John Sandford - Saturn Run

The Nixon was traveling a hundred times faster than a high-speed bullet. A millimeter grain of interplanetary sand packed the same wallop as a rifle slug when it hit the ship at a hundred and forty kilometers per second.

The ship was covered with microseismometer sensors. They dutifully picked up the small but sharp impulses of sand strikes and relayed the information to the maintenance computers, which pinpointed the spot on the ship where the hit had taken place. The Nixon averaged about one hit a week, which wasn’t a lot, considering the distance they covered in that time. Each hit was shortly followed by a visit from a service egg. The divot got filled with structural composite putty and epoxy overcoat. The entire EVA took less than an hour.

“The thing about interplanetary space, as you all should know by now, is that it’s astonishingly empty,” Martinez told the crew. “The asteroid belt is only a little less astonishingly empty—I’m thinking we might get one hit a day out there, maybe two dozen total for the transit. None of them, I hope, will be larger than the ones we’ve already seen. The odds of a hit inconveniencing the power plant or heat radiating system are really, really small.”

Becca jumped in: “The odds are small, but just in case, we need to go through the protocols for dealing with the strike in those areas. I’ve got a lot of stuff to tell you, but mostly it boils down to this: if we take a critical hit on the engine or the radiators, you call Engineering and you wait for specific instructions. You don’t go off on your own or I honest-to-God will murder you. Is that clear to everybody?”

Everybody nodded.

“What happens, er, if the hit’s bigger than a grain of sand?” asked one of the trainees who hadn’t read the handout.

“That’s why we’re training you extras,” Martinez said, “because if that happens, it’s gonna be a major clusterfuck. How major, depends on where it hits. The real problem of the asteroid belt is not only are the sand-sized hits more common—we can handle those—but we’ve also got some bigger rocks out there. There are a hundred times fewer one-centimeter rocks out there than millimeter ones, so there’s a better than even chance we’ll never encounter one, on the whole trip. Even in the asteroid belt. That’s a good thing, because an impact with a centimeter-sized rock would have the explosive force of several kilos of high explosive. Containing something like that would be a struggle—that’s why we have the nose and tail cones.”

“What about ten-centimeter rocks?” asked the same trainee.

“That could be a total disaster, again, depending on where it hit.”

“We couldn’t dodge it?”

“No. We cover more than a hundred thousand kilometers every fifteen minutes—a third of the distance from the earth to the moon. We simply can’t track rocks that size, that far out. The good news is, the chances of hitting something that big are far less than one percent. Far less.”

“Be like losing the lottery,” Sandy said.

Martinez scratched his chin: “Interesting concept—losing a lottery. I’ve never heard of such a thing.”

After they finished the inside class, they went outside in the eggs, to practice the plaster-and-paint on simulated hits. They were being monitored by Crow, who monitored all EVAs. The entire interior of the ship was covered by vid monitors, and the vid was cached for later viewing, if necessary. The exterior was of more immediate concern; Crow worried that if somebody were to sabotage the ship again, the attack well might come there and so real-time surveillance was in order.

He listened to the eggs going out, watched them by tapping into Martinez’s vid feed, then tapped into the private comm channel between Darlington and Johansson, and listened for a while.

One of his surveillance computers automatically monitored all shipboard communications, and a relational app alerted him to problematical talk and provided a written transcript—but those were just the words. They didn’t catch tone and the unvoiced emotions that directed it; there was no substitute for the occasional direct audio surveillance.

Crow was a bit surprised those two had fallen into bed. Not that he hadn’t expected Darlington to make a move at some point; really, the only question was how soon. Johansson, on the other hand… he’d have guessed she was too wrapped up with her work—obsessed might be more accurate—to consider any distracting personal involvements. The boredom of interplanetary flight was a bigger factor than he’d realized.

He would have to remember that if he ever found himself in this kind of insane situation again. Not that he was planning to.

Their conversation was work-related discussion interspersed with personal chat. It had taken nearly three weeks for the honeymoon period to wear off, and since then they’d slipped into mismatched couple behavior.

He was sure they’d deny the couple part. The mismatch, no one could deny. They squabbled. It was none of that “opposites attract” nonsense; they were just different. Johansson’s single-minded, utterly dedicated work focus didn’t stay at work; it carried over to her approach to her entire life. She behaved as if everything in her existence was a chore, and she liked the chores.

Right now the squabble was essentially territorial, although Darlington didn’t seem to realize that. Playing in Johansson’s quarters meant they were playing by her rules. She’d defined the scope of the relationship from the very beginning. Keeping physical matters on her turf reinforced that authority. Served Darlington right. He so took it for granted that he called the shots in these sexual liaisons that he couldn’t wrap his head around why this one was discomforting him so. He’d made the first pass, but then she’d grabbed the ball and called the plays after that.

But… something else came through the squabbling, something the computers and transcripts wouldn’t flag. After listening for ten minutes, he thought, Damnit. They’re falling in love.

That could be bad both ways.

He considered Darlington to be one of his troops. Troops were always better when unencumbered by attachments, especially attachments to critical personnel. There might even be more complicated sexual arrangements, he worried, that could turn into bitterness and strife. For example, what was going on between Darlington and Fiorella? Did Johansson know about it? Was there anything to know?

Darlington was his ace in the hole, but he wasn’t a very stable ace. So far the relationship seemed to be working for Johansson and Darlington, but if, or more likely when, it went south…

He figured Johansson was far less likely to fall apart. She had fuckin’ balls. Except… she counted for a lot more.

It was a classic risk vs. threat. More likely that Darlington would melt down, but all they’d lose would be a card he might never have to play and a cameraman. More likely Johansson would keep it together, but if she didn’t, there went the ship’s most important crew member.

“I got a fuckin’ soap opera,” he said aloud. “We got three hundred contingency plans, and not a single one for a fuckin’ soap opera.”

The Nixon was ninety-three days out, eight hundred and ten million kilometers from Earth, six hundred and twenty million from Saturn, and on the far side of the asteroid belt. Becca rode a transport cart down the axle to the service egg bay, sucking on the morning’s third bulb of coffee as she went. The day before, the Nixon had reached the point where it would stop accelerating outward from the sun, turn tail-forward, and begin the three-month process of decelerating into Saturn.