John Sandford - Saturn Run

When they were a few hundred meters out, Martinez said, “I’m giving you your controls. Try not to screw it up, but if you do, I’ve still got you.”

“Got it.” Sandy sat there for a minute, looking around. Strapped into the egg’s chair, he was as comfortable as he had been on the shuttle. Not even his subconscious had to think about what to do with body parts and zero-gee. All that surfing: sometimes you’d get driven under by a big wave, and you needed to relax, and let it happen, but always remain aware of where “up” was. Where the air was.

And the view here was much better than anything he’d had in the Pacific: his own personal window into the universe.

“You just gonna sit there?” Martinez called.

“Just soaking in the view. You’ve got one hell of a backyard,” Sandy said. He started to laugh, and didn’t stop for a moment, his first good laugh since the day he left for Argentina. He felt like somebody had just taken two hundred pounds of lead off his back.

Martinez laughed with him, the pure joy of being outside.

They worked it for an hour, Martinez pushing Sandy to react more and more quickly to weird, unnatural commands. He fumbled a few times, but got it right more often than not. As they worked, station personnel would sometimes pause at a nearby view window and watch them play.

For some reason that Sandy didn’t know at the time, the station wall behind the port was painted black. He found out later that the paint job cut down internal reflections, so if you were contemplating, say, the Milky Way, you could really see the Milky Way. What he saw with his art history eye, though, was that when the station personnel paused by the window, framed in a rectangle slightly wider than it was high, they looked like paintings by Caravaggio.

Sandy unhitched the lid of his camera case and pulled out a Red. He pressed it up against the egg’s window, using the front-edge electro-adhesive grips to hold it in place. Then he nudged the controller and sent the egg into a very slow spin, doing a fifteen-second pan of Habitat 1, the earth, and the black, starry space surrounding it all.

He killed his rotation with the window facing the station and did a slow zoom-in on the viewing port. He moved closer, and closer, until he was hovering just outside, and his proximity alarm beeped.

Martinez said, “You’re getting pretty tight there.”

“I know,” Sandy said. “Give me a second.” Sandy unstuck the Red, selected a 100mm zoom setting. A crewman walked past the window, paused to look at the egg hovering outside, then went on, but Sandy had time to do a basic reading on the light coming off his face.

“Hey, Joe, how much of a hassle would it be to get Fiorella over by that observation window?”

“Depends on what she’s doing,” Martinez said. “We’ve got links to all you new guys, let me try her.”

“Thanks.”

Joe came back a moment later. “She’s at Starbucks, probably fifty meters away. What’s up?”

“Can you link me to her?”

“Sure. Hold one…”

Fiorella came up: “What?”

“I need you to walk fifty meters down the hall, or whatever, to the viewport. I’m outside in an egg. I want to look at the light on your face. Do an establishing shot.”

After a second of silence, probably calculating exactly how much she hated him, Sandy thought, Fiorella said, “Okay.”

A minute later, she appeared at the window. The reflected sunlight off her hair was spectacular, maybe too spectacular.

“What do you want me to do?” she asked.

“Let me get a read…” Sandy thumbed down the red-gain, just a bit, because he wanted to keep the play of light off her hair, added a touch of color to her face, brought up her cheekbones, deepened a few shadows, then said, “Look sort of pensively off to your left, as though you’re watching construction work…. Tip your head just a millimeter or so to the right, I need to get that reflection off your nose…. Step five centimeters back…. Okay, hold that… one, two, three. Now slowly, slowly turn back to your right, turn your shoulder as you survey the scene…. Shit, I’m losing your hair. Let’s do that again. I need to make the background a little denser, and I need you to do all that over again, and talk, tell people what you’re seeing out there.”

They worked it for five minutes, then Sandy said, “Okay, I got it.”

“Send it to me,” Fiorella said.

“Don’t have your phone number.”

He could see her sub-vocalizing, talking to her implants, and then she said aloud, “You should have it.”

Sandy checked his wrist-wrap, saved the number, and sent the vid file. “You’ve got the file. I’ll talk to you when I get back inside.”

Martinez called: “You ready to go back in?”

“I’m ready, but I don’t want to.”

“I’m getting hungry out here.”

“Then let’s go. I’ve got some vid to look at.”

Inside the air lock, Sandy popped the egg’s door, then relaxed back in the seat, pulled the monitor out of the Red, and skipped through his survey footage to the shots of Fiorella. Martinez cycled through the double doors to look over his shoulder.

When the last of the shots ran out, Sandy asked, “What do you think?”

“You’re a natural on the egg. You could get a job up here. And if Fiorella doesn’t like that vid, she’s nuts. She’s a redheaded Venus.”

“Thank you. Listen, how hard is it to alter the canopy on the egg?”

“What do you need?”

“I need to inset some ports. I need to take out a few chunks of standard glass and replace it with optical glass. Shooting through the standard canopy glass degrades the image. That’s okay for the propaganda vid, but if we want the highest level of detail on the documentary stuff, I’ll need optical glass.”

“I can do the insets if you can get the glass, and if it can pass the stress tests,” Martinez said.

“We’d probably need some clip-on covers—lens caps—when we’re not actually using the glass, protect it from scratches.”

“We’ve got a good fabrication shop up here, shouldn’t be a problem,” Martinez said. “Shoot me some specs on size and I’ll print them for you.”

“I’ll talk to Leica, see what they can get us,” Sandy said. “I’ll try to get the specs to you soon as I hear from them.” He thought for a moment. “Is your stuff sophisticated enough to print a guitar?”

“You gotta be kidding me—you play?”

“Yeah. You too?”

“I’ve printed maybe twenty guitars since I’ve been here,” Martinez said. “Shoved all but two of them into the recycling, but I’ve got a Les Paul replica that’s so sweet you won’t believe it. Right now, me and another guy are about halfway done printing a piano—like a whole fucking grand piano with strings—but making pianists happy is a lot harder than getting a guitar right.”

“We could start a band,” Sandy said, with his toothy grin.

“We got a band—in fact, there are five or six bands, if string quartets count as bands,” Martinez said. “Music is big up here. Everybody’s a specialist in something, with not a lot of overlap. Music is one thing you can do in low gravity without complications, and it’s a good way for people to get together.”

They headed back down the corridor to the lift that would take them to Habitat 1, talking about cameras, video games, and guitars—a friendship being formed. On the way, Sandy’s wrist-wrap tingled: Crow.

“Yeah, what’s up?”

“What’d you do?” Crow asked.

“I was getting checked out on an egg,” Sandy said.

“I mean, what did you do with Fiorella?”

“Took some pictures of her. Why?”

“She mentioned that it’s barely possible that she might be able to work with you, after all.”