John Sandford - Saturn Run

It was dim out there: the sun was still the sun, but drastically shrunken: pea-sized.

There was no planetary light to fill in the shadows. Jupiter was nowhere close, and Saturn was still a long way out—although they’d been past the orbit of Mars and through the asteroid belt, and were approaching the orbit of Jupiter, the planets were nothing like evenly spaced: Saturn was twice as far from Earth as Jupiter.

Sandy finished another scan of the slot nozzle and asked, “Now what?”

“Let’s just back off for a while—probably ought to go back in, but let’s give it another hour.”

“All right.”

“How come Fiorella’s not out here?”

“After the turnover operation, we had about as much as we needed for her show. She talked to Wendy about what she’d see today—Wendy said there wouldn’t be much—so she’s trying to scrape some kind of feature story out of the garden guys.”

“That ought to be exciting. I hear they thought they had an aphid last week.”

“Turned out not to be true. It was a flake of the dry fertilizer they use.”

Becca laughed and said, “And you ran right over to cover the nonexistent aphid?”

“Hey, it coulda been a big story.”

Becca made sure they were on a private channel. “Can I get serious for a moment?”

“Yeah?”

She could hear a little resignation in that drawn-out word. “I’m feeling like we need to talk about what’s going on between the two of us. And I’m going to need you to talk back for a change. Please?”

“Oh, Jesus…”

“We’ve been keeping company, as my folks would put it, for two months now, and I’m still not sure how deep I’m in. For me, that’s a long relationship.”

“I guess it is for me, too,” Sandy acknowledged.

“You think I don’t know that? I knew that about you the day after we first met. The other women on the team made sure I knew about you. You think you don’t have a reputation that precedes you?”

“Ummm, I don’t think about it.”

Becca sighed. Guys! “I’m sorry. That’s not really what I wanted to talk about and I’m not trying to put you on the defensive. It’s just…”

Becca took a deep breath. I’m finally getting to the point, she thought.

“It’s not that I don’t like it, it’s just I don’t exactly know what that is. I’m not sure there’s a future.”

“If this is about us breaking up…”

“What? No! No, no, no! I mean, I’m really enjoying this. Whatever it is.”

Deep breaths, just breathe, she thought. Damn, I hate Talks.

Engineering pinged.

“Hold on,” Becca said, “Wendy’s calling. Back to you in a minute.”

Becca opened the two-way comm to Engineering. “How’s it going, guys? I’m seeing temperature fluctuations in Exchanger 1. Anything I need to worry about?”

Greenberg came back: “Becca, it doesn’t look like much from here. We’re getting a few hiccups in a couple of the heater coils. Minor current spikes. We’ll stamp ’em out.”

“Okay, Wendy, but sooner rather than later, okay? Turnaround’s enough work without distractions. Let’s kill this one, pronto.”

“Sure thing, boss. I’ll ramp up the damping algorithms another notch. That oughta do it.”

“Good. Stay on top of it.”

Becca switched two-way back to Sandy. “Hey, you listen in on that?”

“Yeah, what’s up?”

“Not much, some rattles in the gears. Do me a favor, though, feed me an external shot of Slot Nozzle 1, the outboard half? IR, false color mapping, like you did back when we were doing the Earth-orbit tests? Can you do that?”

Sandy was a few hundred meters away: “No problem, I’ve had an IR camera running. Just let me switch to wide-angle”—there was a pause—“Okay, should be getting the IR feed on screen four”—another pause—“Okay, I just kicked in the color thermal map post-process on the vid. You seeing that?”

“Yeah, it’s good. I’m copying Engineering in on this.” Becca opened a conference channel back to Engineering. “Wendy, I’m feeding you Darlington’s IR view of Nozzle 1. See that hot spot between Plates 87 and 91, about seventy percent out from the mast? I think that’s where the fluctuations originate. Try dialing back the heaters around there.”

“I agree. We’ve already been focusing on that section,” Greenberg said. “We’ll sweat the small stuff, doncha worry.” Wendy clicked off.

Becca switched back to the private link with Sandy.

“What was I saying? Oh yeah. I’m liking this. A whole lot. I think you are, too. You’re sticking around, anyway. It’s just that… when we get back, I expect I’m gonna go home to Minnesota and you’ll be going back to Pasadena. That whole shipboard romance thing, and that’ll be it.

“I’m really not sure I want that to be it. I’m still working on it. But I’d really like to know how you feel about this… ‘thing’… between the two of us. You ever thought about moving to Minnesota? Okay, not much to surfing there, but at least we’re not topping fifty degrees in the summer.” Becca took a deep breath. “Okay. That’s your cue. I’m done. You’ve got the floor.”

Sandy was silent.

“Sandy? What’s on your mind?”

“Well, I hadn’t thought that far ahead.”

“Well, maybe it’s time!” Becca blurted exasperatedly. Damn, this mattered. She was surprised by that.

Another ping: “Wait one, Wendy’s pinging me again.” Becca went back to the engineering channel.

“What’s up?”

“We sent a power-back command, but Heater 1-89’s still pumping out full heat. What do you rec—”

And then the engineering operation stopped being routine, and turned into a nightmare, a train wreck. Everything happened in a fraction of a second, but Sandy’s combat-trained brain played it out in slow motion, so he wouldn’t miss any of the uglier details.

The radiator boom-wall ruptured right next to the hot spot his IR camera had highlighted. Molten radiator metal poured out of the breach, a surreal liquid explosion of silvery blobs moving at different speeds. One droplet of spray, traveling at over one hundred kilometers per second, pinged on the large front port. He instinctively recoiled—sniper! Then his explosion reflexes kicked in. Look for bricks coming down.

He leaned on the joystick, realizing in the first second that he would be hit. The bigger blobs moved more slowly, like oncoming cars, but there was no hole in the spray he could duck into. He couldn’t move the egg fast enough to avoid all of the molten metal. A major hit on that big Leica-glass window would be very bad. He needed to rotate the pod to get the window out of the line of fire. The egg’s least sensitive equipment was located in the bottom, where the heavy mechanicals were, and Martinez had given him the good training. He started spinning the egg so the bottom would take the impact.

He didn’t quite make it, but it was good enough. The impact came a second later, on the corner of the utility cradle, below his seat. It felt like the rubbery impacts of a bumper car at a carnival, but a lot harder, but that was okay, because it came through his butt. If he’d taken it on the face, even if the window had held, which was doubtful, he’d be looking at a fractured vertebra.

Then the electronics started screeching at him, and the life-support indicators went to a screaming yellow. And though he was upside down to Becca, he saw a barrel-sized slug of molten metal slam into her egg at head-on-auto-collision speed.

No sound, other than his own electronic warnings: he was locked on Becca’s channel but heard not a word or a scream, the vid was down, nothing but the sight of the egg getting hit, and the egg flying off, tumbling, at ten, twenty, thirty meters per second. He wasn’t sure. His own egg was rotating, and she’d passed out of his field of view.