Part 1: The Breach

It could have been catastrophic. I could have been killed, thought Dr. Banks. His heart rate remained elevated and his breath fogged his glasses.

The breach in his suit was small, but it was enough for him to make direct contact with the surrounding water. The icy water splashed his foot with a familiarity that brought him back to his childhood memories of playing in the icy puddles surrounding his home in Montana around late February, The dive suit he wore functioned appropriately -- the processing unit sensed a breach and filled his boot with polymer, preventing further spread of fluid.

He was able to collect his samples from 50 feet below Enceladus's icy shell and return back to the Falcon Scott to process them. The rest of the crew was certainly aware of the breach, for it would have been displayed all along the ship's monitors and his mission was instrumental in the mission. But his cohorts seemed to sense his discomfort and let him continue without a word. They would have be watching on the monitors in the bridge, away from the sterile laboratory Well, let's get on with it. He prepared sixteen cold test tubes filled each with 5cc of the near-freezing water from the oceans below. The samples had to remain at 4 degrees Centigrade, so he took every precaution to limit exposure to the air and proceeded as quickly as possible.

Dr. Banks wiped his forehead. He was sweating, despite the low ambient temperature in his laboratory. That's interesting, he pondered. I must have been really rattled.

Four separate processors each took four of the cold test tubes filled with the samples. Each would run various analyses on Enceladus's waters, testing various parameters thought to be essential for or indicators of life; pH, presence of hydrocarbons and minerals, byproducts of metabolism, oxygen saturation, among others. Detailed reports, dozens of pages long, would be printed out and would need further analysis. After a few minutes of loading the samples, the bespectacled young physician pressed START and sat down to reflect.

On Earth, the Falcon Scott's mission had a sort of sex-appeal to it. Six heroic travelers boarding a sturdy craft and traveling for several months to land on the most foreign of environments; Saturn's sixth largest moon. They would drill deep through the icy shell into the oceans below to look for whatever strange and unique critters may be floating about. Perhaps, even, intelligent life existed below and the possibility of communicating with them existed! Ha! If only! Dr. Banks scoffed. The more pessimistic, but perhaps more realistic view of the mission was one of six scared scientists stuck on a tiny craft eating horrible food and wasting away on the way to a giant snowball so they could drill down, get some samples, and then analyze a bunch of numbers for a few weeks. Well, that's all science is, really. A bunch of numbers.

/r/beneaththerings Thread