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    Alien Contact: Titan
    Alien Contact: Titan
    Alien Contact: Titan
    Ebook115 pages1 hour

    Alien Contact: Titan

    By William D. Gibson

    ()

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    About this ebook

    Two Titan missions followed the successful manned exploration of Europa in 2135. The 'First Contact' there engendered great enthusiasm for more exploration and discovery. Several of the most advanced technology-rich nations followed with manned flights to worlds in the solar system where life might exist.

    Both the Chinese and the joint US/UK missions found life on Titan. Or it found them.

    Meanwhile on Earth, the world's top two superpowers, US and China, were close to an armed confrontation relating to claims made on the Republic of China, formerly known as Taiwan.

    Captain Ray Haskins of the joint US/UK mission to the Saturn moon, Titan, was the father-in-law of the captain of the other Titan mission, one from China. Ray hadn't seen his only daughter in 10 years. His son-in-law was the reason why.

    The setting has the makings of a chilly family reunion on Titan, almost 900 million miles from earth and 290 degree below zero...an unforgiving father-in-law, an insensitive son-in-law, and an unusual cast of alien life forms, one of which may bring about the end of the human species.

    LanguageEnglish
    PublisherWilliam D. Gibson
    Release dateMay 12, 2012
    ISBN9781452489513
    Alien Contact: Titan
    Author

    William D. Gibson

    Raised in Massachusetts, William Gibson is a Brown University graduate with a Bachelor of Arts degree. He served as a Special Agent in Counterintelligence in the Army during the Vietnam War, and obtained an MBA after that. Forty years of his working life have been at least partially devoted to putting words together, first writing intelligence and inspection reports for the military. Out of the Army, he followed a career in banking in Risk Management and Credit Administration. It was professionally satisfying to generate policies, plans, and reports for the bank. But when he retired, he opted for the fun of writing about zombies, science fiction, and now something real like Bigfoot. He currently resides in Berkley, Massachusetts.

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      Book preview

      Alien Contact - William D. Gibson

      Alien Contact : Titan

      By William D. Gibson

      Copyright 2012 William Gibson

      Smashwords Edition

      Smashwords Edition, License Notes

      This ebook is licensed for your personal enjoyment only. This ebook may not be re-sold or given away to other people. If you would like to share this book with another person, please purchase an additional copy for each recipient. If you’re reading this book and did not purchase it, or it was not purchased for your use only, then please return to Smashwords.com and purchase your own copy. Thank you for respecting the hard work of this author.

      ****

      Important Stuff

      This is a work of fiction in which I am taking certain fictional liberties. Although some characters may have the names of actual people, things or places, their resemblance to actual persons, things, or places is coincidental.

      ****

      Chapter 1 - Introduction

      Ethan, you okay? asked Martin, his co-pilot. You've been staring into space.

      Yeah, yeah, Marty. I'm fine. Sorry. I was just thinking."

      Anything you care to share? asked Martin. Thinking about Jess?

      Yes, I was. I just got a blip from my wife, said Ethan. She may have received a message from Jess.

      That would be great, wouldn't it? asked Martin. How long has it been?

      A long time, but she doesn't know yet if it is or not. It just got me thinking, said Ethan.

      Ethan Haskins and his wife had not seen or spoken to Jess, their only child, for the last ten years. When Ethan took the helm of this space expedition to Titan, he knew it would be at least another three years before there would be a chance he'd get to see her. He believed she was alive, somewhere in China, near Beijing, he thought, living with that son of a bitch, Aiguo. He had heard they had two grandchildren, a boy and a girl. Ethan's wife had a friend, traveling in China, who had seen Jess and the kids a year or so ago. The friend reported the sighting back to them. He was sure of it. He saw them in Beijing and thought Jess may have recognized him. She had turned away and went in another direction. Ethan kept his emotions hidden. There wasn't a day that went by that he didn't think of his daughter and his grandchildren; grandchildren he thought he had, but had never seen. And that asshole, Aiguo. He thought of him, too. And not nice thoughts. He knew Aiguo well enough. Both he and Jess went to MIT. They excelled in math and the sciences. Jess and Aiguo met in their freshman year. Jess was beautiful and Aiguo's match in most every area. That's probably why he was attracted to her. Plus, Jess had taken Mandarin Chinese from the age of 10. Aiguo spoke flawless English. They could have a conversation in either language or both, and sometimes did, to the irritation and distraction of Ethan. There was love between them, Ethan acknowledged, as difficult as it was for him.

      Aiguo's education was funded by the Chinese government, and more specifically, the Chinese National Space Administration. There was an important future ahead for Aiguo. He would someday play a major role in the exploration, claiming and colonization of space. That's what worried Ethan. He wondered about his daughter's relationship with someone who would eventually break her heart. He didn't foresee that it was his own heart that would be broken. Jess and Aiguo graduated near the top of the class. Ethan waited for the tears he thought Jess would have within a week or two after graduation. She'd be devastated, he thought, when she had to deal with Aiguo's going back to China.

      Ethan and his wife still have the note she left them. She told them she'd be gone for a while and that she loved them. Strange the way she said that; they thought it was her way of saying good-bye to Aiguo in private. But it wasn't. As they discovered later, she left the next day for China with Aiguo. They married there and, as far as they knew, remained there since their Justice of the Peace wedding. That was ten years ago. It astounded Ethan and his wife, Marty, that Jess had not once called them or written. Not in ten years. She was their only child. It was so unlike Jess. She and her mother often spoke several times a day while she was in college. Just about every day. It was a mystery to the Haskins and it pissed Ethan off something fierce. He wasn't mad at his daughter. He blamed Aiguo 100%. He hated Aiguo and he hated the Chinese. He wasn't the only one.

      The tension between the U.S. and China had been high for a century. China was pretty much the equal of the U.S. economically and militarily. Their GDP passed that of America's by the middle of the twenty-first century. Both were quite suspicious of each other and continually engaged in high levels of spying, counterintelligence and cyber warfare. Yet the two continued to be trading partners. The Chinese depended on U.S. expertise still in many areas. Top students, like Auguo, still came to the United States or Britain for a top notch education, especially in English, the world's dominant language, by far, in the 22d century. The Chinese were generally jealous of what Americans had; and Americans were wary of what designs China had on them, the rest of the world, and space. The two countries had been at odds for decades, struggling to see which was the real superpower.

      The flight to Titan had been ten years in planning. When 'First Contact' was made a decade before on Europa, a wave of excitement and enthusiasm overwhelmed everyone on Earth. The story was well known now. Aqualiens inhabited the oceans of Europa under its modestly thin icecap, the most important discovery of which was intelligent life forms that looked much like cephalopods on Earth. They were not a technological civilization, but they were intelligent. They used chromataphores in their bodies to produce patterns and pulses of colors to communicate. They had an exotic language of light and body movements which required long hours of study and computer power to understand and translate. They nurtured their young, and hunted and lived in groups. After some initial tension between the human explorers and the aqualiens, an understanding was reached for the mutual benefit of each. Europa would be colonized eventually.

      When Europa revealed that intelligent life could be found in the seemingly uninhabitable remote colder and darker places of our solar system, the interest in further space exploration reached new heights. Aside from the raw curiosity, there were economic reasons for exploration, including mining. There were also territorial interests among the world's largest and most advanced nation states to colonize and claim the most valuable properties. This included several moons of Saturn and Jupiter, the ones with life-supporting compounds of water, methane, silicon or ammonia.

      The principal countries which were economically prepared and technologically advanced enough to undertake such a mission were limited to a handful. The United States and the United Kingdom collaborated on several moon missions and one to Mars. They were the first to announce their flight to Titan. Soon after, a Japanese/India consortium scheduled an expedition to Enceladus while the European Alliance indicated it would be going to Callisto. Russia was deferring its decision for a mission while China was known to be interested and able to take on such a flight. However, it had not yet publicly scheduled or designated its destination, this despite an international agreement it had signed requiring such a declaration well in advance of its flight.

      The Chinese were quite secretive about everything related to its Space program. They felt it related to weapons and defense and decided decades back to be remain a rather closed society in this and just about every other way. The democratic tendencies of China were suffocated by military involvement in the twenty-first century. Democracy was reported by everyone as living on life support in China.

      Ethan was as prepared for this flight as any he had made. He was a highly decorated, former Navy fighter pilot before the military switch to a 100% remote controlled drone air force. Despite working two jobs to put himself though college, he graduated fourth in his class at the University of Massachusetts. His superiors and subordinates both considered him a problem solver of the first order and a lightning fast thinker with a moderately high tolerance for ambiguity. His leadership style was mostly consensus-building, although if he thought he was right about something (which he usually was), you couldn't talk him out of it. He was a truly independent thinker and found humor in most things. He kept himself in excellent physical shape. He was 48.

      Although he probably wouldn't admit it to anyone, Ethan

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