John Sandford - Saturn Run

She looked him up and down, deadpan. “Tell you what. Take off those clothes and I’ll decide if I like what I see. Then I’ll let you know.”

Sandy shrugged again. “See, what you probably don’t know is, I’m the least body-shy person you’ve ever met.” He sat back down and started to unzip his softboots.

“Wait, wait, that was kinda a joke. You really… want to do this?”

“You really want to play another game of Go?”

“Fuck no,” she said, pulling her shirt over her head. “Hurry.”

“What do you think?” she asked forty-five minutes later.

“About what?”

“About the fuckin’ quality control, dumbass.”

“I give us a B-plus.”

She propped herself up on her elbow and said, looking down at him, “Excuse me? A B-plus? I’m pretty sure I haven’t had as many partners as you have, so my statistical baseline is not as long—”

“B-plus is as good as it’s ever been, for the first time,” Sandy said. “This was most excellent. Check the time.”

She did the blink thing: “Oh, yeah. We’ve got time for more…”

The ship’s computer wasn’t very smart. Under the captain’s orders, it killed lights in Becca’s cabin at 23:00. After checking to make sure that Becca was in her bed, it periodically checked to make sure that she mostly stayed in bed until it turned the lights back on at 7:00 each morning.

It didn’t check to see if she was alone—it could have, but it hadn’t been told to. Nor did it have any way to make sure she was actually asleep. That night, mostly, she wasn’t. Neither was Sandy.

Early in the morning, Sandy woke, bumped around in the dark until he’d located his clothes, sat on his Go chair to tie his shoes.

Becca said, “That was pretty amazing.” Then, “Okay, that’s a cliché, what you’re supposed to say the next morning so nobody’s ego gets bruised. But, really, I mean it.”

Sandy groped for her in the dark, kissed her. “What you said. It was amazing. You were amazing. We were both amazing. How come nobody ever told us low-gee sex would be that good?”

“Damned if I know. Maybe it’s like a rite of passage. Or maybe they’re just afraid that if they told us when we came on board, we wouldn’t get any work done. We’d be too busy humping.”

“I don’t think they’re that subtle,” Sandy said. “If they’d actually thought about it, it’d have been included in our shipboard-life manual.”

“So…”

“We need an encore, if you’re up for it,” Sandy said. “Maybe like, mm, a couple hundred encores.”

“I’m definitely up for it, but we’ve got to be careful after what happened with the orgy group.”

“We’re not an orgy group,” Sandy said.

“Still…”

“Gotcha. And you’re right. Discretion. Nobody says nothin’ about nothin’.”

“I…” she began, then stopped.

“What?”

“I kind of want to tell you about something that involves you and Fiorella.”

“Don’t,” Sandy said. He pressed a finger to her lips, happy that she couldn’t see his face in the dark. The Hump Pool was up to a hundred and ninety thousand. “I don’t want to hear her name again. Not from you.”

“Well…”

“Please. Promise.”

“Okay. Her name shall never pass my lips again.”

“Excellent,” Sandy said. “Now, I sneak out and creep down to the Commons, like I was up early, on my way to breakfast.”

“Kiss me again.”

Sandy arrived at the Commons two minutes later. There were few people in the room, and he got a tray, some heart-healthy cereal that tasted like cardboard, and some heart-healthy reconstituted simulated free-range chicken eggs, scrambled, that tasted like yellow stuff with salt on it, and looked around.

Crow was sitting by himself, as he usually was, but squinting in Sandy’s direction. Sandy carried his tray over, put it on the table, and said, “How’s it goin’, big guy?”

Crow looked at Sandy’s fresh, pink, relaxed face for another moment, then said, unconsciously mimicking the executive officer, “Ah, Jesus.”

Sixty-eight days after launch, five hundred million kilometers from Earth, and three hundred seventy million kilometers from the sun, Fang-Castro was methodically paging through her morning reports—boring morning reports—when her door pinged.

She had no appointments scheduled. On the other hand, the new open-door policy, instituted after the orgy fight, was her idea. “Come in,” she said.

Crow stepped into the room carrying a slate. “Apologies for the interruption.” He lifted the slate. “Vintner’s calling. The President wants to chat. Now. With both of us.”

“Bad news?”

“That’s usually the case when they surprise me,” Crow said. “Another alien coming in? I don’t know.”

“Let’s get it over with.”

“I’ll set up the channel and secure the room.” The presidential seal on Crow’s slate display was replaced by a rapidly changing diagram, mostly in green, with orange highlights.

Fang-Castro’s lips turned up at the corners, amused by his intensity. “You think my office might be bugged?”

Crow’s eyes flicked up to hers, then back to the display. “Of course it is. I’m making sure that nobody else has bugged it.”

Fang-Castro’s slight smile disappeared.

“All right, we’re ready at this end. Now we wait,” Crow said. Earth was half a billion kilometers away. It would take most of an hour for Crow’s go-ahead to reach the Oval Office and for them to respond. “I’ll be in the Commons.”

“I presume you have business to keep you occupied?” Fang-Castro said. “You’re welcome to stay here, if you wish.”

Crow nodded. “Thank you. I will, it’s quieter than the Commons, and not as lonesome as my quarters.” Fang-Castro poured herself another cup of tea, and poured one for Crow. She pushed it across her desk. “Indulge yourself, Mr. Crow. It’s an especially good vintage.”

The dark-eyed man looked up, came to some kind of decision, and leaned forward and picked up the delicate china cup. He sniffed, slurped, and held the brew for a moment in his mouth. Fang-Castro almost believed there was a momentary look of pleasure on his thin face.

“Very good,” he said. “Yes, very, very good. Thank you.” He returned his attention to his slate, cradling the cup in one hand.

They worked in an almost comfortable silence for an hour. The encrypted signal from the Oval Office was picked up by the ship, routed to Crow’s slate, decrypted, and sent to Fang-Castro’s office screen, and only to her office screen. Vintner was in the foreground of the vid image, with Santeros and DARPA director Lossness in the background.

“Good morning, Captain Fang-Castro, Mr. Crow,” said the President’s science adviser. “Not good news, I’m afraid. The Chinese did another midcourse correction burn, but this one was considerably longer than we expected or even knew that they were capable of. They’ve picked up three kilometers per second. JPL says it’s advanced their Saturn ETA by over three weeks. They’re now expected to arrive at Saturn near the first of April.”

Lossness loomed on the screen. “The deep space network indicates that they also jettisoned some material or sections of their ship both before and after the burn. We don’t know if this was planned from the beginning or is some sort of contingency plan, or if it’s an act of desperation. If they had that much additional reaction mass in their original burn budget, we’d have expected them to use it on launch. It would’ve bought them a lot more time.”

Vintner took over again. “We believe it’s probably some combination of all those motives. Likely they jettisoned as much mass as they could before the burn to lighten the ship and take best advantage of the thrust, and then they threw away some extra tankage afterwards. Our guess is that they’ve burned into the reaction mass they need to decelerate. They need to drastically reduce their dead weight if they’re going to have enough delta-vee to achieve Saturn rendezvous.