It didn’t start with the thought, “Hey, Saturn’s rings would make a great racetrack,” but that’s how it ended.

It began with the realisation that the orbiting meteoroids, being mostly made of ice, were an ideal source of hydrogen for in situ rocket fuel synthesis. Some duodecades and a few billion work hours later and the NST-1 (Near Saturn Transport), an orbiting station and refinery, was completed, becoming the largest engineering project in history and an essential waypoint for outer solar system transit.

As the only human settlement in the sector at the time, the station became known colloquially as ‘Nest’ and was very much the prototype for the modular gas freighters that came years later and that are now the backbone of Aquatec’s mining operations.

The autonomous trawlers that travelled the rings performed the actual harvesting of the ice, but it was the ‘Kingfishers’, the brightly coloured shuttles that travelled between the trawlers and Nest, that are particularly memorable, not for the work they did, but for what they did after.

When the transit industry switched to alternative fuels, the mining operations on Saturn were all but shut down and the Kingfisher craft and their drivers were retired. But those drivers had little interest in leaving the planet they had come to call their home and realised that with some minor modification, the lightweight, highspeed Kingfisher craft could become the ideal racecraft. And where else to race, but through the planetary obstacle course that they knew so well?

And race they did.

The Kingfishers created the first motorsport of its kind, a space race like no other. Tourists, with little other reason to visit the outer system, would flock to the spectacle and watch the pilots spinning along the rings at a million miles an hour, ducking and weaving between whirling mountains of rock.

And so it was that for just a few short years, those daredevil drivers were the fastest humans in the universe and earned the name, ‘Speed Kings’.

ANAX