John Sandford - Saturn Run

Early May.

Fiorella was in an EVA suit, floating next to a construction worker who was re-forming a wedge-shaped piece of the station’s superstructure on the habitat side of the reactor; Sandy was in an egg, twenty meters away, working his cameras.

The worker, whose name was Everett, and who came from Tacoma, Washington, gave a ten-second explanation of what she was doing, and then Fiorella moved away from her, just a bit, so that Sandy could keep her working in the background, but also close on Fiorella’s face.

“With two months to go until Nixon ’s launch, this former space station is an around-the-clock hive of activity. With the whole world following the Celestial Odyssey —the Chinese ship has just passed the orbit of Jupiter—space has stopped being routine for a large fraction of humanity, for the first time in a century. Anyone with a pair of binoculars or even a small telescope can watch as dozens of construction workers like Everett finish the American ship.”

“I don’t like that sentence,” Sandy said on his direct link to Fiorella. “I think it should be, space has stopped being routine for the first time in a century.”

They talked about that and Fiorella reworked it, and when it was done, they headed back inside.

The work outside was now so intense that getting egg time and suit time was becoming difficult; they wouldn’t get it at all, if the President hadn’t spoken directly to Fang-Castro about it. “This will either be a triumph or a disaster. If it’s a disaster, there’s nothing I can do about it. But if it’s a triumph, I want the credit, goddamnit, and that means you put the news people out there anytime they want to go. I’ll talk to them about keeping it to a necessary minimum, but if they think it’s necessary, you put them out there.”

The news links now had countdown clocks on their screens, and England’s Daily Mail announced a new construction disaster at the top of every cycle, along with rumors of zero-gravity orgies, secret contacts with the aliens (with photographs of Santeros talking with a meter-tall large-eyed silvery alien in the Oval Office), and rumors that the whole trip was a fraud by the Americans and Chinese, just as all twenty moon landings had been.

For the general public, what Fletcher had characterized as “the most important scientific discovery in history”—Sandy’s discovery of the starship—was increasingly lost in the noise: there wasn’t any starship, not anymore, just some scientists announcing there’d been one. There were no little green men coming to visit, no “To Serve Man” landings on the White House lawn or in the plaza of the Forbidden City. The starship was an abstraction that fascinated folks for a few weeks and then got pushed out of consciousness by the humdrum minutiae of daily life.

But when you could look up in the sky and see a spaceship being built, that was real.

Back inside, Sandy tracked Fiorella as she floated down the length of the center shaft, through Engineering. Sandy was floating as well, but behind him, one of the engineers, who was off-shift, was standing on the “floor” with gripping pads on his shoes, holding Sandy upright and at the same time backing down the shaft, as Fiorella, given a shove by another volunteer, who had then slipped out of sight, floated toward them. Every minute or so, air resistance would start slowing Fiorella down, and they would start over.

“This all became very real for us with yesterday’s one-hundred-percent burn, our first full-fledged engine tests,” Fiorella said to the cameras. “The Nixon has four VASIMR engines, two coupled to each reactor/power subsystem. Each engine, full on, gobbles down over two and a half gigawatts of electricity. Combined, they suck up more juice than many major cities. What the Nixon gets for all that juice is thrust. For those of you with scientific minds, at launch, the VASIMRs will deliver over two hundred thousand newtons of thrust. That sounds like a lot, except each of the Chinese’s ten nuclear thermal engines produces five times as much thrust as Nixon ’s entire complement.

“The Nixon is not a sprinter. At launch, it won’t even manage half a percent of a gee. The Chinese ship took off twenty times faster, the rabbit to the American tortoise. It couldn’t keep that up. After a handful of hours of that, the Odyssey had exhausted its reaction mass and was coasting on its trajectory to Saturn—as it still is.

“The Nixon is a marathoner. The nuclear-electric VASIMR system won’t shut down after a few hours or even a few days. It can run nonstop for months, accelerating the ship to the halfway point near Jupiter’s orbit and then continuously decelerating it until it arrives at Saturn. The VASIMRs will only add a handful of centimeters-per-second velocity to the Nixon every second. But there are a lot of seconds—more than eighty thousand in a day, two and a half million in a month. That adds up to a lot of velocity.”

“I think we might be getting too technical,” Sandy said.

“Hey: let me do this, you just run the cameras,” Fiorella said. “I’ve written in optional cuts. Some people will get the comic-book version, some of them will get the science.”

“If you say so.”

“I say so. How does my lipstick look?”

“It’s okay so far, but stay away from that left corner.” Fiorella had a tendency to chew the lipstick off her lower left lip. “Keep going.”

“I will have to say,” Fiorella said to the camera, “that as important as the tests were, they were spectacularly boring to look at. The engineers who were in charge of making the reactor play nice with the cooling vanes were successful, but once the sails were out, they didn’t look like much of anything but sheets of tinfoil, and the plasma exhaust from a VASIMR engine produces only the faintest of glows. You can barely see it even on the nightside.

“But make no mistake: this was a critical test and the Nixon passed it with flying colors. This was our first real space flight. We only raised our orbit by a hundred kilometers or so, but it was our first step, if only a baby step, toward the mysterious moons of Saturn.”

Sandy looked away from his cameras: “Moons of Saturn?”

“Well, we think we’re going to a moon.”

“But most people don’t know that, they think we’re going to the rings.”

“Sandy…”

Early June, six weeks before launch, and the new arrivals were becoming accustomed to their new world. More or less.

Barry Clark was a tall, thin, dark-haired biochemist, an associate professor at Ohio State. Chuck Freeman was a short, stocky, red-haired Marine Corps sergeant. Clark lived near the center of Habitat 2, and was walking down the hall to his room when he saw Freeman—who’d cross-trained as a maintenance tech—unloading a vending machine from a wheeled pallet.

There would be six vending machines in a small room in Habitat 2, so that those who lived there would not have to travel all the way to the Commons, in Habitat 1, to get a simple snack.

With the pallet in place just outside the vending room, Clark saw Freeman lift the heavy machine off the pallet and, taking backwards baby steps, maneuver it into place in the vending room.

“You work out, huh?” Clark asked, as he passed by. The vision of Freeman lifting the machine created a particular mental construct in Clark’s mind. The machines weren’t that heavy in space.

Freeman said, “Ah, it’s four hundred kilos down on Earth. Up here, only forty. Forty kilos, I can handle.”

“When will they be up and running?” he asked.

Freeman patted the machine. “Gotta plug them in and load them up. Four of snacks, two of drinks. If I’d had to carry this baby full of water, it would have been a different story. That’ll add another twenty kilos. Anyway, should have them up in an hour or so.”