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about this! I mean --"
    "Nice try," Gruber grinned at her. "Parents or no, hands or no, you're still writing up the report. If you can't type, you can dictate."
    She tried to kick him in the shin, but he managed to get out of range. The first time, anyway.



The Mystery of Miranda
    by David A. Simons
    Artwork by Scott Altmann
----
    I learned about the canyon from Shelley, an ex I hadn't seen or thought about for fifteen years.
    I almost deleted the message unread when I saw who it was from. But Shelley being Shelley, she'd known just what to say to get my attention.
    "I've found something," she began, "which might interest you."
    She sent the message from the surface of Miranda, one of Uranus' inner moons, where she was trailing a team of miners on a geological survey. Deep inside Miranda's Chevron Valley, they'd stumbled upon the rim of a previously uncharted canyon. It was narrow, crescent-shaped, mostly obscured by shadow, missed by both the Voyager and Bard probes. The miners scanned a few rock samples at the lip, found nothing which interested them, and moved on.
    But Shelley had lingered. She'd dropped in a stream of radar balls, constructing a crude map of the canyon's interior. When she saw the results, she didn't share them with the miners. She sent the map directly to me.
    It was the deepest canyon in the solar system. Twenty-three kilometers, straight down, from surface to floor. Three times deeper than the Hebes Chasma on Mars, twice as deep as the Herschel crater on Mimas, deeper even than the ice rifts of Tethys. A dark void in the ground, like an open mouth, plunging to depths never encountered by man.
    The moment I received Shelley's message, I began making plans. I would be the first to reach the canyon's floor.

    "Ready whenever you are, boss," said Wil. He and Katherine stood ten meters back from the canyon's rim, decked out in the latest UltraThins, kicking at the dusty ground impatiently.
    It was morning, if there is such a thing in the outer solar system. Uranus hung low in the sky behind me, casting a green glow over the jagged peaks of Chevron Valley. To my right sat our lander, its feet braced against the icy ground, the climbing rope extruding from its belly, drawn taut over the white-gray surface rock. And directly in front of me, the canyon beckoned -- a thin black ribbon, snaking across Miranda's ragged landscape.
    I was ready, too. I'd tossed the rope's weighted free end over the rim fifteen minutes ago, double-checking the connections as they slid by; it should now be settled at the bottom. But Wil's announcement wasn't meant for me, it was meant for the fourth member of our party.
    Shelley.
    As a
quid pro quo
for telling me -- and only me -- about the canyon, I'd agreed to bring her on the climb and let her collect rock samples for her lab. As I'd feared, she was already slowing us down.
    Shelley's pressure suit was one of the old, clunky beasts I'd given her on Mars fifteen years ago. She'd loaded it up with a belt full of terrestrial geology tools -- chisels, sonic scanners, and portable mass specs -- and now she strapped two enormous sample bins to her air tanks, tripling her width.
    "I wouldn't carry all that mass," I said mildly.
    "The gravity here is less than one percent
g
," she retorted. "I weigh one pound. I think I can handle it."
    True, but if she filled those bins with rocks, her lateral momentum would be unwieldy. I shrugged. I had my diamond knife. If she slowed us down, I'd just cut the sample bins free.
    I switched to the group frequency. "Shelley's radar map shows nine ledges on the north wall. We'll rappel down the rope, single file, ledge to ledge. Stay above me, and don't let your speed exceed three meters per second. Clear?"
    Katherine smiled politely and nodded. Wil smirked and saluted. Shelley finished adjusting her gear and balanced on her knees, watching me.
    I clipped the rope to a pair of carabiners on my hip, then shuffled my feet backwards to the