activity of the cells, combining it with the ultraviolet and the grass-like cells extruded and ruptured even more rapidly. Focusing the infrared on the diatomous cells didn't cause them to rupture, instead it accelerated their transformation from normal eukaryotes into the alien silica walled cells.

Following this line of thought she tried lowering the temperature and found that the transformed cells were highly resistant to low temperatures with none of the cell wall damage usually seen when cytoplasm freezes. But she also noted that at very low temperatures the cellular transformation completely stopped and when she bombarded the grass-like cells with UV nothing happened. It appeared that freezing temperatures arrested the alien pathogen, but didn't destroy it, since heating the cells back up resumed the inevitable spread of the infection.

[Mr. Handy]

"Thanks, that will prove helpful," replies Sam. "Looks like we're dealing with a silicon-based lifeform. We just ran across someone out on the surface in a suit - almost literally, but we stopped just in time. We're about to take a closer look."

[Mephistophilis]

“Be careful; if it’s someone infected… we’ll, I don’t need to tell you what might happen,” Kiara radios back.

“Please keep me updated; I need to know when we can take off so we arrive just before you guys. In the meantime I’ll see what I can do with this data. Kiara out.”

[aine]

“That’s a whole lot of data. What can we take from it to help us?”
Nicole gets up and prepares to exit the rover.
“I’ll go and you stand by to pull me back in. If it’s safe enough we”ll risk another person if we need to. I’m guessing the suit is empty. Or, at least, the occupant is long gone.
Maintain radio contact.” She nods.

[Mr. Handy]

"Will do,"says Sam, gripping the rope. "Be careful."

[Starspawn338]

Jojo frowns at Isabella. "Running into an obstruction is the opposite of what I just said."

Then with Kiara's transmission, he nods in approval. "I'm glad she was able to do some more tests while waiting. Good use of time!"

[Mephistophilis]

Nicole walks very slowly across the methane snow, it crunches under her feet. She notices that there are no footprints around the figure despite looking back to see that she is leaving clear indentations in the orange snow. She grips her pistol tightly in her hand, it is awkward in the thick gloves of the surface suit. The sensation of walking out in the atmosphere of Titan is no less disconcerting than it was back at the rover garage, worse even without the metal walkway for the magnetic boots to adhere to. She imagines it is what walking along the bottom of a swimming pool would feel like.

All the while Nicole is walking the figure doesn't move. When she arrives behind it she places her hand on the shoulder and gives it a nudge.

Nothing.

She circles around the suit as best she can to get a look inside. As she suspected the suit is empty. The transparent visor is smashed with a gaping hole in the centre but no blood or other signs of injury. The radio does that odd thing again, where the static goes quiet as if someone is transmitting something, transmitting silence.

[aine]

“There’s no one in it... The visor is smashed open... Did you notice the radio just then?... As if someone just pushed the mute button.”

Nicole’s voice comes back muffled and interspersed with slightly nervous, heavy breathing.