Titan

31 December 2095: Morning

Shouldn’t you be at your job?” Holly asked, as she stood in the morning sun with Tavalera.

They were waiting in front of the administration building, at the crest of the little hill on which the village of Athens was situated. Low, white-walled apartment and office buildings lined both sides of the village’s gently curving main street. In the distance sunlight sparkled off the lake.

Tavalera’s normally gloomy face took on a slightly stubborn expression. “You oughtta be in your office, too.”

“Nope,” said Holly. “This morning I’m taking a field trip.”

“Me, too, then.”

“Raoul, I don’t need a bodyguard.”

The slightest of smiles sneaked across his lips. “I don’t want you wandering down in the underground alone with that guy.”

“You mean, this is a good excuse for you to take the morning off.”

“I don’t trust Timoshenko. Not with you.”

Holly didn’t know whether to be flattered or annoyed. “Timoshenko’s no prob,” she said.

“Then why’s he need you to guide him around? Can’t he read a map?”

“He didn’t ask for me to do it. I volunteered.”

Tavalera’s smile grew minimally wider. “Oh, so you wanna take a morning off, too.”

She laughed. Then, pointing at the man in coveralls trudging up the path, she said, “Here he comes, right on time.”

There was a moment of embarrassment as Holly greeted the engineer and introduced Tavalera. How to explain why Raoul’s here with me? Holly wondered.

She heard herself explain, “Raoul wanted to see the underground, too, so I thought the three of us could go down there together.”

“All right by me,” said Timoshenko, eying Tavalera with something like suspicion.

“’Kay then,” Holly said. “There’s an entry port behind the building.”

Slightly more than an hour later, the three of them had walked more than five kilometers through the maze of ducts and electrical conduits that honeycombed the region between the landscaped interior of the habitat and its outer shell. The area thrummed with vibrations from electrical machinery and the flow of water and hydraulic fluids through heavy pipes. Lights turned on automatically as they proceeded along the metal walkway, and turned off again as they passed. Maintenance robots rolled past almost noiselessly on their air-cushioned trunions.

One of the squat little robots stopped in front of the trio of invading humans and scanned them with its camera lenses.

Timoshenko bent over it and said, “Hey, don’t you know I’m your boss?”

The robot rolled off while the three of them laughed.

At one time Holly had used this underground region as a refuge, a place to hide when Eberly’s brutal associates were hunting for her. The area looked unchanged; it still felt dry and warm, smelled of machine oil and, faintly, of dust—despite the constant buzzing sweeping of the maintenance robots.

Timoshenko constantly checked their position against the electronic map displayed on his palmcomp as Holly led them toward the endcap region.

“You don’t need a map?” Timoshenko asked.

“Nope. Got it all memorized.”

“Holly has a photographic memory,” Tavalera said.

Timoshenko snorted. “You better watch out if you marry her. She’ll never forget a word you say!”

Holly and Tavalera looked at other, then back at Timoshenko.

“It’s a joke,” Timoshenko said.

Tavalera started to smile. Holly said, deadpan, “I won’t forget that.”

All three of them burst out laughing.

Later, as they started back toward the ladder they’d come down on, Holly asked, “Do you want to see more? The other side’s pretty much the same as this one.”

“No, this is enough. Besides, my feet hurt.”

“Why’d you want to come down here?” Tavalera asked. “I mean, you’re supposed to be in charge of exterior maintenance, not inside.”

Timoshenko tilted his head slightly to one side. “I don’t believe in watertight compartments. Exterior maintenance shouldn’t be totally insulated from interior maintenance. I want to see what could get damaged if the outside shell is penetrated.”

“Penetrated?”

“By a meteor. A chunk of ice. A big rock.”

“Or by an explosive break in one of the superconducting lines,” Holly added.

Timoshenko dipped his chin to her. “Very smart woman.”

“Come on,” Tavalera said, quickening his pace. “It’s almost lunchtime.”

“Yes, my stomach is already growling,” said Timoshenko. “But I think I’ll go back to the fancy office that Eberly has given me. I have a lot of calculations to make.”

“Damage assessments?” Tavalera asked.

Timoshenko nodded grimly. “And ways to improve the superconductors’ armor.”

As she sat in her cubbyhole of an office, Nadia Wunderly watched glumly the old video of Manny Gaeta’s flight through Saturn’s brightest ring: a lone man in that heavily armored suit disappearing into the vast swarm of glittering icy particles, like an arctic explorer of old trekking across a glacier and being swallowed up by a blizzard.

I bet he’d do it again, she said to herself. He’d do it for me. I could make him feel guilty enough to agree to go out there one more time.

But Kris would kill me. She loves Manny and she’s not going to let him risk his butt for me or anyone else. Especially not for me. She knows Manny and I were sleeping together until she came on the scene and took him away from me.

Wunderly thought she ought to feel resentment toward Cardenas, but she knew she didn’t. Manny was just a fling, she remembered, a lot of fun while it lasted but I knew it wouldn’t last long. What would a dynamo of a hunk like him want with a mousy overweight geek girl like me? He was just using me to get the information he needed for his stunt through the rings.

But she smiled to herself. He used me pretty damned well. And I used him, too.

She had to shake her head to drive those memories away and concentrate on her work. The display screen showed a close-up view of Saturn’s B ring; a swirl of ice particles braided into interconnected ringlets as far as the camera could see, like an enormous intricate pattern of diamonds wheeling, glittering, dancing before her eyes. It was hypnotic; she could watch them for hours.

Clucking annoyedly to herself, she commanded the computer to display the imagery in negative. The glittering jewels changed instantly to various shades of gray, the infinite space beyond them to pale creamy white. Still she watched, fascinated. Spiral density waves weaved through the rings and the scalloped edges of the gaps between them, delicate threadlike open paths that she knew were the wakes of tiny moonlets racing along the edges of ringlets like sheepdogs herding the particles into line.

What makes them do that? she asked herself. Look at the way the individual ringlets twist around one another, like the threads of a hooked rug that’s made out of jewels. What drives those dynamics? How did they get this way?

A fragment of memory from her high school days popped into her mind, a couplet by Robert Frost:

So many secrets in those rings, Wunderly thought, as she watched the swirling ice particles. So much to find out, to learn, to understand. If only Manny—

And then it hit her. Manny doesn’t have to go into the rings! I can do it myself!

Wunderly sat up straighter in her chair, her mind churning. His suit’s here. I can use it; Manny can show me how. He can run the operation from here, he can be the crew chief or whatever they call it. I bet Raoul Tavalera would help him, too. Kris wouldn’t mind if I borrowed the two guys for a while.

She got to her feet and looked around her cramped, cluttered cubicle. I can do it! she told herself. Just one quick zoom through the rings to pick up some samples and bring them back here for analysis. In and out.

I can do it.