Ringshine Read online

  ***

  Trent entered into his tiny, two-bedroom apartment and headed straight into the spare bedroom, which had been converted into a very messy, unorganized office. He sat down at the computer chair and stared at the poster of Saturn on the wall behind the desk. It was his favorite planet and had held him in intrigue since he first saw it as a child.

  The poster was an enlarged image shot by the Cassini spacecraft of the gas giant back-lit by the sun and brightly illuminated in the foreground by ringshine: the light reflected by the icy bodies composing the rings, lighting the backside of the planet. Nestled within the image, a small pinpoint of light was just visible through a gap in two of the rings. Although it looked like a bright, blue-colored star in the distance, it was actually the planet Earth, nearly a billion miles away.

  He looked around at all of the training materials scattered about on the desk. In the morning, he would begin receiving images from one of the three new probes that had recently arrived at the ringed planet. The Saturn Surveyor Mission consisted of three spacecraft traveling as one and separated into its component parts as it neared the enigmatic world. A polar surveyor, a ring orbiter and a cloud surveyor made up the contingency. Saturn-3, the probe surveying the clouds and a host of newly discovered storms roiling within them, would be delivering his images. However, he was more interested in the data from Saturn-1, the polar surveyor.

  He couldn't wait to see close-up, detailed images of the large, geometrically shaped cloud formation on the planet's north pole. There was nothing like it yet found in the solar system or beyond; a six-sided, hexagonal cloud formation that had baffled scientists and astonomers since its discovery. He wouldn't be working with that probe directly, but he would be following its progress closely through the internet and his own inside information. “That's one sexy planet...” he slurred, nodding to the poster on the wall as he clumsily got himself up and stumbled to his bed.

  Trent awoke to his phone's alarm blaring a rooster's crow into the empty apartment. He fumbled with the phone until it was silenced, then got up and began his morning routine: coffee, cigarettes and the news. He greedily sucked down two glasses of water after catching up on the happenings in the world, smiling at the mention of the Saturn Surveyor's arrival on a morning talk show. He got his computer up and running, logged into the remote server to access his tools and readied himself for a day of working fun.

  Trent arranged his notes from training and began downloading image packs, anywhere from a few to hundreds of images sent in bulk, as the probe accumulated them. His online tools allowed him to draw shapes on the images, outlining areas of interest, which he then labeled and stored for transmission at the end of the day.

  About two hours into the morning, nearing the time for his first break, he noticed something unusual at the edge of one of the images. It looked like a bright moon, but was reflecting far more light than any moon he had seen thus far. The next few images revealed the object in more definition, and Trent was able to identify it as the only other spacecraft in the vicinity, the Cassini probe. Realizing what he was seeing, he quickened his pace, scanning through dozens of images as the craft made its way to the opposite edge of the frame, almost out of sight behind the curve of the huge planet.

  A streak of light appeared in the next image, coming from behind the planet, well out of view of the probe. The next showed it had moved quite a distance in a very short time. Trent was excited, hoping that he had just witnessed a comet or asteroid zooming by, when the next set of images displayed on his screen. The bright object seemed to be elongated, looking almost cylindrical, but it was hard to tell with the resolution of the current shots. As he scanned through more images, he stopped recording or notating anything.

  “What in the...?” he heard himself say aloud. The image on his screen showed a bright flash that obscured nearly everything in the shot. As the flare receded through the next sequence of images, he could clearly see the debris and aftermath: tiny flakes of metal and iridescent foils reflecting light in different directions all at once, trailing the object as it kept traveling on into the void of space. Cassini had been hit... and completely destroyed.

  Trent's phone rang, and it made him jump. He stared at the device for a few seconds, his heart pounding in his chest, before recognizing the number and answering the call. “Hello Donnie,” he answered the call.

  “Trent, how are you doing today?” Donnie, his direct supervisor asked.

  “Good, loving this new project, thanks for the opportunity,” Trent replied, trying to suck up a bit.

  “How far have you gotten today? What batch number are you working on?” his supervisor asked.

  “Batch 66512, just finished it. Ready for the next one,” Trent lied, not wanting to tell his boss that he had been scanning through images without notating. He gave him the batch number for the images preceding the Cassini orbiter, reasoning that he would go back and mark the images, then call with the revelation of the impact on the spacecraft. He was sure that it would be a major news event by that time, then he could just send his images on their way.

  “Shut it down, and send everything you've done so far today,” Donnie stated, suddenly sounding very serious.

  “Umm, did I get fired or something?” Trent asked.

  “No, you're not fired, just take the rest of the day off. We've got some system issues that need to be worked out, tomorrow is business as usual,” Donnie informed him, “Get those files over here right away, alright?”

  “Sure thing, I'll do it right now,” he assured Donnie, and the call abruptly ended. Trent looked back to his monitor and began to prepare the images he had processed for transfer. As he worked, he also printed images of the impact on Cassini, thinking that if things were going sour with this job already, he could sell the images online.

  He stored the images on a thumb drive and finished his transfer, but before signing off completely, he wanted to see the next few images from the probe. He began the download process, but was met with a 'signal lost' message. He knew from training that when the probe was blocked completely by the planet, communications would temporarily be lost, but those times were well known and incorporated into his schedule. “Maybe that's it?” Trent pondered aloud, “Maybe they already know and are probably repositioning everything to get a better look.”

  Confident in his assessment, Trent scooped up his prints and went into the kitchen, grabbed a beer and plopped himself down on the loveseat. He turned on the television to CNN, expecting to see the headlines flooded with news of the unfortunate demise of the Cassini spacecraft. A full hour and another beer had come to pass before he realized that nothing at all had been mentioned about the impact. He flipped through several channels, even visiting the NASA channel and corresponding website, but nothing alluded to the event.

  “Thought that would be big news,” he told the television. Trent decided to talk to his sometime girlfriend, Kim, a planetary science student he had met online through some of his past crowdsourcing projects. They eventually started dating off and on. Kim was twelve years his junior, with him at forty-two, and neither had any illusions of their compatibility. They just had fun from time to time, usually after drinking too much. Trent tapped his pocket to assure that the thumb drive was in there, then departed for Kim's place.