EP724: The Season of the Storm

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Escape Pod 724: The Season of the Storm

Author: Jonathan Edelstein
Narrator: Maxine Moore
Host: S.B. Divya
Audio Producer: Summer Brooks

Escape Pod 724: The Season of the Storm is an Escape Pod original.

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Twenty kilometers outside Nkoloso Station, we stopped for gas.

The Titan rover turned and Misozi steered for a group of outcroppings; there were more of those now that we were getting to the uplands north of Kraken Mare. She slowed and stopped beside one of them, a cairn of ice-rocks fused into a column half again my height.

“Elias!” she said. “Let’s cut some.”

My eyes flicked to the dashboard display. “We’re not low.”

“Never hurts to top it off, and we’ll be up there a couple of days.”

Misozi was like that. She liked her margins of error large, and she’d never be satisfied with the gauges at eighty percent when they could be one hundred. She wasn’t going to change, and her habits had saved our lives a time or two, so I didn’t argue. Instead, I opened the door and jumped down.

There was a toolbox on the rover’s flatbed with the word “Banda” scrawled on it in an ancient marker; Misozi opened it and took out an ice pick and hammer, and I did the same with the box labeled “Yaluma.”

A breeze was blowing and stirring the dust and ice particles on the ground, raising even more of a burnt-orange haze than was usual in Titan’s sky. Enough dust was in the air that I had to wipe the face-plate of my suit, and I had the sensation of being in a cloud. I leapt into it; a single bound, in gravity one-seventh of what I’d been born under, took me to the middle of the cairns.



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[CryptoMe]

Fun, standard, sci-fi short story. No big surprises, but nicely done.
I did like the fact that the first people on Titan were from a country that is not known to be a major space faring nation, either now or in the story's time.

[AM Fish]

Yes!  More of this please.  I loved this story.  Here are some of the things I loved about this story (unordered list):

• Being on Titan,
• Hanging around the Kraken Mare thinking about the American subs and "vinyl" bugs,
• Learning about Edward Makuka Nkoloso (I had never heard about him)

This story made me want to read a bunch of other stuff and read the story again.