DATE: Year 486-B, Sol 614

  LOCATION: Enceladus (Saturn Ring E)

  The trader, Kitchen Lister, had not actually been on a routine courier mission to Titan, that’s just what he told Poe. He had equipped with ship with a collector and gone off on the long trip to Saturn because he’d learned from a reliable source that the geysers on the moon of Enceladus were peaking again, and there were new deposits of organic material on Ring E.

  The sources were not mistaken. Ring E is the furthest from Saturn of the 7 main rings. They were labeled A through G, but went in a different order: D, C, B, A, F, G, then E. Why they may have been labeled that way hadn’t been known in hundreds of years. It’s likely the furthest ring was called Ring E because it was formed by the material Enceladus spouted out from its geysers, mostly water vapor and ice but also organic compounds and even salt. The organic compounds were valuable. Many of them could be used to produce high-nutrient slurp, making the long trip out to Saturn worth the cost even up to the charters and settlements on Mars.

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  The fresher the compounds the more they were worth. Kitchen Lister parked his ship with the collector facing one of the outer columns of ejecta from Enceladus. The collector, outfitted with a specialized filter, capturing the material from the geyser, separating the water vapor and ice from organic compounds, and the organic compounds by type, and letting the rest pass through.

  Lister relaxed while the collector did the work. That’s when he saw the alien, outside his generous view port.