John Sandford - Saturn Run

They’d been dropped at the far end of the terminal. Inside the doors, Sandy found himself in a private waiting room. Through glass doors on the far wall, he could see a larger waiting room, with more people in it.

Crow was sitting on a bench, looking at a tablet: he glanced up when they walked in, and raised a hand to them. Fiorella made a beeline for him and Sandy heard her say, “Mr. Crow, we’ve got to talk…”

The two other people included a short, round blonde, who hadn’t looked up when they walked in, probably the power engineer, Rebecca something, and a large black man with white hair, who was clutching a nylon travel case, and had to be the anthropologist. The blonde was pounding on a tablet; the big man looked like he needed somebody to talk to. Sandy went that way, stuck out a hand, and said, “You’re John Clover, you’re more important than I am, so how about if I suck up for a while?”

“I could use some good suckin’ up,” Clover said, as they shook hands. “You must be the rich kid.”

“Not only that, but I’m good-looking, have a terrific singing voice, and women find me irresistible,” Sandy said, as he dropped into the chair next to Clover. “For the most part, anyway. I’ve already pissed off half the women on this flight.”

Now the blonde looked up at him, glanced over at Fiorella, back to Sandy, and said, “If you keep talking over my work, here, you’ll have pissed off all of them.”

Clover said to the blonde, “Let me tell you something, honey—”

“I’m not a honey,” Becca snapped.

“Of course you are, and I’m a southerner, so I get to call you that,” Clover said. “What I’m gonna say is that they are about to strap a twenty-megaton nuclear weapon to our asses and blast them into orbit. Y’all ought to be sweating it out. Like me.”

Sandy smiled at that and said, “A twenty-megaton nuke?”

“Might as well be, as far as we’re concerned, you know, if it blows,” Clover said.

“Ah, it’s not going to blow,” Sandy said. “A fortune-teller in Venice told me that I’d suffer a long, lingering, painful death.”

“Good, good,” Clover said. “I’m reassured.”

He had a case by his feet; the contents meowed. Becca looked at it and asked, “You’re taking a cat?”

“Only way I’d go,” Clover said. “You got a problem with that?”

“No. Actually, I don’t,” Becca said.

Sandy shrugged. “Neither do I. Long as it doesn’t shit in my shoes.”

“I can’t promise anything,” Clover said.

Crow strode toward Sandy, typing on his handslate, not looking at it. He bent over and said, quietly, “Don’t fuck with her.”

“She started it. I’m tired of people assuming that I’m incompetent because I’m rich. I—”

“Don’t… fuck… with… her.”

“All right, all right. I’ll go easy,” Sandy said.

“Good answer.”

Sandy muttered, “I just gotta remember, journalism school grads can be touchy about their lack of intelligence.”

Crow said, “Actually, it’s a double major in economics and general science. From Stanford.”

“Jesus. Is everybody on this trip a genius?”

“Pretty much,” Crow said. “Except maybe you and me.”

“But we’ll have guns.”

Crow brightened. “Yes. Yes, we will.”

A woman in a Virgin-SpaceX sky-blue flight attendant’s uniform walked into the waiting room and said, swinging her face between the two groups, Crow-Fiorella and Sandy-Becca-Clover, “Mr. Crow, everybody, the crew has completed their preflight check. You’re free to board the shuttle.”

They did.

Five humans and one cat went out the back of the terminal to a canopied, air-conditioned people-mover that hauled them out to the shuttle, followed by another shuttle with people from the other waiting room.

The Virgin-SpaceX shuttle was called Galahad , and featured horizontal takeoff and a maximum pull of 2.2 gees. Seating twenty-four, not including the flight crew of five, it wasn’t much different in overall size than a commercial hopjet. What caught the eye were the retractable wings, now just stubs on the fuselage, the unusually large and long engine nacelles, and the broadened belly, the better to hold more fuel and evenly distribute the heat on reentry.

The shuttle rested in its launch stage, a less conventional-appearing aircraft. A pilotless drone, not much bigger than the shuttle, it was essentially a cradle slung between two large engine and fuel tank cylinders with oversized air intakes. Four stubby fore and aft wings projected outward from the cradle. Heavy on the muscle and light on the brains, the launcher was commanded by the flight crew during the first stage of ascent and by ground control after it separated from the shuttle.

The Galahad ferried people from Mojave into low Earth orbit. That was the hardest part, energy-wise, but also the shortest part of the trip. Takeoff to orbit took half an hour. The shuttle couldn’t take them all the way to the station in its thousand-kilometer-high orbit, though; not enough fuel. Once in orbit, Galahad would dock with an orbital tug that would take it the rest of the way to the station, an energetically easier jaunt but one that would take another four hours. Not much different than the flight from L.A. to Sydney.

Crow and Fiorella had been up before, hitching rides on space-available seats. Fiorella had spent two weeks at the station, while Crow had only been up two days. The other three had never been.

They boarded the shuttle on a mobile escalator; inside, the space was a little cramped, but the seats were large and extraordinarily comfortable. Smartfoam cushions, supported by a powered carbon-fiber skeleton, monitored a hundred pressure points and molded themselves to their backs and butts.

Clover was looking nervous; the flight attendant came and smiled at him, whispered something. Clover nodded, and she gave him a bottle of water and something else. Pills, Sandy thought. Clover popped them, and two minutes later, said something funny to Fiorella, who was sitting across the narrow aisle from him, and the TV lady laughed.

Good pills.

When everybody was seated, the flight attendant said, “I know some of you haven’t been up. In front of you, there’s an oxygen mask capsule. They have been sanitized since the last flight. The slightly astringent odor you may smell is actually a sealer, should you need to press your face into the mask. When we reach maximum acceleration, you’ll feel as though you weigh twice as much as you do now—we’ll be pulling two gravities, or two gees, as we say. There may be a sensation of suffocation. You won’t be suffocating, but you may feel that kind of pressure. Simply press the tab under your right thumb and a mask will extrude. Don’t worry about moving toward it—the face-recognition system will find you. Breathe normally. Don’t try to remove your safety harness—that won’t help. If any of you are feeling even the slightest bit nervous, we have some excellent calming medications available. Feel free to ask.”

She went on for a while, and when she finished, Sandy asked her, “How about Mr. Snuffles?”

“Mr. Snuffles is asleep,” she said.

“Snoring like a chain saw,” Clover said over his shoulder. And, said the man who moments before had been sweating like a Miami sneak-thief, “let’s light this motherfucker up.”

Really good pills.

Becca was annoyed with herself. She was about to take a trip that maybe one person in a million got to make, that every techie dreamed of, and she couldn’t stop thinking about heat flow integrals. A symptom, she thought, of her obsessiveness. On the job, it worked to her advantage. At times, though, it got in the way.