She opened up her GUTdrive and skimmed around the orbit of Saturn.

Chiron was an obscure ice dwarf, a dirty snowball two hundred miles across. It looped between the orbits of Saturn and Uranus, following a highly elliptical orbit. One day the gravitational fields of the gas giants would hurl it out of the System altogether.

It had never been very interesting.

When Gage approached Chiron, she found a dozen GUTships drifting like spent matches around the limbs of the worldlet. The ships looked as if they were being dismantled, their components being hauled down into the interior of the worldlet.

A Virtual -- of a man's head -- rustled into existence in the middle of Gage's cabin. The disembodied head eyed Gage in her pilot's cocoon. The jostling pixels of his head enlarged, as if engorging with blood; Gage imagined data leaking down to the worldlet's surface.

"I'm Moro. You look clean." He looked about forty physical, with a high forehead, jet black eyebrows, a weak chin.

"Thanks a lot."

"You can approach. Message lasers only; no wideband transmission."

"Of course--"

"I'm a semisentient Virtual. There are copies of me all around your GUTship."

"I'm no trouble," she said tiredly.

"Make sure you aren't."

With Moro's pixel eyes on her, she brought the GUTship through a looping curve to the surface of the ice moon, and shut down its drive for the last time.

She stepped out onto the ancient surface of Chiron.

The ice was a rich crimson laced with organic purple. The suit's insulation was good, but enough heat leaked to send nitrogen clouds hissing around her footsteps, and where she walked she burned craters in the ice. Gravity was only a few per cent of gee, and Gage, Mars-born, felt as if she might blow away.

Moro met her in person.

"You're taller than you look on TV," she said.

He raised a gun at her. He kept it there while her ship was checked over.

Then he lowered the gun and took her gloved hand. He smiled through his faceplate. "You're welcome here." He escorted her into the interior of Chiron.

Corridors had been dug hastily into the ice and pressurized; the wall surface -- Chiron ice sealed and insulated by a clear plastic -- was smooth and hard under her hand.

Moro cracked open his helmet and smiled at her again. "Find somewhere to sleep. Retrieve whatever you need from your ship. Tomorrow I'll find you a work unit; there's plenty to be done."

Work unit?

"I'm not a colonist," she growled. "You think we'll be here that long?"

Moro looked sad. "Don't you?"

She found a cabin, a crude cube dug into the ice. She moved her few personal belongings into the cabin -- Virtuals of her parents on Mars, book chips, a few clothes. Her things looked dowdy and old, out of place.