‘Harry, hold on.’

He hissed something wordless, exasperated, and ran back into the house, slipping on cold paving slabs. I thought he’d fall, but he held on to the door frame and was gone.

I relaxed against the bench, swearing to myself. Idiot. So close.

Later we learned that Devonald had met a school friend we also knew at a pub not far away, just hours after being escorted from the airbase. The friend, a huge beast of a man named Alex, had spied Devonald nursing a full pint of ale alone. He’d approached his friend hoping to catch up, only for Devonald to tell him the whole story; how it had been for years without family or friends after his wife died from spinal cancer, diagnosed not long after they’d been contracted to the base. The trips he’d made to the perimeter wall, the money he slipped to guards who let in local women to take care of lonely men’s needs. The quiet, barren rooms formerly used for interviews, one wooden table, three chairs, where it all took place. The banter between himself and the women, nothing remotely classified as far as he could remember, but the chip … Perhaps the chip said different. The shock of guards pulling him from his desk, rough hands at his back, pushing him down aisles. Big as he was, Alex cried when he told us how scared Devonald had looked at that empty table, and how he’d thought that being at a party, among people, might have cheered him up. Made him feel less alone. I listened, unaware yet that our chance meeting had reawakened an interest in the WiSP that would last the rest of my life. Juanita sucked air between her teeth, holding my hand tight. None of us were chipped back then. It wasn’t obligatory at that point, thank God. That, too, would come later.

Nothing lives on Saturn. As beautiful as it looks, it will always be a dead, cold world. Its atmosphere, composed mainly of ammonia, is gaseous. Its interior, silicon rock and liquid hydrogen. This made the sixth planet a perfect target for Mimas 4’s maiden journey. Far enough to pose a challenge, close enough to reach with probes, silent enough to register even the faintest subatomic charges and, under the best possible conditions, perhaps rejuvenate a planetary graveyard.

The first probes, launched centuries before, were mere fly-bys, intersolar tourism so to speak, taking low- and eventually high-res photos of the planet and moons for extensive mapping. Later missions were exercises in fact-finding, an exploration of methane lakes, a search for life. When none were discovered, Saturn was written off as a lonely outpost, great for chemists and physicists, bad for biologists. The probes that followed had been nothing more than monitoring stations, early-warning systems and the humble beginnings of docking stations for proposed interstellar exploration.