The Ice Moon Explorer by Navin Weeraratne Page A

who has to clean it out." The threat of
shit work.
    I pulled up a status on the bioreactor. It
was a chamber that could duplicate conditions in the ocean's
different biomes. It needed chemicals, but I had stocked up before
leaving Carolyn Porco Station.
    "We have enough magnetite. If the wrigglers
become a problem, we can add a bit. That will inhibit them. It
should be enough till we make it back to Porco."
    "Alright. I'll prep it then."

    It was, as things usually are in a small
spaceship, uneventful. I followed Florida's climate refugee crisis
on NPR, 79 minutes late. Vajra Kapoor checked in from Telesto, he
was delighted with ICE's progress. He'd finished designing a new
aquarium drone that never needed to surface. Maggie Liu (off mining
Helium 3) called it his Worm Spy Cam. Worms were the apex of life
on Enceladus. Worms and leeches - these days at least. The past had
been quite different.
    "I've got this," said Pilot some hours later.
"You should take the rest of the day off."
    "You sure?"
    "Yeah. And you're tired. You're starting to
make mistakes."
    I looked at the time. We'd been working
twelve hours, straight.
    "Alright, you finish up then. I'm going to
the Village to have a beer with my son."

    Virtual Interaction for Long Agenda missions
via Group Environment (VILAGE)
    "Did you hear about Van Prooijen? Got crushed
to death by a rover. Family doesn't want to speak to him
anymore."
    The Voyager Three was a dimly lit bar. Yellow
and blue, Tron-style light strips trimmed the bar and tables. An
Europa driller nodded to the Syrian-German punk music. The Halley's
Comet miners watched baseball on a large TV, 79 minutes late.
    "No," I sipped my beer. It was, as always, as
good as I remembered. "That's terrible. What's he going to do?"
    "His job I guess," Kapoor ate some peanuts.
"What else is there for him? Mars is well automated, he'll be fine.
Christina Henkel has taken him under her wing."
    "Henkel? They the Dead Engrams Club now?"
    "How many people want to hang out with a dead
guy?"
    "I don't care if they're dead or not. They're
still people."
    "Tell that to their families. You can't bury
someone, and then log in and say 'hi'."
    "They should get used it. Any serious
planetary scientist is going to outlive their body. If you're
beyond the Moon, you've got a high fidelity copy in the
Village."
    Above the counter, a huge TV showed a
monster. It was a car-length worm, but with six fins. Two were
alongside its lamprey mouth, like canard wings on a fighter. It
investigated the camera, drawn by its searchlight. Black pits
covered its face: nostrils. Blue ink squirted from a nozzle in the
corner of the image. The monster waved off, like it had smelled a
really bad fart.
    "I've not seen that before."
    "Oxygen," Kapoor grinned. "Just a wee bit
dissolved in, with some coloring. I figured since it's so toxic to
them, they'd be able to sense it. That worm shark won't be
back."
    "Free oxygen in a hydrothermal vent
environment?"
    Kapoor shrugged. "It works. And my cam drones
don't get eaten anymore. It must be something they learned to sense
a long time ago. Like how everything on Earth avoids hydrogen
sulphide."
    "The whole natural history of Enceladus is
just germs, jellies, and worms," I pointed at the screen, "And then
these buggers show up. Suddenly it's like a tropical rainforest
down there. And then, in a hundred million years, we're right back
to jellies."
    "The Golden Age was their Cambrian
Explosion," Kapoor kept his eyes on the screen. "Life on Earth also
took ages to do anything interesting."
    "But it stayed interesting."
    "Earth is a better place to survive asteroid
impacts than Enceladus. Whatever hit there -- Maggie has found
ejecta, as far out as Ymir. Golden Age debris sticks out in this
system, like a bruise under make up."
    "Not everywhere."
    "Yeah, I'm keen to see your latest. If those
geysers bring up tissue from anything large and interesting, I'll
find it. Clone it. Stick it in a tank."
    "For someone once quite