Europa did not look hostile. That was the first unsettling thing about it.
From the viewport of the approaching transport shuttle, the moon was beautiful. It was a perfect sphere of pale ivory, crisscrossed by deep, rust-red fractures that looked like the veins in polished marble. Behind it, Jupiter filled half the sky—a monstrous, churning canvas of cream and ochre storms. The gas giant was a gravity well so violent it generated its own radiation belts, a king that crushed its subjects with invisible weight. But set against that chaotic backdrop, the little ice moon seemed delicate. Serene.
Daniel knew better. Nothing that moved that much mass quietly was delicate.
He sat strapped into the acceleration couch, his eyes fixed on the viewport. The shuttle was drifting alongside the Ring Core. It was a marvel of active-support engineering—a superconductive silver cable encircling the entire moon, fifty kilometers above the surface. It was so thin it almost vanished when the harsh Jovian light hit it edge-on, but it hummed with enough electromagnetic current to push against Europa's magnetosphere and stay aloft.
Above the ring hung the habitats. They were arranged like beads on a wire, rotating drums of metal and composite plating that levitated in the magnetic fields generated by the core.
And from each habitat, thin black threads dropped toward the gleaming, bone-white ice below.
The tethers.
Daniel watched one of the tethers through the reinforced glass. To the naked eye, it looked like a static line holding a balloon to the floor. But Daniel wasn't looking at the line; he was looking at the tension.
It vibrated. The movement was incredibly small—perhaps only a few centimeters of oscillation across a cable fifty kilometers long. It was the kind of thing most people, even trained riggers, would ignore as ambient atmospheric drag or standard mechanical shudder.
But the frequency was wrong.
Daniel counted the beats in his head. Tighten. Slack. Tighten. Slack. It wasn't a random flutter caused by the habitat's spin. It was periodic. A slow, agonizing tightening, followed by a terrifying moment of slack, then a violent snap back to tension.
It looked exactly like a lung breathing under duress.
"Docking corridor in thirty seconds," the shuttle pilot announced over the comms, his voice tight with the concentration required to match velocity with a magnetic grapple that would pull the little ship into the station.
Beside Daniel, Bram leaned forward against his crash webbing. His dark eyes were wide, tracking the massive arc of the ring. "Look at the scale of it," the dwarf muttered, his voice a low rumble of pure reverence. "It's gorgeous. They actually built it."
Daniel nodded slightly, but his attention didn't leave the tether outside the window. "Europa flex cycle is every three point five days, correct?" he asked the pilot.
The pilot glanced back over his shoulder, a frown creasing his helmet liner. "Yeah. Why? You can see the ice moving already?"
Daniel pointed a gloved finger at the glass. "No. But that tether is taking a maximum tension load every three minutes."
The pilot's frown deepened into something resembling annoyance. "That's impossible. The orbital drift correctors fire every ten minutes to maintain alignment. You're just seeing the thruster compensation."
Daniel didn't respond. He looked past the tether, down to the ice below. The red fractures in the surface weren't static lines carved into bedrock. They were tectonic boundaries. Thirty meters of tidal flex every single cycle. That was the official number the engineers back on Kronion had quoted. But numbers on a chart were abstractions. Out here, suspended in the dark, the movement was terrifyingly real.
The shuttle aligned with Outpost Four's docking ring. The magnetic clamps engaged with a low, heavy thud that vibrated up through Daniel's boots. The hum in the shuttle's hull changed pitch, syncing with the habitat's rotation and the relentless electromagnetic scream of the ring core outside.
"Welcome to Outpost Four," the pilot said, unbuckling. "Watch your step. The gravity is light today."
Bram grinned like a man about to walk into a fireworks factory with a pocket full of matches. He unlatched his harness and grabbed his heavy tool rig. Daniel followed him, stepping out of the airlock and into the docking corridor.
The interior of the habitat smelled faintly of ozone, cold metal, and stale coffee. The gravity was indeed light—maybe six-tenths of Kronion's standard 1.0G. It was enough to walk normally, but every step carried a slight, buoyant bounce that made Daniel feel ungrounded.
The station was a hive of stressed activity. Technicians and riggers moved through the curved corridors in tight groups, their voices echoing off the composite bulkheads. There was no casual banter. Faces were drawn. Clipboards and datapads were clutched tightly. It didn't feel like a research outpost; it felt like a submarine taking on water.
They followed the signage to the central operations concourse. It was a vast, domed room located in the non-rotating hub of the habitat.
At the center of the room floated a massive volumetric projection. It was Europa's structural model.
Daniel stopped walking. He dropped his duffel bag onto the deck plating and stepped up to the edge of the holotable.
The diagram showed the entire architecture in glowing wireframe. The silver ring core. The cluster of habitats hovering around it. The anchor tethers dropping straight down into the ice shell. And beneath the ten-mile-thick crust of ice: the ocean.
The subsurface ocean was represented as a calm, uniform blue volume.
Daniel frowned.
Bram came up beside him, dropping his own heavy bags. The dwarf crossed his arms, his eyes tracking the glowing lines of force rendered in the simulation. "You see it?" Bram asked quietly.
"Yeah," Daniel said. "They're modeling the ocean like a tank."
Bram snorted, a sound of profound professional disgust. "Engineers love tanks. Tanks are predictable. Tanks have walls that don't move."
"But it isn't a tank," Daniel said. He reached out and tapped the interface at the edge of the table.
The model expanded, the perspective diving beneath the ice. The ocean layer swelled to fill the center of the room. Daniel keyed in a command, accessing the raw telemetry feeds from the deep-dive probes.
Suddenly, the uniform blue volume changed. Thermal vents flickered to life across the seafloor like tiny campfires. Heat plumes rose from them, rendering as slow-motion, twisting storms of orange and red that slammed into the underside of the ice crust. But the simulation still treated them as localized, static heat sources. The water around them didn't circulate.
"They're ignoring convection," Daniel said, his voice flat.
"They're simplifying it to save processing power," Bram corrected, though he didn't sound like he believed it was a good excuse. "They only care about the vertical displacement of the ice. The tidal squeeze."
Daniel shook his head slowly. "They're ignoring the thing that actually moves the mass."
"Convection is accounted for in the secondary fluid dynamics model," a voice spoke from behind them.
Daniel turned.
A woman stood a few meters away, holding a datapad against her chest. She wore the slate-gray uniform of the project, with the heavy black band of Station Command on her bicep. She was in her late forties, with sharp, striking features and hair pulled back into a severe, no-nonsense knot. Her eyes were dark and exhausted, but they carried the intense, piercing focus of someone who was used to being the smartest person in the room.
This was Dr. Anika Voss. Chief Structural Engineer of the Europa Ring Project.
She looked at Daniel and Bram the way experienced, battle-weary engineers always looked at fresh arrivals from the inner system—with polite skepticism and a faint, lingering readiness for disappointment.
"You must be the new transfers," Dr. Voss said, stepping up to the holotable. She looked Daniel up and down, noting his youth. "Bram, structural integration. And Daniel. Hydrology."
"That's right," Daniel said.
Voss looked at the modified projection, where Daniel had forced the thermal plumes to render. "And you've been on my station for less than five minutes, and you already think our foundational model is wrong."
Daniel looked back at the projection. The holographic tethers hung perfectly straight, rigid lines connecting the floating habitats to the ice. There was no drift. No oscillation. No breathing. The model represented an idealized universe that simply did not exist outside the computer.
"Yes," Daniel said. "It's wrong."
"Why?" Voss asked. Her tone wasn't defensive, merely challenging.
"Because you're trying to hold the moon still," Daniel said.
A few technicians working at nearby consoles paused, glancing over their shoulders. It was a quiet, dangerous thing to say to the Chief Engineer.
Voss folded her arms. She didn't look angry, just terribly tired. "The moon moves thirty meters per tidal cycle, Daniel. Jupiter squeezes it, the ice shell rises, and then it falls. We know this. We account for that vertical displacement in the tether tension tolerances. We have slack-spools the size of buildings designed to pay out and reel in the cable as the ice moves."
"That's vertical movement," Daniel said. "And it assumes the ice is moving uniformly."
"And?"
"And the ocean underneath the ice is moving, too."
Voss gestured dismissively to the glowing blue model. "The total ocean mass is constant. The volume doesn't change."
Daniel almost smiled. The Old Man inside him recognized the fallacy immediately. It was the arrogance of someone who had spent too much time designing steel beams and not enough time watching a river carve a canyon.
"Water doesn't care about volume, Doctor," Daniel said softly. "It cares about pressure gradients."
He reached into the hologram and expanded the thermal vent layer until it took up the entire table. He pointed to the massive plumes of heat rising from the ocean floor.
"Those vents are pumping heat into the ocean continuously. But because Jupiter is squeezing the moon, the pressure in the ocean isn't static. It's dynamic. When you combine localized heat with massive, variable pressure, the convection cells don't just rise and fall."
Daniel traced a curved line through the projection, dragging his finger from the equator toward the poles.
"They migrate," he said.
Voss frowned slightly, her eyes following his finger. "They shift with the tidal squeeze."
Bram leaned forward, catching Daniel's rhythm perfectly. "Meaning the ocean mass isn't just moving up and down," the dwarf grunted. "It's moving sideways. You've got subsurface currents the size of continents sloshing laterally under the ice."
"Exactly," Daniel said. He zoomed the model back out, bringing the tether anchors back into view. "You're anchoring the habitats to the ice shell."
"The ice shell is the only solid structure available," Voss said, her voice tightening with the first hint of genuine frustration. "We can't anchor to water."
"But the ice shell isn't stable," Daniel countered. "It's floating on a moving ocean. When quadrillions of tons of water surge laterally beneath the crust, the friction drags the ice with it. The crust slips."
Voss crossed her arms tighter. "Our geologists calculate that lateral crustal slip is negligible. Millimeters per day."
Daniel turned and pointed toward the massive observation viewport at the end of the concourse. Outside, the black thread of a tether dropped down toward the brilliant white horizon.
As they watched, the tether twitched. It was a violent, sudden shudder that sent a vibration rattling through the deck plates of the concourse.
"Your tether says otherwise," Daniel said.
Voss turned slightly, her jaw clenching as she glanced toward the window. "It's within tolerance. The magnetic locks on the ring are compensating."
"For now," Daniel said.
Bram had already pulled out his personal datapad and synced it to the station's raw telemetry feed. He watched the oscillation frequencies scroll across his screen, his thick brows knitting together.
"It's accelerating," Bram said quietly, tapping the screen. "The lateral drag on Anchor Four just spiked by twelve percent in the last hour."
Voss frowned, finally stepping closer to Bram to look at the numbers. "That's impossible. We're in the middle of the tidal cycle. The load should be stabilizing."
"It's a resonance spike," Daniel said.
"With what?" Voss demanded, looking up at him.
Daniel pointed a thumb up at the ceiling. "With Jupiter."
Silence hung heavily in the concourse. The ambient hum of the life support systems suddenly seemed very loud.
"The subsurface currents are hitting a harmonic resonance with Jupiter's magnetic field," Daniel explained, his voice calm, devoid of the panic that was beginning to seep into the room. "The induction drag is compounding. The ocean is pushing the ice, the ice is pulling the tether, and the tether is dragging the habitat out of its magnetic levitation groove on the ring."
Voss stared at him. She looked at the raw numbers on Bram's pad, then back at the perfectly straight, idealized tethers in her holographic model. She sighed, pinching the bridge of her nose.
"You've been here fifteen minutes," she said.
Daniel nodded.
"And you already think the entire foundational architecture of a trillion-credit station is fatally flawed."
Daniel didn't look at her. He was watching the ocean model again. The blue volume was still perfectly, infuriatingly still in the simulation. But standing here, feeling the faint, rhythmic shudder of the deck plates, he could almost feel the currents surging underneath the ice miles below them. He could feel the weight of it.
"You built a rigid structure on a breathing moon, Dr. Voss," he said softly.
"And?"
"And you're going to spend the rest of your lives tightening bolts and dumping power into the magnetic locks to hold it still." He finally looked up, meeting her dark, exhausted eyes. "Until something snaps."
Right on cue, the tether outside the viewport shuddered again. It was a harder jerk this time. A coffee mug resting on a nearby console rattled against the metal surface.
Then, it stilled.
Dr. Voss studied Daniel for a long, calculating moment. She didn't dismiss him. She didn't call security. She was a scientist standing on a crumbling bridge, and she had just met someone who seemed to understand exactly how the wind was blowing.
"If you're right," Voss said, her voice dropping to a low, intense murmur so the rest of the room couldn't hear. "If the induction drag is going to overwhelm the magnetic locks... what would you do differently? We can't un-tether. If we detach, the ring loses its mass-balance and we spin out into Jupiter's gravity well."
Daniel looked at the model. He looked at the silver ring, the rigid anchors, and the vast, dynamic ocean beneath it all. He remembered Kronion. He remembered the torque storm, and how the massive conduits had simply bled the load sideways, warping to survive.
You don't stop the mass. You invite it somewhere else.
"You stop fighting the tide," Daniel said.
The engineers working at the nearby consoles had completely stopped pretending they weren't listening. The room waited.
Daniel reached into the hologram. He highlighted the magnetic suspension clamps holding the habitat to the ring.
"Right now, when the ice drags the tether sideways, you dump power into the clamps to hold the habitat in exactly the same spot on the ring," Daniel said. "You're treating the drift as an error."
"Because it is," Voss said. "If the habitats slide along the ring, they collide."
"Then you manage the slide," Daniel said. He swiped his hand, overriding the clamp protocols in the simulation. "You unlock the rigid suspension. You put the entire habitat on a dynamic slack-leash. When the ocean drags the ice, you let the tether pull the habitat along the ring. You let it drift."
Silence fell over the concourse.
Bram grinned slowly, a low chuckle rumbling in his chest. "Lateral bleed," the dwarf murmured. "You turn the habitats into shock absorbers."
Dr. Voss did not smile. She stared at the projection, watching the habitats in Daniel's modified simulation slowly slide back and forth along the silver ring, swaying in time with the breathing of the moon below.
It was an engineering nightmare. It meant constantly recalculating docking corridors, transit times, and power routing. It was messy, chaotic, and terrifyingly fluid.
It was also the only way the tethers wouldn't snap.
"Interesting," Voss said finally. She didn't say it was crazy. She didn't say it was impossible.
She turned back to the holotable, her eyes burning with a new, frantic energy.
"Show me the math."
Daniel didn't hesitate. He stepped into the space beside her, his hands moving over the haptic interface of the holotable with a fluid, terrifying speed.
He didn't start by adding new code; he started by deleting her assumptions.
He stripped out the rigid anchoring constants. He deleted the static ocean volume parameters. He wiped the localized gravity compensators that the simulation used to artificially smooth out the math.
"What are you doing?" a senior systems tech demanded, stepping forward. "You're destabilizing the entire predictive model."
"I'm removing the blindfolds," Daniel said, his eyes fixed on the projection.
He pulled the raw telemetry from the deep-dive probes—the heat plumes, the salinity densities, the chaotic swirl of the subsurface currents—and mapped them directly onto the tether tension physics.
The simulation immediately turned a violent, angry red.
[WARNING: CATASTROPHIC SHEAR FAILURE IMMINENT.]
The holographic tethers snapped, whipping wildly as the simulated habitats tore free from the ice and slammed into each other along the ring.
Voss's face was a mask of cold stone. "You've just proved my point. If we don't lock the magnetic suspension, the induction drag pulls us into a collision cascade. The station destroys itself."
"That's what happens if you just let go," Daniel corrected, his voice a calm, steady anchor in the room. "I didn't say let go. I said manage the slide."
He looked at Bram. "Structural tolerances. If we put the magnetic locks on a variable-resistance slip-clutch, how much lateral force can the ring handle before the superconductive core warps?"
Bram stepped up, his thick fingers dancing across his own side of the console. He didn't need to look up the material specs; he had memorized them on the three-week shuttle ride from Kronion.
"The core is solid," Bram grunted. "It can take the shear. The weak point is the habitat hull where the suspension pylons connect. If you brake too hard while sliding, you'll rip the pylons right out of the bulkheads."
"So we don't brake hard," Daniel said. "We brake like water."
Daniel began to write a new algorithm. It wasn't a structural equation; it was a fluid dynamics formula. He took the math he used to route a billion gallons of water through the arterial conduits of Kronion and applied it to a city made of metal and glass.
He tied the magnetic suspension locks directly to the tension sensors on the tethers.
"When the ice moves," Daniel explained, his hands weaving through the holographic light, "the tether pulls. When the tension hits eighty percent of maximum yield, the magnetic locks on the ring don't clamp down. They release. Just five percent. Enough to let the habitat slide along the ring in the direction of the pull."
He executed the code.
The simulation reset.
The red warnings vanished, replaced by a complex, shifting web of amber and green.
In the projection, the habitats were no longer static beads on a wire. As the simulated tidal flex of Europa squeezed the moon, the subsurface ocean surged. The induction currents flared. The tethers pulled.
But this time, the tethers didn't snap.
Outpost Four slid smoothly along the silver ring, drifting eighty meters to the west, absorbing the kinetic energy of the ocean like a shock absorber. As the tidal wave passed, the magnetic locks gently increased resistance, slowing the slide, and bringing the habitat to a smooth, unforced halt.
"Look at the tether tension," Bram said, a fierce, triumphant grin splitting his beard.
Voss looked. The tension had peaked at eighty-two percent. Well within the safety margin.
But Voss didn't look relieved. She looked horrified.
"It's a pendulum," she whispered, staring at the simulation. "You've turned a multi-trillion-credit orbital facility into a pendulum."
"I turned it into a buoy," Daniel said.
"Do you have any idea what this means logistically?" Voss demanded, her voice rising, the polished veneer of the Chief Engineer finally cracking. She jabbed a finger at the sliding holograms. "Power umbilicals. Transit corridors. Docking schedules. If the station is moving fifty, sixty, a hundred meters a day in unpredictable directions, how does a supply shuttle dock? How do we maintain hardline comms with the surface drills?"
"Shuttles match velocity," Daniel said flatly. "You dock like a ship at sea, not a building on land. And you switch the hardlines to slack-spools."
"And the people?" Voss countered, stepping into Daniel's space. "We have three thousand people on this outpost alone. Scientists. Riggers. Families. You want them to live in a city that is constantly, unpredictably in motion? The vertigo. The micro-accelerations. The sheer psychological terror of knowing the ground beneath them is sliding?"
Daniel looked at her. He thought of Elara, gripping a bonding tool, terrified of losing control, trying to bolt him to the floor.
He didn't blink.
"They are already living in a city that is being ripped apart," Daniel said, his voice dropping to a register that carried the impossible, ancient weight of his soul. "They just don't feel it yet because you're hiding the math from them. You can give them the illusion of stability today, Dr. Voss. But tomorrow, you're going to give them the vacuum of space."
The concourse was dead silent. No one breathed.
Voss opened her mouth to reply, her dark eyes flashing with a mix of fury and cornered realization—
THUD.
The sound didn't come from the air. It came through the deck plates. It was a massive, concussive impact, like a sledgehammer striking the hull of a submarine.
The artificial gravity flickered, dropping Daniel's stomach into his boots for a nauseating half-second before slamming back to normal.
Alarms shrieked. The ambient lighting snapped from soft white to emergency crimson.
"Report!" Voss barked, spinning away from the holotable and lunging toward the primary command console.
"Massive tension spike on Anchor Four!" the senior systems tech yelled over the klaxons, his hands flying across his board. "Induction drag just jumped off the scale. Jupiter's field is peaking early. The ocean is surging."
"Magnetic locks?" Voss demanded.
"Dumping auxiliary power to the clamps to hold position," the tech replied automatically. "We're at ninety percent power. Ninety-five."
Daniel looked out the massive viewport.
The tether was no longer a thin black thread. It was vibrating so violently it was a blur. And now, he could hear it. Through the vacuum, through the meters of composite shielding, the sound of the tortured carbon-nanotube cable was transferring into the station's frame.
It was a high, dissonant scream. The sound of a world trying to break a chain.
"Tether tension at ninety-two percent of maximum yield!" the tech shouted, panic bleeding into his voice. "Ninety-four!"
"Hold the locks!" Voss ordered. "Reroute life-support reserves to the magnetic coils! Do not let us slip!"
She's tightening her grip, Daniel thought. She's drowning, and she's grabbing the anchor.
"It's going to snap!" Bram roared, looking at the telemetry on his pad. "The shear stress is accumulating in the pylon joints! You're going to rip the floor out of this concourse!"
"Tension at ninety-seven percent!" the tech screamed.
The deck beneath Daniel's boots began to groan. Dust drifted down from the ceiling panels. The scream of the tether was deafening now, vibrating in Daniel's teeth, rattling his bones.
He saw it happening. He didn't just see the numbers; he saw the fluid dynamics of the ocean below, the rigid, arrogant geometry of the station above, and the inevitable, catastrophic intersection of the two.
Daniel didn't ask permission.
He moved.
He crossed the deck in three long strides, shoved past the junior analyst, and planted himself at the secondary operations terminal.
"What are you doing?!" Voss yelled, lunging toward him. "Security, get him off that board!"
"I'm bleeding the load," Daniel said.
He didn't use the simulation code. There was no time to compile it. He did it manually. He brought up the magnetic suspension controls, his fingers dancing across the haptic keys with the terrifying, muscle-memory precision of a master pianist.
"Daniel, stop!" Voss reached for his shoulder.
Bram stepped between them. The dwarf didn't raise his hands, he just expanded his chest, turning himself into a wall of solid muscle and exo-rig armor. "Let him work, Doctor," Bram growled, his voice a low rumble of absolute authority. "Or you're going to die in the dark."
"Tension at ninety-nine percent!" the systems tech wailed, covering his head with his arms as if expecting the ceiling to cave in. "Yield failure imminent!"
Daniel found the main clamp registry.
Water doesn't argue, he thought. It flows.
"Dropping magnetic resistance to forty percent," Daniel announced, his voice slicing through the panic.
He hit the execution key.
The station lurched.
It wasn't a gentle slide. The sudden release of tension was violent. The entire habitat groaned as it was violently yanked along the silver rail of the orbital ring.
People screamed. Technicians were thrown from their chairs, sprawling across the deck plating. Voss stumbled, catching herself on Bram's armored shoulder. Daniel gripped the edges of the console, his knuckles white, riding the tectonic shift of the city.
The viewport swung dizzily as the habitat slid seventy, eighty, ninety meters along the ring.
But the screaming stopped.
The horrifying, high-pitched shriek of the dying tether vanished, replaced by the deep, rushing hum of the magnetic coils allowing the station to glide.
"Ramping resistance back up," Daniel said, his eyes tracking the induction wave on the monitor. "Sixty percent. Seventy. Eighty."
The slide slowed. The habitat shuddered, the kinetic energy dissipating smoothly into the dampening fields of the ring core.
With a final, heavy groan of settling metal, Outpost Four came to a halt. One hundred and forty meters west of its original position.
The klaxons fell silent. The red emergency lights blinked twice, then reset to standard white.
Daniel let go of the console and took a slow, deep breath. He could feel the sweat cooling on the back of his neck.
He looked at the systems tech, who was slowly peeling himself off the floor.
"Tether tension?" Daniel asked.
The tech scrambled back into his chair, his hands shaking as he pulled up the readouts. He blinked, rubbing his eyes as if he couldn't believe the screen.
"Tension is… it's at sixty-two percent, sir," the tech stammered. "Nominal. Induction drag is still high, but… the shear stress is gone. We're stable."
A collective, shuddering breath left the room. Someone in the back began to laugh—a high, hysterical sound of pure relief.
Dr. Voss pushed herself away from Bram. She straightened her uniform tunic, her hands trembling slightly. She walked over to the viewport.
The tether was still there. It wasn't perfectly straight anymore. It hung at a slight, visible angle, pointing back toward the anchor point on the ice. But it wasn't vibrating. It was holding.
She stood there for a long time, staring out at the vast, uncaring expanse of Jupiter and the broken ice of the moon below.
Finally, she turned back to Daniel.
She didn't look angry anymore. The arrogant, exhausted certainty that had defined her posture was gone, replaced by the hollowed-out look of a woman who had just realized she'd been driving her family toward a cliff in the dark.
"You did it manually," she said, her voice hoarse.
"I had to," Daniel said. "The system was fighting the physics. I just gave the physics somewhere to go."
Voss looked at the console Daniel had used. Then she looked at the young man standing in front of it. He didn't look smug. He didn't look triumphant. He just looked like someone who had done a job.
"If we automate that process," Voss said slowly, the gears of her brilliant mind already beginning to turn, grinding against the new paradigm. "If we write your algorithm into the master control… the transit corridors will have to be completely redesigned. The power umbilicals will need dynamic slack."
"It's a lot of work," Bram agreed, stepping up beside Daniel. "Good thing you just hired a new structural integration chief."
Voss let out a short, breathy laugh that held no humor, only the sheer, crushing weight of the task ahead.
"It's going to take months to rewrite the logistics code," she murmured. "The station is going to be in constant motion."
"It's already in constant motion," Daniel corrected gently. "Now, you're just admitting it."
He walked away from the console, picking his duffel bag up off the deck. He slung it over his shoulder and looked out the viewport one last time.
Europa was a monster. It was a chaotic, breathing, surging world that cared nothing for the little metal beads strung above it. It could not be mastered. It could not be held still.
But it could be ridden.
"Where's my bunk, Doctor?" Daniel asked. "I want to get some sleep before the next tide comes in."