Last Days on Kraken Mare

"It's real," Mia van der Venne decides. "We evacuate. Citizens first, then the old guard. And we assume that we're never coming back." No one breathes. Down beneath their meeting table, pouches of farmed salmon, beef en culture, buttered carrots, and bok…

Everyone has had their say. Mia puts her hand down on the cold tabletop. "We are going to evacuate. Xiana, call Babatunde and get the Duiker up from the borehole. I want them moored in the submarine pen in three hours. We'll start podding citizens in the…

The military dropships pierce the nitrogen clouds like bullets, plasma-hot trick shots through the evacuation fleet swarming over Titan. By the time Ishita Bhattacharya-Garcia has calmed down the panic in Traffic Control, there's nothing left for Mia to do…

Mia van der Venne is more than 200 years old. Change comes faster, these days, and you live to see more of it. Changes like Ismail being allowed to pray not in the real direction of Mecca but in the direction Mecca would be if it were transposed from Earth to…

The beam kisses the rising shuttle and cuts through it, like a wire through a block of butter, as if the ship and everyone inside were as thin as the hydrocarbon sleet. Thunder booms, louder than Earth's, through heavy nitromethane air. Mia watches the…

Now she kneels trembling on the carpet outside Pell's abandoned lab as Morgan-2 shouts in grief and rage. "I didn't want this. Do you understand? I came here so she wouldn't have to die!" "Then you should've TOLD ME!" Mia screams, and that mulberry rod…

Mayday, Mayday, Mayday. All circum-Saturn stations monitoring GUARD, this is New Pacific Arcology, declaring a SUNDOWN loss of habitability event. We have 2.9 million souls aboard. We repeat, Titan is no longer safe for human life. We are experiencing…

Maury Yamashita dives through bad water. It's not water at all, but that's what the dolphins have nicknamed it—bad ocean—because it sucks to swim in it. At nearly -200 degrees Celsius, the methane is so viciously frigid that vacuum, the acme of pure cold, is…

The gecko-grip surfaces on his forearms catch—and hold. "Whew," he says, and he has never meant anything so inane so deeply. The swarmers seethe and pulsate in the perforated plastic sac. Not Titan's highest life, nor its lowest, they hive across the icy…