The Lair

Abstract

Tanya stood on the shore, cradling a new set of samples, her Zodiac staked to the beach. She could hardly wait to get back to her gas chromatograph/mass spectrometer and microprobes. What wonders awaited her from those depths? She took a last glance back. Somewhere out beyond the orange smog, the sky above was fading from gray-green to purple as twilight arrived. The dull rust of the landscape would bleed into a ruby red before it faded to black. The drill, nearly a silhouette now, rose above a layer of sickly yellow fog, still pounding away, plunging deep into the viscera of Saturn’s largest moon. The ocean it explored had never seen the light of the feeble Sun, never tasted the bitter methane rains or felt the acrid hydrocarbon dust of a million years’ flurries. What could be down there?