John Sandford - Saturn Run

“What did I do?” Becca blurted. She grasped for something, anything.

“You didn’t do anything, as far as I know,” Klipish said. “I was told to make sure that nothing happened to you, after you left work. I was told that if you got a hangnail, I’d be reassigned to Texas.” He twinkled at her.

“Not that,” Becca said, putting a hand on his sleeve.

The woman who was coming up said, “Bob, stop twinkling at her.” The woman held up her phone and flashed her ID. “Dr. Johansson, my name is Marla Clark. Pleased to meet you. You have a meeting.”

“A meeting? Right now?”

“Not exactly right now, but first thing in the morning, in Washington, D.C.,” Clark said. “By the way, we assume you’ll need a moving company, though you don’t really have all that much. We’ve contacted two that have been approved by Homeland Security.”

Becca: “A moving company?” And how did they know she didn’t have that much?

The next morning, Becca was fifteen hundred kilometers from home. She’d been snatched, politely but firmly, and shoved into a private hopjet that had delivered her to the D.C. airport barely an hour later, a little after one o’clock in the morning, EST. Her “entourage”—she decided to think of them that way, instead of as her “handlers” or, worse, “captors”—had been pleasant, solicitous of her comfort, and entirely uninformative.

They’d hustled her off to a terrific hotel, where she was deposited in a luxury suite that contained a fresh change of clothes, which were her size and even her style, which struck her as efficient, considerate, and creepy. Clark had come with her. She recommended a hot shower before going to bed. “I’ve put in a seven o’clock wake-up call for you, so you won’t be late for the meeting.”

“What meeting?”

“The meeting,” Clark said with a shrug.

Nine hours after getting on the train in Northfield, Minnesota, she was sitting in a White House waiting room decorated with paintings of former First Ladies. Clark was no longer with her, but another woman, this one named Marsden, from the same tribe as Clark, handed her a cup of coffee and said, “Relax.”

“If you were in my shoes, would you relax?” Becca asked.

“I don’t know exactly what shoes you’re wearing,” Marsden said. A navy officer was walking across the room toward them, and she added, in a low voice, “But if this guy is coming for you, my answer would be, ‘No.’”

The officer was coming for her. His name was Rob, he was a lieutenant commander, and he shook her hand pleasantly and said, “You’re up, you can bring your coffee,” and to the escort, “I’m told she’ll be half an hour or so.”

Santeros was on her feet, talking to a fat man, when Becca was ushered into the Oval Office. Santeros smiled at her and waded across the carpet, extending a hand.

“Dr. Johansson, Rebecca,” she said. “Good of you to come, on such short notice.”

“Happy to,” Becca said, biting back a less polite reply: Did I have a choice?

Santeros gestured to the fat man. “This is Jacob Vintner, my science adviser. We’re going to have to make this quick. I brought you here because the United States needs your skills. We want you to design the power management system for a twenty-thermal-gigawatt reactor, and we need it rather quickly. Might you be interested? We want you badly enough to have rushed you here like this, but you’re free to decline. We do have other candidates.”

“I’m currently committed to a project with Minnesota Power—”

“We’ve already talked to your employer and they’re happy to give you an indefinite leave of absence, with no loss of position or seniority, in the national interest,” Santeros said.

“What kind of power plant is this?”

Vintner said, “We can’t really go into the details because of national security. All I can—”

“Wait a minute,” Becca said, jabbing her finger at Vintner. “This has got to be for the Mars mission! You need a big honkin’ reactor, I bet. Hot damn. Okay, I’m in, on one condition.”

Santeros asked Vintner, “Why do all these people have conditions?”

Vintner said, “Because they’re important enough to have them, I guess.”

Santeros was amused. She turned back to Becca and asked, “What’s yours, Rebecca?”

“If I build your power plant, I get to go along.”

Santeros nodded: “Okay.”

Vintner, the bureaucrat: “Before we give you any more details or address your speculations, which we cannot confirm at this moment, we’re going to need you to sign some documents.” He handed her a slate.

“If this is about clearance, I’m already cleared for nuclear work,” Becca said.

“We know that. This is a higher level of clearance. You were vetted for it last night,” Vintner said.

Santeros walked around behind her desk, sat down, looked at a screen, tapped it a couple of times, and said to Becca, “Sit and read it.”

Becca sat and gave it a quick scan. Boiled down to a few words, it said that if she talked out of turn, she was going to jail. She signed it, touched the ID square with her thumb, and handed it back to Vintner.

Santeros offered up the barest of smiles. “So we can give you a detail—and please remember what you just signed. We’re not going to Mars—we’re going to Saturn.”

“Saturn?” Becca was dumbfounded. “Why Saturn? You can’t just be one-upping the Chinese. Jupiter’d be closer. What’s at Saturn?”

Santeros said to Vintner, “You’re right. She is pretty smart.” And to Becca: “More by accident than anything else, one of our astronomical observatories saw what we believe to be an alien starship going into Saturn—and we believe there’s something else there, possibly a station.”

“Holy shit!”

“Exactly. I’m sure you can work out the implications.”

“But…” Becca rubbed her forehead with a knuckle, thinking, then said, “It’ll take us years to get out there.”

“Not with the power plant you’re going to design,” Vintner said.

Crow had never allowed himself to get tired, when he didn’t have to. Other people could get tired, but not him: he’d taught himself to sleep, anytime, anyplace. He’d slept on helicopters on combat missions, he’d slept in fighter planes, he’d deliberately put himself to sleep in the President’s private office, waiting for her to return from a meeting.

His wrist-wrap tapped him, and his eyes popped open. The limo was easing through the narrow, rotting streets of the Ninth Ward, reading the address sensors buried in the street. Crow popped a piece of breath-cleaning gum, poured a palmful of water from a bottle, wiped it across his eyes, checked the time: he’d gotten a solid forty-five minutes rolling in from Louis Armstrong International.

A minute later, the limo eased to a stop outside a dilapidated faux-Restoration house. Crow picked up his slate, stuck it in his jacket pocket, got out, walked up the badly cracked sidewalk, pushed the doorbell, and stood back to look at the moss.

Moss everywhere, including fine tendrils advancing across the windows. The Restoration style became popular after Hurricane Clarence flooded the city in 2044. New Orleans had been submerged three times in the first half of the century, and each time, the levees were built higher, the pumps made bigger, and the city fathers swore that once and for all they’d solved the problems born of rising seas and eroding deltas.

The residents hadn’t believed them in 2044, any more than they had the two previous times, but that hadn’t stopped them from rebuilding. Now, with almost a quarter century gone since the last wipeout, houses that had been new in 2045 were beginning to sink into the landscape.