Free Project Sail by Anthony DeCosmo

Englishman hid his amusement when the young corporate executive opened his eyes and said, “You’re right, it works. I can feel it, right in this spot.”
    Wren remained silent, fearing he might laugh and spill coffee.
    Reagan Fisk once again raised his leg and at the same time said, “I never knew about this. Just like you said, the panels are pulling me down, but I can feel the current from the drive flowing over me, like it wants to carry me to the rear of the ship.”
    “That’s…that’s fucking awesome.”
    “Are you going to try?”
    “Um, no, I was just doing it in my quarters. I’m on my way to the bridge.”
    “Say, we should get a bunch of us and do it down in the canteen, side by side,” Fisk said.
    “Maybe later. Hey, Hawthorne is in there giving it a try, but he is sitting down instead of standing up. You might want to show him the right way.”
    “Hell yeah, thanks!”
    Fisk took his bubbling enthusiasm to the canteen. Wren nearly spit coffee as his suppressed chuckle reached the surface. The idea of feeling a gravity flow during deceleration aboard a diametric drive ship was the spacefaring equivalent of a snipe hunt.
    Behind him, from down the corridor in the canteen, he heard Hawthorne shout an obscenity.
    When he arrived at the bridge, Wren found the pilot at his post, Horus working navigation, and a guy with an olive complexion at the station controlling communications and flight operations. However, he had come to the bridge to appreciate the view from the forward window, not visit with the crew.
    The Virgil decelerated as their destination neared, but despite what he told Fisk, that did not create a gravity flow a person could sense by closing his eyes and balancing on one leg. It did mean they were now close enough to see Saturn from the bridge.
    Saturn was not a colorful planet, but it inspired awe nonetheless. The massive sphere could swallow seven-hundred Earths and while the rings were the most distinguishing characteristic, they were only part of this king’s court. Sixty natural satellites orbited the monster, making it nearly a solar system unto itself.
    From his vantage point aboard the Virgil, Wren saw the entire planet, although that was steadily changing as they moved into Saturn’s shadow on approach to Titan, the behemoth’s largest moon.
    As a scientist, he knew facts about Saturn, such as wind speeds could reach eleven hundred miles per hour. He knew that a layer of metallic hydrogen twenty times the size of Earth surrounded a rocky core at the middle of the gas giant. He knew that Saturn’s magnetic field was a thousand times more powerful than the one protecting Wren’s home world.
    But as he gazed out the window, that incredible planet did something few things did to Leo Wren: arouse his imagination. Saturn’s giant size and beautiful rings made it an icon of space travel, a symbol of the universe’s mysteries.
    He fought back, however, forcing himself to question the value of deep space missions when his homeland on Earth remained a dead wasteland.
    As they neared, that big sphere grew until it filled the window. At that point, the swirling gases of the ringed planet replaced the stars as the backdrop to his view and the moons of Saturn moved to the foreground with one in particular swelling as the Virgil drew close.
    This was Titan, the second largest moon in the entire solar system and an important human outpost.
    Titan offered a feast for the eyes, starting with an orange tint produced by its dense atmosphere, but that was just the beginning.
    He intruded on the pilot’s work and accessed the ship’s visual scanners to see through the nitrogen-rich organic smog and scan Titan’s surface. With the equipment, Wren could make out the vast plain named Shangri-la, a black void cutting across the moon’s surface. He also saw the tall peaks of Sotra Patera, a cryo-volcano spewing ammonium and water.
    Annoyed at the interruption, the pilot grunted and then switched