Caton handed her the helmet, ushering her toward the door. “Because that’s the way it is. Come on, we need to go.” His tone was gruff but not without sympathy. He hoped that the people up on the LORIN stations were on form today. Everything depended on them now.
* * *
A million miles above Saturn, Landen Keene sat tensely in a seat to one side of the Fire Controller’s console in the command room of LOng Range INtercept Station 5, between the orbits of the second and third outer moons, Iapetus and Hyperion, and 30 degrees north of the plane of the ring system. A large screen to one side showed a view of Saturn’s banded globe seemingly floating in a shining elliptical ocean formed by the rings seen obliquely. In normal circumstances the sight would have been stunning. Right now, however, all attention was focused on the image hanging above the holo-table in the center of the floor. It showed a sector of the moon system plane outside the rings on the near side of Saturn. Rhea was close to the center, looking like a mottled gray marble. Titan, farther out and three times its size, sat just inside the image volume as a smoky brown ping-pong ball. And coming in from the side on a slanting trajectory, a pattern of red points, moving perceptibly, denoted the swarm of dark objects that had appeared suddenly from the outer Solar System, hurtling inward into Saturn’s gravity well.
The encounter with Athena had deflected Earth into a more eccentric orbit and perturbed the motions of all the inner planets with consequences that were not yet clear. In addition, the attendant debris pulled out of Jupiter at the time of Athena’s birth, and the bodies sent off in wild directions by Athena’s several interactions with the Asteroid Belt since, had created a multiplicity of rogue objects, some of which traversed paths reaching out almost to the orbit of Uranus. The incandescent ones, such as the several score of new comets torn from Jupiter, and hot material ejected from Athena itself, were fairly easy to track—although prediction of future motions was complicated by electrical disturbances that made the old laws of celestial dynamics unreliable, at least for some time to come. But dark, colder objects could appear unexpectedly anywhere, at any time.
All prospects of support or supply from Earth had gone. The environment on and around Earth had remained too hostile to contemplate reestablishing a human presence there in the time since the Athena catastrophe occurred. Hence, the survival of the Kronian colony depended crucially on technology in all its forms and the rapid development of more advanced ones. People from Keene’s kind of background were invaluable. He was on LORIN 5 to learn more about Kronian operations involving nuclear technology—specifically, in this instance, the system of orbiting defense stations that had been put up around Saturn’s moon system for protection in these violent and perilous times.
Jebsen, the Fire Controller, Kronian-born and characteristically tall, with fleshy, swarthy features, moved his head above the neck ring of his pressure suit to scan the updates from the long-baseline search radars and targeting computers. The inside of a LORIN station was cramped and cluttered. The need had been to get them up fast, when the first effects of Athena’s raging began manifesting themselves.
An operator called from a position to the right of Keene and above, between a bulkhead support and bank of cable boxes. “Fifty-three objects registering Class C and up. Eleven major Titan hazards, aimed and locked. Eight on miss trajectories. Remainder of scatter pattern implicates Titan immediate sector, nineteen at forty-two percent mean, Rhea fifteen at sixty-eight.”
“Pods within range and able to bear total twenty-three rods,” another voice reported. Jebsen took in the confirmation from the displays. Not good.
The LORIN stations were adaptations of a space weapons system devised as a precaution years ago, when political tension between Kronia and Earth had raised the possibility of armed conflict—which, as things turned out, hadn’t materialized. They carried a complement of ejectable pods that powered themselves to a safe distance of anywhere from fifty to several hundred miles before deploying a cluster of heavy-metal lasing rods that could be independently aimed at multiple targets. The device was pumped by the energy from a fission bomb explosion, focused in the nanoseconds before the rods vaporized into concentrated X-ray laser beams capable of destroying a spacecraft from ten thousand miles.