Enceladus Station: Fountains

ENCELADUS STATIONA Science Fiction Murder Mysteryby Douglas H AlexanderBeneath six kilometers of ice on Saturn's smallest reflective moon, three thousand souls live in a maze of bored-out tunnels - and someone is killing them.When Lieutenant Mark Grant disembarks at Enceladus Station after eighteen hours of interplanetary transit, he expects a quiet posting. A frontier outpost. A single unsolved homicide. A weary Sheriff who needs help closing the file on Doctor Craig Walters - stabbed in his own laboratory two months earlier with a scalpel buried to the hilt. Routine. Tragic. Already cold.What Grant finds instead is blood on the Research Center floor at four in the morning, no body, no witnesses, and a Governor whose first instinct is to track that blood across the crime scene with the heels of his polished shoes.Welcome to the ice.❖ ❖ ❖In the year 2130, humanity has scattered across the outer solar system. The RipJump drive has collapsed interplanetary distances - journeys that once took years now take hours, ships riding naturally occurring tears in spacetime like commuters on a magnetic rail. Mars is settled. Titan is mining. The orbital platforms above Jupiter are old news. And Enceladus - Saturn's icy white pearl, with its impossible geysers shooting from a buried ocean - has become humanity's strangest frontier.