Enceladus

Book 4 of The Galactican Series takes place in 2151 in which Roy Stone is charged with the security of 3000 galacticans and 300 space-adapted humans aboard SIS Jonathan Lunine en route to Saturn’s moon Enceladus. The ship, 7.5 km loa, is powered by fore and aft mounted Deuterium-3Helium fusion drives enabling her to reach Saturn from CisLuna--a distance of 8.5 AUs--in a mere 279 days using a hyperbolic trajectory. Legacy chemical rockets like Titan IVB/Centaur rocket that carried Cassini-Huygens back in 2004 required nearly seven years with numerous gravity-assisted flybys along the way. Commanded by a sentient AI version of her namesake, JPL Chief Scientist Dr. Jonathan Lunine, the ship carries four nuclear powered submarines designed to melt through Enceladus’ 30 kilometers of crustal ice to begin explorations of the subterranean oceans in search of DNA-based microbial life. The trip is proceeding uneventfully, boring by Roy’s standards, until Roy’s Number 2, Dieter Willms, informs him there has been a murder in Alpha Ring. As Roy begins his murder investigation, unbeknownst to him an ancient computer worm is assembling itself in the bowels of the ship’s software architecture. It is the grandchild of the American-Israeli Stuxnet virus that destroyed so much of Persia’s uranium enrichment facility at Natanz back in the early 2000s only this time it has been repurposed to dismantle the ship system by system. SIS Jonathan Lunine is now in a race with time trying to return to CisLuna before she disintegrates leaving her crew adrift in space 8.5 AUs from home.