"Hello, world, and it's a busy day today. I'm live-vlogging our close pass by Saturn and its moon, Titan. We're just a few minutes from our closest approach - but at our speeds, three minutes of travel takes us four hundred thousand kilometres. Titan itself is under twenty-six hundred kilometres across, and we'll be getting close enough that Pumpkin's sensors should be able to measure a tiny bit of atmospheric drag.

"Sticking to the standard axes, with positive declination being 'up', you can see Saturn off to our left; we're looking at its brightly-lit southern hemisphere. Its rings are kind of edge-on to us and hard to see, but you can see the ring-shadows on the northern hemisphere. We passed by the first moon, Iapetus, about four million kilometers back, Phoebe is one and a half million ahead of us in Gemini, and everything else is close to Saturn, in Hydra. Straight abaft of us, in Sagittarius, are almost all of the planets in conjunction with the sun, which probably causes all sorts of complications for any astrologers around here. And completely invisible, ahead of us, about twenty-five degrees 'down', between Orion's Belt and Monoceros's forehoof, is our destination, Observatory B, directly opposite Seventy Ophiuchi.

"Above us and to our left is Testbed Six. That glowing cloud behind it isn't any sort of rocket exhaust; it's an aerosol lens. Gerard has told his ship to continuously fire a couple of lasers, whose interference patterns shove around tiny beads of glass, which collectively act like a single giant lens. Since the last time I mentioned it, he's doubled the power of the beams he's requested from the Ríos de Luz, to a hundred twenty megawatts. That's ten times the power produced by Pumpkin's fusor; and since Testbed Six is ten times Pumpkin's mass and keeping the same acceleration, it's entirely possible he's fully powering his drive from that beam. Not that he's willing to talk to me about it, beyond the bare minimum I need to know to fly safely around his ship. My revenge against his silence has been cleaning him out at penny-ante poker the last few days. He's gotten decent at playing the cards; but he's still got a lot to learn about playing the players.

"Focusing back ahead of us, we can see the yellowish, slightly hazy ball of Titan. It used to be more of an orange during my first life, before they started using solar-excited atoms in its ionosphere as a lasing medium, and picking up a few extra bucks by pumping the result into the Ríos de Luz. Hm... checking the angles, it looks like most of the beamage that Testbed Six is currently collecting is from lasersats around Titan, and the rest is from somewhere around Saturn.

"I think I'm going to stop virtually narrating now and settle in to enjoy the view. This is going to be the last exciting thing I'm going to be looking at for months. And once Pumpkin accelerates for a while longer, I'm going to have to huddle inside to avoid getting blasted by slightly relativistic interplanetary particles; and by 'slightly' I mean on the order of ten rads a second around turnover. So I'm just going to settle into my lawn-chair on Pumpkin's nose and watch for a while.

"...

"Hunh. Wonder what those sparkly flashes in Titan's atmosphere are.

"...

"And we're past Titan. I'm not going to try to lean over Pumpkin's bow's edge to look behind; that's begging to risk needing Huey to come rescue me. So I'm going to watch Saturn for a while longer, then head back inside. I'll want to inspect some of the hardware that just had a few gobs of data lasered into it, and then I should probably start rearranging some furniture. I'll be moving my bunk as far back as possible, and shifting most of the cargo and stores up front, to act as extra radiation shielding. I'll be moving the main computing hardware to the back with me, and a few sensitive things like Faz's own body and its CPU. Turnover will be annoying, but I've made arrangements with Gerard for both of us to use each other's ship as a bit of extra shielding, during the moments our ships physically rotate, and when, for at least a few seconds, our ships will be turned sidelong against the interstellar dust instead of narrow-end on. I'll be getting more benefit from that than he will, but he's got more mass to act as shielding and so doesn't need as much protection as I will. I expect we'll figure out more favours to exchange to balance things out, over time.

"Faz, you've been awfully quiet this whole time. Anything you want to share with your viewers, while you're still physically incarnated?"

"Tabarnak. Have you been checking your messages?"

"I've had my filters set to pop up an alert for anything of high priority, or needing personal attention, but am now going over everything recent since you brought it up. ... Not seeing anything eye-catching."

"I think someone just tried to kill us.

"Those flashy things you mentioned? That was Space Traffic Control aiming some beams at some unannounced craft trying to launch out of Titan's atmosphere. And my oraculist divinations for today involved a surprising high percentage of the Monte Carlo extrapolations that indicated we weren't just going to face risk, but some sort of consciously-directed opposition to achieving our goals. I thought it was going to be a hacking attempt while you were collecting data through the lasers, or maybe a competing business pulling some sort of stunt to drain away some of your customers... but actually trying to blow us up is certainly within the parameters. I ignored that possibility because, well, Traffic Control is good at keeping things like that from happening... and I think they just did."

"... Let's head back in. I may not put as much trust in your prediction methods as you do, but I rarely mind a bit of prudence. And I really don't want to imagine how hard it would be for someone to have dropped some sand or BBs ahead of us, but I think I should work that out. ... And maybe tell Cindy to start nudging us a few dozen metres to the left, and then file a revised flight-plan with Traffic Control to move our approved corridor just outside our current one. And see if I can whip up any improvements to our forward-facing lidar. And... probably stop live-broadcasting every idea I come up with. Sorry, folks, looks like that's the end of today's vlog... and, er, hopefully not of the whole series."