John Sandford - Saturn Run

“Becca’s hit, oh fuck oh fuck, Becca’s hit, I’m going that way, I’m going that way…” He slammed over the joystick.

Nothing happened.

He slammed it again.

Nothing happened.

Martinez: “I’m coming, I’m coming…”

Sandy called Becca once, twice, three times, got nothing back.

One of the techs called from the egg base: “Sandy, your egg’s screwed. Stay off the electronics… stay off the electronics…”

“Becca’s hit, you gotta—”

His microphone shut down—Martinez could do that from his command egg—and Martinez said, “Shut up and listen. I’m in my egg, but it’s gonna take a couple minutes to get out there. The data feeds say you’ve got a fire in the R-Box, you’ve got to pull the flush ring for R. Can you pull the ring?”

The emergency panel was overhead and Sandy swatted the cover away, saw the red flush ring for R, and pulled it.

“R ring pulled. Joe, you gotta move. She was hit hard. Jesus, she was hit, I can’t see her, my maneuvering gear is all red—”

“Sandy, I’m losing your data feeds, I don’t know if it’s the fire, I think that’s gone but it’s possible the metal is still hot and is reigniting, but the feeds are going down one by one.”

“What about Becca? You gotta get going… you gotta go—”

“Do you have a status on your air?”

“No, not anymore. I’m dead in the water, man, all the vids are going out, they went yellow and then red and now they’re going out. The LEDs are still powered, but they’re going to red, too, I’m not gonna be any help.”

“Listen. Did you take that bag of cookies with you?”

“What? What? Cookies…”

“Listen to me, man. The cookies. Did you eat the cookies?”

“What the fuck are you talking about, Joe? Are you out—”

Martinez’s voice was cool, but sharp: “Sandy, this is important. Did you eat those cookies?”

“No, no… I…”

“Look at the bag. Is the bag normal, or is it all puffed up? Is it fat?”

Sandy looked at the lunch box—the container where they kept the food, picked up the bag of cookies. It looked like somebody had been pumping air into it.

“It’s fat. It’s like a ball.”

“Goddamnit. You’re leaking air, your pressure is dropping. Hold real still, spit a little, just easy, small drops of spit… see which way the spit drops drift…”

“Tell me about Becca…”

“Becca’s a separate problem and we’re working on it,” Martinez said. “We’ve also got to work on your problem. Spit.”

Sandy spit, and the tiny drops of saliva hovered in front of his face for a second, then another, and then they began drifting down to his right. As he did that, he heard Martinez shouting over the open link, “Elroy! Elroy! Call Butler and see what the situation is with the other eggs,” and “Sandy, what happened with the spit?”

“They’re drifting down to my right, not outward… it’s not centrifugal force… they’re going down behind the seat, I can’t see… Joe, I think if there’s a crack, it’s probably in the bottom of the interior shell. I can’t reach it.”

“Shit. You smell anything?”

“No, I—”

Sandy’s microphone went dead, and so did the sound feed coming in; a new red LED light began blinking up and to his left. Now he really was dead in the water, and not only that, he was isolated from the others.

He couldn’t see the ship itself, but he could see one section of the radiators, which seemed to be moving along in a smooth flow. It had been the other one where the problem occurred, he thought.

The interior lights flickered, and another LED popped up: the lights had gone to emergency battery power, and the emergency batteries were in the ceiling, away from the impact zone. He should have light.

Anything he could do to help himself? Nothing came to mind. He looked up at the emergency box, and a half-dozen additional flush rings. Couldn’t hurt to pull them, he thought: they were basically fire extinguishers, mechanically operated, and the egg was dead, anyway. He pulled them all, one at a time.

His egg continued its slow tumble, the ship was now below his feet. Then he picked up Becca’s egg. He almost missed it: it looked like a large dim star, and he wouldn’t have noticed it at all except that it was moving. Maybe three or four kilometers away, he thought, though he didn’t know for sure.

Nothing, nobody was going after it.

He screamed at it: “Becca! Becca!”

Captain Fang-Castro sucked thoughtfully on her second bulb of pouchong of this watch. The delicate tea soothed her nerves and gave her something to do with her hands. Bridge watch was uneventful on the Nixon , and thank God for that. Still, it meant the officer of the watch mostly had little to do but sit in the big chair and look, well, watchful.

Fang-Castro liked to keep busy. Doing nothing, even watchfully, made her fidgety, and a fidgety commander was not good for morale. Consequently, tea was usually in hand.

The crew was excited about midcourse turnaround. It was the first tangible evidence of progress since they’d completed their slingshot pass of the sun, and it meant they were more than halfway to Saturn.

They were two and a half hours into restart and the engines were up to three-quarters thrust. Fang-Castro was finishing her tea when the faintest of shudders rippled through the bridge.

“Nav, what was that!” she snapped. “Comm, give me Engineering and patch Mr. Martinez in.”

Navigation came back instantly: “Command: we experienced a lateral impulse, ship’s aft. It turned us slightly off course. Attitude control is bringing us back on heading.” A second later, “Our acceleration is dropping rapidly. It looks like the engines are shutting down.”

“An impact?”

“Don’t know, ma’am, we’re inquiring.”

Frank LaFarge, who was on engineering watch, spoke up. “I’m not seeing damage indicators commensurate with an impact big enough to shift our heading.”

Comm spoke up: “Engineering’s on.”

“Dr. Johansson, what just happened?” Fang-Castro kept her voice calm and level, belying her twitching gut.

“Captain, Greenberg here. Becca’s on EVA, observing the radiator ramp-up. We’ve lost contact with her. Radiator Boom 1 experienced a blowout. We don’t know how serious it is, but we’re hemorrhaging radiator melt. I’ve initiated rapid shutdown and containment procedures on the damage.”

“Are we in any immediate danger, Dr. Greenberg?”

“I don’t believe so, Captain.”

Nav came back: “Command, we’re accessing the fore cameras, we’ll have them up in a few seconds.”

Comm: “We have Mr. Martinez on—”

Fang-Castro: “Nav, hold the pictures. Comm, show me Joe: Joe, what happened?”

“I’m really busy right now, ma’am, so I gotta be short.” Martinez was buckled into his egg. “We blew a radiator, looks like, some of the melt hit Becca’s and Sandy’s eggs. Sandy’s damaged but I think recoverable if I can get out there, but my best bet now is that Becca’s gone.”

“Gone? You mean…”

“Dead. The monitoring vid showed her getting hit by a wad of metal the size of a chair. Hit hard, head-on. The shell’s intact… maybe… but the cradle, power system, propulsion, they’re trashed. Her egg’s been hurled away from us. I gotta go, I gotta go, if I can get the goddamn garage door open, I gotta go…” Fang-Casto heard him shouting at somebody, “Get off the line: get off the fuckin’ line, get off the fuckin’ line and get me out there…”

Fang-Castro: “Keep me informed when you can, Joe.”

“Yeah, I will, ma’am. Sandy’s losing power, we’re losing his data feeds, get me out there, you motherfuckers, I don’t care about that, use the crank, use the fuckin’ crank if you have to and get into suits. I’ll bring Sandy back into Bay 12.”