Chapter One
Ice crashed into ice. From boulders to snowflakes, the Rings gleamed and swirled on either side of the wide Encke Gap. One of Saturn’s moons, Pan, made waves in the edges of the chaotic frozen streams on either side. Chawla Station orbited along behind.
I put one of my telescopes on Chawla.
Home sweet home was an adorable tuna-can habitat shape with barely visible spiky bits on the near side for port attachments and all the complex machinery that had allowed the First Crew to use it as RSC Chawla on the other side. Someday, I was going to get permission to visit that slightly higher radiation area and see that part of the station with my own eyes.
“Stop daydreaming, Caly,” I reminded myself. Today, I had permission to use my pod Ladybug to fly, with mostly automated controls and maybe get a tiny bit of manual flying time.
What had Susu, my grandma, said when she let me borrow the last couple parts I’d needed to pass the equipment inspections?
Oh yeah: “Don’t get scared of the ice bits. You’re a Sadou. We are way tougher than a shimmering sky smoothie maker.”
“Go giant flat smoothie maker, go,” I muttered. From this angle, the Rings did look a bit like a flattened out slushy if you squinted at them just right. Kind of caramel colored mostly, but with brighter sparkles here and there. And stretching as far as the eye could see.
Talking to yourself is stupid, I imagined my new little brother, Dorian, saying to me.
“Stop listening to that baby, Calypso,” I told myself, but for honesty my brain added on, even if he does fly better than you. That freak of nature ten-year-old. Who is a real Sadou, not like—
“‘Sometimes the only way to get to smart is through stupid,’” I quoted. “Thank you, Jules.” I’m not silly enough to thank my new older brother to his face, but alone in the pod, doing that did help smash my self-doubt so I continued louder, “You got this, Calypso, just go with the Flow.”
My pod, the pods of my two classmates, the tutor Professor Azul’s remote, and the massed icy rubble Ring that was probably originally a single large moon circled the planet about once every fourteen hours.
House-sized icebergs down through dusty snowy bits seethed in this ever-shining frozen ocean. The planet’s cloud tops rotated far below. They spun some four hours faster still, so everything moved. Out here everything was moving. Always moving. We called it the Flow.
Publicity photos of Saturn from far away make the Rings look like a thin flat sheet of slightly creamy paper.
The images aren’t as pretty as the real thing. Or as dangerous.
“Stop that, Caly. Nothing but a big slushy maker.”
Seen from up close and just above them, they are way more like a giant slushy in the sky. A giant gorgeous slushy that cuts the sky in half.
Sadous had been taming the Rings for generations. I’d be just fine, questionable DNA or not. Why this was a paradise compared to some of the Solar System planets.
We have plenty of water out here. Sure you can’t breathe in space, but we have pods and suits. You can’t grow anything to eat in it, but we have some nice big ships and stations where we can. You can’t make even a cup of that frozen ocean into liquid water without power, but we have loads and loads of power from helium-three.
Ladybug’s water was nasty-tasting pod water even with the vitamin packet flavoring. I took a sip to calm myself even though I wasn’t thirsty. I had plenty of air. I had a strong pod. I had two other kids out here with me and Prof. Azul watching everything. Chawla wasn’t too far to respond in an emergency either. I was going to be fine.
What had happened with my new brothers was just a rare complex accident. They were completely fine now, and I was going to be just fine too.
This Ladybug was the third pod I’d worked on. After the thing happened and my parents had needed to adopt them, Jules took over the first pod and finished it up. He’d been fourteen then and ready to take the Maturity Test for full-on grown-up-ness, and he wanted to see if he could break Chawla Station’s all-time record for distance travelled from home.
(Spoiler, he did. But he’s a real Sadou, so that surprised nobody.)
Then, Dorian, my new younger brother who is one year and a month younger than me, turned out to be a piloting prodigy, so of course, he needed a dedicated pod of his own too.
But my Susu, who of course had spares upon spares for all sort of ship parts, helped me get this version of Ladybug finished up, so I got to do the final checks and finally got to fly. I would have to do more work on it before it would be ready to take me out a respectable distance for my own Maturity Test, but still.
It was good to be finally flying something.
Any day you get to look at Saturn and the Rings through the viewport of a spacecraft you helped build is a good day.
“Take that, everyone who says I’m not a real Sadou.” Jules and Dorian kept those other kids alive too, and they would’ve done the same for me if I’d been with them. Who knows, maybe I would’ve been a help and not a kid that they needed someone to sit on while the useful kids figured out how to build a transmitter from the wreckage of their craft without destroying what remained of the life support.
“Focus on now, Caly. Not on that.”
Ladybug and I were floating right in a haze of fine snow at the edge of the three hundred plus kilometer Encke Gap in the A-Ring about a thousand kilometers downflow from Pan.
Down here, closer to Saturn, the ice chunks orbited the planet a little faster than the moon. Pan’s gravity grabbed at the icy Rings pulling them “up” away from Saturn a tiny bit as they flowed past. This is how the thirty-four-kilometer-long frozen ravioli’s gravity kept this traffic lane in the Rings entirely free of pesky equally frigid moving violations.
The ice chunks left their stately circular paths around the planet in a pair of wakes on either side of the gap. The part of the wake that I could see through Ladybug’s viewport was downstream of Pan on the side of the gap closer to Saturn. Here the ring bits distorted flow and their own gravity caused them to bunch up, jostle around, and bounce off each other in a slow rhythmic dance forming kilometer-wide troughs and crests. If you looked at wakes from above the Ringplane, they looked like strands of spaghetti laid carefully next to each other in long gentle spirals with little gaps between them. The gaps were the troughs where there was less stuff, and the spaghetti would be the crests where everything piled up. The crests where the ice bunched up were chaotic with pieces of all sizes moving every possible way. From my vantage point they looked like the aerial photos of mountains and valleys that Susu had showed me from Africa back on Earth.
The Wakes were a great place for piloting practice. There was a lot of ice to dodge, we were close enough to home that help wasn’t that far away, but we were far enough that you really felt like you were on your own.
I mean…I could cover Pan, the station, and pretty much everyone I’d ever met with my thumb!
The lonely iceroid I was drifting behind was a bit bigger than Ladybug. It was the biggest thing around just out past the Gap edge, and we’d used it as a reference point to gather before starting our flight practice. It began to completely block my view. The viewport darkened to useless in my own little personal eclipse.
A few quick keystrokes gave me the angle from Prof. Azul’s remote instead, complete with digital contrast amplification and a little infrared touch-up to tell shimmering ice from spacecraft. Out here, sunlight sometimes isn’t bright enough to rely on by itself.
I hung out, waiting for my turn while Xavier and Omaara did their Ring dives.
Xavier, my best buddy in the whole Solar System from pretty much the moment his dad had dropped him off for a “Saturnian Rings-style educational experience,” was a Rockworth from those Rockworths with the same genetic dwarfism as everyone in his family. He was flying MetalHeadCrusher7 and making it look easy.
Omaara Ulbadine was a contractor kid who, well, if you can’t say anything nice, don’t say anything at all. She flies Daphnis Bound.
Waiting was dull, but the boulder would shield Ladybug pretty well. Sometimes the normal jostling between all the independently swirling flakes, boulders, clumps, and bergs that made up the Rings pushed stuff in funny ways. I didn’t want to get hit by even a small iceroid while focused on my displays.
The crests and troughs formed an irregular landscape filled with peaks and valleys, walls and gaps, and the occasional rogue boulder like the one I was waiting behind. You could drive a pod through that chaos if you were good. You could weave your pod up and down and in and out of it continuously if you were really good.
I wanted to be that good. Both Omaara and Xavier already were.
That was Ringdiving.
The Rings were pretty much the only place in the Solar System that you could fly like this. Ringdiving was the ultimate test for all the best piloting programs and the skills of the pilots that used them. It didn’t have much practical application anywhere else in the Solar System honestly, but that didn’t stop the spacing families who owned large segments of the Belt from sending their kids to Saturn to prove that they could do it. Or stop the absolute brightest of the contractor families from pushing for their kids to prove their piloting skills here. Anyone who could solo a pod in the Rings could handle pretty much any spacecraft anywhere with no problem.
It wasn’t just rich folks from elsewhere that had something to learn or to prove though. Locals with voting shares took Ringdiving very seriously too. Doing it well was the first step towards getting your family willing to let you go try to do a Maturity Test. And beyond that, anybody who wanted to attend the School absolutely had to impress their Station Council and everyone else on the Station with their scores from the Maturity Test. All real Sadous attended the School.
I was going to the School. No matter what Prof. Azul said about my skills not really keeping up with what he would expect from a Sadou.
But I wasn’t going to be Ringdiving today.
“Ms. Ulbadine, proceed on Vector 1. Mr. Rockworth, Vector 2. Acknowledge with jets.” The voice of Prof. Azul signaled that Omaara and Xavier were finally going to begin.
Their two pods glowed against the backdrop of the icy celestial ocean, the hot pulses of their maneuvering jets blinking like little intermittent stars. Names in neat print popped up next to them. Daphnis Bound would be Omaara’s of course. Her mom was already transferred over to that station by the moon of the same name. She’d been bragging for ages about how they thought so highly of her mom on Daphnis and would be sending for her and her dad any day now to offer them shares as future citizen-leaders.
That’s just silly contractor talk. People on Daphnis use voting shares just like on Chawla and all the other Saturnian Stations. Contractors who come in from outside the planetary zone are all supposed to be able to earn at least one voting share. It’s just that Station Councils are often slow to allow that opportunity to be part of it all. The Pascaline-Adamou Compact has stuff to say on that, but it can be hard to convince a majority of any particular serving Station Council to follow the exact letter of that oldest law.
Omaara’s pod was rotating almost before Prof. Azul finished speaking.
Show off.
I had to zoom in on the script to see the long name my buddy Xavier had picked for his pod this time. And woah, now that was impressive acceleration! MetalHeadCrusher7 engaged lateral and main thrusters and dove straight at the first clump on his vector at a few gees before zipping through the ice dust in the open space just behind it and up in the space next to another. He skipped with amazing skill through the clearings and then cut diagonally along the icy undulations forming Pan’s gravity wake. Into and out of the troughs, as if that ice out there wasn’t harder than granite.
He made it look like so much fun.
Ladybug had pilot-trainee limits set that wouldn’t let me even attempt to try that. Today, Omaara and Xavier were showing Prof. Azul that they were ready to be grown-up full citizens, but I would only be Ringskimming. My pilot board wouldn’t let me do anything but fly straight and steady just above the Rings where I might not need to dodge anything at all even one time. Ringskimming was actually what most jobs in the Rings called for day to day. If you needed to get into the Rings for ice mining or salvage or whatever, it was usually safest to keep your spacecraft just above them and send in your drones. Ladybug carried dozens of the little things for that purpose.
Safe.
But not very much progress on the skills I really, really wanted to practice.
“Sit here, don’t go manual. Don’t mess anything up. Trust the piloting computer,” I repeated to myself. But I watched Xavier and even Omaara with a mix of envy and longing. They’d done the work to get signed off for solo manual flight within the Ringplane. They got to do it. Maybe next time I could fly a three-point constellation with them…
Well, no. They’d be long past these little practice flights when my family and I finally got back from our trip to Phoebe and I could do the exams and go out with full piloting board permissions. Then I could finally complete my Ringwalk and enter the School. If they’d been children of citizens like I was, they’d maybe even have done their Ringwalk before I got back. Not that a Rockworth like Xavier couldn’t have been a citizen if ever his family wanted to apply.
But the Ulbadines, uh, no. Not with the current Station Council anyway.
Omaara Ulbadine keyed her transmitter to squeal out a warning.
That brat! She shouldn’t have been distracting Xavier while he was doing proximity maneuvers like that!
“Voice transmissions are for emergencies only during the exercise,” Prof. Azul’s clipped voice chastised Omaara, but then he immediately contradicted himself by continuing to talk. “Very fine flying, Mr. Rockworth, a credit to your family.”
Xavier had done a dive completely through the Ringplane! Rolling his pod this way and that to avoid hitting anything with too much mass and flying straight down through one of the troughs where the Rings weren’t as dense. He disappeared beneath long enough that I found myself holding my breath. I was about to make an unauthorized radio call myself to see if he was all right even though I knew it was probably pointless. All the ice between us would block our pod comms completely. Then MetalHeadCrusher7 punched back up through the next trough with a shimmering snowy cometary tail on the other side of the nearest crest several kilometers away.
Xavier transmitted a weird giggle that I’m sure he wanted to be a manly chuckle, but his voice broke and squeaked high like it had been doing a lot lately.
He’d not be willing to show his dad and older brothers the flight video now with that on it, but I thought he still should. It was great flying. He was definitely ready to join his people back in the Belt. Or maybe he’d go to their new prospecting field in the Trojan Asteroids. The density of the asteroids trailing Jupiter was nothing like what Xavier trained with here in the Rings of course, but the skills he picked up here would give him his pick of crews.
Life among spacers pretty much everywhere just got better when you’d proved to them that you knew what you were doing.
Didn’t hurt to prove it to yourself either.
Xavier transmitted again, “Bet even your mom couldn’t do that, Omaara.”
“I—”
“Ms. Ulbadine, one more radio silence break without due cause, and—”
I waited with everyone else to find out what Prof. Azul’s threat was going to be, but it seemed that his imagination failed him, because the transmission just clicked off.
Omaara didn’t reply though. Like me, she could probably imagine plenty of things he could do to her grades that’d be no fun for her at all.
I did notice that Prof. Azul had said nothing about Xavier misusing the radio.
Xavier went right back to chortling and bobbing MetalHeadCrusher7 way closer between the clumps than was, strictly speaking, perfectly normal. Or particularly safe.
I was going to be able to fly like that. And I could too. It wasn’t a matter of superhuman reflexes or a genetically engineered sixth sense. Spacecraft ran on skill, sure, but it was mostly skilled use of software. The Rockworths had some of the best piloting routines in the Solar System. Xavier had copied over his close-in avoidance piloting software kernel into my pod. The good version too. The proprietary Rockworths-only version. All I had do to was toggle one switch and it would override my trainee piloting board permissions and shift from the maximum safety autorouting to one with a lot more freedom where I could get in really close and test out how responsive Ladybug really was.
“Well done again, Mr. Rockworth,” Prof. Azul said as Xavier and Omaara brought their pods back to the Gap edge and slowed their relative velocity to zero. “You can skim a bit whenever you like, Ms. Sadou.”
This was going to be me getting recognized on an open line for all of Chawla Station to hear. I just needed to get to the other side of this boulder…and maybe break the rules just a little.
I switched off the view from the professor’s remote, opened up my piloting display, and mapped it all out on my screen.
I imagined Ladybug’s willing red-wing painted hull darting out from behind my boulder, going full burn at the nearest spaghetti-string of iceroids, running over it as close as I could, and then dipping down just a little into the trough on the other side before popping back up and skimming the rest of the way. I’d have enough fuel to boost at full thrust to swing back with a flight path that buzzed Xavier close enough to read the giant ROCKWORTH written on the side of his hull in diamond-dust paint with my own eyes.
I’d technically still be Ringskimming, I told myself as I modified the flight path that the Professor and I had agreed to.
I’d just be doing one single little tiny dive…no…more like a dip…there was a nice clear area just there, between the two nearest wakes. This was safe enough. It wasn’t technically agreed to, but Prof. Azul never said I couldn’t do it.
I set my flight path to take me over the Ring for the first few kilometers passing out over the abrupt edge of the wake. I bet Prof. Azul probably wouldn’t even be able to tell when I did my little dip with the optics on his remote.
“Ms. Sadou, anytime now, please begin your skim on Vector 3 as briefed.”
I flicked the switch labelled “Rockworth Kernel” to “Enable.”
I hit my main engines and lateral thrusters maybe a little too hard, the newly modified software giving me a bit more range than I was strictly speaking allowed to have. Ladybug soared out from behind my lone icy boulder and towards the edge of the Gap in that joyous arc I’d seen in my mind.
“Yes, yes, yes!” The main engines pushed me back in my seat as the lower lateral engines shoved me down into it.
Ladybug picked up a few hundred meters per second and that suddenly-too-close frozen string of ice filled my entire window. Xavier made this look so easy! Was I an idiot? No, the computer said I was going to clear it all just fine. Trust the piloting computer. I restarted my chant, “I got this. Yes, yes, yes, I do.”
The mass separated into distinct bits as I sped closer. More and more iceroids in a variety of sizes whizzed underneath Ladybug as I flew to a point only a few meters above the first of the dense crests. Chunks of ice as big as our pods jostling with each other in a beautifully orchestrated mess below me. The closer it came the more it was clear that there were no gaps big enough to fly through. The Rockworth-mod added in a bare fraction more lateral accel, and Ladybug cleared the crest of the dense mass of iceroids by just a slight fraction of her own length. The blindingly white top of the crest suddenly dominated my vision and I blinked as my viewport compensated for its glare.
I was free.
“Careful there. Don’t go ballistic on me, okay, Ms. Sadou?” warned the professor over the comm, but I thought I heard amusement and maybe a tinge of respect in his voice.
I burned the upper lateral engines just a little bit more than I needed to flatten out my flight path. This would bend my vector down towards the trough for my mini-Ringdive in a way I hoped Prof. Azul wouldn’t notice or at least wouldn’t comment on. I felt like I was falling as I gently floated up out of my seat and my seatbelts tugged me back down.
Too much acceleration like that and all the blood would go to my head, and I’d have a redout. Ladybug and the Rockworth software would keep going, but I’d pretty much be out of the piloting game until my head cleared. Good pilots almost never needed to use that much acceleration though. Dad always said a good pilot used software and their superior foresight to avoid having to use their superior reflexes.
I was coming up to the end of this first kilometer-wide dense crest, and the glaring off-white landscape below me began to thin out. I could again clearly see gaps between individual iceroids. I had timed my burn perfectly. Ladybug was aimed to pass down into the first trough close by a clump of smaller ice chunks tumbling around near the middle of the relatively open space of the trough.
“Calypso nails it!” Xavier hooted as I finally cleared the crest and passed close between two frozen boulders I wasn’t actually sure I’d seen when I plotted this.
Thank you, Xavier!
The spinning lone clump dominated my thoughts and my vision as it sped closer. I double-checked my path. The software said I’d pass right under it just fine. Then I could reverse my burn with my lower laterals and rise back up out of the Ringplane. Flying the trough seemed easy after the chaos below me in the crest.
Wrong. So wrong.
In a split second just long enough to see the problem but not enough to fix it, I saw an individual iceroid pop out from behind the clump, separate from the main mass, and make its way back down. Very, very fast and directly in my flightpath.
I was hitting it. No time. No time at all. But I’d simmed these things for hours and hours and hours.
My fingers grazed a slight change in the lateral thruster controls. The Rockworth kernel amplified my attempted correction in exactly the wrong way. Because of course it did. The Rockworth kernel was optimized for the Trojan Asteroids, not for the Rings.
I dimly remember the sound of the hydrolox throttle valves banging fully open and the lateral thrusters lighting off.
At maximum acceleration.
My world turned red as a near simultaneous clang reverberated through Ladybug’s entire hull. Everything spun. Where was—
Blackness smacked the back of my head with a roundhouse kick.