Nobody shows up for the team meeting until Kwon walks in with a plate of cookies. Liu and Krüger are quick to materialize as the smell wafts through the Pod. Liu empties enough notebooks, maps, and mathematical instruments to sink a small canoe onto the coffee table, which wobbles ominously. Krüger looks around for somewhere to leave his coffee. An attempt to clear a spot dislodges several pens, which scatter across the linoleum.

Krüger rescues an antique-looking brass compass from the stack before it slides away, too, and stows it in his pocket before taking resignedly to a couch and perching his laptop on his knees. He snatches his travel mug from the floor as a notebook pile starts to tip. Kwon takes the logical approach and fetches a chair from her workshop to double as a second table. It takes two more to finally bring the scientific detritus under control, then several stools to provide space for laptops and cookies. I pull the latter to my side of the room to hold ransom until the meeting has gotten underway with some semblance of focus.

Finally, it looks like we might actually be able to start. I start the voice recorder on my phone—no way in hell I'm taking written notes—then give the loaded coffee table a side-eye, which Liu catches. "We don't need it all," she says. "I just forgot where I put the calculations. It all needs to go back to the lab anyway."

"As long as we can talk without it, then, fine by me." I lean back in my armchair, which gives a hideous rubbery groan that makes us all wince. "Who wants to start?"

They exchange a glance and a nod. Liu thumps a thick teal notebook into her lap, bouncing her and Kwon's couch. "I can. First of all, how much do you know about demighosts?"

I sit up straighter. This was another kerfuffle in the scientific community, groundbreaking on par with Yahvi's proposition of planetary consciousness, and released only a year earlier. Anyone with a pair of eyes or ears and the remotest access to a news source heard about it—in pop-media form, at least.

"Give us an overview," I say. I don't trust pop media, and I want to make sure we're all on the same scientific page about the details.

Liu nods. "Okay. Well, they're basically objects that move on their own. The kind of thing people would put down to ghosts if they were superstitious... you know, 'teleporting' cups, a door that closes by itself, et cetera, et cetera. Well, demighost theory says there's a reason it happens. It's something to do with quantum entanglement, but it basically means the object that's moving is connected across a parallel dimension to another object in the same one. That other object is the one moving, but because they're linked, they move together. Does that make sense?"

Kwon nods slowly.

"Enough to work with," I say. It's about what I've heard. The first report I ever heard about the phenomena used the example of a pair of doors, each in their own house, on two separate planets. If the pair became linked, one could become a demighost of the other, or both could be equally affected. Whenever someone opened or closed the "host" door, the demighost door would move the same way.

"There are caveats, though," sayd Liu. "A hypothetical 'perfect' case means complete, two-way mimicry: when one door opens, the other opens, and when one closes, the other closes. But that's a perfect case. Most of the time, the link is too small to notice, so most of the 'ghosts are real' stuff with slamming doors and things flying around is exaggerated. It's way more likely that a demighost door would just creak a little when its host moves."

Movement-across-distance is opening up all kinds of possibilities here on Mahaha. I don't want to jump to conclusions, but I'd be lying if I said I didn't see how this applies.

"Do you think Mahaha has demighosts?" says Kwon.

"Well," says Liu. "Possibly."

Like I thought.

"See, there's a subtheory dealing with living things. It basically says that you can get a demighost linked to something alive, or even an echo of that same living organism in another place. People aren't actually sure if those two are the same phenomena, but they operate in the same way. The demighost moves like its living host, without being alive itself. Like a puppet. We think Mahaha might have that."

"The butterfly?"

"Yeah. It looks like a real butterfly, so it would be the echo type, with the demighost made of ice."

"But it would need a living butterfly?"

"Somewhere, yeah."

"Here?"

Liu looks to Krüger, who picks up the thread of the explanation.

"Hypothetically, you could get demighost pairs across any span of distance, but the only ones people have found have been close-range: a planet away at best. Qalupalik, right now, is farther from any other planet than the longest-range demighost ever discovered. Mahaha is its only moon with even a chance of complex life, and obviously nothing's living on Qalu itself. It's a gas supergiant. Which means if there are living butterflies hosting these ones, they're here."

"On Mahaha," I say.

"On Mahaha."

"Great." I rest my head on one hand. A subsurface ocean was one thing, but butterflies are very much land-based creatures. "Where?"

His inner biologist looks entirely too excited about the prospect. "Well, that's where things get interesting."

My favourite thing to hear.

"When we first found methane gas on Mahaha, I assumed it was abiotic," says Krüger. "Siphoned off Qalupalik and locked away somehow. But the longer we've spent here, the more we've found, all of it under the ice. There's not enough in the atmosphere for it to be coming from above, which means there must be something below-ground producing it."

If there's one thing I know about methane gas besides the fact that it's highly flammable, it's that it has a biological source as often as not. On earth, in fact, most of it is biotic, formed from cow farts, old landfills, and rotting organic matter. The question, then, is where we might find a Mahaha equivalent in or under at least five kilometers of ice.

The other question is how quick Yahvi would be to make a planetary fart joke if she were here. She'd get the best kick out of it.

I shut that thought away.

Krüger begins to list off options for our hypothetical methane source, only half of which make half-sense to someone without several biology degrees. The most relevant point I filter out is that an under-ice, air-pocket ecosystem might offer three things in one: the methane pockets I worry about on every outing, the mysteriously appearing water vapor that maintains Mahaha's snowfall, and habitat for the demighost butterflies' hosts.

What it does not solve is the moving ice.

Kwon beats me to that. "But if there are little pockets of... algae or bacteria under the ice where there is sun, why haven't we seen them? The ice moves all the time."

And could easily crush such a pocket besides. On this moon, I can't think of any way for them to stay connected enough to offer contiguous habitat.

Krüger looks slightly embarrassed. "Well, that's the catch. We still don't know how the ice moves, which means we also don't know how deep that movement goes."

"We don't know anything about the ice, let's be honest here," says Liu. "How it forms, how it moves, how it dies, how it did whatever the heck that was to the Isoptera. Basically, the ice could be at the center of all our problems, and we'd never know."

I don't know why I keep expecting straight answers from a pair of scientists. These two hypothesize more than most, but they're ultimately slaves to the scientific method: they won't state something as fact without evidence, and they're going to want evidence before they start drawing conclusions.

"It killed all the other probes, too," says Kwon.

"Yeah, we don't know what that's about," says Krüger. "It could be coincidental; the anomalies that took out the probes could be common out here for all we know. Like Lingmei said, we don't have enough information to tell."

I know exactly what's going to come after that statement.

"Which is why we have an idea," says Liu, sitting up primly like formality will make me less wary of whatever the i-word entails this time. "We're out of probes, but we've managed to salvage most of them after they went down. Some still have working instruments. If we used the pieces, Dea and I could put together mini-sensors to scatter across a wider area than we've covered so far. If the storms that took out the bigger probes are common, we'll see them then. We might even see if they follow a pattern. We just need a wide enough spread to keep any single hit from knocking out the whole operation."

It's a field mission. Of course it's a field mission. The fact that I saw this coming does not make it land any lighter. After the death of the Isoptera, I said we would not be sending out any more probes, but on the other hand, everything Liu is listing off is information I desperately need in order to plan our next move. I care about the butterflies insofar as they represent the interest of a deadly planet and its potential inhabitants, but I really want to know what's up with the ice.

"And they'll be small," Liu adds, "so if they get hit, they're probably done for. We wouldn't need to go out and retrieve them again."

The problem with smart trainees is that they know exactly how to play against your worries. She's made a compelling pitch. For what we might get out of it, this new experiment might just be worth the risk of one more day in the field.

"How long do you think it'll take to put these sensors together?" I say.

Liu glances at Kwon, who answers for both of them. "I think we can have them ready by the end of the ecliptic cycle if we start tomorrow."

"I'd say that's a plan, then."

Liu hugs the notebook she's holding and bounces not-so-surreptitiously on the couch. Krüger looks some mix of relieved, proud of her, and faintly smug.

"I expect a deployment plan when you come back with the probes," I say. "With safety considerations and at least one backup option. Krüger, I want you to vet everything before I get the final presentation. Any questions?"

"Yes," says Krüger. "Can we have our cookies now?"

I push the cookie chair back into the center of the room, where it's set upon as if by vultures. You'd think we starved everyone here. I extract myself from the blow-up armchair—it's been swallowing me slowly for the last half-hour—and head to the comms room to mark the due date for this project on the station calendar. When I open the tablet, the first thing to pop up is the scientific record column. Krüger has answered my highlighted note with a link to a file in the station shared drive. By the time stamp on it, he's had this for some time already.

I open it. The graph I requested shrinks to fit the screen. It's a time series of the frozen-instrument incidents we've had thus far. Starting at zero over our first week on Mahaha, it creeps across the last two months in a slow, upward curve.

Krüger has left a note on the side of the page. I've been watching it. Could be instrument wear, but I'm not convinced.

I'm glad I'm not the only one considering the possibility. I update the calendar, then shut off the tablet again. The real question is whether he'll respond the same way I will if my gut instinct about Mahaha turns out to be true.