Titan

23 December 2095: The day before

The successful landing of Titan Alpha on the cloud-shrouded surface of Saturn’s largest moon was not the only startling event aboard habitat Goddard. A day earlier, Pancho Lane had provided fireworks of a different sort.

Although she had officially retired as CEO of Astro Corporation, Pancho still had enough clout to commandeer the fusion torch ship Starpower III for a six-week flight to distant Saturn. And to bring a gaggle of ICU bigwigs and news executives with her, as well as her personal bodyguard and lover.

Pancho made her way up Starpower III’s paneled central passageway toward the bridge to watch the torch ship’s approach to Goddard through the bridge’s glassteel ports. Once an astronaut herself, she had no patience with sitting in her compartment and staring at a video display of the approach and docking. Nor was she in a mood to mingle with the passengers in the central lounge: flatlanders, most of them. Earthworms who had never been farther than the comfortable cities on the Moon and only traveled deeper into space in the luxury and safety of this commodious torch ship.

If the ship’s captain or crew members felt uncomfortable with the retired head of the corporation poking around their bridge, they did their best to hide it. Pancho sat at the vacated life support console, where she could gaze through the bridge’s sweeping windows of heavily tinted glassteel as Starpower III neared Goddard’s main docking port.

It took an effort to keep her eyes off Saturn. The planet bulked huge and looming, nearly ten times bigger than Earth, striped with soft tan and muted yellow clouds whipping along at hyperhurricane velocities. White clouds circled the pole. Or was that an aurora? Pancho wondered. It’s summertime down there in the southern hemisphere, she thought. Temperature’s prob’ly gettin’ close to a hundred and fifty below zero. They must be clouds, ice formations.

The rings were tipped so that Pancho could see them in all their dazzling complexity, glittering, glistening broad bands of gleaming ice chunks hanging in emptiness, stupendous rings many thousands of kilometers across, yet so thin that the stars shone through them. This close, Pancho could see that the rings were braided, countless individual rings woven together like a rich circular tapestry made of brilliant diamonds. Some of the scientists claimed that there were living creatures in those ice particles, extremophiles that thrived at temperatures near absolute zero.

Compared to gaudy Saturn and those radiant rings, the man-made Goddard was not much to look at, Pancho thought, as she watched the massive habitat growing larger. It was a thick, ungainly cylinder, twenty kilometers long and four across, rotating slowly to produce an artificial gravity for the ten thousand men and women living inside it. It reminded Pancho of a stubby length of storm drainpipe hanging in the emptiness, although as they neared it she could see that its surface was pebbled with observation bubbles, docking ports, antennas and other projections studding the cylinder’s curving flank. And at about two-thirds of the way along the cylinder stood the ring of solar mirrors standing like a collar of flower petals, drinking in sunlight for the habitat’s farms and electrical power and life support.

Susie’s in there, Pancho thought. Then she remembered: Mustn’t call her Susie anymore. She changed her name to Holly. And it damned near killed her.

Despite her best intentions Pancho couldn’t help feeling a simmer of resentment about her sister. Sooze was only three years younger than Pancho, as far as calendar age was concerned. But while Pancho had allowed her hair to go stark white and was taking rejuvenation therapies to stave off the encroachment of age, Susan was physically no more than thirty. And mentally, emotionally—Pancho grimaced at the thought.

Susan had died while she was a teenager. Pancho had administered the lethal injection herself, once the medical experts had woefully assured her that there was no hope of saving Susan from the drug-induced cancer that was ruining her body. So Pancho pushed the hypodermic syringe into her sister’s emaciated arm and watched her die. As soon as she was pronounced clinically dead the medics slid her body into a heavy stainless steel sarcophagus, a coffin-sized dewar that they filled with liquid nitrogen, steaming white, deadly cold.

For more than twenty years Pancho guarded Susie’s cryonically preserved body as she herself climbed the corporate ladder of power from hell-raising astronaut to CEO and board chairman of Astro Corporation. Pancho directed Astro’s side of the Second Asteroid War, and once that tragedy ground to its exhausted, blood-soaked finish, she had formally retired from Astro to start a new life of—what? she asked herself. What am I doing here, all the way the hell out at Saturn. What am I going to do with the rest of my life?

Her immediate plans she knew. She was going to see her sister for the first time in nearly three years. Spend the holidays with the only family she had. The thought made her tense with apprehension.

Once Susan had been revived from her long years of cryonic suspension and her cancer removed by therapeutic nanomachines, she was like a newborn baby in a young adult’s body. The years she had spent bathed in liquid nitrogen had saved her body but destroyed most of the synapses in the cerebral cortex of her brain. She had practically no higher brain functions. Pancho had to feed her, teach her to speak again and to walk, even toilet-train her.

Slowly Susan became a mature adult, yet even when the psychologists happily proclaimed her training to be a complete success, Pancho was disturbed. She wasn’t the same Susie. Couldn’t be, Pancho realized, yet the difference unsettled her. She looked like Susie, talked and laughed and flirted like Sooze, but she was subtly different. When Pancho looked into her sister’s eyes, it was somebody else in there. Almost the same. But only almost.

And the first thing Sooze did, once she was fully recovered, was to change her name and traipse out on the space habitat Goddard on this wild-ass mission to explore Saturn and its moon, Titan. She picked up and left Pancho behind, with a smile and a peck on the cheek and a perfunctory, “Thanks for everything, Panch.” She ran off with that slimy son of a bitch Malcolm Eberly.

That was why Pancho was not in her most chipper and cheerful mood as Starpower III docked with Goddard and began to disembark its VIP passengers. She felt sullen resentment and an anger she believed to be completely justified. And she was more than a little apprehensive about how Susie would receive her. How’s she gonna react to having her big sister drop in on her, after she’s flown almost a billion and a half kilometers to get away from me? Merry Christmas, now go home: that’s what Pancho feared her sister’s attitude would be.

Stewing inside, juggling these emotions, Pancho made her way down the ship’s central passageway to the main docking port after the skipper had announced they’d mated with Goddard. All the big muckety-muck scientists and news execs were gathering in the port’s waiting area, chatting and buzzing impatiently. She saw Jake Wanamaker easily enough; he towered over the others. His craggy face broke into a smile as he spotted her and Pancho couldn’t help but grin back at him.

“Hi, there, sailor,” she said, once she had sidled through the gathering crowd to stand beside him. “New in town?”

“Yes, ma’ am,” answered Wanamaker, falling into the old routine. “Thought maybe you’d show me the sights.”

They both laughed and Pancho felt better.

Until they finally stepped through the airlock and into Goddard’s reception area. The crowd was arranging itself into a straggly line as personnel from the habitat checked names and assigned the visitors to living quarters. Then Pancho spotted Susie, tall and lean as herself. She looks okay, Pancho thought, her heart leaping. She looks fine.

“Panch!” Sooze yelped, and she pushed through the line of notables toward her sister.

Mustn’t call her Susan, Pancho reminded herself. She’s Holly now.

Her sister threw her arms around Pancho’s neck and Pancho knew it was going to be alright between them. No matter what, it was going to be okay. She introduced Holly to Jake, who took her hand in his meaty paw and said hello almost solemnly while Pancho beamed at them.

“C’mon, let’s go to my place,” Holly said. “You can find your apartment later, after the crowd’s thinned out.”

Pancho happily followed her sister as far as the hatch that led out to the corridor beyond the reception area. Standing there was a handsome, youngish man, hair the color of straw swept in thick waves, strong cheekbones, thin straight nose, chiseled firm jaw and piercing sky-blue eyes. His face was sculpted so perfectly that Pancho guessed he’d had cosmetic therapy. What was that word the old-time racists used? she asked herself. The answer came to her swiftly: Aryan. That’s what he looked like: the ideal Nordic hero. Yet below the neck he looked soft, a slight potbelly bulging his loosely draped tunic. As if his face was all that mattered to him.

“Panch, this is Malcolm Eberly, Goddard’s chief administrator and—”

Pancho lashed out with her right fist in a lightning punch that caught Eberly’s smiling face solidly on the jaw and knocked him backward onto the seat of his pants.

“That’s for damn near killing my sister, you no-good son of a bitch,” Pancho snarled at him.