Lemuria

Sixteen days later, the Intrepid was in a high orbit above Lemuria and its rings. Its crew had spontaneously gathered in the conference room between shifts. Kat and Tat had taken to working early in the ship’s artificial day-night cycle. Helga and Marius had taken to working later. Vigo kept irregular hours. Life aboard the cramped ship was peaceful, and the initial giddiness brought on by surviving the voyage from Earth, had faded to routine. They had sent out four probes to the gas giant, its moon, and its rings. So far, two had returned.

The enigmatic moon passed in front of its enormous companion. A crimson disk flecked with white clouds, it contrasted starkly with the brown and yellow cloud decks of the gas giant. Wisps of pink florescence encircled the equatorial regions, culminating in an eerie blue cyclone. Tatiana knew of a similar phenomenon from the year she spent on Io. Interaction with the magnetic field of the gas giant transformed the planet into an electron trap, funneling them back to its giant companion via an intense torus of magnetic flux.

“It lacks radiating roadways, with cities connected by networks.” remarked Marius as he strained to make out the surface through the clouds. A bewildering array of artificial satellites circled both bodies, some lazily looping out of the gas giant’s orbit into a figure eight above the strange moon.

“Those rings seem positioned to intentionally interact with the magnetic field of the gas giant.” speculated Tatiana. To her, they had just stepped into the living room of the gods. The four mammoth rings cut black profiles across the yellow disk below, blotting out stretches of billowy starfield in the background like some monstrous clockwork.

Helga commented “Baby is beaming everything back to Earth, at 26 million bits a second. Naturally, we don’t know whether anyone back home is listening. If something happens to us, Earth will hear the tale. That assumes, of course, that people on Earth are listening. Both broadcasts are so energy-intense, we have almost certainly drawn attention to ourselves, either though the radio signal itself, or through the increased output of the ship’s power plant.”

Tat broke in “The reason for the monotonous surface is that the entire planet appears to have been modified.” She touched a control and the view shot to a close-up. “The planet is covered with dense formations resembling architecture, but on an unprecedented scale. The outer 100m is interspersed with an energy-absorbing coating resembling vegetation. Chromatographic analysis suggests it captures photons at much higher energies than Terrestrial plant life. The planet lacks its own magnetic field, and is absorbing a massive flux of high-energy electrons from the synchrotron radiation surrounding the gas giant.”

“The clouds are CO2, by the way, not water.” The biologist broke in, perhaps a moment before Tat was finished “They are mixed with ammonia crystals, and an interesting array of hydrocarbons. The rest of the atmosphere is an argon-nitrogen mixture with a small amount of methane.” He motioned to the computer and the image changed. “Radiotelemetry from the first probe suggests the architecture stops at 70 degrees north and south. Those polar regions may be remnants of the original planetary biosphere. Note that liquid hydrocarbons precipitate in the atmosphere and fall as rain there.”

“What do they eat?” asked Marius.

“I don’t know. To devote so much of the planetary surface to inhabited structures, even the most sophisticated systems of agriculture would be challenged.”

“Are the rings inhabited?”

“I don’t know. Possibly.”

Perhaps sensing Vigo’s consternation, Marius offered “Well, Helga and I haven’t had any luck establishing a method of communication. The radio broadcasts, neutrino emissions, and other radiation suggest no recognizable modulation for the transfer of information.”