Today, the hydrocarbon clouds of Titan had rolled back over Kraken Mare, rendering the waves of the methane sea impossibly blue as they lapped at the shore, gradually eroding sharp spires of ice into rounded pebbles. Beatriu Cardona shivered despite the warmth of the rover’s interior as the vehicle plowed along the frigid shore, tanklike treads crushing the ice sand into chevron-shaped tracks. Above them, distant and beautiful, Saturn and its rings and the other moons of the gas giant hung in the sky. A rare and beautiful sight on Titan—usually the smoggy clouds obscured the view.

That beauty hung counterpoised with the sober nature of their mission.

Lars Karlsson looked back at her from the driving compartment. “You ready to fly?”

They’d been partners for most of the last mission cycle. So for ninety out of the last one hundred and twenty Earth days, they’d both lived in this rover, one of them driving while the other navigated around steep, jagged cliffs of ice and plotted courses through electrostatically active dunes of black hydrocarbons. Sometimes, they didn’t need words to communicate. The rest of the time, it felt like words were some sort of shield or screen.

This was one of those moments.

“Just need to attach the helmet, and I’ll be out the air lock.”

His eyes caught hers, and they both grimaced. They were here to check the status of a team that had gone off the grid four days ago. Chances were, this wasn’t a rescue mission, but a recovery. And as such, they needed to be doubly cautious, themselves. Only one of them would be permitted to enter the living quarters of the Phantom at a time, unless something went catastrophically wrong, and the first investigator needed to be pulled out by the partner who’d been left back at the rover.

“It’s kind of killing me, not knowing what happened to them,” Beatriu muttered. “I was slated to join them next time we rotated assignments.” She’d already studied the controls of the Phantom and was qualified to pilot the sea-going vessel. There was only a month to go before assignment rotations. But now, disaster had struck.

“Yeah, I know.” Lars sounded . . . not angry, but sad. But when she looked up, he grinned at her. “Leaving me to break in a new partner here on rover detail. With my luck, whoever I got would snore.” He reached back and gripped her gloved hand. “We’ll figure out what happened to them.”

The words and tone were meant to be bracing. Beatriu accepted them for what they were, attached her helmet, and slipped out the rover’s air lock.

Outside, the thick pressure of Titan’s atmosphere caught the wing panels of her suit, conspiring with the light gravity to lift her off her feet. Tiny, drone-like rotors on her shoulder and legs lifted her body into flight position, and she controlled the whole apparatus through a heads-up display in the helmet of her suit. As such, Beatriu dove into the clear sky, lifted by chill thermals, heading out over the waves of Kraken Mare. Her Catalan ancestors on Earth would have been amazed to see a human flying through the air without a jetpack or visible signs of engines. Here on Titan, in the right weather conditions? Flying came almost as naturally as swimming did on Earth.

Though the sun was only a chip in the sky here in Saturn’s orbit, the light reflecting off the sea was nearly blinding. Lars’s voice in her ear and the suit’s connection to the satellite positioning system guided her, however, and soon, she saw her target—a carbon fiber and titanium ship, drifting in an aimless circle through the cold blue methane waves. “Sighted the Phantom,” Beatriu reported over the radio, knowing that Control would hear her, just as Lars did, though they were hundreds of kilometers away, near the equator. The signal was being bounced off a satellite in orbit, making for negligible delays in communication.

“Acknowledged,” Control’s voice crackled back in her ear. “Any signs of damage?”

“None. Looks like the escape pods have been used, though.”

Control monitored her breathing while she slept. Monitored how many times a day she urinated. Monitored every spike of her heart rate. They saw what she saw through the camera mounted in her helmet.

She had no privacy from Control, that faceless panel of experts in their fields, sitting around banks of computer screens. Sometimes she resented the omnipresence of Control in her life. The rest of the time, it was a comfort.

Beatriu landed on a flight deck intended for helicopter drones—it was small, and slick with exotic ices. It hadn’t been cleared in days. Her feet slid uncertainly under her, and she came to a crashing halt against a carbon-fiber railing, also rimed with ice.

“Cardona, status! Your heart rate just spiked!” Control snapped in her ear, while on her private channel, Lars’s voice sounded far more concerned. “You all right?” Lars asked. “That landing looked like Bambi on ice.”

“Knocked the wind out of me.” She made the reply over the common band. Lars would hear her. So would Control.

She uncurled from the railing gingerly, checking for suit tears, even as liquid methane/ethane mix sprayed over her from a wave that slapped the port side of the Phantom. The Mare was choppy today, and the Phantom rolled in the play of ten-meter waves.

Beatriu ignored the spray and focused on scanning for tears. Even a tiny rip in the outer fabric could lead to a suit breach later. “Everything checks out on my suit, though. Heading inside now.”

“We also serve who only stand and wait,” Lars replied dryly on the common band. “Don’t make me come in there after you.”

Neither of them spoke English natively—she spoke Catalan as her first language, Spanish as her second. He spoke Norwegian and Swedish. But he was a fund of odd quotes and quips in their mutually adopted third language. This sounded like a quote, and she debated asking him for the source . . . but it could wait. She laughed under her breath, a short bark of sound, and headed to the air lock, which cycled easily under her fingertips, and from there into the living quarters of the Phantom.

Inside, Beatriu sampled the air briefly before confirming over the radio, “The gas mix is off. They may have been suffering from hypoxia before whatever happened . . . happened.”

“Understood,” Control crackled in her ear. “Continue investigating.”

“Keep your helmet on, for god’s sake,” Lars opined from the rover. He sounded restless.

“Don’t worry. I’m not going to make you suit up for flight today.”

“Well, thank heavens. I fly about as well as a hippo.”

“Cut the chatter,” Control’s voice came through, bristling with irritation. “Keep the channel clear.”

She moved from the air-lock area into the galley. No sign of the three-person crew, but they’d clearly been disturbed at their meal. Food lay out on the small tables that folded down from the walls, spoiling in the warmth of the chamber.

A quick check of the cramped bedding area—no bodies. Up a deck, to the closed-off bridge, where alarms flashed unhappy amber at her. “Control, I’m seeing two alarms on the bridge panels. One indicates low oxygen levels. The other indicates a fire in the engine compartment.”

For a moment, she thought she caught movement out of the corner of her eye. Beatriu spun to face whatever had just crept up beside her . . . and saw nothing. Her heart thudded in her chest as adrenaline and stress cortisol spread through her system. She tried to master it with slow, deep breaths. It’s nothing, she thought. There’s no one here.

“Cardona, Control. The medstaff just monitored a spike in your heart rate and blood pressure. Please be advised that if there were a fire, the ship would already have combusted,” Control replied, steadying her. “There would have been enough oxygen, even at low levels, to create a rather spectacular fireball when combined with the methane/ethane of the lake below. You’ve got nothing to worry about.”

Beatriu scanned her surroundings, still unnerved by the sense that something had moved nearby. “Still, I should check it out,” she finally answered.

“Is the engine currently running?” Control asked.

“No,” she replied. “Phantom is drifting on the current.”

“All right, check out the engine compartment.”

As she turned to clamber down the narrow steel gantries to the lower decks, she again caught some shadow, some sense of movement, behind and beside her. Once again, Beatriu spun, steadying herself against the rails with her gloved hands.

And once again, nothing was there.

“Lars?” she asked over their private channel, so Control couldn’t complain about them cluttering the radio. “Did you fly over when I wasn’t looking?”

The radio crackled in her ear. “Ahh, that’s a negative,” Lars responded slowly. “What’s the deal?”

“Not sure,” she replied, just as slowly.

She’d visited the ghost village of Mussara once, in her youth. Abandoned in the 1960s, the ancient stones of the village and its church had been a fine outing during daylight hours. Camping there after nightfall, however, she’d sworn she’d heard horses neighing in the distance, and the rattle of wagon wheels and harnesses. All the fruits of a vivid imagination, she reminded herself now.

In the engine compartment, all white and silver and modern, she found no evidence of flames, but did find two expended fire extinguishers. “Hypoxia can lead to hallucinations,” Beatriu said over the radio, her voice dubious. “So maybe they heard a faulty alarm go off for fire control, and they were already hypoxic? And when the flames wouldn’t . . . go out . . . they got into the escape pods?”

“The oxygen alarm should have gone off long before they started suffering symptoms,” Control responded after a moment, but the voice on the other end of the conversation sounded equally dubious. “That’s a lot of things to go wrong at once.” A pause. “Do you have pings on the escape pods?”

“That’s the next thing I was going to check.”

She didn’t know if the escape pods had radios. Control had steadfastly refused to answer that question. She didn’t know if the people in the pods had been alive, breathing, and in communication with Control the whole time they slowly suffocated. She couldn’t imagine what that would do to the people at Control. Having had to talk to the terrified people in the pods, reassuring them, keeping them calm, all the while knowing that the closest “rescue” equipment would be a day too late. Would they have lied to the survivors? Would they have told them the truth, and have walked them through the stages of rage and grief into acceptance of their own imminent deaths?

She’d never know. Control would never tell her.

Beatriu headed back up to the bridge, now checking her own oxygen levels in her suit. It wouldn’t do to start hallucinating herself. Her own controls showed soothing green lights across the board, however. Nothing to worry about.

As she established the last known coordinates of the escape pods, her heart sank. All three had jettisoned towards the center of Kraken Mare, rather than towards the shore of Moray Sinus, the large northern bay that they were closest to.

“Go ahead and check the logs,” Control requested next. “Nothing should be encrypted.”

Except several logs by the captain, Ayme Marcel, were password protected. That took intervention by Control to break through, while Beatriu worked on regaining control of the Phantom. “Another set of hands would be helpful here. Can Lars come over now, or is this situation still considered too dangerous for both of us to be in the same place?”

“I can work on the oxygen situation,” Lars volunteered in the next breath, before Control could respond. He was clearly champing at the bit to be of use.

Control took a moment to confer amongst themselves, before the primary voice took the microphone once more. “We’ll give that the okay for now. Cardona, be on the flight deck with a line in case Karlsson misses his landing.”

“Their faith in my flight skills is overwhelming,” Lars muttered on the private channel.

Beatriu snorted in response. “You said you fly like a hippo.”

“Yeah, but they didn’t have to confirm it.”

The deck remained rimed with ice, methane/ethane spray breaking over the carbon-fiber prow periodically as they headed into a patch of heavier waves. Beatriu waited up on the flight deck, a heavy cable with a hook attached to it in hand, ready to wave off Lars’s landing, her stomach aflutter with the danger to him now more than it had been for her own landing. She couldn’t control how he flew. Couldn’t feather the controls for him as he hovered above the heaving deck. “Little lower. Can’t make positive contact with you yet.”

“I’m trying. The Phantom’s wallowing in the waves like a sow in a mud pit.”

Inch by inch Lars’s lanky frame in its bulky, heated flight suit edged in for a landing. His boots hit the icy deck, and she managed to snap the hook into his belt—just as a particularly large swell hit from the port side, knocking them both flying for the railing once more. This time, they both were hurled over the rail, in the strange slow motion of Titan’s low gravity.

She had just enough time to grab the rail with her left hand while clinging to the cable with her right. Lars, attached to the cable, was secured to the flight deck . . . but now dangled a meter or so above the heaving methane/ethane sea. Up close, the liquid was gray and gelid—promising certain death if their flight suits sank into its depths.

“Forbanna hestkuk!” Whatever that meant, the tone was a curse.

“Cardona, Karlsson, please respond!” Control sounded frantic.

“Working the problem right now,” Beatriu rapped out tersely. Sometimes, Control could be a real pain in her ass. Couldn’t they see through the helmet cameras that no one had time right now for a fucking report?

“Have you got rotor control?” she asked Lars on their private band.

“Yeah, I do.” He sounded relieved. “But I’m tangled in the cable. Will it get in the way of the rotors at my current angle?”

She checked. “Damn. Yes. I’m going to climb down and untangle you.”

“Negative. You climb up, get yourself on the deck, and then you can pull me the rest of the way.”

She had to admit, he had a point.

Shortly thereafter, through a combination of rotor work on her part, and some climbing on his, they were both back on the deck. “That was more exciting than I like,” Lars said, sounding as out of breath as she felt. “Let’s get below, where it’s . . . relatively safer.”

Control, back in their ears now, seconding Lars’s request that they get indoors.

Back through the air lock. Two sets of hands, a comforting, real presence with her as they set about recovering the vehicle and solving the mystery of what had happened here.

Control broke through the password locks on the captain’s entries, and they both heard Ayme Marcel’s voice in their helmets as they worked. “I’m putting this in my private files for the moment. Dwayne Henderson is, too. We don’t want to go on record with our findings yet. People will laugh and say we’re seeing things. Things we want to see in the data.”

Beatriu started a little, her gloved hands lifting above a console as she listened to the dead woman’s words. Seeing things?

“We’ve been taking sonar soundings of the Mare for weeks now, and Dwayne . . . well, he’s ex-Navy. Submariner, sonar specialist. He doesn’t imagine things.” Frustration in the captain’s voice. “But he’s periodically turned up something large in the readings. Something large and moving. It keeps to the edge of sonar range, so it looks like a sensor ghost. But it varies in position. And it’s following us.”

Beatriu licked lips gone dry behind the visor of her helmet, and continued listening. Control had gone completely silent. Evaluating the message at the same time.

Captain Marcel’s voice went on, “I’ve turned and headed for the so-called sensor ghost several times. That’s given us a better sense of its size. It’s big, whatever it is. Thirty, forty meters, easily. Larger than the Phantom. It stays submerged most of the time, but the depth of the sonar contact varies from ten meters below the surface to nearly fifty. And when we head towards it . . . it retreats. Henderson tells me he thinks it’s a biologic. Kovalenko keeps trying to talk us out of it. No signs of life on this moon, he keeps repeating—but the more often we encounter the sensor ‘ghost,’ the more doubt I hear in his voice.”

Listening to the dead woman’s voice sent chills creeping down the back of Beatriu’s neck as she continued to work in the bridge, while Lars was below, trying to repair the carbon scrubbers and the oxygen tanks, and everything else that life aboard the Phantom relied on. “All lights down here are green now,” he reported after an hour’s work.

“Still showing amber on the alarms up here.”

“Might be a faulty circuit somewhere in between,” Control suggested. “Wait fifteen minutes for a full cycle of the system, and then you can remove your helmets,” they added. “In the meantime, try to pull the sensor logs. Let’s see what they were seeing.”

“Are we going to try to retrieve the bodies?” Lars asked, clumping up the gantry ladder onto the bridge to stand beside Beatriu.

“Yes, if possible,” Control replied. “But they’re literally not going anywhere for the moment. Let’s see if they died for something, first.”

And then, for the third time, movement in the corner of her eye. Beatriu spun, catching a glimpse of . . . something. A human form, just behind the captain’s chair. There, then gone again.

Lars’s head didn’t lift from the controls as he prodded at a keyboard with thick, gloved fingers, trying to bring up the sensor logs.

Beatriu stared for a moment, shuddering inwardly. Ghosts didn’t exist. Ghosts weren’t real. Though the “sensor ghost” might turn out to be something, what she’d just seen was . . . apophenia. Part of her brain recognizing part of a pattern and filling in the rest. Humans were good at filling in patterns.

Which might explain the crew of the Phantom—filling in details to find “life” where there was none. Or finding it, in truth.

But maybe people could still be haunted, nevertheless. Which was all humans were, after all: haunted atoms, moving unquietly through a careless universe.

Beatriu took one last, uncomfortable glance in the direction she’d just seen the shape, the movement. And then put her head back down and went back to work.

Fifteen minutes later, however, as they pulled off their helmets to breath freshly recycled air on the bridge, and with their radios turned down, Lars asked quietly, “Did you call me a couple of minutes ago, when I was down in the gas reclamation center?”

Beatriu glanced up. Met his eyes. “No,” she answered. “The radio log would show if I had—”

“I thought I heard a voice,” he continued, looking down at the control panels once more. “A woman’s voice. Calling my name.” A pause. “She sounded like she was a long way away.”

Beatriu swallowed, her throat dry. “I keep thinking I’m seeing things,” she admitted. “It’s probably just our minds playing tricks on us.”

“Probably.” He looked up. “Glad it’s not just me, though.”

“Me, too.”

They recovered the escape pods, opening them just long enough to confirm that there were, in fact, no living occupants. Then closed them again. Beatriu thought that the frozen bodies would stay livid in her mind forever. In one, Captain Marcel had scratched into the wall the words, It’s here and It’s alive.

“What the hell did she see out the window of the escape pod?” Lars asked softly over the radio as they closed the hatch respectfully once more.

“I don’t know,” Beatriu replied, shuddering a little. “I’m not sure I want to know.”

“You going to be okay piloting this big sow of a ship alone?” Lars paused, then added, his voice oddly fierce, “Because if you aren’t, then I say we tell Control to go fuck themselves, leave the rover where it is, and I’ll keep you company all the way back to base.”

She thumped a hand against his shoulder, so he could feel it through the thick layers of their suits as they headed back inside the Phantom. “Didn’t know you cared.”

“Maybe I do,” Lars said, lowering his helmet to touch hers so that she could hear him without using the radio. “Does it matter?”

She stopped in her tracks. Once again, she felt that flicker on the edge of her awareness but pushed it aside. Instead, she slid an arm around his waist carefully. “It matters to me,” she answered, and squeezed him tightly enough that he should be able to feel it. “It matters to me.”

A pause, and she said, almost diffidently, “You do need to pick up the rover. But how about, before you leave, we get a shower in at the facilities on board?”

“Both of us out of our suits at the same time?” Lars’s voice, muffled though it was through the helmets, sounded teasing. “Control will have a fit.”

“Let them,” she said, leaning into him, feeling oddly content in spite of . . . everything.

Control did indeed have a fit, with the medical staff complaining mightily about spikes in both of their heart rates and blood pressure before all their sensors went dead. Then the main voice of Control came back on, sounding amused and altogether more human than they normally did, and said, “We sometimes forget that we’re not running robots here. We can give you an hour or two to get, uh, cleaned up and feeling more human.”

The next day, both vehicles headed south for the Throat of Kraken, where the currents rolled through thick and fast. Usually, the Phantom wasn’t much faster than a buoy-tender on Earth—strictly about twelve knots an hour. With the current pushing the ship, Beatriu briefly outpaced Lars, who was forced to navigate around patches of ice boulders and other debris on the ground, so she arrived at the southern port before he did—and chafed, waiting for him in the small habitat dome where all of two other people lived and worked.

The official findings were bleak. The oxygen sensor had shorted out—a flaw in the system, practically predestined to fail. A faulty circuit, installed on Earth, had led to hypoxia in the crew. The problem with the fire alarm was trickier to ascertain, but it looked like one of the crew had somehow tripped the alarm themselves. Control thought it was Kovalenko, but they’d never know for sure the hows and the whys of it all.

The sensor ghost? Pursued them all the way to the main port at the southern edge of Kraken Mare. The last time Beatriu recorded it was just before docking. Several times as they sailed south, Control asked her to change course. Every time she did so, the “ghost” changed course with her. As Captain Marcel had reported in her log, it varied in depth but stayed a constant distance off the bow.

Control had no answers for what it was, but promised to pull up a flotilla of radar-equipped drones from the southern hemisphere to try to chase it down the next time the Phantom put out to sea.

Lars and Beatriu decided not to disclose what they’d seen or heard aboard the Phantom. Lars asked for, and received, to his surprise, permission to follow Beatriu in her new posting as captain of the vessel. All he needed to do was qualify as a watch-stander and get up to speed on the engine of the vehicle.

Sometimes, even haunted atoms were lucky enough to find something that resonated on the same frequency that they did. And therefore, didn’t have to face a careless universe on their own.