Bastion Saturn

by C. Chase Harwood

  A beam of strong sunlight was blasting through his windshield and across the cabin like the line of a plasma cutter. A glance outside explained it. One of the array of huge mirrors that Harry relied on to capture sunlight was misaligned. Saturn only receives one percent of the sunlight Earth does. The mirror, and hundreds like it, concentrated that light to grow grains to convert to ethanol, which Harry used to make the booze that was currently breaking Caleb’s head. A micro meteor must have hit it. Rather than focusing the light on Harry’s domed crops, it was filling Caleb’s cockpit, triggering dreams of Vermont.

  As he stretched, yawned, and marveled at his body-odor’s ability to overwhelm the general stink of his ship, Vermont fresh cut grass still swirled in the recesses of his olfactory memory. He would put his foot down today. They would risk it and head for the Magic Castle. He needed an Earth fix. After three Earth months of creative moneymaking, Caleb wanted to stare at something green, even if the bulk of it was artificial.

  From his position on the moon Rhea, the huge orange-yellow moon Titan was just coming into view. With an old-fashioned pair of binoculars that he’d won in a card game, he spotted the black dot that was the floating city called Hanson. The planet-size moon appeared as though some god had tossed Mylar confetti all around it, each silvery spec representing a mirror that focused sunlight on Titan’s dense atmosphere. Vast chemical and organic processes were taking place in that atmosphere. Man’s first experiment with terraforming another celestial body was well underway. A person couldn’t breathe there yet, but soon enough. Perhaps in a couple more decades.

  Caleb grunted at the notion of twenty years and expertly moved from his small bunk into the cockpit to sit in the pilot’s chair. Time to wake the gang.

  Before he could send the text, a sight that would never feel real presented itself outside the windshield: a woman, wearing only go-go boots, took baby steps across the lunar surface. She held her clothes over one arm while her eyes remained fixed on the airlock-loading entrance to Harry’s. The woman was shaped like a creature off the pages of a graphic novel. Her hair was messy and remained stiff in the low gravity vacuum. The only telltale sign that she wasn’t made of flesh was the gentle slow motion bobbing of the silicon that held her breasts up almost impossibly high—that and her glowing white skin. Caleb lightly chuckled as he remembered Spruck immediately forking over the bulk of his latest share to Harry in exchange for a night with the sexbot. The machine was an Asian model made to look twenty-five or so, and Caleb noted that she had her pubic hair “grown out” the way Spruck annoyingly professed to like it. The robot’s feet kicked up little quickly falling dust motes as they crossed the heavily packed ground of the landing area. She reached the airlock, not bothering with a code. Her proximity sent a signal for the door to open, skipping the first part of the pressurization procedure. Caleb shook his head slightly and felt his stomach rumble. The hangover was going to be epic. He needed a greasy breakfast and a beer to push through it. He sent a text to the gang letting them know he was going for cheesy eggs and that they could join if they wanted.

  He thought of the naked robot’s nonchalant stroll with envy as he pulled on his stinking elastoware. Saturn’s magnetosphere did an adequate job of protecting its satellites from the Sun’s radiation, but stepping outside still meant facing astounding cold and nothing to breathe. For the hundredth time, he questioned the decision to leave Earth. As he stared over at Titan, appearing so close and yet dwarfed by the giant ringed mother planet on the opposite side of his view, he considered again the undertaking in which they were all participants. The self-assembling city Hanson, floating in its own gas balloon at the edge of Titan’s atmosphere, was a marvel. The seeding of methane-eating bacteria throughout the Titan atmosphere and in the methane lakes of the planet marked an ingenious achievement. The microbes ate and ate and in turn created oxygen, farting it into natural atmosphere of nitrogen laced with hydrocarbon. The mirrors that concentrated the distant sunlight onto the moon warmed it just enough for the new oxygen to remain a gas and the microbes to stay alive. It was breathtaking in its ingenuity. The addition of oxygen as a gas to the hydrocarbon-rich air also created a volatile situation. A big enough spark could set the whole atmosphere aflame in a giant chain reaction. This required constant vigilance. Even now, Caleb could see a black dot on the hazy surface appear and collapse on itself as a Gliding Fire Team set off a Buster. Like detonating dynamite to control an oil rig fire, a Buster created a controlled explosion that sucked up all of the available burnable gases, thus preventing any spontaneous combustion. The whole thing was an engineering feat that even a creationist could appreciate. And yet, whenever the Earth was close enough in its orbit for spotting with the naked eye, a pinprick nearly indiscernible from the stars beyond, Caleb would leave the scoped version of it up on a monitor for days. Fuck AI. Fuck the fools who embraced it. There was no going back. The people of Earth were just one big fucking source code now.

  He flicked the switch on his elastoware bodysuit and felt the piezoelectric cells working away, pressing his skin against his muscles. He opened the hatch to the Diamond Girl’s exosuit port and climbed into the overly familiar thing. As he shoved his foot into the right boot he felt the dampness collecting there. He really needed to pony-up and get the suit cleaned. No amount of antifungals were going to beat what he had growing in there. Letting his arms slide into the sleeves, he poked his head into the acrylic dome helmet with a practiced fluid motion. His breathing echoed around his head in an old familiar way that he didn’t even notice any longer as he spoke the command for the hatch to close behind him. He raised the cover shell and stepped off the loading platform onto the soft talc-like ground.

  4.5 Earth Months Earlier

  As was his way, Caleb Day had left Earth with the intent to wing it. A man of vague objectives, he found that shit happened whether he planned for it or not. A person who hated disappointment, he had adjusted himself to this reality at an early age, choosing instead to let life come to him. His one acquired skill was breaking and entering, which he began to develop when he was eleven with nothing much to do while growing up in a small Vermont town. It started on one mind-bogglingly boring weekend, when he and some other kids hopped a bus to a bigger town and wandered around aimlessly until they were all hungry. It was a Sunday, and some stores still closed on Sundays back then, including a sandwich shop that had an alleyway loading zone. Caleb was never sure where the notion came from, but as his buddies were all whining about food and not having enough money to pay for it, he simply grabbed a tire iron that was laying in the back of a parked pick-up truck, stepped over to the sandwich shop backdoor, and slammed the flat end of the iron into the jam, popping the lock. The kids looked at him with surprise—not that it stopped them all from going inside and making themselves sandwiches. Caleb made sure that they cleaned up after themselves, and pulling the door quietly shut, they skittered away like sated mice in the night. Twenty-six years and countless break-ins later, he had never been caught. Chased, yes. Shot at, three times. Photographed, only as a blur. Yet, he never considered himself a criminal, more an observer of life who took advantage of gaps as they presented themselves.

  Upon arrival in the Saturn System, and after thawing out from hibernation, he awoke to find that he had five thousand credits left in the Bank of Titan. He had departed Earth with nearly three-hundred thousand, but supposedly a nonmetastasized cancer had been discovered in his liver during a routine hibernation scan. With his body temperature already reduced and his brain activity nil, the standard, preauthorized procedure, was for the medbots to print out a new liver using his own reactivated stem cells and swap it with the bad one. Because socialized medicine was considered a sin among the pioneers, and because no insurer was willing to underwrite any of the colonists anyway, the procedure cost nearly three-hundred-thousand credits, all of it going to the med company that had set up shop on Caleb’s particular ship, the Miner 49er (also known as a Hanson building). Caleb awoke
to discover that life continued to hold a regular pattern for him, and that yes, absolutely, shit happens. When the Miner 49er docked with the mother city of Hanson, aka the Magic Castle, Caleb stepped out on the gravity-enhancing magnetic street and found himself nearly destitute. He had a room in the building that he owned outright, but having not secured a job before he left, the lights would be out in a month and food would be a major consideration. Through sheer wit and remarkable skill at taking what he needed without being caught, he survived a year. Then he saw the ads calling for police duty. Deciding that the best cop was one who could think like a ne’er-do-well, he filled out an application. Ready to sign up a walking corpse if it had to, the service put a freshly printed uniform on him post-haste and gave him a month of training.

  His first job was as a last-minute replacement with a small force assigned to oversee the peaceful final touches on a contract joining the drug-making establishments on Dione and Pandora. He was given a battered shuttle that had been converted for police work and sent alone to rendezvous with the Pandoran-based contractors who were already in route to Dione.

  To reach the rendezvous, Caleb had forty-plus hours of flight time to contemplate the swiftness of his career change. The uniform created in him its intended effect: for the first time in his life he felt a part of something greater than himself, and while his instincts accepted that notion as being good on the whole, his gut, the thing he trusted most, still rebelled against it. Relying on others had always ended in disappointment for him. From his parents and grandparents, to his aunts and uncles, to anyone else who took him in, relationships ended in acrimony—girlfriends especially. Work? Jobs! Jobs were way-stations from pile of shit to pile of shit. Nevertheless, his survival instinct ruled for the moment. The uniform was a positive development, and he vowed to himself, beyond the empty vow that he had made to the Hanson Chamber of Commerce, that he would give this opportunity his best shot. Being a cop meant being something greater that just another cog in some clockwork. Being a cop meant being an overseer of the greater society, someone who helped his fellow citizens stay within the social contract. Perhaps best of all, being a cop gifted him with power. Caleb had never felt powerful (except for when he had successfully made off with things). Power, anchored in the foundation of the ruling class (for that was who had the real power), felt exhilarating.

  The Pandoran flotilla comprised one large container ship surrounded by five smaller police ships. Caleb was directed to bring his shuttle into the formation by a police sergeant named Gunderson who was directing things from the bridge of the container ship. In a society without an official military, the formation felt very marshal to Caleb.

  Though the orbits of Titan and Dione caused the two moons to come relatively close to each other on a regular basis, for whatever reason, the Pandoran flotilla chose to rendezvous with the smaller moon when Dione’s orbit was on the opposite side of Saturn from Titan. As far as Caleb was concerned, this required an illogically long trip—but who was he to question it?

  After a few days of mind-bogglingly boring travel, with little to no communication, they finally approached their destination. As the fifteenth largest Saturn satellite, Dione was yet another pockmarked gray body, not terribly different from the bulk of Saturn’s airless moons. Primarily a dirty ice ball, its craters served as foundations for the domed acreage that was the hallmark of the farming community. Huge mirror-arrays guided the nurturing sunshine to the crops beneath and automatically tracked the star to maintain their intense focus as the moon orbited its gas-giant mother. When the Sun was out of view, hydrogen power plants did the rest, converting the energy locked up in the ice into electricity for UV LED banks. The climate inside each dome was adjusted for the type of crop, though most crops on Dione were of the cannabis and poppy variety.

  The 3,942,021 people who had set out for a new life in the Saturn System had a natural libertarian streak, bonded by a consensus that this new land of opportunity, made up of likeminded, live-and-let-live people, would need very little in the way of law enforcement. Such a conceit naturally assumed that every man woman and child would choose to be armed. What better way for a population to honestly thrive than to ensure that individuals were well armed? Nothing keeps folks in line better than cold loaded steel (or in most cases a short-range nerve disrupter) nicely displayed on everyone’s hips. As a result of this mutual understanding, only one hundred cops had made up the original token force, in a planetary-lunar system that far exceeded the landmass of humble old Earth. In a community where everyone had a “Don’t Tread On Me” flag, there were nearly infinite possibilities for treading.

  Without a nanny-state enemy to fear, and theoretically safely removed from the evils of AI and a planet full of ABE jerk-offs, the natural thing for these humans to do was to find new enemies. Cliques formed, with sides taken and property squabbled over, and in the land grab that ensued with the settlement of any of Saturn’s sixty-two utilizable moons, inevitably conflicts arose.

  After the chaos of year one, the police force expanded to eighteen-hundred mostly disaffected individuals who had found that colonizing grit didn’t come to everyone. Additionally, the mighty Bez Hanson, father of the new colony, had asked for deputized law enforcement volunteers to fill the gaps. These folks acted as local constables while simultaneously going about their daily occupations. Monty Teach was one of those. With his pot farm dome established on Dione, Monty found it advantageous to add cop to his title of farmer. As the Pandoran flotilla came into orbit, both the pot farmer and cop sides of him frowned as he gazed at the arrival on the co-op’s telescope array. The baker’s dozen of farmers and chemists in his syndicate stood in the room behind him and stared at the screen as well. They had set up a bar with real booze and put up a sign that read: “The Dione-Pandoran Company—Together—Better Pharmaceuticals.”

  A guy named Bill Withers had convinced them all to create the first co-op, and then convinced them further that a big cash haul would come from further consolidation with the Pandorans. Withers harrumphed at the approaching ships saying, “Don’t know why they need a police escort. Deal’s all signed off. Formalities is all.”

  Monty said, “Well, if it’s got some official stamp, maybe I better throw on a uniform.”

  While the newly minted Officer Day had orders to maintain geosynchronous orbit above the main dome that was labeled on his heads-up as Monty’s Retreat, the Pandoran container ship landed first, followed by the rest of the police escorts. The whole situation felt bizarre to Caleb, made more so by the fact that he hadn’t really been filled in on anything. There had been almost no communication on the trip from Titan, and now that they were at Dione, other than the confirmation of his arrival and the order to stay in orbit, a command followed to maintain radio silence, including all text transmissions. He hadn’t been trained for such a mission, hadn’t been filled in on what the game plan was. His mission packet merely informed him to report to the rendezvous and follow orders from there, and that he was expected to act in a standard security role as described in the police handbook. As he watched the other ships land, he scanned the handbook again in his heads-up display. He couldn’t find anything that quite related to the current conditions. His police shuttle had a fully functioning non-networked computer system with trillions of bytes of info about every known settlement in the system. The non-networked element ensured independence. Networked systems were ripe for AI control, even at an average of 1,400,000,000 kilometers away from Earth. He decided to look up the folks on Dione. There were thirteen registered farms, all also listed as pharmaceutical manufacturers. All of the farms had been established at the edge of the trailing orbit of the moon and therefore less susceptible to hits by foreign objects. They were, however, constantly dusted by the very fine smoky ice powder raining in from Saturn’s E ring. Ten of the farms were family operations with an average of five members. The forty-one children in the group were all home-schooled, but each farm took turns offering extracurricular activi
ties. Four of the children had been born on Dione. Caleb raised an eyebrow as he scanned through the birth photos of one of them. Giving birth information to the governing bodies on Hanson was purely voluntary beyond the sex. One baby was an oddity indeed: it was long and bowlegged with extremely thin limbs and a large head with a puffy face. Was this the future of men in lower G environments? There had been lots of speculation on new races or at least shapes of humans arising from mutations within and around the rings of Saturn. Each moon had its own level of gravity. Titan had gravity greater than Earth’s moon, with air pressure one and a half times as great as that of Planet Earth’s, making the air feel a bit like walking in a swimming pool. What would babies look like on Titan? A flash in the corner of Caleb’s vision caught his eye. One of the farm domes erupted in a huge fireball and just as quickly died down to small scattered flames. Then another one, the explosion sending bits of dome and plant debris scattering two-hundred meters all around. Caleb instantly brought up the situation display and called out to the Sergeant.

  Gunderson calmly replied, “Maintain orbit, Officer Day. You are weapons free if you see any vehicles trying to get off this moon. Out.”

  Caleb looked across the control panel. Weapons? “Did you say weapons, sergeant?” With the word weapons uttered, a new image came up on his heads-up offering the choice between a multi-stage laser (for everything from blinding to cutting) and a pod of missiles. “When were they going to train me on this shit?”