Titan

20 March 2096: Simulations laboratory

Pancho had to squint as she approached the B ring. This was their first full-mission simulation and all the details were in place to test her.

“Lotta glare here,” she said into the helmet microphone. “Either the sim’s too bright or we oughtta add another layer of tint to the visor.”

“I’ll check it out,” Gaeta’s voice replied.

It was like dropping into a blizzard. The simulator couldn’t reproduce the gut-hollowing sensation of falling, but as Pancho watched the swirling ice particles of the B ring approaching her, she felt pretty damned close to it.

“Suit’s getting pinged,” she reported. The simulation was reproducing the impacts that Gaeta had experienced when he’d dived through the ring. Minor hits, but Pancho knew there were chunks of ice-covered rock in the B ring that were as big as cannonballs and were moving just as fast.

She glanced at her thruster controls. With her hands inside the suit’s gloves, she could control the thrusters with the motions of her fingers. But control was a relative term. Try avoiding a bowling ball that’s comin’ at you at supersonic speed, she told herself. Good luck, girl.

“Okay,” Wunderly’s voice sounded inside her helmet, “open the sampling boxes.”

A trio of sampling boxes had been attached to the chest of the excursion suit. Pancho had laughed when she’d first seen them. “Suit looks real female now,” she’d said, pointing.

“First time I’ve seen square ones,” Wanamaker had cracked.

“Or three of’em,” Tavalera had added, in a rare burst of humor.

Pancho was strictly business now, though. “Opening sampling boxes.”

“Confirm,” Gaeta said, “samplers open.”

By the time they had finished the simulation Pancho felt tired yet high with adrenaline. As she climbed out of the suit and down to the floor of the sim lab, Wanamaker said, “Good morning’s work, Panch. You’ve earned a fine lunch.”

“Okay, but lemme shower first. Gets sweaty in there.”

Wunderly asked, “How soon do you think you’ll be ready to make the real flight?”

Pancho shrugged, but before she could answer Wanamaker said, “We need at least several more weeks of simulator runs, Nadia. There’s no sense rushing this. Pancho’s got to be able to do this mission blindfolded, purely by reflex.”

Wunderly nodded glumly and walked away. Pancho knew what she was thinking: The election’s only ten weeks away. Will we be able to run the mission before then?

Leaving Tavalera to shut down the control consoles, Gaeta walked over to the trio standing by the massive suit. “Your turn this afternoon, Jake.”

Wanamaker nodded. He was due to practice flying the transfer craft that would carry Pancho to the B ring and then pick her up on the other side.

Looking almost guilty, Pancho said, “I can’t make it this afternoon, guys. Gotta be at Holly’s rally.”

Gaeta frowned, but Wanamaker said, “We can run the transfer sim without her, can’t we, Manny?”

“It’d be better with Pancho in the suit,” Gaeta said.

“No can do, fellas,” said Pancho. “Promised my sister I’d be at the rally.”

“What rally?” Wunderly asked.

“Come with me, Nadia,” Pancho replied. “You oughtta be there, too.”

“But—”

“No buts,” Pancho insisted. “The guys can run the transfer sim without us. Can’t you, Manny?”

Clearly unhappy about it, Gaeta nodded minimally. “I can run the suit.”

Pancho turned to Wanamaker. “Well?”

“Hearkening and obedience,” Wanamaker said with a mock bow.

Tavalera asked, “What’s this rally all about?”

“Women’s stuff, Raoul,” Pancho replied. “But men are welcome to attend, too.”

“I need you here, Raoul,” Gaeta said firmly.

“Yeah, I know. I was just curious.” But he was thinking, I haven’t seen Holly alone for weeks. Guess I wouldn’t at her rally, either, whatever it’s about.

Holly stood alone on the stage of Athens’s indoor theater and watched the rows fill up almost entirely with women. Pancho sat in the front row, grinning up at her. And she even had Nadia Wunderly sitting beside her. She saw Professor Wilmot and a couple of other men, including that Ramanujan guy that worked for Eberly. A flaming spy for Malcolm, she told herself. It almost amused her to see Wilmot and Ramanujan sitting together, as if for protection, amid a growing sea of women. Berkowitz was in back, a remote controller in one hand to direct the cameras he had stationed in the far corners of the theater.

Otherwise the theater was occupied by women. Dozens of conversations hummed through the place, but so far they didn’t sound impatient. Quite the opposite, Holly thought. The women seemed positive, even buoyant.

More were still coming into the theater at two o’clock, the time set for the rally to start. Holly fidgeted nervously on the stage, torn between a compulsion to start promptly and a desire to get as large an audience as possible. The theater sat four hundred, and the seats were more than half filled. Malcolm’s first rally back in his first election campaign hadn’t drawn this many.

She killed a minute or so adjusting the microphone pinned to the lapel of her tunic.

At last, three minutes past the hour, Holly cleared her throat and said, “I want to thank you for coming here this afternoon.”

All the buzzing conversations stopped. All eyes turned to Holly. She noted a few women were still trickling into the theater and hurrying to seats toward the rear.

“I know a lot of you have had to take time off from your jobs or other occupations to come here. I want to apologize for having this rally at such a weird hour. Thing is, the administration claimed that all the theaters and other public spaces are completely booked for every evening between now and election day. And you know who runs the administration!”

“Malcolm Eberly!” someone shouted.

A chorus of hisses rose from the audience. It startled Holly; it sounded like an angry warning from a den of snakes.

“Reason Eberly stuck us with this midafternoon time is that he figured nobody’d show up.”

“But he was wrong!” a woman yelled. Laughter and cheers rose from the audience.

Holding up her hands for silence, Holly went on, “The reason I accepted this dimdumb time was that we’ve got an important job to do, and we can’t waste any time getting it done.

“What is it?” Pancho asked, at the top of her voice.

Suppressing a grin at her sister’s stooging, Holly said, “We want the Zero Population Growth repealed, or at least reexamined.”

“Repealed!” several women shouted.

“Well, okay, but Eberly’s going to say that the ZPG protocol can’t be repealed or even altered unless there’s a formal petition signed by sixty-seven percent of the habitat’s population.”

“No!”

“Boo!”

“That’s a crock!”

Again gesturing for silence, Holly said, “I’m afraid it’s true. I’ve looked it up. Our constitution states that any clause or protocol that’s in force now can only be changed or repealed outright if two-thirds of the habitat’s citizens sign a petition to that effect.”

A babble of angry voices rose from the audience.

“Now wait,” Holly urged. “Wait up! Women make up forty-seven percent of the habitat’s population. If we get all the women to sign the petition, we only need two thousand men to sign up.”

That silenced them. Holly could practically hear them thinking; Two thousand men. How are we going to get two thousand men to agree with us?

Fishing her handheld from her tunic pocket, Holly flashed the petition she had drafted on the rear wall of the stage.

“I’ve written up the petition, all nice and legal,” she said. “Now what we’ve got to do is get sixty-seven hundred signatures in less than six weeks. Petitions have to be officially registered and counted by May first, one month before the election. That gives us only forty-one days to get the job done. We’ve got to get busy!”

They jumped to their feet and cheered. All but Wilmot and Ramanujan, who sat there in stony silence. Holly felt thrilled at their response until she realized that there were hardly more than two hundred here. We need sixty-seven hundred signatures, she thought. Even if we get every woman in that habitat to sign the petition, which we won’t, we’ll still need two thousand men.