John Sandford - Saturn Run

“No.”

“You might as well tell me what it is—I can always look for your smiling face in the academy yearbooks.”

“It’s Crowell. David Crowell,” Crow said. “Nobody’s called me either name for years. Even my wife called me Crow.”

“I guess it goes with the job,” Fang-Castro said.

“Yeah. Anyway, White is furious at the very thought of allowing Chinese troops on the Nixon . That’s what she calls them—Chinese troops.”

“International law says I would have to help if the Chinese ask, and I can do it. If I don’t, I could be charged with murder. Rightfully so, in my opinion.”

“And that, Naomi, is why they’re not talking to you. They want to decide.”

“I’ll tell you what, David. It appears to me that we’re looking at the first real interplanetary bureaucratic clusterfuck.”

“Yes. And I’ll tell you what, Naomi: if push comes to shove, and I do mean shove—I’ll back you up. All the way. I will.”

Fang-Castro’s implants pinged. Her eyes popped open as she tried to remember why. Then, Ah!

She slipped out of bed, dressed in her plain tan NWUs as quietly as she could, stepped out of the bedroom, closed the door, left the cabin, and walked down to the Commons. There were a dozen other people there, mostly the night shift, picking up coffee, along with a few day-shift workers who appreciated historical markers, even if they couldn’t particularly see, feel, hear, smell, or taste this one.

Most of those were looking out through the big port window. Fang-Castro got an orange juice and went that way, watching a countdown that popped up on a corner of the screen, something like the New Year’s countdown.

Hours before, they’d begun to bend around Saturn. In three minutes, they’d close that first loop: the official seal on the fact that they’d shed enough of their excess velocity and achieved a closed orbit around the enormous planet, bound by Saturn’s gravitational pull.

They were late. The original plan had placed them at Saturn for Christmas. Instead they’d arrived just in time to celebrate the start of spring. Like that mattered, 1.3 billion kilometers from home.

What mattered was that the Chinese were only two weeks behind them.

Two minutes, one minute, ten seconds, zero.

“There it is,” somebody said, and there was a smattering of applause.

“It’s a big deal, ladies and gentlemen,” Fang-Castro said. “We’re there.” She watched the planet swinging by for another moment, then walked back to her cabin. Fiorella would be doing a brief rendezvous broadcast in the morning, and Fang-Castro wanted to look good.

Sandy said, “Anytime…”

His egg had been basically unrepairable after being hit by the molten radiator metal, but he, Martinez, Elroy Gorey, and a couple of other techs had pulled the undamaged Leica optical glass off the old egg and reinstalled it on another one. He wasn’t using the Leica glass at the moment, because the standard egg glass softened Fiorella’s image.

Fiorella was floating fifty meters away, and Sandy slowly closed from a wide-angle image of Saturn, and a slice of its rings, to a close-up of Fiorella’s face.

Fiorella said, picking up from what Fang-Castro had said a couple of times in that morning’s interview, “Rendezvous—it was a big deal. For those of us who witnessed the entire project, it’s hard to believe that only two years ago, most of us would never have thought we’d leave the surface of the earth. For those of us who had, we’d gone no further than Earth orbit, a trip that takes not much longer than an ordinary jet flight from Los Angeles to London. But to think we’d be orbiting a planet over a billion kilometers from home! A bare year ago, the Chinese construction of a Mars transport had been state of the art: just a few months to Mars, if you caught the right launch window. This new technology, encapsulated in the Richard M. Nixon , could make that run in a third of the time and it could fly almost anytime it wanted. How proud President Nixon would be if he could see us now!”

She went on for a while, talking of the frustration of crawling back to Saturn after the ninety-million-kilometer overshoot—though a funny definition of “crawl.” Twenty-five kilometers per second was roughly twenty-five times faster than the speed of a standard rifle bullet, but compared to the flight out, at a hundred and fifty kilometers per second, it felt like crawling.

“As beautiful as it is, it will take us a week to move in from this preliminary orbit to what we hope and believe will be an alien space station. Saturn is gorgeous, but its rings are nothing more than a beautiful buzz saw of orbiting debris, mostly water-ice, with some rocks included. Our destination is technically called the C Ring’s Maxwell Gap, near the innermost part of the ring system. The gap itself is almost entirely free of debris—but to get there, we’re going to have to avoid the saw blade. This will be the most delicate part of our whole flight: this crew is up to it, but you’ll want to stay tuned. Aliens on tap!”

Three-two-one. “Okay… we’re out,” Sandy said.

“Look at my lipstick.”

“It’s fine. You gonna change blouses?”

“Yes, and I’ll get rid of the necklace and mess up my hair. This has to look as informal as possible.”

When they were ready, and she’d changed, Sandy said, again, “Anytime.”

Fiorella flashed her Number 1 smile: “Hi, kids. As I suppose most of you know by now, the third-graders at La Canada Elementary School in La Canada-Flintridge, California, and the fifth-graders at Hillside Elementary in Cottage Grove, Minnesota, have made a special request that was forwarded to us by President of the United States Amanda Sentaros… Oh, Jesus, I fucked that up… Santeros, Santeros, Santeros…”

“Yeah, and now you do need to check the lipstick,” Sandy said. “When you fix that, pick it up at, uh… special request…”

“Okay.” She fixed the lipstick. “How’s that?”

“Good. Do it anytime.”

“…Cottage Grove, Minnesota, made a special request that was forwarded to President of the United States Amanda Santeros . The kids asked for a tour of Saturn’s rings, and that’s what we’re going to give you guys, right now.”

Santeros spoke to Crow and Fang-Castro in one block of verbiage, because of the time elapse in the transmission back and forth:

“I’m fully aware of the dangers of trying to get into the alien object too quickly. That has been repeatedly pressed upon me by my scientific advisers, to the point of being tiresome. I leave to you the tactical details of doing that, but would remind you that we’ve lost a lot of time. A lot of time—and our Chinese friends and allies are coming in fast. We still don’t know exactly what they are doing, but do not underestimate the dangers here. We are pressing the Chinese government for details of what they expect from us, if anything, but they are being remarkably reticent. Mr. Crow is aware of the many scenarios we have been discussing, and can provide the command with details of these discussions, but I say again: you must move as quickly as possible, now, and you must take great care in any approach from the Chinese. With the time lag we have in the broadcasts, we may not be able to provide timely advice, or provide… timely discussion with the Chinese… over any difficult situations you may encounter. We’re counting on you to act in the best interests of the United States….”

When she was done, Fang-Castro said, “Oh, boy.”

“Yes,” Crow said. “That was a very complicated way of saying, ‘If you screw it up, you’re on your own.’”