Rings

“Do you remember the story about the Sun Domes?”

I guess he could tell by the way I acted I didn’t have a clue as to what he was talking about. All I could really think about was the pull; the tearing that carried us away. It always happened when the ships pumps started. The pumps that pulled water from the rings of Saturn

“You know the Ray Bradbury story – about the guys that crashed on planet, it was a jungle planet, - and it rained all the time - and they kept looking for the Sun Domes to get out of the rain.”

I still had nothing. But that was OK. I was intent on the stars, the stars that were twirling around us.

“I think it was a book, but we saw the movie, remember we picked up the transmission about a month ago”

Now I remembered. We had been able to pick up transmissions from Earth for a very long time now, but most were broken and shattered. But this transmission, the transmission of the movie with the Sun Domes, was whole.

“Anyway, I wish we had that here, on one of the moons of Saturn, so we wouldn’t have to go through this all the time.”

He was right. This was a bother. Humans had discovered water in the Rings of Saturn back in 2005, but there was no real method or reason for extracting it until just recently. Now, with the colonies on nearly every single moon, humans were trying to extract it all the time. The crafts would sail above the rings, extracting water, using it, purifying it, then returning it to be used again. The water in the Rings meant that large amounts of water no longer had to be carried on the ships.

They came with their tubes and their ships; wrenching us from our homes, dragging us to theirs.

“If there was a jungle planet where it rained all the time, they could just get all the water they needed from there.”

The tube closed in on us, narrowing as it entered the craft. We shot from the opening, flickering and dancing around humans. Dancing to the rhythm of the humming engine, dancing to the sound of the pump that dragged us from all we knew to this world of flesh and steel.

“It’s another one of those freakin anomalies,” I head one of the humans say.

“What causes it,” said the other

“Electrical charges or some such stuff, at least that’s what the scientists say. Stop the pump. That will kill the charge and it will go away.”

The music of the motor died and we raced to the tube, raced down to the darkness, raced back to the dark and the ice, and the rocks. Back to the Rings

And the water that is our home.