Gardens of the Sun by Paul McAuley Page B

planned to wait out the search and then slip away. The technician slapped a tranquilliser patch on her forehead and fastened a mask over her face, and one of the marines lifted her out.
    A slender figure dangling limp and helpless in the man’s arms. Loc’s prize. His ticket to a better place. His way back in.

7
    Sri Hong-Owen didn’t hear about it until a news bite hit the nets: a brief announcement that Avernus’s daughter Yuli had been taken into custody following a collaborative action between the civilian administration of Dione and the military, soundtracked over video of a tall young girl dressed in an orange jumpsuit and sitting at a table in a bare room with two burly marines behind her. Propaganda no doubt meant to dishearten the resistance. No details about how or where she had been captured, or whether she had given up anything useful about her mother. Sri tried to reach out to Arvam Peixoto, but couldn’t get past an aide who, even though the line was strongly encrypted, refused to give her any information ‘for obvious security reasons’.
    Sri was on Titan, exploring one of Avernus’s gardens. It had been located just six weeks previously by one of the autonomous drones: a small tent capping a shaft drilled into a volcanic dome west of Hotei Arcus, giving access to domains of ammonia-rich water seething with a complex ecosystem of halflife prokaryotes. She ignored Vander Reece’s advice, told him he was in charge of the crew until she returned, and flew north in one of the dirigibles to Tank Town.
    The journey covered some seven thousand kilometres and took a little over two days. Flying under the hazy orange sky across a vast desert of transverse dunes neatly combed in parallel rows hundreds of kilometres long, built from crunchy grains of frozen gasoline and shaped by prevailing winds that blew steadily from west to east, with long shallow slopes scalloped and sculpted on the upwind sides and steep slip faces on the downwind sides. The sun, a pale spotlight blurrily magnified by the dense atmosphere and ringed by shells of diffused light, tracked across the dense orange smog that sheeted the sky, slowly descending towards the western horizon through Titan’s long, long afternoon. At last, a low range of hills appeared out of the haze: outliers of the northern uplands, a rumpled province of ammonia-water ice carved by the lightning forks of dry river channels and dappled with thousands of lakes, some little more than shallow ponds, others small seas the size of North America’s Great Lakes. It was midwinter. Methane accumulated during the summer rains was evaporating from the lakes, leaving behind ethane doped with benzene and complex hydrocarbons. The larger lakes had shrunk inside their contoured beds and some of the smaller ones had dried up completely. The braided river channels were dry too. This dark, rugged landscape spreading away under the omnipresent orange haze, the tops of ridges and low domed hills palely gleaming where ammonia-water ice had been stripped of overlying organic material by aeolian erosion and run-off from the methane and ethane rains.
    Tank Town squatted on the shore of one of the largest of the lakes, the Lunine Sea. The Brazilian base was a few kilometres to the north, a segmented structure built from discarded cargo shells and raised on fat struts and wrapped in silvery quilted insulation, its fission pile lofting a pale plume of steam bent by the constant wind. The traffic master refused to lay on a special shuttle, so Sri was stuck there, buzzing with frustration like a bee in a bottle, until the scheduled supply run arrived. She tried and failed to get information on the capture of Avernus’s daughter, collated her field notes, and paid a visit to Tank Town’s mayor, Gunter Lasky.
    The old man was of the pioneering generation which had fled from the Moon to the Outer System, and the first person to have established a permanent home on Titan. One hundred and