John Sandford - Saturn Run

“We’ll see that it gets taken care of,” Crow told him.

Crow talked to the President: “Fang-Castro and I spent six or eight hours talking about it, all told. It’s coming together: I think we’re good. And she’s better than good. Now we just have to screw down the security. If we can get six months, it’s a done deal.”

Fiorella’s broadcast on the first night got a six-share nationally, and a two-share worldwide, as the first comprehensive on-site vid from what would become America’s first interplanetary ship. For her blog, a six-share was terrific. A worldwide two-share was even better.

From there, it should have dropped off fairly sharply. But at midnight, Pacific time, she was running a twelve-share worldwide, meaning that twelve percent of the people in the world who were watching television were watching her.

Vid Ultra Stars were lucky to get an eight. An analysis by Public Analytics implied that it was the cross-breeding of Serious Science News with the sensuality of the photography that kept people looking. A hack collective had blown the images to one thousand percent in an attempt to isolate actual nipple pigmentation, and had reported that it may have been some kind of chemical composition overlaid on Fiorella’s epidermis. It wasn’t clear whether the hackers had ever heard of makeup.

Becca didn’t notice any of that. She got back to Georgetown and took up residence at the National Center for Mathematics. Somehow, the designs would go better, she thought, if the supercomputer were in the next room, so she could yell at the support techs if necessary.

Clover learned that there was a twenty-two-pound underage on the next Virgin-SpaceX flight up, and got Crow to send up a cold case with a giant sack of raw medium shrimp, an uncooked chicken, a bag of rice, a box of smoked pork sausage, bottles of olive oil, Worcestershire sauce and New Mexican red sauce, onions, garlic, a couple of green bell peppers, celery, tomatoes and bay leaves, some chicken stock, sea salt and three kinds of pepper and a variety of other spices. Fang-Castro and Tomaselli were invited to the Midnight Special, as Clover called it, a secret dinner out of sight in the back of the cafeteria, and when they were done, Fang-Castro said, “Okay, we’re going to need some extra freezer room for specialty cooking… what would you call it? Can’t say, ‘Jambalaya for Important People.’”

“Rations,” Clover said. “Special rations for morale purposes.”

“Exactly. Rations,” Fang-Castro said. “God, this could kill my waistline.”

Sandy bought two more Reds on his own, and had a long talk with Leica about optical glass for the new vid ports on the egg. Leica could produce the glass over the next six months or so and guarantee that it would meet stress requirements. They also offered an endorsement. Sandy turned it down; not that he wasn’t flattered, but he didn’t like the idea of wearing labels, and didn’t need the money. After being turned down, Leica offered the loan of a half-million-dollar ultra-zoom, which he took. He called Martinez with the glass specs. Martinez said, “Yeah, I can do that, but they’re quite a bit bigger than I’d expected.”

“Believe me, it’s been thoroughly worked out by some of the top guys in the vid field,” Sandy said.

By that, he meant Gunnery Sergeant Cletus Smith, who told him, “As a rule of thumb, figure out how big you need them. Then double that. Then double that again. You’ll wind up using all of it.”

Outside the eggs, in space, he would carry his Reds in a special housing, adopted from dive housings. He got in touch with a French dive manufacturer and made arrangements to pay for three housings, to include battery-driven heaters and Leica glass. The housings would cost him forty thousand dollars each, but Sandy didn’t care: it was faster if he paid himself, rather than wait for government approval.

The dive manufacturer offered an endorsement. Sandy almost turned it down, but then thought of his surfer friend pushing brooms in Caltech’s Astro building. “Listen, if you endorse a friend of mine—he’s big in the surf world—I’ll talk about your dive gear when we get back and maybe we could do a vid on the equipment we use up there.”

The deal was done; Sandy was walking down the hall the next morning when the surfer/janitor exploded from a machine room, off a crowded corridor, and wrapped him up in a hug and kissed him on the cheek. “Man…”

“They’re looking at us strangely,” Sandy said.

Sandy also needed every picture he could get, and every analysis he could find, of the environment in Saturn space. What was the light like? Would there be dust problems?

His best secure access to the information on Saturn’s environment was through the Astro center, and Fletcher, with Crow’s encouragement, unhappily gave him a closet-sized office with nothing but a shaky wooden table, an uncomfortable chair, and a computer port.

“The thing is, he’s got to look at this stuff, since he’ll be spending so much time out in the environment,” Crow told Fletcher. “We can’t have a guy who’s going to Mars being caught doing in-depth research on Saturn. He needs a computer with your security shield on it.”

Sandy left the crappy furniture in the hall and brought in his own. He was working there late one night when he heard people running in the hallway, and looked out and saw an Astro Senior Star go by—a fat guy, running like an Olympian, really pumping his knees—and out of simple curiosity, followed.

The fat guy knew Sandy was cleared for Saturn work, and so didn’t shoo him away as he called Fletcher, and sputtered into the secure phone.

Crow’s wrist-wrap had a nasty urgent alert that sounded like a frog in agony: “ BREET BREET BREET… You have an urgent phone message. Do you wish to hear it? BREET BREET BREET . You have an urgent phone message. Do you wish to hear it? BREET…”

“Okay, okay, goddamnit, I’m awake. Shut up. Who is it? What time is it?”

“Five o’clock in the morning, March twenty-sixth. Call from Sanders Darlington listed Most Urgent no details…”

Two in the morning on the West Coast. Whatever was happening there, Sandy didn’t think it could wait until later.

“Answer.”

Sandy came up: “Crow?”

“This had better be good.”

“Sorry to bust you at this time of the morning, and you would have heard in the next couple hours anyway, I think, but I thought since I had the direct line—”

“What the hell is it?”

“The starship’s leaving.”

“Shit!” Crow fumbled for the bottle of stim pills on the nightstand. “You mean it’s gone?”

“It’s going. It fired up its engines about twenty minutes ago. It’s already got enough velocity to break orbit, and it’s looking like it’s vectoring well out of the plane of the solar system. The smart boys think it’s leaving for good.”

“And now everybody and their cousin can see the goddamned thing?” Crow popped three stim pills, one more than the max.

“That’s what they’re saying. Well, not exactly that. They’re saying that at Saturn’s distance it’d only look like about a twentieth-magnitude star. You’d need several meters’ worth of telescope to detect it.”

“So maybe we’re going to get lucky, again?” Crow didn’t much believe in luck, not the good kind, anyway.

“No. Listen, I don’t know the details about this stuff, but they’re saying that it’s burning a lot hotter than when it came in. It’s putting out a load of 511 keV gamma rays. I asked one of the other grad students. That means—”

“Shut up, kid, let me think for a sec.”