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international protocol. More, we can’t afford the time and effort to maintain such strict controls, even if we had the resources.
    “But we can continue our research. Athena was meant to probe Enceladus’ interior, but she can tunnel into Europa’s just as well—and provide us with all the water we will need. Unmanned probes have traveled through the system, but as we know from Phobos and Mars, all the automated probes in the universe still aren’t nearly as good as human beings on-site, if you can get them there. Well, we are here, and we will not just survive. We will not just rescue ourselves. We will learn , just as we came all the way out here to do.”
    Helen suddenly laughed, and A.J. looked at her in confusion. “What’s the joke?”
    The blonde paleontologist shook her head bemusedly. “It’s…so typically Madeline, three steps ahead of our own thoughts. If we were all thinking of this as survival and nothing else, we’d be doing our science all right…but feeling guilty about it, as though we were somehow wasting valuable thinking resources. She’s already seen that and this makes it all part of our job—so we can just enjoy as much as we can.”
    Madeline felt a touch of pink on her cheeks, and—unlike in some instances—it wasn’t entirely at her choice. “Anyone else taking a few minutes to think about it would see it. I just want us to remember to be human in all ways. Not just for remembering the dead…but for keeping us among the living.” She looked up involuntarily, and—like the others—she wasn’t really seeing the low ceiling of Munin , but the immense black sky with mighty Jupiter low in the west and Sun a tiny disc less than a fifth that seen from Earth. “Especially when there’s nothing else living within hundreds of millions of kilometers.”

Chapter 4.
    I am the only living thing within hundreds of millions of kilometers, thought General Alberich Hohenheim.
    The thought was not, he admitted to himself (there being no one else to admit it to) strictly true. There were undoubtedly a number of bacteria, possibly fungal spores and such, still living on the remains of the giant mass-drive vessel Odin , and there was the possibility that the water-oceans under the surfaces of Europa and Ganymede harbored some form of life.
    But of course when we think such thoughts, we mean beings like ourselves—other people, or perhaps dogs or cats, something that feels as we do and would be able to alleviate our loneliness in isolation. And there is nothing like that save for me until you reach—at least—the asteroid belt and Ceres.
    Seated—strapped in—at the engineering console of Odin , Hohenheim could see the exterior view displayed faithfully by the still-operating exernal cameras of Odin , or the half of Odin that remained at all. The forward portion, separated from the rest in Hohenheim’s last-minute desperation maneuvers to prevent a meteoric crash into lethal Io, had impacted on the volcanic moon of Jupiter just scant minutes before Hohenheim’s section had passed—just barely—by Io and continued onward.
    In the following days he had gathered supplies from the wreck which seemed both far larger and more cramped than it had before. Sometimes he had to wriggle his way through crumpled metal that half-blocked a corridor, or find a way to force open a door whose frame no longer quite fit and which no longer had power to control it.
    It was, he had to admit as he took a bite of the tight-wrapped liverwurst sandwich that was his lunch, something of a miracle that any of the systems were still functioning. Fitzgerald’s shrapnel-filled shell had detonated at what might have been the worst possible angle and shredded the huge EU vessel like a bird hit by a shotgun blast at point-blank range. Angles of explosion and of other hardened components had protected engineering itself and some of the other core regions, but the damage was so pervasive, so heavy, that even systems which