Endurance

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It was the fourth millennium.

Earth was restored. Great engineering projects had stabilised and preserved the planet’s fragile ecosystem: Earth was the first planet to be terraformed.

Meanwhile, the Solar System was opened up. Based in the orbit of Jupiter, an engineer called Michael Poole industriously took microscopic wormholes – natural flaws in spacetime – and expanded them to make transit links big enough to pass spaceships, enabling the inner System to be traversed in a matter of hours rather than months.

Poole Interfaces were towed out of Jupiter’s orbit and set up all over the System. The Jovian moons became hubs for interplanetary commerce.

And Poole and his colleagues pushed further out.

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The spacecraft from Earth sailed through rings of ice.

In its first week in orbit around Saturn it passed within a third of a million kilometres of Titan, Saturn’s largest moon, sensors peering curiously down at unbroken haze. The craft had been too heavy to launch direct with the technology of the time, so its flight path, extending across seven years, had taken it on swingbys past Venus, Earth and Jupiter. Primitive it was, but it was prepared for Titan. An independent lander, a fat pie-dish three metres across, clung to the side of the main body.

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