After the conflict at Locus, the Plurality became embroiled in a hot debate regarding the dangers of hypercorp adventurism in the outer system. It was generally felt that the Planetary Consortium hoped to keep the outer system in a position similar to where the United States kept Latin America by meddling in its affairs throughout the nineteenth and twentieth centuries, and that the only counter to this was a show of force. Titan’s thick atmospheric haze makes ground-based space defense systems considerably less effective than on other worlds, but satellites and space platforms were too vulnerable to serve as command and control centers.
The solution was to capture three of Saturn’s small retrograde moons—Phoebe, Skathi, and Abramsen (once designated S/2007 S 2, now renamed after a pioneering Titanian economist). Phoebe is the largest of the three objects. The other two were maneuvered into the system’s L4 and L5 points. The calculations required to relocate these bodies were painstaking and the energy expenditure tremendous, but all three now serve as major components of Titan’s orbital defense grid. Whether the system created thereby is impregnable has yet to be tested.