Saturn
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SATURN
Saturn is a hundred times heavier than the Earth and deeply cold, something like 350 degrees below zero, because the faraway sun only gives about one percent of the light and heat to Saturn that it does to the Earth. But that is still about five thousand times brighter than the full moon in Earth's night sky, and the eyes can adjust, so seeing isn't a problem.
The ring system of the planet is truly big. In fact, if the famous "braid- ed" F-ring is taken to be the outer edge, it takes light a full second to cross from one side of the rings to the other. The B-ring is the brightest one, because it is about six hundred feet thick. The second brightest is the A-ring, which is one hundred and fifty feet thick. These rings were made of countless pieces of ice, ranging in size from microscopic to small moonlets.
When Chivalrous arrived in the ring system, Brand laid claim to a six hundred-foot ice ball sitting in the middle of a local thickening of one ring- let in the A-ring. The nearest neighboring ringlet was thirteen miles away and moved at only a brisk walking speed relative to Brand's ice ball, just three miles per hour. The narrow gaps between the innumerable ringlets were mostly clear of ice.
After his planned burn to send the ice ball closer sunward, a fourth of Brand's water would be gone. If his ice ball were re-melted at that point and allowed to become a solid ball again it would have a diameter of only 475 feet across instead of the original 600.
There didn't seem to be any way around the requirement for a second burn at the destination. Brand had to circularize his descent ellipse, or the ice ball would start to climb back out toward Saturn's orbit again due to the conservation of angular momentum. A second burn would reduce the ice ball in mass yet again, and it would be as though Brand set out with an ice ball only 380 feet across.
He could avoid the second burn by crashing the ice ball into an asteroid, but it would vaporize on impact and the whole thing would be gone. There would be no payday in that case.
But there was one "asteroid" in the Belt that wasn't an asteroid at all. According to Robyn's data it was a mile-wide collection of smaller rocks, boulders, pebbles, and sand, all spinning just fast enough to keep from sticking together, but not spinning fast enough to fly apart. Roth Wardian owned it, and he made a tidy profit mining its innards, because he could borrow around anywhere inside it without the expense of drilling solid rock. Wardian called it the Gravel Pile.
"Roth Wardian!" Jabniel said with some alarm. "Are you crazy? That's the same guy who ripped you off!"
"Jabs, look, I know what I'm doing." In the time they'd been together traveling out to Saturn, Brand had shortened his wife's name from Jabniel to Jabs.
He reckoned that his ice ball could crash into the Gravel Pile without blowing up. Oh, it would break up alright, but the fragments of ice would just be swallowed up inside the Gravel Pile and Wardian could go in there and grab ice chunks easier than other companies could drill for ice on asteroids that already had great veins of the stuff running through it.
Asteroids were all on different orbits with different periods, and the relationships between them were always shifting. Sometimes a lot of water- rich asteroids would drift close together. Supply would outstrip demand and water prices would plunge, at least for that region of the Belt. Other times a "desert" would form when few or no asteroids bearing water would be in a region, and the price of water would sharply increase.
All of these situations were compiled and documented in the Old Spacer's Almanac (going on all of seven years old) that was transmitted to subscribers throughout the system. Brand knew the Gravel Pile was entering just such a desert.
Brand also knew Roth Wardian would remember his name, so he let Jabs negotiate the contract under her prenuptial name of Jabs Bat-Naseth. Roth did know Jabs' father Naseth, and so he was eager to do business with her. He was also well aware of the coming dry spell, and that's why he agreed to Jab's idea to crash the ice ball into his Gravel Pile, and why he also agreed to pay Jab's almost insane asking price.
Roth realized Jabs would be flying in with her ice ball together with who knows how much protection, so he didn't plan to "break cherry" on her like he did to Brand, but when all was said and done, Roth figured he would still make a killing. He'd have the only asteroid with water ice for mil- lions of miles around.
The Gravel Pile was closer to Jupiter than to Mars, firmly in nephilim territory. Wardian had his start as one of Gina's boytoys but he went rogue, and when he scammed Brand on his first ice ball that gave him enough capital to move to the outer Belt. He, like Brand, was one of just a handful of humans who had set down roots beyond 4 AU.
It was slow going, the negotiations between Wardian and Jabs, because round trip for radio transmission at light speed between Saturn and the Gravel Pile was three hours.
In all of the vast area of Saturn's rings, the arrival of Brand and Jabs by all rights should have gone totally unnoticed. They should have made hardly more than a blip. But the negotiations with Roth Wardian, conducted entirely in the clear, attracted the attention of the Stratis gang, a small group of those very nephilim criminals the Gerash Patriarch had warned Ro- byn about at Fortuna.
Stratis could have never done the planning and the thinking for the stunt Brand proposed to do, but hy didn't have to. After hy sat there and lis- tened in to everything Jabs said, Stratis got it into hyz thick head that if hy moved really close to the Jabs kid, say only forty or fifty miles, and watched har like a hawk, it could be hyz ticket out of the Rings. When it was underway hy could take over the iceball, kill Jabs, and ride the ice ball all the way down.
The Stratis gang was mobile. They had a taut little warship about the size of a corvette, but it could be controlled by just three yeng, or even just two in a pinch. Stratis parked in Brand's ringlet 75,000 km from Saturn's cloud tops, but about forty miles to the east of Brand. By Saturn's standards, this wasn't being a good neighbor. It was akin to parking one's mo- bile home flush up against another one. Brand knew this sign couldn't be good.
Brand used the engines of Chivalrous to melt a small pond into the surface. Quickly, before the ice froze again, he sank Chivalrous into the ice until he struck bottom. He melted more ice and sank again, and again, using the retrorockets to push them all the way through the ice until the back of the ship was just poking through the other side, with only the engine nozzles and the back door sticking out into space. Then he let all the water freeze again, which unfortunately put some dents into the ship as the ice expand- ed.
For the next few months he melted many veins into the ice, which would al- low hot water to make a slush to be used as propellant for the big burn. Also he dug a large chamber in the precise center of his iceball, and there he constructed from scratch (using knowledge that his father Blaine Millet had imparted to him) perhaps the largest macro that had ever been built. He also built a couple hand-held macros for defense, much like the Golden Gift.
Brand made a mistake during the assembly of these macros, however, and the beam that leaped out from them was red, not purple. He didn't learn of the importance of this until an incident happened somewhat later with an in- truder.
One time when Brand was working in the central chamber he was caught off- guard by one of Stratis' henchyeng, Gliek, who had managed to get aboard by stealth. He had Brand in hyz cross-hairs, dead to rights.
But Jabs, working inside the Chivalrous, happened to see them together on a screen so now it was har turn to be Brand's Knight In White Shining Armor. With a stab of har finger on a nearby button, the air quietly began rushing out of the central cavern. Brand realized what was happening and quickly took a breath and held it.
Gliek didn't know what was happening and hesitated in hyz shot, but hy continued to breathe in and out as the air rapidly thinned. Black and white dots danced across hyz vision as hy grew more and more confused. In seven seconds more hy was unconscious.
By three seconds after that, still observed by Jabs, Brand grabbed a hand macro and turned it on Gliek. But nothing happened. His chest didn't disappear.
Brand's macro was working, but the beam used photons with frequencies a full octave down from the photons of factory-spec Femina Caelestis macros. Glieck's chest was phantomized, but the atoms remained in place, and after that they could not be phantomized again, even if Brand could lay his hands on a macro that worked according to the original prints.
Jabs hit another button to begin restoring the air to the cavern. In less than a minute Gliek stirred back to awareness.
Generally, water inside the human (or nephilim) body is not free. It's mostly trapped in the spaces between knots of proteins, which are like tan- gled phone cords. Even blood is just a thick syrupy mess, almost a gel. If Brand had fired his faulty macro beam at Gliek's gut he might have just run a slight fever.
Instead Brand fired the macro at Gliek's lungs again and even though his chest could not be phantomized anymore, the fresh air in his lungs was phantomized. All the air molecules in his lungs found they could drift right through each other instead of bouncing off each other like before. So there was no more pressure. His lungs became like bottomless pits ready to accept any additional amount of air.
So Gliek took an involuntary final gasp that went on and on as long as the macro continued to fire, until maybe ten times hyz lung's normal capacity was crammed with phantom molecules of air in quantum flux, all superimposed over the top of each other.
Then, seven seconds after Brand turned the macro off, all those molecules started obeying Pauli's Exclusion Principle again, which said they couldn't occupy the same space at the same time. All that suddenly superheated high pressure air came roaring back out of Gliek's mouth like rocket exhaust, taking flaming bits of what used to be his delicate lungs along with it.
It was an incredibly painful but relatively quick death. And that was the end of their Josh Glieck problem.
"Fools rush in," Brand muttered, "where angels fear to tread."
Jabs entered the ice cavern armed with har own macro, and found that Gliek was already dead. "Who the hell is hy?"
"Probably one of our nosy neighbors. I don't know how hy got in here, but I don't want to wait around for another try by those guys. We have no choice. Get ready for departure."
There had been no news from Gliek since Stratis dispatched his henchman to Brand's iceball, but he knew something was up. Predictably, when Brand started his burn, Stratis shadowed him with hyz own ship.
Brand's navigation calculations involved the use of a right triangle. One leg of the triangle was the 4 miles per second of velocity change Brand needed to get from their circular orbit in the A-ring up to escape veloci- ty. The other leg of the triangle was the 3 miles per second of velocity change he needed to get from Saturn to the Gravel Pile.
The third leg of the triangle, then, 5 miles per second, was the bottom line, the total velocity change he needed to come up with. It was going to consume about half of the ice ball's water as propellant just to get the journey underway.
Now anything in orbit around Saturn that wasn't flying exactly along the equator will cross the equator twice on each circuit, once going from north to south, and again going from south to north. As the ice rock began moving away from Saturn, at every equatorial crossing Brand skillfully wove through narrow gaps in Saturn's A Ring where the sheet of floating ice was thin or non-existent.
It took many days. After each ring crossing he had a twelve hour rest period before preparing for the next one. During those down times, Brand pieced together what happened with his macro and the intruder, and this suggested a narrow path out of their predicament, but he had to work quick- ly.
As the ice ball continued to accelerate, some of the ionized hydrogen and oxygen atoms from the propellant stream was diverted into storage chambers carved in ice after being separated by electrostatic plates, to be used later for power on the trip to the Gravel Pile when they ran out of SHe-3.
Finally they were free of the A-ring, and emerged into empty space. Brand stopped weaving the iceball by manipulating the exhaust stream and sailed straight and true.
Stratis saw Brand's maneuvering cease. He said, "Loreth, you may now regis- ter our displeasure with Jabs for the loss of our colleague Gliek."
They lobbed a shell, which flew across the intervening space and hit dead- center, right between the six roaring engines of Chivalrous' hexagonal drive section. The back door was taken out, and air began to rush out of the ship.
"We have a hull breach," Jabs said, striking buttons that would close a series of hatches between the habitation module and the service tunnel to the rear.
"If we survive this adventure," Brand said, "I'll go back there in a suit and repair the damage.
"Return the gesture," Jabs told him. "I thought this was a warship."
"I'd love to, dear heart, but this warship has its nose buried in six hun- dred feet of ice and its ass sticking out in space. We're going to have to just try to evade them. All I can do right now is program random course changes and hope they won't be able to connect with another round."
And there was another problem looming. The F Ring, focused by shepherd moons, and even "braided" in spots, was too dense to plow through, and too wide to hop over on the ascending and descending nodes. It sat out there like the Great Barrier Reef.
But the F Ring only blocked the slower descent ellipse used to get an ice ball from Saturn to the outer edge of the asteroid belt. The faster ice balls headed for Mars or Earth-Luna just missed grazing the outer edge of the ring. Due to this basic fact, no one ever actually tried to send ice from Saturn to the outer asteroids until Brand's current stunt.
After setting the computer to weave randomly when it flew, Brand left with Jabs. They floated to the simple spherical cavern at the exact center of their ice ball, reached by a long thin tube melted into the ice.
As the ship whipped the iceball this way and that to evade more of Stratis' incoming shells and the cave seemed to turned around them, Brand and Jabn- iel hovered in free fall next to a pair of gadgets.
"Hold your breath," Brand said as they reached final approach to the F Ring. "Here goes."
Brand's entire ice asteroid, including Brand himself and his wife, was phantomized by an omni-directional burst from the first gadget. The air in the small room, no longer confined by collisions with the walls or by col- lisions with each other, rushed out almost instantly, and the Millets found themselves in a total vacuum.
The actual passage through the F-ring took far less than one second.
Brand and Jabs felt nothing. Nor did they see anything but a momentary blankness. With even their retinas phantomized, their retina did not block photons of light, just as their bodies did not block the ice of the F-ring. Seven seconds after Brand's gadget turned off they could see again.
Some liquid oxygen prepared by Brand beforehand was quickly brought to a boil by the second gadget and filled the room with air again before Brand and Jabs could pass out. The period of time they spent in vacuum was too brief to cause serious issues with decompression.
"We did it!" Brand cheered as they accomplished their breakout to clear space beyond all further obstacles. "We made it through!"
"No collision," Stratis's one surviving henchman Loreth said on the pursu- ing ship. "The F-Ring wasn't so much as ruffled by har passage."
"Jabs must have found a hole," Stratis concluded. He recklessly steered his ship in after har. Not a glimmer of the truth, that they used a macro to penetrate the F-ring, registered on hyz mind.
"There's no hole!" Loreth screamed. "Veer off!" But it was far too late.
There was no explosion, for Stratis's ship was water-powered, so there were no combustibles aboard. The red glow came from kinetic energy as his unlamented ship disintegrated and the broken fragments ping-ponged through the ice.
This time the F Ring was ruffled. And that was the end of Brand's Stratis gang problem.
"Fools rush in," Brand muttered, "where angels fear to tread."
* * * * *
What followed was the Crossing, a transit from 1993 to 1996 without benefit of phantomizable water. Every single drop of water contained in Brand's ice ball had been phantomized once and for all just to get it through the F Ring barrier. As his grandfather Jerry Shy Bear discovered long before, phantomization was a one-shot deal. Nothing in the universe would get those molecules to "stand up" ever again.
Brand analyzed the stroke of luck that allowed him and Jabs to escape from the Stratis gang. An error in his macro design had caused it to oper- ate at a lower frequency than the original. It still phantomized gases and liquids normally, causing them to disperse, but solids, or colloidal solids in suspension within liquids (such as Jello, or human bodies) remained in place while they were phantomized.
He and Jabs were living proof that humans could survive being hit with a sub-macro, operating with red light rather that violet light.
Further experimentation showed that using infrared light allowed even gases and liquids to remain in place. Brand had discovered an efficient way to pre-phantomize a block of metal for use in a macro engine. Previously, this metal had to be supercooled to slow the atoms to a crawl, then re- constituted from metal vapor after pre-phantomization, which was a tedious and lengthy process.
With some foresight on the part of Brand, he had used his big macro to separate a considerable amount of water into hydrogen and oxygen, which was stored as liquid in different ice voids scattered throughout their little asteroid. This could be combined again to make a flame for heating and cooking, or to produce electricity in a fuel cell to keep the batteries of Chivalrous charged up.
And there remained a small amount of SHe-3 to help tide them over. Still, four years would be pushing the limit, and strict conservation was observed at all times.
With the ship's nose buried deep inside the ice ball their only view of out- side space was through the remote cameras Brand had placed on the surface. There was nothing to see at any rate.
In 1995 they just crossed the orbit of Jupiter, and that giant planet was, of course, nowhere nearby when they crossed. So the unneeded flight deck was largely abandoned.
To save power, often Brand and Jabs stayed in just one of the staterooms and kept each other warm, moving to one of the other four staterooms when it started to smell too funky in the first one. Clutter from years of lousy housekeeping hung about them. There were tools, publications, and personal items floating about to no end.
All the misplaced objects that briefly caught their fancy, all their reference-only discarded junk tumbled in the air like the contents of an attic, filling every available space. To reshelf half of it would be an exercise in three-dimensional polyominos: possible, but impractical. However, they dared not throw anything overboard yet no matter how trivial. Not with half of the journey yet to complete.
So this Crossing became a dreadful self-imposed torture for Brand and Jabn- iel. Oh, it wasn't all torture. Sometimes they came out of hibernation in their current stateroom and caught up on the work that the ship demanded.
In their routine aboard the ice ball, their "days" blended from after-work fatigue to late afternoon relaxation to evening lovemaking without any sharp transitions. There was a low intensity sexiness with every moment together and at no instant could one say "now we are making love" or "now we are not."
Jabs was a muffle, which made Brand a tyke. He had to be an ambitious lover, because Jabs had two clitorises that required satisfaction. Usu- ally he would bring one off by oral sex, and the other by penetration.
Jabs was a nephilim female, so her chromosomal makeup was ZZ, while Brand, as a male human, was XY. So there were only two possible outcomes of blending their sex chromosomes:
XZ - Jist (young jen) YZ - Dirk (young yang)
Gradually Jabs took on more than her share of the work maintaining their home, letting the constant activity still her mind. She made routine inspections of forgotten corners of the ice ball and marveled at the reli- ability of some of the components of Chivalrous, despite the ship's extreme age.
Victoria Millet was born in 1994 during the second year of the journey to the Gravel Pile. Che was not born when Brand and Jabs had phantomized themselves, yet every atom in hez little body had already been phantomized.
The labor was agonizing for Jabs, of course, since Brand had nothing in the way of painkillers, and in free fall it was very messy, with globules of amniotic fluid going everywhere in the stateroom they used for the de- livery room.
When the child arrived, in apparent good health, Brand looked between its legs and saw both a tiny penis and a scrotum, and just below them was a set of labia majora. And Brand realized they had a real problem, because they were making for Earth, and the Earth didn't know about jens. Society on Earth wasn't designed to deal with jens. This whole thing was something he never thought about when he was courting Jabs.
Brand talked things over with his wife and they both decided that since their baby had a vagina, and a womb, and would be perfectly capable of bearing children someday, they would raise it as a girl on Earth, and they would start treating her as a girl right here in the ice ball. So Victoria Millet she was. But the kid would have a very hard row to hoe.
It was only with constant watchfulness that Brand and Jabs and baby Victoria continued on with their mini-ecosystem intact. Everything was recycled. Air, water, and even their own solid wastes were turned into compost for their little garden. The ship had dried fruits, beef jerky, and canned foods stocked in odd corners which Brand dug out now and then to prevent them from starting to despise eating the same old foods.
From the General Store at Saturn's moon of Tethys Brand once bought a sup- ply of meats, which he kept frozen in nooks of the ice ball to supplement their diet, but these were rationed too.
In terms of recreation there was plenty to do. Since they were not going directly to Earth, Brand decided to maintain zero-gee for the Crossing. He figured they could all acclimate themselves to gravity at their own pace on the flight from the Gravel Pile to Earth). Free fall play was readily available at any time.
The ten-foot wide hole down the first four decks of the ship was like a miniature Freeball Gamecore once Brand had lined the edges of the decks with padding. To exercise the brain, every book ever scanned or otherwise stored in electronic form was in the memory of Chivalrous.
For atmosphere, he played rock music. He hated the crap they were playing back in the Rings, weird schizophrenic disco Jabs liked but he despised. It was mostly songs about people slitting their wrists and trying to clean up after themselves as they died. Things like that.
When it was Jabs's turn to listen for alerts on the alarm board sha nursed Victoria and took in old movie titles, which were as close to Earth as sha had ever been. To Jabs, who was born and raised in space, the concept of a blue sky, any scene filmed outdoors, on a "planet" was simply beyond har ken.
As Victoria grew to become a toddler (if "toddling" was possible in free fall) it wasn't any better for her. She was second-generation space-born. The scenes of Earth on Jabs's screen were only vaguely understood by her at best. But Victoria did enjoy seeing movies with animals.
* * * * *
With a year left to go in the Crossing, petty little perceived slights and injuries boiled up and spilled over. Jabs went on a sabbatical. She took Victoria, got in the runabout and moved off for a while, claiming she need- ed to take the machine out for an extended inspection of the ice ball's exterior. But she went much farther afield than Brand expected her to, and that alarmed him.
The controls of the runabout comforted her as she sulked. Oh, she would still talk to Brand on the radio but there was always the psychological refuge of the off switch and the symbolic "You-can't-reach-me-from-there- and-sweet-talk-me-into-quitting-my-temper-tantrum."
When she didn't come back within 24 hours the war of words escalated and Jabs began taking the runabout further and further out to "punish" Brand.
Of course, she regretted playing this game after they finally made up, especially after realizing how long it was going to take to get back to Brand now that her tantrum had already been thrown and all she wanted to do was see him as soon as possible. At the height of Jabs' folly, she was a hundred thousand miles away, far beyond visual range of the ice ball, and the time lag actually become noticeable.
She couldn't hurry back because the runabout's energy source wasn't the phantomized water anymore but their precious last few drops of SHe-3. Her selfish fit was going to be very costly.
Sweet conversations resumed between them. The delay gave Jabs just enough time to compose each of her words before she spoke them. She constructed her response to be as sexy and provocative as she knew how, but she missed the simple spontaneity of actually being with Brand.
When the big day arrived Jabs docked at the aft end of Chivarous and delivered Brand's twenty-seventh birthday present: herself. Brand didn't even wait for her to get out, he pressed into the runabout and virtually attacked her.
Victoria at age two was a little too young to really understand what her parents were doing, and she wouldn't remember it anyway. After her father kissed her, Victoria went back to sleep, for the excitemnt of the final approach had kept her up all night, and Brand laid her to bed in one of the staterooms. Then it was on to the business at hand.
Jabs had criss-crossed harself with red electrical tape like a present and she let Brand devour har. The runabout became the scene of zero-gee gymnastics as they welcomed each other back to the heaven of their joined bodies.
"I really missed the smell of you," Brand said, savoring the special yin scent Jabs always had when he had finished his lady. "I didn't appreciate it until it was gone."
When the end came they could only lie there wrapped in each others' limbs, whimpering "I love you" to each other. Every inch-pound of sexual torque inside them had been wrung out. They were astonished anew at the amount of sensual joy they had given each other and the complete satisfaction they felt.
