Titan Read Online Free Page B

after hand. She is in her element, kind and warm and loving. I would be lost without her. The line seemed endless, and Urbain struggled to find something worth saying, something more than “Merry Christmas” endlessly repeated.
    At last it was done. Urbain rubbed his numbed hand and looked out over the assembly. Two hundred men and women, he thought. One hundred and ninety-four, to be precise. It is such a small number to run the scientific investigation of Saturn, its rings, and its moons. But when you must greet each one individually it seems like a very large number indeed.
    Nadia Wunderly was one of the last persons that Urbain had greeted. She was the maverick among his scientists, and although she had brought Urbain sudden and unexpected success, he still regarded her with a mixture of disquiet and, yes, jealousy. She had refused to follow his orders and join the others in
the study of Titan. Instead she had focused single-mindedly on Saturn’s rings. And discovered organisms living in their particles of ice. A great discovery, if it held true. Wexler and her ICU lackeys seemed to harbor some doubts about Wunderly’s claim.
    Now Wunderly drifted from the reception line to the makeshift bar that had been set up along the base of the auditorium’s stage. She was a young woman, not yet thirty, with a rather pretty heart-shaped face. Urbain thought she would look even prettier if she stopped dying her hair brick red and let it grow normally instead of chopping it into those ridiculous barbs; her hair looked like the spiked end of a medieval bludgeon. She was wearing her usual dark tunic and slacks, which was unfortunate: Her figure was ample, too ample for his taste. Buxom, yes, but also heavyset, thick in the waist and limbs.
    He mentally compared her to his wife. Slim and elegant, Jeanmarie would commit suicide before letting herself gain that much weight.
    Wunderly was also looking at Jeanmarie Urbain. Slim as a stylus, she thought. One of those lucky women who had a metabolism that burned calories faster than she could ingest them. Probably never had to diet a day in her life. She can wear those frilly dresses and look gorgeous in them. I’d look like a hippopotamus in a tutu.
    But that’s all changing, Wunderly told herself. I’ve dropped five kilos in the past two weeks and I’m going to lose another three before New Year’s Eve. Now for the real test.
    One of the guys behind the bar offered her a cup of eggnog. Wunderly almost took it before she pulled her hand back and asked for mineral water, instead.
    The guy—one of the technicians who worked with the Titan Alpha engineers—grinned at her. “One glass of genuine recycled local aitch-two-oh, courtesy of the waste management department,” he said cheerfully, handing her a glass.
    Wunderly grinned at him. “You can’t scare me.”
    He grinned back. “Ho, ho, ho and all that, Nadia.”
    “Same to you,” she said, then walked away from the bar, into the milling throng.

    The speakers set up at either end of the stage were pouring out syrupy Christmas tunes. Somehow they made Wunderly feel sad. Have yourself a merry little Christmas. Sure. A billion kilometers from home. Well, at least I can go home when I’m ready. Most of the poor slobs in this habitat can’t.
    Then she saw him, standing by himself off in the corner where the stage met the auditorium’s side wall. Squaring her shoulders like a soldier heading into battle, she pushed through the crowd at the bar and went toward her target.
    Da’ud Habib was chief of the computer group. He didn’t look like the other computer geeks, scruffy and rumpled. He was wearing a crisply pressed red sport shirt over his slacks. Sandals, though, and no socks. Actually he was almost kind of handsome, Wunderly thought. He kept the dark little beard that fringed his jaw neat and trim. His eyes were a deep liquid brown. But he was pretty much of a loner, a quiet guy. His ancestry was Arabic, she knew. She had