“You won’t be needing the pincers,” Fritz interjected.

“It works good enough,” the tech said. “Just isn’t as smooth as it oughtta be.”

Gaeta thought, If it’s good enough for Fritz it’ll be okay.

But Fritz said, “I’m going in for a final check.”

Gaeta smiled and nodded. He had expected that. There were three standards of acceptability in this world: average, above average, and Fritz. His chief technician’s keen eye and finicky demands had saved Gaeta’s life more than once.

Sure enough, Holly eluded her trackers after less than half an hour in the tunnels. She had ducked through an access hatch, clambered down a ladder, and then scooted light-footedly along the lower tunnel until she came to the big valve on the water line. Holly knew that this pipeline was a backup and not in use except when the main line was down for inspection or repair. So she tapped out the combination code on the hatch’s electronic lock and crawled into the dark pipe, closing the hatch after her without making a sound.

She couldn’t stand up inside the pipe; couldn’t even get up to a kneeling posture. She slithered along on her belly almost effortlessly. The pipe was dry inside, its plastic lining smooth and easy to slide along. Her only problem was estimating distance in the dark, so she used a penlight to show her where the hatches appeared. Holly knew to the centimeter the distances between hatches. When she had crawled half a kilometer, she stopped and broke open one of the sandwich packs she had brought with her.

As she munched on the sandwich in the faint glow from the pen-light, she felt almost like a little mouse down in its burrow. There are big cats out there, she knew. But I’m safe enough here. Unless somebody decides to divert the main water routing through this backup pipeline. Then I’d be a drowned little mouse.

The two black-clad security officers stood uncertainly in the tunnel, gazing up and down along the pipes and conduits.

“She just disappeared on us,” the man said to the third tracker, who wore a gray running suit. He was tall, rangy, not a gram of fat on him; he looked like an athlete who trained hard every day.

He held the chemical sniffer in one hand, a small gray oblong box — the same shade as his running suit.

“She came this way, definitely,” he said.

“But where’s she gone?” asked the woman.

“That’s not your problem. I’ll take over from here. You can go back and report to the boss.”

They were reluctant to leave, not so much because they were zealous about their jobs, as a decided lack of enthusiasm for the prospect of facing Kananga empty-handed.

“You sure you don’t need help?” the man asked.

The gray-clad tracker smiled and hefted the electronic sniffer. “I’ve got all the help I need, right here.”

Gaeta had been in the shuttlecraft before. Fritz insisted that the stuntman familiarize himself with the vehicle that would carry him from the habitat to the rings. Manny had found the craft to be pretty much like dozens of others he had seen: utilitarian, austere, built more for efficiency than comfort. The cockpit had two seats shoehorned in among all the flight controls. Behind that was a closet-sized “amenities” area with a zero-g toilet built into the bulkhead right next to the food storage freezer and microwave oven. The sink was there, too. Two mesh sleeping bags were pinned against the opposite bulkhead.

The cargo bay was pressurized, so while Timoshenko ran through his final checkout of the craft’s systems, Gaeta ducked through the hatch to look over his suit.

It stood looming in the bay, so tall that the top of the helmet barely cleared the bay’s overhead. Gaeta looked up into the empty faceplate of the helmet. Some people saw the suit for the first time and got the shudders. Gaeta always felt as if he were meeting his other half. Alone, each of them were much less than they were together: the suit an empty shell, the man a helpless weakling. But together — Ahh, together we’ve done great things, haven’t we? Gaeta reached up and patted the suit’s upper arm. Some of the dents from the simulation test they’d done hadn’t been smoothed out of the suit’s armored chest, he noticed. Shaking his head, he thought he should speak to Fritz about that. He should’ve treated you better, Gaeta said to the suit.

“Launch in five minutes,” Timoshenko’s voice came through the open cockpit hatch. “You’ll have to strap down.”

Gaeta nodded. With a final look at the suit, he turned and went back into the cockpit to start his journey through the rings of Saturn.

Kris Cardenas tried to keep busy during the last hours before Gaeta’s launch. Eberly had lifted the ban on her nanolab, so she had gone to the laboratory, where she had real work to do. It was better than sitting in the apartment trying to keep herself from weeping like some helpless female who was supposed to stand by bravely while her man went out to do battle.

It annoyed her that Tavalera wasn’t at his job, until she realized that he probably didn’t know the lab had been allowed to reopen. She tried to phone him, but the comm system couldn’t find him and his personal handheld had been deactivated.

That’s not like Raoul, she thought. He’s always been reliable.

She went through the motions of designing repair nanos for Urbain’s Titan lander, then finally gave it up altogether and turned on the vid.

“There is the shuttlecraft,” Zeke Berkowitz’s voice was poised on the edge that separated authoritative self-assuredness from excited enthusiasm. “In precisely fifteen seconds it will separate from the habitat and begin the journey that will carry Manuel Gaeta into the rings of Saturn.”

Cardenas saw a view from the exterior shell of the habitat. She knew that Berkowitz’s newscast was being beamed to all the media networks on Earth. She could hear the computer’s voice counting down the final seconds.

“Three … two … one … launch.”

The shuttlecraft detached from the habitat’s huge, curved surface, looking like a squarish metallic flea hopping off the hide of an elephant. Against the iridescent glowing disc of many-hued Saturn, the shuttlecraft rose, turned slowly, and then began dwindling out of sight.

“Manuel Gaeta is on his way,” Berkowitz was announcing ponderously, “to be the first man to traverse the mysterious and fascinating rings of Saturn.”

“Goodbye Manny,” Cardenas whispered, certain that she would never see him again.

INTO THE RINGS

Even though she knew that the backup pipeline was perfectly safe, Holly began to get a little edgy about staying in it. In her mind’s eye she saw some maintenance engineer casually switching the habitat’s main water flow from the primary pipeline to the backup. Just a routine operation, yet it would send a flood of frothing water cascading down the pipe toward her, engulfing her, sweeping her along in its irresistible flow, drowning her as she tumbled over and over in the roaring, inescapable flood.

Dimdumb! she snapped at herself. You’re scaring yourself like some little kid afraid of monsters under the bed. Yet, as she crawled along the perfectly dry pipeline, she kept listening for the telltale rush of water, feeling with her fingertips for the slightest vibration of the pipe. And the pipe wasn’t perfectly dry, at that: here and there small damp patches and even actual puddles told her that water had been flowing not so long ago.

She had thought she’d stay in the pipeline until it made its big U-turn, up near the endcap. Well, maybe not all the way. It’d be good to get out and stretch, be able to stand up again. So she slithered further along the pipe, even though the lingering fear of drowning still gnawed at her.