The Pandora Probe

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I was anchoring a set of attitude jets to a hundred-meter ring fragment, getting it ready for its long drop into the inner Solar System, when I spotted the artifact. It glistened under the ice like a fish in water, and I thought for a moment it might be a ring trout that had somehow burrowed into the rock-hard surface, but ring trout are gold and this was silver. When I scraped a flat spot in the ice to look through, I saw that this was long and cylindrical, without the tentacles of a ring trout, either.

It was about a meter deep, embedded in remarkably clear ice. Usually the frozen mountains we mine from Saturn’s rings have a milky, bubbly texture from all the fracture lines and voids left over from their accretion, but the area around the artifact was clear as glass. When I shined my spotlight at it I could hardly see the beam; just the silver cylinder resting there, about as big as a person’s thigh.

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