Titan's Plague: The Trial by Tom Briggs (story reading .txt) 📕

Pati rarely entered Richard’s office. Even though he spent most of his time working on Picus, taking the shuttle from their private dock up and back every day, it was his space. Today, however, the space could be useful for Pati.

The room was small, maybe three meters square and just over two meters tall. High enough for a secgen to stand comfortably. It had a desk facing a large viewscreen, with two monitors on the desk. A few pictures were attached to the walls that showed Pati in happier times.

It had been a stormy six months since the beginning of the year. Whatever happened to change Richard, happened around that time. Before then, he was the perfect definition of a prince. She shook her head, wondering how it could have all gone so wrong.

She remembered how her old boyfriend, Jerry, decided he wanted to go in a different direction with his life. Given that today he still lived in her hometown of Dingle, Ireland, he didn’t change his direction too much. To a twenty-one-year-old girl, though, the world had just ended.

It surprisingly didn’t, and a week later, she changed her profile to “available.” Pati received numerous inquiries the next week, most of whom should not have made it through the filters. When she got to Richard’s, he seemed like a good guy.

He only listed his last name, age, and a few interests with the required pictures and proof of authenticity. His last name was McLear, without mentioning that he was one of the “McLears.”

They exchanged messages the following week. Despite not talking in realtime, she had a better feeling about him than she did with the local guys. Then he said he’d be on Earth’s moon in a few weeks and asked if she could meet him. When he didn’t hesitate to cover her trip costs, she suspected his last name stood for more than identification. And when they met, there was too much about him to deny he was from that rich and powerful family.

What struck her the most, though, was their chemistry. They spent a day together, and she continually lost herself in their conversation. The day went by like an hour, and on her way back to Earth, she could only think of how just being with him felt. It was so wonderful that she thought his wealth would be a hindrance to their relationship. She wanted to be with him every day, and the day after their date felt like being weaned from pain killers.

The wealth actually facilitated their relationship. He brought her back to the moon for another date before he returned to Titan. It was better than the first, and Pati knew he took the slower ship back just so they could talk in realtime longer. The only misfortune was that when he proposed, she couldn’t answer him immediately and hug him as she wanted. She had to be content that if she didn’t get the proposal of her dreams, she at least got the guy she dreamed of.

The only problem had been moving to Titan where they’d have the wedding. Richard offered to transport her whole family on a fast cruise to Titan and return them as soon as possible. That would be massively expensive yet pocket change to his family. The one thing they couldn’t purchase was the time away, at least six months. Her father couldn’t leave the fishing business, nor could the rest leave their jobs for that time. Her mom and sister made it, and it killed her when they had to return. The room they stayed in was across the hall, and Pati cried for an hour there after they returned to Earth.

She got over it and couldn’t complain about her new rich and famous lifestyle. The new world was always interesting, even if it was confining. Last year was a wonderful time in her life.

She shook her head and looked back at the wall to the picture of Richard and his family. Pati barely knew his parents. After the wedding, they traveled to Earth’s moon and stayed there until their deaths later in the year. It shocked her. Richard, however, seemed less affected. It was maybe a few months after that his moods and actions changed for the worse, and she assumed his parent’s deaths were the reasons for his abusiveness. When he didn’t change back, she no longer thought about root causes, only about her survival.

The only other family member was his brother, Kerry. He was a few years older and became the primary executive in McLear Industries when his parents left. When she first met Kerry, he seemed cold, and he wasn’t much better to Richard. After Richard changed, Pati never saw them together outside of business. When she grew up, she wished her family could be wealthy in a way like the McLears. The downside to such life was all too apparent now.

Pati took a seat at the desk. She activated the large viewscreen and tapped the controls to find Richard’s account. It was no longer available. Pati surmised the McLear Industries personnel had erased Richard’s information from this control. They were always efficient.

She didn’t need his account though; she wanted more information on McLear Industries, since she might be asking for some of that business. She announced that fact to the controls, and an article from Titan News Network appeared from five years ago.

The story began in 2055 with the invention of fusion-drive for space vehicles. Spacecraft holding dozens of people then traveled to Mars and the moons of Jupiter to land and explore. Settlements were established on Earth’s moon and on satellites just outside Earth’s atmosphere. Earth supplied these settlements, and the settlements returned valuable materials like Titanium, Helium-3, and stuff you had to make in zero/low gravity.

The McLears owned steel manufacturing factories around the Great Lakes in North America. John McLear was the chief executive, and he sank money into developing a space probe that had nothing to do with making steel. Stockholders voiced their displeasure, but as he had a majority stake in his company, he got what he wanted.

The investment showed no signs of return when they launched in 2075. Within a few years, the probe landed on a picked asteroid and gave it a push. It hadn’t moved very far when the probe ran out of propellant, but it was enough. It was then that John McLear revealed his plans. The mission was to move the iron-nickel asteroid, which rivaled a small moon in mass, into a new orbit so it would rendezvous with Saturn in thirty-two years and seven months.

John McLear was ninety-one-years old. His son, Bill, took over after the stockholders revolted. Bill McLear sunk more money into their space program, sending equipment and material to the asteroid on its way to Saturn. He was in his sixties at the time, and in his mid-nineties when the asteroid reached Saturn. He remained in charge of McLear Industries, while his daughter, Jamie McLear, traveled to the asteroid to assume control there. When she arrived, the equipment and personnel were in place, and she had the orbit manipulated so Saturn’s moon, Titan, caught the asteroid in its gravitational hold and made it a satellite of the satellite.

That was when the real work began. Jamie McLear held a press conference and announced she had assumed control of McLear Industries. The factories on Earth would be sold, and the new company headquarters would move to the asteroid, which she named “Picus.”

The facilities on Picus were zero-gravity steel factories and a shipyard. The asteroid provided iron and nickel, while carbon was available on Titan. The shipyard built space-tankers with the manufactured steel, and the tankers landed on Titan to fill their holds with liquid methane and other organics. Soon after, chemical plants were built on Titan to include the equally valuable ammonia in the shipments.

Carbon and nitrogen were now available to all the settlements outside of Earth, at a fraction of the cost it took to launch from the massive Terran gravity well. Those elements were necessary to supply what were now hundreds of millions of people living outside of Earth for their foodstuff processes. Jamie McLear quickly cornered that market with her burgeoning space fleet. It took another five years for the money to roll in, but she was the most powerful merchant in the solar system by then.

Pati stopped reading. She’d never met Richard’s grandmother; she’d died when he was in his twenties. Pati had heard the stories, though, and a more impressive lady she couldn’t imagine. When she retired, she could not return to Earth because gravity treatments for bone loss and other zero-gravity maladies had been developed too late in her life. She lived the rest of her hundred plus years on Picus. When she died, Richard’s father sent her body back to Earth.

Pati resumed her research. In time, her body would also go back to Earth. Except, Pati would still be living in it.