Vincent Valaches the fourth was the current owner of Interspace Technologies. He owned almost every major spaceport on Earth and the Lunar Union, as well as the craft that travelled between them. His grandfather had built the company over most of his lifetime, when they were still using rockets for escaping Earth’s gravity. Vincent’s father took over and ran the company for a decade, accumulating enough wealth for an early retirement at 40, leaving him the best hundred years of his life to enjoy it. Vincent at 26 was a completely reasonable age for a latter generation spiral to own a huge corporation. ‘Spirals’, so called because their net worth was so astronomical that writing out all of the zeroes by hand would inevitably devolve into just making a long corkscrewed spiral across the page.
Third generation spirals like Vincent had never known what it was to be denied something because of cost. Where most people want for something they cannot afford, a nicer car, a bigger house… second gen spirals had all you could imagine, so they wanted something beyond that. They desired to go to the edges of human reach. Near light speed travel could take them anywhere in the solar system, still mostly untouched planets and moons just waiting to be possessed. And Vincent wanted them. Not to own them, it was illegal to develop beyond the Earth and Moon, only scientists would be permitted to visit them.
Vincent was a huge supporter of scientific discovery, financially. Really he did not have much care. But he funded expeditions to all corners of the solar system, with the caveat that he went along. This was the loophole most spirals used to get their names in the history books. The first man on Mars had been an astronaut, and the last astronaut to have a first. Europa was conquered by the businessman Hanoi Nakamura, while the scientists who made it happen sat and watched. As he went skiing.
Sitting in a pod made for four, Vincent stretched out and looked towards his destination. The rings of Saturn. It would only be a few minutes before his craft would automatically pull into a retrograde orbit just above the densest region of the rings. They of course were not solid, but disparate chunks of ice. But that didn’t dissuade Vincent from his goal of snowboarding around the rings. In the cargo hold of his ship he put himself into a deep space suit. It was more or less a mechanized suit of armor with its own engines, life support, and navigational controls. When he mounted himself inside of it he stood almost two dozen feet tall. After a few final checks the cargo bay opened and with the flick of a switch he was propelled out. He guided the suit down and when he approached a dense enough region of the ring he put his feet out and with a click a rounded platform extended from the mech legs. It formed into a surfboard like shape and affixed to the bottom of his feet. Now in his position Vincent smiled and started his near light speed engines.
“I’m beginning my journey.” He smiled and the cameras inside of his suit recorded it for posterity. “The section of rings I am on has a circumference of about 300,000 miles. Using the on board engines, I should be able to make a lap in about five minutes once I am up to speed.” Leaning forward the mech mimicked his motions and the engines began to accelerate him. The suit mitigated most of the G forces he would have otherwise been subjected to as he moved faster and faster. At first it was more like he was flying along the ring, chunks of ice were few and far between, but as he sped up the ring began to blur beneath him. The surfboard was pushing off against more and more ice particles. When he reached half of his speed it felt like a smooth surface. The ice particles acted like soft snow to his metallic exoskeleton. Although his engines were guiding him in the appropriate direction, he could now do more fine tuned steering by turning his body, and the angle at which his board cut into the ring. He slalomed a bit back and forth, kicking up long clouds of ice as he went. It had been a long and expensive trip. For about a half hour of snowboarding. He made a half dozen laps around Saturn, leaving a smooth trail through the ring before he began to decelerate.
“Having surveyed the rings, I am now collecting a sample” He reached down with a mechanized arm, and it formed a scoop which collected the fine particles of ice as he skimmed over them on his board. This was the entire scientific purpose of the mission, it could have been done with a probe. But that wouldn’t feed Vincent’s ego. With a few cubic feet of ring ice stored inside of the mech he finished joyriding and came back in synch with his transport vessel. It was the most expensive snowboarding trip to date.
“I am glad that I was able to do this for science, and the betterment of humanity. May we one day all travel the planets.” His last message would go into the press kit before his interviews back on Earth. He wanted to see someone beat snowboarding Saturn’s rings. Nakamura would be so jealous.
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