Trang by Mary Sisson

didn’t, ” she said, more
forcefully. “OK, it was kind of hard to miss when it was happening, but it’s
not like it was my decision or anything.”
    “Oh my God!” exclaimed Philippe.
“I-I-I mean, I know the defenses went up right after the treaties were
modified, and there were rumors that the warheads had perhaps been manufactured a little early. But I didn’t, I had no idea—there were riots in Japan
over those mines!”
    “And, they all still alive to riot
again,” said Pinky. “We through!”
    Philippe peered at the
satellite-studded space before them. “How can you tell?”
    Pinky tapped a monitor. “Saturn,
Titan, is gone,” he said.
    Philippe looked through the window
again. They weren’t facing Saturn and its moons, so the difference in scenery
was subtle—far fewer stars, but equally as many satellites.
    But shouldn’t he have noticed?
There were no weird feelings, or bizarre lights. Indeed, there were no lights
at all, except those flashing on the satellites.
    “Didn’t there used to be a ring of
lights around the portal?” he asked.
    “The aliens put lights there to
mark it when it first opened up,” Shanti replied. “But we had them take them
away—there was a concern that it kind of made for an inviting target. Plus, it
was alien technology, and we didn’t want any of that near our portal,” said
Shanti.
    “So we just have our banned,
illegal, deadly nuclear technology?”
    “It’s not illegal now, ” said
Shanti. “Besides, we’ve got no mines on this side, they don’t like that. From a
security standpoint—and this may be useful to you as well, I don’t know—they’ve
really got this idea that there’s your space, and then there’s our space. And by our space I don’t mean ours like theirs, but ours like everybody’s .
    “ Your space is totally
yours—you can arm it like you want, and no one can enter it without your
permission, and if they do, you can blow them away, no problem. Our space is share-and-share-alike—it’s open, people can do as they please, you
don’t have big weapons sitting around because that makes people feel unwelcome.
As far as I can tell, the living areas on the station and what’s on the other
side of each portal is, like, private space, your space. Everything else
is our space.”
    “Interesting,” said Philippe,
looking at the blinking devices around them. “What are these satellites, then?”
    “Surveillance,” Shanti replied.
“They send probes back through the portal every few minutes. If you look, you might
see one shoot.”
    Philippe watched, but nothing shot
while he was looking. It was funny to think that with all the advances in
communications technology, the military and the Space Authority had to rely on
sending physical messages, just like the old postal systems or the Pony
Express. But that was the portal—nothing from one side went through to the
other, except for people, ships, satellites. . . . It was so bizarre.
    The Titan portal, you could work
your whole life on that alone.
    Philippe wondered how Yoli was
doing. He fervently hoped that no one had called her a university fucker to her
face.
    “You see there?” asked Pinky,
interrupting his musings.
    “Oh, wow!” said Philippe. “The
station’s just right in front of us, isn’t it?”
    The station—the massive, alien
station—was looming up before them, and Philippe had hardly noticed it. It
wasn’t lit well from the outside, and he stared at it, trying to connect the
lights sprinkled across his field of view into the sunburst shape made familiar
from videos and diagrams.
    “It’s not that easy to see, is it?”
Philippe said.
    “It’s fucking dark,” said Shanti.
    “Yeah,” said Cheep. “Surprisingly
so, right? But we’re really far from any natural light source—they built this place
in the middle of fucking nowhere. What you’re used to seeing is footage from
satellites, and those cameras are made to work in low light, and then the
images