Saturn 94

You wake up aboard Orbita, a logistics station in the Saturn system. You were never meant to be here. They sent you out as a scientist, to study Enceladus. Instead you ended up among cargo, rockets and empty corridors. Now four colonies on three moons depend on you for supplies, and the Party is waiting for a report. Cargo: every kilogram counts Orbita’s storage bays are full of cargo and modular rocket parts: engines, fuel tanks, cargo modules, passenger modules. Building a rocket for a specific flight is your job. Calculate how much fuel the flight needs, choose the configuration, and decide whose request flies today and whose waits for the next launch window. There is never enough fuel, never enough capacity, and there are always more requests than available rockets. Communications: voices on the other end The radio is your only link to other people. Contact depends on where the moons are: you can only reach a colony while it is in direct line of sight. Aim the antenna, set the frequency and polarization, go through relay stations when there is no direct path. And then — talk. Over time you get to know the people on the other end, and every one of them will remember how you treated them. You cannot keep everyone happy. The radio carries more than voices. It also carries files: photographs, reports — and things that could see you denounced as a traitor to the Party. Life support: the station does not run itself Orbita is not scenery — it’s an organism. Every compartment and every device runs off one shared power grid, and there is never enough power for all of it: to switch one thing on, you have to switch another off. Oxygen filters have to be changed on schedule, and pressure controls in the docking bay leave no room for error. Historical background: a world where the USSR won This is an alternate history where the USSR won the space race and became the dominant power on Earth. Once the Moon was settled, the Party set an ambitious new goal: to colonize the moons of Saturn — Enceladus, Titan and Phoebe — before the end of the millennium. Off-nominal: what Orbita is hiding Why is the captain’s cabin locked? What happened to the previous keeper? What’s inside the abandoned section of the station? Orbita is hiding things. So is the mission that brought you here. Do you go looking for answers — or do you focus on saving the mission from collapse and keeping people alive?