Serendipity was an old ship. For more than two centuries she had sailed the same slow course from the inner planets to the Jovian moons and out toward the Kuiper Belt, that clot of comets lying between Neptune and Pluto. There, after unloading cargo and picking up freight bound sun-ward, her crew would adjust Serendipity’s sail, align the spinning prismatic circle of Kapton19(tm) at an angle to the distant solar orb, and begin the decade-long spiral back toward the heart of the system. Serendipity had made eleven such round-trip voyages.
Like most of the crew Captain D’Angelo Jones had been born aboard her and had grown up within her slowly rotating tangle of corridors, cargo pods, and superstructure. Except for a brief period off wiving while Serendipity tacked above the Mars ecliptic to avoid the asteroid belt, Jones had spent his life inside the ancient vessel, and he knew her every sound, her every twitch and tremble, as well as he knew his own physical body. That long bass thrum was the tension of the vast sail against its rigging. The sad creaking pulsing in and out of audibility—that came from winches making microscopic alterations to the sail’s trim, keeping Serendipity bearing straight, propelled by sunlight across the ocean of night. His cousin Leticia—Letty—was the lookout on watch. Her short black hair fanned in a curly halo around her dark features in the micro-gravity as her fingers flickered over the flat screen before her, scouring space around Serendipity with optical scanners and radar.
“Everything’s clean for fifteen hundred klicks,” she said.
“Leshawn?” D’Angelo asked.
His niece’s second husband was at the weapons console. “Fore and aft cannons loaded with buckshot, D’Angelo. Lasers ready.”
Beatrice had the helm. Unlike the others, Jones’s wife was fair, with a complexion the color of milk and a ruff of hair as golden as corn. Her eyes were pale, pale blue. Beatrice had been born on Phobos, which had been settled by Europeans. “Orbital insertion in six minutes, two seconds,” she said.
“Hold her steady.”
They were skimming seventeen hundred kilometers above the rings of Saturn, a vast uneasy ocean that stretched below them into infinity. Rivers of color, glinting silver and gold and crimson and umber, writhed into view and disappeared astern.
Saturn was off the starboard bow. Although it was still a hundred thousand kilometers distant, the immense brown and yellow hemisphere subtended a quarter of the sky.
Serendipity would approach Saturn within eighteen thousand klicks, entering a shallow orbit meant to fling her away into space like a stone from a slingshot. Only by leveraging such a gravitational assist from the gas giant could they hope reach the Kuiper Belt. The efficiency of a solar sail was proportional to its proximity to the sun.
“Whole lot of debris ahead, D’Angelo.” Letty studied her console. “Pebbles. A dozen pieces a meter in diameter.”
“Range one thousand, two hundred eighty klicks,” Leshawn said. “Locked on and standing by.”
“Clear a path,” Jones ordered.
The rings of Saturn were composed of rock, dirt, and ice, trillions upon trillions of pieces varying in size from particles of smoke to floating mountains. Most fell toward the low end of this spectrum. The rings surrounded the planet in a belt almost three hundred thousand kilometers in diameter yet they had an average thickness of a single kilometer and sometimes their width could be measured in hundreds of meters. Occasionally, however, plumes of debris would be knocked out of the rings, either by collision with other particles or simply through some peculiarity of gravitational interaction. This created navigational hazards for ships approaching the planet.
Leshawn triggered his weapons. Beams of coherent light lanced out. The debris in their path exploded into mist.
“All clear,” he said.
“Beatrice?” Jones asked.
“Orbital insertion in four minutes, thirty seconds.”
“Steady as she goes.”
Jones gazed warily through the clear dome of the bridge out at the kilometers of sail, brilliant against the jet backdrop of space. Rock, dirt, and ice weren’t the only perils facing the old ship during its traverse of Saturn. The rings were inhabited by tribes of piratical aborigines, the descendants of castaways, outcasts, and criminals, who enjoyed nothing better than hijacking passing solar sails, robbing them of cargo, and enslaving the passengers and crew.
These vermin lived in caves that they hollowed out in larger pieces of ring material. They mined iron, copper, lead, and other metals from the infinite expanse of detritus and refined the ore by hand, casting it into the machinery necessary to survive in vacuum. They breathed oxygen extracted from water ice through electrolysis, which also provided hydrogen to fuel their rockets. Since the sun at this distance was too feeble to support plant growth, they polished acres of ice to reflective smoothness, aligned these mirrors in huge fields, and concentrated the sunlight to an intensity sufficient for hydroculture. Even so protein was scarce in the rings. That was another reason the scum took captives.
Unfortunately, despite their primitive level of technology, the aborigines were a real danger. Over the years Serendipity had been attacked seven times during her passages of Saturn.
“More debris to starboard,” Letty announced.
“Clear a path.”
“Two minutes, six seconds.”
“Hold her steady.”
Serendipity, like most solar sails, was a freighter. Her cargo consisted of bulk goods and durable commodities, items that weren’t sufficiently valuable to warrant the exorbitant cost of shipping aboard a fusion ship and whose worth wouldn’t decrease during the long years of transportation by sail. She was carrying whiskey in bond from the Tarsus distilleries on Io, mining and manufacturing equipment, silk and wool from the Imbrium farms on Luna, and five thousand indentured servants from the urban warrens of Valles Marineris. These were enduring the long haul to the Kuiper Belt in suspended animation, frozen to within degrees of absolute zero. They were strung out behind the ship in translucent capsules that were open to vacuum, insulating their cargo from temperature variation but not providing much else in the way of amenities or safety.
On average 97 percent of such passengers survived the crossing alive and undamaged. One percent would die. Two percent would suffer freezer burn of varying severity.
“Twenty-two seconds to insertion. Twenty.”
“Captain—”
The use of his title alerted Jones. “What is it, Letty?”
“Seven degrees to port. Range nine hundred and forty klicks.”
“—Four seconds,” Beatrice was counting down. “Three seconds. Two … one. We have insertion.” His wife’s hands fell away from the helm. Serendipity had made orbit.
“Eight hundred and twenty klicks,” Letty continued. “Eight hundred and ten and closing.” His cousin shunted data from the optical scanners to the main display, giving them a view of a swarm of rock and ice fragments rising from the plane of the rings toward Serendipity. At this distance the instrumentation had a resolution of twenty meters. It was impossible to decide whether the scene was innocuous or whether it hid some greater danger. “Seven hundred and ninety and closing,” Letty called out. “Relative velocity at point one klick per.”
“Bring it up on infrared,” Jones instructed.
Letty stroked the console, switching the view from the visible spectrum. In this mode space was dark blue. The chunks of ice and rock, scant degrees from zero Kelvin, were only slightly paler. Jones studied the image intently. Nowhere did he see a trace of green or red, yellow or orange, which would indicate living warmth and the presence of enemies.
Still he remained uneasy.
“Bearing?” he asked.
“Should cross our bow by eighty-six klicks.”
“Too close,” Jones muttered. He stared at the screen and then said to Leshawn, “Take out everything larger than a meter.”
His niece’s second husband nodded. “Aye, aye, D’Angelo.”
Leshawn bowed over his board. Once more lasers lanced forth, the forward sections of the beams becoming perceptible each time they found a mark, momentarily delineated in the clouds of steam and dust generated by their impact with the swarm of debris hurtling from the rings. Again the lasers flicked out, creating a nimbus of subliming water and methane vapor mixed with chlorine and fluorine as well as with particles of carbon, iron, and nickel.
Velocity distorted the shape of the cloud into a comma kilometers long.
Then this cloud itself detonated, shooting streamers of brilliant fire, bright candles of furious white light fleeing from the maelstrom, and Jones felt a sick twist of tension settle inside his chest, understanding exactly what he was looking at, knowing that it had all been a ruse and that they were under attack. The damned savages had hidden their filthy makeshift rockets in the ring material and the sons of bitches were coming full throttle straight toward his ship.
Evasive action was out of the question. Clutched by Saturn’s gravity, Serendipity would be unable to maneuver until she rounded the vast planet and was flung again toward deep space and the Kuiper Belt. The savages’ timing was perfect.
Jones refused to allow emotion to enter his voice. “Fire at will,” he said.
“Immediately, captain.”
They carried projectile weapons against just such an eventuality. The three forward cannon were loaded with rounds of buckshot. Leshawn fired the guns, filling space ahead of Serendipity with a storm of pellets capable of penetrating the ice and metal out of which the primitives built their frail ships. Unfortunately, Jones knew, it wouldn’t be enough. It never was.
He keyed on the intercom. “Now hear this. Now hear this. All hands to stations. Serendipity is under attack. Prepare to repel boarders.”
Forty-six of the savages’ tiny ships had been concealed among the rock and ice, shielded from visual and infrared detection. Three were destroyed within seconds. Four veered off on tangents at the mercy of malfunctioning control systems. The remaining thirty-nine ships continued on course despite the barrage of buckshot Leshawn threw at them.
At a distance of sixty kilometers their jets fired, braking their velocity relative to Serendipity. Letty pasted a close-up on the main screen, allowing a view of the lead vessel. Its fuel tanks, exhaust chamber, and attitude jets were fashioned from hand-beaten metal. The navigational and electrical systems, however, which were too complex for the savages to manufacture themselves, had been stripped from vessels they had robbed. The rest of the thing was a chunk of ice that had been crudely chiseled into shape, hollowed out, and pressurized.
The airlock was a pane of ice that had been frozen to the hull to create an atmosphere seal.
It shattered suddenly into a thousand shards, which fled away into space. Distant figures emerged from the ship through the portal now revealed. They fired their thrusters and burned toward Serendipity. Fighting would soon be hand-to-hand.
Jones thumbed on the intercom. “Engagement in seventy-three seconds.”
Beatrice stood down from her console, went to the arms locker, and removed four epées—projectile weapons were, of course, useless at close quarters in micro-gravity since the recoil would send the shooter tumbling. She handed them out, keeping the last for herself, running the slim graphite blade through a lightning routine, the sword moving almost too quickly to see.
Then she went to Jones, her breath hot against his ear and the fine pale hair on her upper lip damp from exertion. “You must take care, my husband,” she told him. “Come back to me. Promise me that you will.”
Jones knew it would be useless to ask the same of her since Beatrice, like all Martians, was both fearless and merciless, God love her. Her lips brushed his. Then she pulled Jones’s hood over his head and secured his face-plate before closing her own.
“Ten seconds to engagement,” Letty counted down. “Eight.”
Serendipity’s sail was a round sheet of shimmering Kapton19(tm) 24 kilometers in diameter with a two-kilometer circular hole cut out of its center. Through this projected the main body of the ship, a complicated spindle almost three kilometers long. Joined to each other by shrouds of cable, both sail and superstructure were spinning with a period of 72 seconds. This rotation allowed the sail to maintain its shape without the need for supporting spars or masts, and also generated an artificial gravity of .3G within the ship itself, sufficient to prevent muscular atrophy and skeletal distortion among the crew during their lifetimes lived in space.
The bridge extended a hundred meters out from the deck on a spire that was in turn seated on gimbals, an arrangement that allowed it to remain stationary while the rest of the ship spun, providing Jones with a stable vantage point.
The crew—his family, each of them a relative by blood or by marriage—took up positions amidships, abaft of the sail and ten meters clear of the rotating complex of habitats and cargo containers, greenhouses, equipment sheds, hangars, and workshops that comprised the untidy bulk of Serendipity. Others took a stand at the bow, guarding the main portal into the vessel.
In the distance, now subtending a third of the sky, Saturn cast a yellow pall over the ship and the tiny figures defending her. Seventeen hundred kilometers away spread the strange and dangerous ocean of the rings, an insane kaleidoscope of chaotic geometry.
With appalling suddenness the savages burst through the sail.
Diminished by perspective, the holes they made coming through the Kapton19(tm) seemed no larger than pinpricks in comparison to the vast expanse of sail. But tension widened the punctures, splitting apart the edges in a visible process, the holes engorging into gashes hundreds of meters wide and hundreds of meters long. Only ripstops—seams of denser material overlaid on the Kapton19(tm) at regular intervals—prevented the sail from cleaving asunder.
Most of the invaders struck amidships directly at the crew. Many failed to bleed off their velocity, using themselves as human missiles, sometimes successfully, sometimes with suicidal results. Others hove to in a blinding flourish of personal rocketry to engage the defenders’ graphite epées with their own cruder weaponry: maces, morning stars, and pikes of beaten iron, sabers of ice, and clubs and daggers of rock. Soon bodies were floating limply or thrashing while their fluids evaporated in the vacuum, the integrity of their suits fatally breached. Vaporizing blood cast the desperate scene in an incongruous pink glow.
Smaller parties of savages struck at the bow. One group jetted for the bridge. Jones readied his sword.
“Let’s have at the God damned murdering sons of bitches,” he snarled, enraged to blasphemy by what they were doing to his family and to his ship.
Beatrice struck the emergency lever, which blew out the airlock, evacuating the bridge of atmosphere. She launched herself into space in a tumble that made her impossible to target as she flew at the savages, careering into them in a deadly flurry and then rebounding at an angle, the tip of her epée crimson.
Jones headed toward the foremost of the approaching party, a tall figure in a black suit emblazoned with stylized skulls of iridescent orange and purple. The savage was wielding a quarterstaff of blue ice with iron spikes embedded in either end. He struck out with the weapon but Jones deflected the blow with the pommel of his sword, slithered the epée around the staff, and ran it into his opponent’s throat, thinking that here was one God cursed barbarian who would see no profit from this day and from the attack on Serendipity. Without drawing breath, Jones leveraged the body to launch himself at another opponent. Out of the corner of his eye he saw Letty and Leshawn skirmishing with their own antagonists. For an instant he caught a glimpse of Beatrice, her pale features set in a feral grin, and then he was wrestling with another of the cannibals. The pirate slit a long gash in Jones’s thigh before the epée slid through the bastard’s heart.
Jones slapped a patch over his wound, stanching the discharge of blood and air.
Leshawn and Letty had bested their opponents. Beatrice was surrounded by three bodies. With a sidelong glance toward Jones, she sliced off an ear from each one and tucked the mementos away for safekeeping. Martians! He thought fondly, loving her ferocity as much as he feared losing her from the consequences of her bravery.
The flare of light from an igniting rocket overcame the softer glow of Saturn. While most of the savages had engaged Serendipity’s crew, others had been cutting cargo containers, hydroponics pods, and similar equipment free of the ship. They had bolted one-shot engines and primitive guidance systems to this booty and were now launching the stuff toward the rings, where others of their tribe were, no doubt, waiting to receive it. This, more than anything that had happened so far—this dismantling of his ship before his very eyes—infuriated Jones. Unable to find his voice, he gestured inarticulately for the others to follow his lead. Thumbing on his jets, he headed for the nearest group of pirates. The scum had detached a dozen suspended-animation capsules from their moorings and were about to consign them into the void.
They weren’t after slaves, Jones knew, since the pirates lacked the technology to revive the frozen passengers. But it didn’t take much skill to slice a steak.
Jones didn’t bother to brake. He changed attitude until he was approaching feet-first and let momentum be his weapon.
The jolt of collision slammed through him from his boots to his teeth. His target came apart.
This effectively killed Jones’s velocity. He lanced out with his epée at another savage but his adversary parried Jones’s thrust with a meter-long cudgel. The riposte caught him just above the face-plate with sufficient force to send him tumbling head over heels into space.
Unconscious.
Three minutes went by before he came to. Choking. Coughing. Lungs on fire.
His mask was full of blood from a gash on his brow, a flurry of red globules joining and breaking apart and rejoining in an intricate dance, obscuring his vision and choking him.
There was too much fluid for his filtration system to handle. Jones knew he would drown in his own blood unless he took quick action. There was, unfortunately, only one thing he could do.
He had ten seconds in which to do it.
That was how long a man could remain conscious in vacuum.
Jones retched out the liquid he had inspired and screwed his eyes shut to prevent ice crystals from forming on them. Exposure to vacuum chilled the body as moisture on the skin evaporated.
He exhaled, emptying his lungs, and stretched his mouth wide open. This would prevent damage to his lungs when atmosphere rushed from them.
Not allowing himself time to think, Jones opened his visor, evacuating it of air. Vacuum bit his cheeks like a thousand needles. His nostrils and throat stung as air hissed from them. The blood fouling his helmet dried into flakes as it was blown out into space. The blood on his forehead congealed and sealed the gash.
Five seconds. Six.
Eight seconds passed before he got his helmet closed and flooded with atmosphere and he was able to breathe freely again.
When he looked around, Jones learned he was midway between the ship and the sail, heading toward the vast sheet at a velocity of five meters per second in a crazy somersault.
Careful bursts of his attitude jets steadied the spin and killed his forward motion. Three additional discharges sent Jones heading back toward Serendipity.
All communications channels were jammed with the mad static of conflict. It was impossible to tell what was going on and how the battle was progressing. Jones keyed on a priority override, which patched him through to Letty.
“D’Angelo, thank God you’re alive.”
“What’s the situation, cousin?”
“We have them contained at the stern.”
“I’ll be there.”
Jones oriented himself and triggered a long burn. Serendipity grew before him. Another burn sent him skimming sternward. A third bled his velocity and brought him to a stop relative to the ship. Not far away two groups were standing off from one another. Fifteen savages were left of the party that had boarded Serendipity. The remaining primitives were gathered in a defensive three-dimensional knot, arm-to-arm and arm-to-leg and head-to-toe, weapons outward, all except for three of their number, who floated forward of the main body. Each held a leash connected to a handcuffed crew member. The leashes attached to the tubing linking the prisoners’ oxygen tanks to their helmets. A good tug would rip loose the hoses and kill the hostages.
“What are their demands?” Jones asked Letty.
She indicated a figure so lanky that it hardly seemed human, wearing a suit ornamented with swastikas and broken crosses done in blood-red. “That’s their hetman. Jasper the Something. A charming conversationalist. He wants passage for himself and his men. All the bodies of their dead. The bodies of our dead, too. He didn’t explain himself but it’s not difficult to guess why. Oh, and Jasper expects a ransom. In bullion, if you please.”
“Does he?” The anger building in Jones was so profound that it required all the control he had developed during his years of command to reply to Letty in an even tone. “Who are the hostages?”
“Kevin Milestone, third engineer. Jasmine Whitlock, first cook, you know her, she makes those wonderful greens. And—oh, D’Angelo, I’m sorry—they have Beatrice, too.”
He heard the news as if from far away, as if it didn’t matter. It didn’t, not really, that’s what he told himself, because he was Serendipity’s captain. All his crew were important to him, no single one any more valuable than any other. At least that was how it was supposed to be, and that was how it was, by God, even though the scum had his wife leashed by the throat.
Jones burned to within ten meters of the hetman, close enough to see the brilliant blue of Beatrice’s eyes and the furious expression in them. He prayed she wouldn’t do anything stupid but feared her courage would overcome her common sense. Martians were like that.
“I’m D’Angelo Jones, captain of Serendipity,” Jones said. “Release your prisoners and you may live. I give you my word.”
“You give Jasper nothing, sailor man,” the hetman replied with a sneer. “Jasper takes what Jasper wants. Jasper takes your ship. Jasper takes your women. Jasper takes your dead to feed Jasper’s children. Jasper is hetman. Jasper takes.”
“You take nothing, hetman. Your people are fled. You’re outnumbered. Give me one reason I should hold back from killing you.”
“Jasper gives you three,” the savage replied and tugged at the leash he held. Beatrice clutched at the hose with her bound hands, taking the strain, but even so the jerk loosened the tube from its coupling and a thin stream of air began jetting from the joint. Jasper laughed. “Maybe Jasper only gives you two reasons.”
“What do you want?”
“That’s better, sailor man. You listen to Jasper. You do as Jasper says. Maybe Jasper lets your people live.”
Before the hetman could continue, however, Beatrice shrugged, blew Jones a kiss, and realized his worst fear. With a jerk of her shoulders, she intentionally ripped the hosing free from her own helmet. Then, disregarding the flooding forth of her life’s air, she drew a knife from an ankle sheath, whipped the blade up, and plunged it into her captor.
Jasper died.
As he did, however, his mace caught Beatrice square in the face. Her mask shattered. Atmosphere rushed from her helmet into space.
Hoping that she’d had the presence of mind not to hold her breath, which would have ruptured her lungs beyond repair, Jones thought, Ninety seconds.
That was how long Beatrice would survive before vacuum killed her. She would be unconscious in ten.
Jones took out the nearest pirates with two quick thrusts. The rest of his crew burned past and fell on the remaining savages but Jones didn’t spare them a glance. He had to reach Beatrice. She was being carried off into space in a mad spiral by the atmosphere jetting from her tanks.
Eighty seconds. Somehow he managed to maintain the countdown in his mind while concentrating on catching her. Seventy-five.
He burned full throttle but couldn’t get near. The squirming tubing on her back altered her bearing by the second and it was as if she were purposely evading him. Not until her tanks exhausted themselves was Jones finally able to reach his wife.
Sixty seconds.
Beatrice was unconscious. Her complexion, even in the dim yellow wash of light afforded by Saturn, was becoming flushed a brilliant red as the capillaries beneath her skin ruptured in the vacuum.
Jones sent them both hurtling back toward the ship with a continuous burn, keeping up the acceleration until his propellant ran out. He thumbed on the priority override and reached Letty.
“We’re coming in at velocity,” he said. “I’m out of fuel. Be ready to catch us.”
“Aye, aye, captain.”
Serendipity drew nearer with appalling inertia. Each instant cut Jones like a razor. He held Beatrice in his arms, cursing her bravery, her God rotted courage, the very qualities that made him love her with such agonizing passion.
Thirty seconds.
“We have you in sight, captain.”
Slowly, all too slowly, Serendipity swelled in bulk, fleshing out into the untidy convoluted structure that it was. A hundred-meter boom was maneuvering a wide-mouthed cargo net into place at their estimated point of impact.
“Don’t get it wrong, Letty.”
“We won’t, captain. I swear it.”
Then everything happened at once.
For a frightening moment Jones thought they would miss the net but they entered it cleanly and continued straight into the webbing, which lacerated their suits but had enough elasticity to kill their momentum without killing them.
Fifteen seconds.
Gas sprayed freely around them from a dozen cuts as the boom brought the net to the hull, where Letty and some other sailors were waiting with a medical tent.
Five seconds.
Jones wrestled Beatrice inside the transparent envelope and flooded it with a mixture of pure oxygen and helium. As the tent expanded with atmosphere, he plunged his arms into the flexible sleeves provided for them and clamped tubing to her femoral artery, drawing her blood through a scrubber chamber, which oxygenated the fluid before pumping it back into her. Then he applied a defibrillator to her chest.
Her body jerked at the shock but failed to continue moving on its own.
Zero seconds.
Jones charged the device and shocked her again. Still Beatrice failed to breath. Nor did a third application of current cause her heart to beat.
It was then that Jones knew he had been too late. He had lost her.
“Captain—”
He refused to remove his eyes from Beatrice’s face.
“What is it?”
“You’re losing atmosphere.”
He shrugged an emergency suit over his torn one and accepted a fresh set of tanks. Still Beatrice lay motionless.
“Status?” He heard his own voice as if from a distance.
“Twelve confirmed dead. Twenty-two injured. We’re still estimating damage.”
Jones allowed his gaze to drift from the unmoving form of his wife to the looming titan that was Saturn. Strangely his rage was directed not at the savages, not at Jasper, the hetman, but at the vast planet Serendipity was approaching, as if it were itself responsible for all this tragedy. If he could, he would have grabbed the world down from the sky and shattered it in his fist. But he was only human.
Jones let out a breath and turned away from Beatrice. He was also captain, by God, with responsibilities that outweighed his personal concerns.
“Well?” he roared to the assembly around him. “What are we waiting for? Let’s get this damned vessel in shape. Letty—detail repair and salvage squads. You there, cousin, I want the bridge pressurized and operational within the hour. Leshawn? Where the hell is Leshawn?”
“D’Angelo … ”
His name came to him so softly that at first he thought he was imagining she had spoken. Then she said his name again.
Monitor lights that had been dark were now flickering as they reported physiological activity. Beatrice’s eyes were open, bloodshot and crimson. Her face was a single ugly bruise but beautiful to him. The swell of her breast as she breathed was the most wonderful thing he had ever seen.
He pressed his cheek against the transparent canopy separating them, unable to speak. Beatrice stretched up an arm and stroked the material with her fingertips as if it were his skin that she was caressing. In spite of her mask of pain, her smile was as mischievous as ever.
“Did I not tell you to take care,” she whispered, referring to the gash across his forehead, her voice incongruously squeaky because of the helium. “D’Angelo, my love, why do you never listen to me.”
Somehow she found the insouciant strength to wink. His heart breaking, Jones raised his head and regarded the crowd of sailors—of family—that was, despite orders, still gathered around them.
“God curse it, haven’t any of you work to do?” he growled.
No one answered. No one moved, either. Then, suddenly, Jones just had to laugh, he couldn’t help it, the laughter exploding from him. Soon everyone was laughing with him, in spite of everything, in spite of those they had lost forever, because at this moment they were alive and that was indeed very good. For now they would laugh.
“Get on with you,” he muttered and took his wife, tent and tubing and life support equipment and all, into his arms and began heading for an airlock.
Now subtending fully two thirds of the sky, Saturn was immense beyond comprehension, her rings an ocean of so much panorama that it hurt to regard them.
Soon they would be on their way past her, assisted onward by the gravity of the gas giant toward the Kuiper Belt. By God, Jones marveled, it was good to be alive and to be a sailor!
End
Be sure to check out David Hill’s other Metastellar publication, Castaway on Temurlone.
This story previously appeared in Far Orbit.
Edited by E. S. Foster.
David Wesley Hill is the author of around forty short stories and a couple novels, including the award-winning nautical adventure At Drake's Command. Mr. Hill lives in rural North Carolina.