John Sandford: Saturn Run

The President asked, “What does he want? The kid?”

“I don’t know,” Fletcher said. “Fame? Notoriety? I mean, he used to shoot vid for a news-and-porn blog.”

“Which one?”

“Naked Nancy…”

“Goddamnit,” Santeros said. “Last time I looked, she had an eight share worldwide.”

“I wouldn’t know about that,” Fletcher said. “But she’s big. Can you imagine what the revelation of an alien ship would mean in terms of ratings?”

Crow cleared his throat and said, “I need to say something here. Dr. Fletcher’s view of Mr. Darlington is not entirely correct. I’ve been trying to herd these particular cats and I’ve put together some dossiers. Dr. Fletcher, I saw on a note from you that Darlington worked for Federal Mail?”

“Yes. Not very successfully, either. I understand he was fired for lack of performance.”

“He never worked for Federal Mail,” Crow said. “He was actually a first lieutenant with an army organization called the Strategic Studies Group in the Tri-Border area.”

Emery, the vice chairman, looked up and said, “Well, that’s a horse of an extremely different color. The only messages they delivered were thirty-caliber or larger.”

“He left there with a price on his head,” Crow said. “The Guapos were offering ten million for it and they didn’t care if a body was attached. The whole Federal Mail business is part of a cover story. Mr. Darlington’s… attitude… if that’s what you might call it… is also referred to by the Veterans Administration as post-traumatic stress syndrome.”

Fletcher was astonished. “Darlington? Was in the military?”

“If what Crow is saying is accurate, he wasn’t just in the military,” Emery said. “The SSG was way out there. They didn’t have a lot of survivors.”

Crow looked at the President: “The point being, behind the surfer-boy attitude that seems to disturb Dr. Fletcher so much, there’s not only a lot of money, but an extremely hard nose. From a review of his records, I would go so far as to say one of the hardest noses in the Western Hemisphere.”

“I don’t see it as much of a problem,” Santeros said.

“It’s not?” Crow asked, but with a smile. He didn’t know what was coming, but he knew Santeros.

“Read the small print in the Universal Service Law sometime,” Santeros said. “I’ve done that. If the former Lieutenant Darlington gives us any trouble, I’ll draft his ass right back into the army.”

Fletcher said, “Draft him? Into the military? Even with Darlington, that seems kind of… immoral.”

Everybody looked at him for a moment, and then the group dissolved in laughter; except for Fletcher, who flushed, and Crow, who only grinned.

Santeros tapped her computer again. “I’ve got to go. Dr. Fletcher, thanks for your time, but now you should be heading back to California to make sure your group stays in line, at least until Crow’s people can get out there. I’ll see all the rest of you tonight. We won’t be having a little tea party like this. Tonight, we get serious.”

As the group rose to leave, Santeros said, “Mr. Crow, would you stay behind for a moment?”

When they were alone, the President asked him, “Is Darlington going to be a problem? I really could draft him… but we’re talking about one of the biggest buttloads of money in America. If either he or his old man went off the rails, the whole thing could go up in smoke.”

“I don’t believe that will happen,” Crow said. “Two things about Darlington: for all the surfer-boy bullshit, he started out as what you’d call… a patriot. I know it’s unfashionable, but that’s the only word that fits. He enlisted right after the Houston Flash, and was in the thick of things down at the Tri-Border. I think that fundamental impulse is still alive. The other thing is, I looked at his VA psych files, and I suspect Darlington does want something. Desperately. And we can give it to him.”

“What’s that?”

“He wants something to do,” Crow said. “Something serious.”

A thousand kilometers above the Washington machinations, Captain Naomi Fang-Castro wrapped up the last meeting of the day, a report on the ongoing repairs to backup electrical storage units. The repair work was fine, but there was a shortage of critical parts, caused by a continuing army inspector general’s examination of the Earth-bound support bases.

The bases wanted to show that they were fully stocked and ready to go for any emergency, and if they drew down stock lists to support U.S. Space Station Three, then they wouldn’t be at one hundred percent. Since Fang-Castro was in the navy, she didn’t have the clout she might have had if the support bases had been run by the navy.

“I’m going to be begging again,” she said to her executive officer, Salvatore Francisco. “I’ve got to find somebody in the Pentagon who can squeeze Arnie Young.”

Brigadier General Arnie Young was the commander of the support bases.

“Talk to Admiral Clayton. He’s a sneaky prick,” Francisco said.

“That’s a thought. The problem is, he always wants some payback. I don’t want to become one of his girls .”

They’d make another round of calls in the morning, they decided, and gave it up for the day.

Fang-Castro headed home, carrying her briefcase. She was quiet, serious, short, and slight; the first impression she conveyed was that of the quintessential forty-something Chinese woman, despite being fourth-generation American. Her parents had brought her up with a traditional, antiquated propriety.

She was nowhere near as frightening as the name “Captain Fang” led some to believe, before meeting her… as long as you weren’t standing between her and her objective, as long as you didn’t ignore one of her suggestions.

The captain’s “suggestions” were not optional. Very few made the mistake of thinking so, a second time. The space station was a comfortable and safe environment, entirely surrounded by near-instant death. Nobody had yet died under her command, and everyone agreed that as unpleasant as her wrath could be, it beat the alternative.

Fang-Castro’s home was in Habitat 1, Deck 1 of USSS3, known as the Resort. The Resort had simulated gravity, equivalent to a tenth of Earth’s, created by the rotation of the habitats, and real private quarters instead of dorms and sleep-cubbyholes. A select few of the quarters even had two rooms. One even had a window.

Fang-Castro loved her window. After a long command shift, she’d sit in her easy chair, raise the vid screen and the stainless steel shade behind it, dim the room lights, and let her mind drift with the stars, and sometimes the dime-sized sun, and at other times the massive soft expanse of the earth, as they all slowly swept past the window once a minute, the markings of a cosmic clock.

It was a near-daily ritual, and she joked that that window was her one addiction.

Her fiancée didn’t like it. The window made Llorena Tomaselli queasy. She’d logged seven months in space as a computer maintenance tech, and she was fine in confined spaces like cable tunnels, but having the whole universe rotate about her, like she was some lesser goddess, gave her mild vertigo. Fang-Castro knew that while she was at work and Tomaselli was home, the shade stayed tightly closed and projected a pleasant Earth scene, someplace in Italy’s Campania. When Fang-Castro was home alone, the stars were always there. When they were both home, they negotiated.

Tomaselli was cooking. As Fang-Castro entered the suite, she smelled stir-fry for dinner—sprouts, jerked mock duck, ginger, hot peppers, and platanos—with rice and red beans on the side. Her stomach rumbled impatiently. She wasn’t an obligate vegetarian, and vegetarianism wasn’t obligatory in space, especially not if you were the station commander. Meat was hard enough to come by, though, that it was easier just to put it out of one’s mind.