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The little inspector jetted into the lock ahead of them, pulling a tool like a pair of bolt cutters from a thigh pocket. “Maybe it came from this.” There was a box attached to the lock’s inside door. “This is a tack-on of some sort. Some kind of little sentinel. May have taken your picture and transmitted it. Let’s take it with us.”

Swan pounded the lock wall next to the device. “Here we are! Fuck you!”

“They already know,” Genette said, working at the little box as if it were an abalone. “But maybe we can turn the tables here. This ship will have a provenance, elements we can trace. We’ll take its AI with us.” The other Interplan investigators opened the i

“Everyone knows a ship has an ID,” Wahram said. “Why would they hang the ship here? Why wouldn’t they just dispose of it?”

“I don’t know. Possibly they intended to use it again and didn’t know about the Saturnian tracking system.”

“I don’t like it.”

“Neither do I.”

“Maybe this ship is from the unaffiliateds,” Swan said. “Off record from the start.”

“Are there ships entirely off the grid?” Wahram asked.

“Yes,” Genette said briefly, plugging cords from Passepartout into ports on one of the consoles.

“I have its data,” Passepartout said.

“Let’s get out of here,” Genette said. “Passepartout says the balloons holding this thing up have been punctured. They’re big, but we need to get out of this thing before it starts falling fast.”

They rushed through the short halls back to the lock. Their cloud diver’s pilot was urgently requesting them to get back inside so it could delink; they were dropping into Saturn at an accelerating rate as the giant balloon over them emptied. Quickly they all five jammed into the lock, the inspector and his two assistants taking up only small spaces in the upper corners, looking like spandrels. When the outer door opened, they jetted out into space. The balloon above the abandoned ship was already visibly deflated, thi

Then they returned to their cloud diver, reeling in on their Ariadne threads. When they were in the lock of the diver, they felt it come away from the abandoned ship and start to rise. They made their way to the bridge, where the pilot was too busy or too polite to comment on the situation. They rose, cutting through clouds overhead, shuddering hard.

“We’re free of it,” Genette said irritably to the pilot. “Slow down.”

Wahram for one was happy to be rising at speed. In his youth people had not dived into the planet; it still struck him as an impudent thing, dangerous in the extreme.

When they were free of the clouds and back in a clear cha

When they were a bit higher, Inspector Genette showed Swan the screen of his wristqube. “We’ve got it confirmed. The ship is owned by a transport firm based on Earth. They never reported it missing. Last registered port of call was that asteroid we saw it on.”

Swan nodded and looked at Wahram. “I’m going to Earth next,” she said. “Do you want to come?”

Wahram said cautiously, “I have to go downsystem anyway. So I think I can meet you somewhere down there.”

“That’s good,” she said. “We can work together there.”

She seemed not to suspect him of any possibility of harm. Which was nice—even encouraging—but, unfortunately, incorrect.

He swallowed heavily. “Before you go—can I perhaps show you a bit of Saturn? There is a different kind of flying you might enjoy, in the rings. And I could introduce you to my crèche. To my family.”

She was surprised by this, he could see. He swallowed again, tried to look bland under her sharp gaze.

“All right,” she said.

SWAN AND THE RINGS OF SATURN

Inspector Genette and his team had business to conduct in the Saturn system and would not be returning downsystem for a while, so Swan was free to join Wahram as he had requested. His ma

The look on Wahram’s face seemed to suggest he felt much the same.

The visit with Wahram’s crèche on Iapetus was just a matter of dropping in on one of the ordinary meals in their communal kitchen. “These are some of my friends and family,” Wahram said when introducing Swan to the small group at a long table. Swan nodded as they chorused hello, and then Wahram walked her around the room and introduced her to people. “This is my wife Joyce; this is Robin. This is my husband Dana.”

Dana nodded once, in a way that reminded Swan of Wahram, and said, “Wahram is fu

“Oh no,” Wahram said. “I was the wife, I assure you.”

Dana smiled with a little squint of suppressed disagreement. “Maybe we both were. It was a long time ago. In any case, Miss Swan, welcome to Iapetus. We’re happy to be hosting such a famous designer. I hope you’ve enjoyed Saturn so far?”

“Yes, it’s been interesting,” Swan said. “And now Wahram is going to take me down into the rings.”

She followed them to the central dining table, and Wahram introduced her to some more people, whose names she forgot, and they waved or nodded without attempting to say more. After a while they chatted with her a bit, then went back to their conversations and left Wahram and his guest alone. Wahram’s cheeks sported little spots of red, but he seemed pleased too and was easy with his crèchemates as they drifted by on their way out. Maybe on Saturn, Swan thought, this was a rousing party.

Soon after that they took a shuttle to Prometheus, the i

Prometheus proved to be a potato moon, 120 kilometers long. Its biggest crater dimpled the end closest to the F ring and had been domed, and a station set just inside the rim.

Inside the dome a group of ring surfers greeted them and described the local wave, of which they were very proud. Prometheus reached its apoapse, meaning its farthest point away from Saturn, every 14.7 hours; each time it did so, it almost brushed the slowly tumbling wall of ice chunks that composed the i