John Sandford - Saturn Run

Martinez maneuvered Sandy’s egg up to the garage, and two space-suited techs hooked up the egg and pulled it inside. The air lock was resealed, and the interior atmosphere checked for any toxic emissions from the egg. There were none; if there had been anything coming out, it had been harmlessly outgassed into space.

The lock was pressurized and the rear garage doors opened. Sandy had no power in the egg and the techs didn’t want to power it up, should there be some problem, so they opened his access hatch with a hand crank.

He was met by Fang-Castro and the others. Sandy eased out, looked at their faces: “She’s dead, isn’t she?”

Fang-Castro said, “She was killed instantly.”

“Are you going after her egg?”

“No,” Fang-Castro said. “We need to concentrate our resources on the crisis here. Going after her would present an unnecessary risk.”

“Then don’t do it,” Sandy said. “Dead is dead. No point in throwing good bodies after a dead one.”

Ang muttered, “Oh, boy.”

Sandy gave him a toothy grin: “Dr. Feelgood. I hope you know what I need.”

“I do. Where are you at?”

“About a five and going down. I was at a nine when the metal hit the fan.”

“Are you using any drugs?”

“Stims, from time to time. Not for several days.”

“No street drugs?”

“No.”

“Adrenal implants?”

“They’ve been pulled.” Sandy looked at Crow. “You told them.”

Crow nodded: “Had to.”

Ang said, “Roll up your sleeve. I’m going to get you started.”

Sandy nodded and smiled and pulled his sleeve up. Ang pushed the pressure injector against his arm and said, “Here it comes.”

Tears started running down Sandy’s face and Fiorella put an arm around his waist and said, “We’ll walk you back,” and Crow patted his shoulder and said, “Captain Darlington. I just… I just…”

Sandy thought through the drugs, So that’s what Crow looks like when he’s sad…

Later that evening, Sandy was lying on his bunk, watching an incoming episode of Celebrity Awards , with Kilimanjaro Kossoff—KayKay—in a stunning red half dress taking a golden trophy for her sponsorship of a massive troop of penguins being relocated in Antarctica, away from their particular melting ice shelf. “When I saw those birds… penguins are actually flightless birds, which a lot of people don’t realize… when I saw those poor birds, I just knew in my heart…”

His door buzzed, and though he didn’t feel like talking to anyone, he said, “Come in,” and the door unlatched and Crow came through and tossed him a can of beer. He had another for himself, and dropped onto Sandy’s chair.

“How you doing?”

“About as well as usual.”

“I don’t know quite what it’s like—the drugs.”

“It’s like somebody removed a couple of cc’s of your brain,” Sandy said. “I don’t feel much concern for anything, or anybody. I really don’t. Ang will start pulling the drug levels down in a week or so, and if he does it right, I’ll be all smoothed out by the time we reach Saturn. Crazier than a fuckin’ bedbug, but smoothed out.”

Crow stared at him for a minute, then said, “Really?”

Sandy popped the top off the beer: “Really. I’m surprised you haven’t done this.”

“I’ve lost a couple friends,” Crow said. “But when we lost them, we didn’t know it. We kept hoping. We only knew they were lost when they never came back. That takes the edge off. We’re still kind of hoping, you know? Like maybe they bailed out and are living in Istanbul or something. The other time… You know I was married?”

Sandy smiled at him: “That seems uncharacteristically optimistic of you.”

Crow hunched forward in his chair. “Yeah. She was the daughter of a Marine Corps general. A flier. In his spare time, he liked to go up in those little stunt jets, fuck around. He’d take her up with him—she liked it—and one day, something broke and he stuck the goddamn jet right into a goddamn mountain. The last thing he said before they hit was, ‘I’m sorry.’ He was talking to her.”

“Ah, boy.”

“Didn’t do the drugs,” Crow said. “I wanted to feel it. I think if anything like that ever happened again, I’d do the drugs.”

“Which is why I’m sitting here watching this moronic vid with a smile on my face,” Sandy said. “They got good drugs now, man. You’re still all fucked up, but it doesn’t hurt as much.”

“Huh.” Crow looked at the screen and asked, “You mind if I watch for a while?”

Fang-Castro was entirely certain she was the unhappiest ship’s captain in the universe, or maybe just the galaxy. The radiator blowout had been about as bad a disaster as one can have in space and still live to regret it.

The blowout had left the Nixon adrift, though it was still tearing along at over a hundred and seventy kilometers per second. They had no propulsion. The VASIMRs were cold and useless contraptions without the necessary gigawatts of power.

There was plenty of electricity from the auxiliary power plants to run all the onboard functions. Life support, computing, communications, none of those were in any danger. They could survive just fine, for a few years.

But they weren’t decelerating and they should be. If that didn’t change, they were on a one-way trip out of the solar system. A year would see them passing the orbit of Pluto. Two and they’d be through the Kuiper belt. A century would pass before the Nixon would reach the Oort cloud as a lifeless tomb carrying the corpses of ninety people who’d died long, long before. The stars were millennia beyond that.

But the aliens…

What kind of civilization had built something that could traverse those distances? She couldn’t imagine. And why had they come, stopped at Saturn, and then left again? Even less fathomable. Her mission was supposed to bring back answers to those questions. Now she wasn’t absolutely sure she’d be able to bring back her crew.

Fang-Castro looked around the table. Crow looked impassive, as usual. No, more like implacable. The man was not happy. She didn’t blame him in the least. Bad enough having an accident that killed someone, bad enough for it to be their chief engineer. Bad enough that it left them adrift, at least temporarily, without propulsion.

Worse that it was Becca Johansson. Fang-Castro had come to genuinely like her. Totally different cultures, totally different upbringings, but they’d both grown up to take no nonsense from anybody, to follow the facts where they led, and to never, ever yield unless they had to.

Martinez—the chief of operations, or head handyman, take your pick—Francisco, the exec, and Darlington rounded out the group in the room. Darlington was not involved in the discussion, but was recording it: he’d insisted on carrying through with it, and Crow had asked Fang-Castro to allow him to do it.

They all turned as Wendy Greenberg walked into the room. She looked flustered. “I’m sorry I’m late, we wanted to pull the latest out of the engines and out of Nav.”

She took the empty chair and Fang-Castro nodded and said, “All right, let’s begin. It’s oh-nine-hundred, October 28, 2067. It’s one day after midcourse flip-over and the heat exchanger accident that shut down our propulsion system and killed Chief Engineer Dr. Rebecca Johansson. A full report on that death will be filed later. I’ve instructed Mr. Sanders Darlington to fully document this meeting.”

She looked around at everybody, then continued, “Dr. Greenberg… Wendy… I do appreciate the situation you’ve found yourself in. I understand your people have been working nonstop to understand the situation and figure out what we’re going to do about it, and you may not have reached any final conclusions, yet. Tell us what you know, because we are looking at a number of critical decisions that need to be made very soon.”