The Year's Best Science Fiction, Vol. 20

“I’ll do that,” he replies. A red glow suffuses the flank of the capsule next to her head, and she looks up in time to see the glaring blue laser-line of the Sanger’s drive torch powering up.

Eighteen million seconds, almost a tenth of a Jupiter year, passes.

The imam tugs thoughtfully on his beard as he stares at the traffic-control display. These days, every shift seems to bring a new crewed spaceship into Jupiter system: space is getting positively crowded. When he arrived, there were less than two hundred people here: now there’s the population of a small city, and many of them live at the heart of the approach map centered on his display. He breathes deeply-trying to ignore the omnipresent odor of old socks-and studies the map. “Computer, what about my slot?” he asks.

“Your slot: cleared to commence final approach in six nine five seconds. Speed limit is ten meters per second inside ten kilometers, drop to two meters per second inside one kilometer. Uploading map of forbidden thrust vectors now.” Chunks of the approach map turn red, gridded off to prevent his exhaust stream damaging other craft in the area.

Sadeq sighs. “We’ll go in on Kurs. I assume their Kurs guidance is active?”

“Kurs docking target support available to shell level three.”

“Praise the Prophet, peace be unto him.” He pokes around through the guidance subsystem’s menus, setting up the software emulation of the obsolete (but highly reliable) Soyuz docking system. At last, he can leave the ship to look after itself for a bit. He glances around: for two years he has lived in this canister, and soon he will step outside it. It hardly seems real.

The radio, usually silent, crackles with unexpected life. “Bravo One One, this is Imperial Traffic Control. Verbal contact required, over.”

Sadeq twitches with surprise. The voice sounds inhuman, paced with the cadences of a speech synthesizer, like so many of Her Majesty’s subjects. “Bravo One One to Traffic Control, I’m listening, over.”

“Bravo One One, we have assigned you a landing slot on tunnel four, airlock delta. Kurs active, ensure your guidance is set to seven four zero and slaved to our control.”

He leans over the screen and rapidly checks the docking system’s settings. “Control, all in order.”

“Bravo One One, stand by.”

The next hour passes slowly as the traffic control system guides his Type 921 down to a rocky rendezvous. Orange dust streaks his one optical-glass porthole: a kilometer before touchdown, Sadeq busies himself closing protective covers, locking down anything that might fall around on contact. Finally, he unrolls his mat against the floor in front of the console and floats above it for ten minutes, eyes closed in prayer. It’s not the landing that worries him, but what comes next.

Her Majesty’s domain stretches out before the battered Almaz module like a rust-stained snowflake half-a-kilometer in diameter. Its core is buried in a loose snowball of greyish rubble, and it waves languid brittlestar arms at the gibbous orange horizon of Jupiter. Fine hairs, fractally branching down to the molecular level, split off the main collector arms at regular intervals; a cluster of habitat pods like seedless grapes cling to the roots of the massive cluster. Already, he can see the huge steel generator loops that climb from either pole of the snowflake, wreathed in sparking plasma: the Jovian rings form a rainbow of darkness rising behind them.

Finally, the battered space station is on final approach. Sadeq watches the Kurs simulation output carefully, piping it direct into his visual field: there’s an external camera view of the rockpile and grapes, expanding toward the convex ceiling of the ship, and he licks his lips, ready to hit the manual override and go around again-but the rate of descent is slowing, and by the time he’s close enough to see the scratches on the shiny metal docking cone ahead of the ship, it’s measured in centimeters per second. There’s a gentle bump, then a shudder, then a rippling bang as the docking ring latches fire-and he’s down.

Sadeq breathes deeply again, then tries to stand. There’s gravity here, but not much: walking is impossible. He’s about to head for the life-support panel when he freezes, hearing a noise from the far end of the docking node. Turning, he is just in time to see the hatch opening toward him, a puff of vapor condensing, and then-