Saturn Rukh (47 page)

As the viewport readjusted to the lowered light level, the crew could now see a cloud of glowing red specks streaking by the viewports, viewports now permanently dim with a silvery-gray film of evaporated tungsten on the outside. Above them they could hear the tether reel whirring freely as the tether flowed out unchecked. They came to the end of the tether and dropped into free fall, the only sound the whir of the still-rotating tether reel above them.

Rod, saying nothing, was quickly analyzing the situation on his commander’s console. Chastity soon was doing the same.

“We got about three-fourths the way around,” said Chastity, explaining things to the rest of the crew while Rod concentrated on trying to figure out their next move. “We’re in a climbing trajectory. It’ll take us high over Titan’s orbit, then back down through it again, but when we get there Titan will still be ahead of us.”

“What happens then?” asked Sandra in a small, scared voice.

“We go into an elliptical orbit around Saturn,” said Chastity. She looked at the trajectory diagram on her screen. “Fortunately our perigee will be outside the ring system so we don’t have to worry about being holed by a ring particle.”

“Then that means we’ll come back up to Titan’s orbit again,” said Sandra. “How long before we meet up with Titan again?”

“According to what Jeeves just told me, two hundred and thirty-seven days,” replied Rod.

“That’s not so bad. We’ll still have food left,” said Sandra.

“We run out of meta in nine days,” said Rod grimly.

~ * ~

Rod and Chastity finally had to admit they couldn’t think of anything to get them out of their predicament.
Sexdent
’s initial speed in its new orbit had been slightly faster than that of Titan, so they had caught up with the moon slightly as their trajectory took them high over it. Titan would move ahead of them again as
Sexdent
slowed at the top of its trajectory. Chastity had used the science telescope to obtain a high-magnification image of the leading Trojan point. On the screen were fuzzy images of the iceberg mountain protecting their donut-shaped return fuel tank from meteorites. The fuel tank itself was just barely visible behind the large rendezvous stage protecting its opposite side. Chastity had brought up the image of the ice mountain in the hopes that the sight of their goal would somehow inspire either Rod or herself to find some way out of their predicament.

“It doesn’t look good,” Chastity finally said. “There’s a thousand enemy soldiers between us and the mountain. We lost our bayonet taking the last foothill and we’re down to our last five hundred and forty bullets.”

What made the problem unsolvable was that they only had 540 kilos of meta left, and they were using it up fast. At
Sexdent’s
normal consumption rate of 60 kilos a day, it would only last nine days. The crew had faced this problem before and soon had everything nonessential turned off, even putting most of Jeeves “to sleep” for most of the time. Even after all their economies, they still faced a short lifetime. The metapowered generator would ran out of fuel and stop supplying electricity in less than a month. Without electricity, all the life support systems would shut down. After that, their bodies would have to start coping with bad air, bad water, and freezing cold. Dan passed out “termination” pills. Everyone hesitated before accepting them, but all did, tucking them away somewhere out of sight in their habitats.

Sandra thought about sending a farewell message to Peregrine, but decided that she wouldn’t even bother to ask Rod for permission to use the energy to do so. With the heat turned off in the capsule, the crew now spent most of their time in their habitats. Pete was given the password to the ethanol stores in Seichi’s habitat and soon was off on a month-long binge, keeping warm by burning ethanol. The other four paired off and shared habitats, partially to keep warm and partially for intellectual stimulation, for they had limited themselves to four-hours-a-day access to Jeeves’s library. No video—that took too much power—text only, saved by the memory feature of the console screen between pages. Most of the crew didn’t use their allotted reading time—usually finding something else to do instead.

Chastity awoke in her habitat. She was alone. Dan must have gone back to his own tube. Despite being well tucked under her bed covers, she was cold. She smiled. She knew how to take care of that problem. She reached up to the ceiling and activated the communicator. “Jeeves?” she asked. “Is Dan awake?”

“Yes” came Jeeves’s reply.

“Connect me to him, please,” she asked. She soon heard the soft sounds of Dan breathing.

“Good morning, lover boy,” Chastity started. “How would you like to start the day off exploring a couple of mountains and a warm cozy forested valley?”

She heard him give a tired sigh. “Gee, darling. I’d love to. But I’m not sure I’m up to it. After all, the last time was only two hours ago. I think I’d better rest some more.”

“You do that,” she replied, pushing off the bed covers and reaching for the latch to the habitat hatch. “If Mohammed is too tired to come to the mountains, the mountains will come to Mohammed.”

Dan heard the intercom switch off and started trying to think the right kind of thoughts to psych himself up for the upcoming visit. It wasn’t hard, for the past few days had been the most enjoyable Dan had ever experienced. His wildest fantasies about making love to Chastity had been exceeded by the reality, except for one thing—the feel of long fingernails scratching lightly down his bare back.

The minutes passed with no tap on his hatchdoor. “She must have stopped by the ladies’ first,” Dan thought to himself, but the minutes continued to drag on with no tap on his hatchdoor. Dan was puzzled, and beginning to worry a little, when suddenly he heard the commotion of a hatchdoor clanging open and loud conversation. He struggled out from under his warm covers, pushed his hatchdoor up, and peered out. Across the deck, peering out from Rod’s habitat door, was a bewildered-looking Sandra, a blanket wrapped around her naked shoulders. Sitting at the pilot console on one side of Sandra was Chastity, still in her blue nightgown, punching icons and talking loudly to Rod. Sitting at the command console on the other side of Sandra was Rod, punching icons and giving commands to Jeeves. As far as Dan could tell from his deck-level viewpoint, Rod was sitting in the commander’s seat stark naked, his lanky thighs starting to turn blue and sprout goose pimples in the cold air of the control deck. Chastity saw Dan peeking out his habitat door and gave him a cheery smile from across the deck.

“I thought of a way to get us out of here!” she said, excitedly. “Instead of us trying to figure out a way to fly over to our fuel tank, I’m going to fly the fuel tank over here!”

“Jeeves. Back off rendezvous tank,” said Rod. On both their screens were two images obviously collected by distant video cameras. One camera was on the donut-shaped fuel tank that contained the meta that would take them home, while the other was on the empty rendezvous tank stage that they had left as a meteorite shield. The camera on each tank stage was transmitting an image of the other stage. The two images shrank simultaneously as the two tanks separated, the small vernier jets on the large empty shield tank flashing occasionally as Jeeves backed it away. When the two tanks were well separated, Rod turned to Chastity.

“It’s all yours, Chass,” said Rod. “Fly that meta tank over here and hook us up!” Chastity reached her right hand into the controller box under her console. The image of the donut-shaped fuel tank sprouted a fine necklace of tiny purple-red meta flames as the vernier jets started the massive tank on its way.

Rod turned to look around the control deck. The face of a bleary-eyed Pete had now appeared in his hatchdoor, so everyone was present.

“Because of Chass, we’re going home!” he announced with a smile. “The fuel tank should be here in a day or so. Although technically the hole in the center is big enough to pass over the habitats, the last thing I want is an accident, so everybody get dressed and clean out your habitats, we’re going to have to pull them all in and store them during the docking maneuver.” Pete, head pounding from a hangover, groaned at the thought. “At least the exercise will keep us warm,” continued Rod. He then looked, down at his blue legs and realized that he had nothing on. His face and chest blushed reddish-blue. “Say, Sandra,” he said with an embarrassed tone. “Pass out my kleins and coveralls, will ya?”

~ * ~

A week later,
Sexdent
was completely checked out and ready. Now that the danger was over and the stress level had lowered, Pete stopped drinking, sobered up, and once again became a help rather than a hindrance to the rest of the crew. Chastity was especially surprised to find that when she came on shift duty at the command console, Pete was usually working away at the science console, using the high-resolution wide-screen color display capability of the large holoviewport.

“What are you working on that you need the holoviewport for?” asked Chastity, who had partially forgiven Pete now that he had mended his ways.

“Helping design a video game,” said Pete cheerfully. “My brother is in the video game business. He thinks our recent adventures would make a great video game. He already has decided on a name for it—’Climbing Saturn’s Rings.’ There are so many different options available. There are dozens of ways to climb down and up the rings using combinations of rocket bums and tether whips. There are all the alien creatures that you have to find on Saturn to get points. And most of the game options will not have a rukh eating the balloon or the reactor failing—”

“In a video game, when you get in trouble and ‘die,’ all you have to do is press the Restart button and you’re alive again,” said Chastity somberly. “It doesn’t work like that in real life.”

“Yeah ...” agreed Pete. His creative momentum lost, he closed down what he was doing and stored it. Chastity noticed the lengthy file title before it disappeared from the screen: TECHNICAL BACKGROUND FQR VIDEO GAME “CLIMBING SATURN’S RINGS.”

~ * ~

“Let’s go home, Chass,” said Rod, when they were finally ready. “Just follow the course Jeeves and I plotted. Slide
Sexdent
over sixty degrees from this Trojan point to Titan, drop into Titan’s gravity well and do a little perigee burn that leaves us falling inward toward Saturn, then in Saturn’s gravity well do a big perigee burn that drops us inward to the Sun—and home.”

“Can we delay our departure for just two hours?” asked Chastity.

“No problem,” said Rod. “It’s going to take us a few days to catch up to Titan, then another few days to reach Saturn. An hour or two different starting time doesn’t make any difference in the energetics, only the timing. But why?”

“I want to wave good-bye to a few friends.”

~ * ~

A week later, after a safe ring passage, Rod lit the candle over the dark side of Saturn. He kept the gee level of the burn at a quarter gee, while rotating the capsule at the same time, so the rest of the crew could sit on the windows of their habitats and look out at the gigantic orange and white clouds rolling past their viewports six hundred kilometers below them, illuminated by their twelve-gigacandle purple-red meta exhaust.

After the main burn ended, Chastity climbed up out of her habitat against the centrifugal gravity, sticking her stump out the hatch door for Rod to pull on to help her “up.” He switched ship control to her pilot console, and leaving her in command, dropped down into his own habitat. With her right hand in the throttle-hole, she tapped the icons on the touchscreen with the pinky on the end of her stump, and soon had a map of Saturn on the screen. Their perigee had occurred on the dark side of Saturn, below the equator. They were now coming up on the terminator, but they had passed over the equator and were now climbing upward over the mid-latitudes of the northern hemisphere. It was in this band, between the turbulent equatorial wind band and the bleak and cold northern cap, that the rukhs flocked. In that region, the display on the touchscreen showed a tiny blinking dot—a weak beacon signal coming from the radio transponder on the mechbot they had left on Peregrine. Their giant friend had been climbing to altitude all night, so as to get ready for the start of the next day’s hunting dive. It would be the astronomer half that would be awake at this time of the Saturnian day. Chastity only hoped that the sky was clear enough that Uppereye would be seeing the stars. Taking the throttle control in her fingers, Chastity raised it slightly three times, timing the burns with the slow rotation of the capsule, finishing off the last of the burn that Rod had started. Doing the burn this far from periapsis was slightly less efficient of fuel, but they now had fuel to spare. In the habitats, each crewmember in turn got to see the cloud patterns light up below. They had once lived there—and one of them had died there. Now they were going home to where you lived under the clouds, rather than
in
them.

~ * ~

Down below, Petra could feel Petru getting tired and hungry. But soon it would be morning, and she could get some rest and let Petro fill the empty gizzard. The sky was clear of clouds above, and Petra could see Parent-and-Child rising over the horizon, soon to be followed by Bright. Parent was the home of the humans. The last she had seen of the humans was the brilliant purple-red light coming from the base of their strange wingless flyer as they entered one of the gigantic ravenous maws of the Swallower.

Just then, a light appeared in the sky above. Petra, with her long experience of gazing at the patterns of light in the sky, marked its position in her memory map of the heavens. The new light was brighter than any star and moving. At first, Petra thought it might be an incoming meteorite, but instead of coming downward and getting brighter, it went outward and stayed constant, until it stopped and faded away. She knew it wasn’t a meteorite when the light turned back on again. She now recognized the reddish-purple color of the light—it was the light emitted by the humans’ flyer!