Saturn Run (17 page)

She stared at him for a moment, then said, “I’m gonna rip somebody’s heart out.”

“I believe you. Do you want me to ask around—”

“No. I’ve got people who can do that better than you can. I just wanted to make sure you weren’t involved.”

“I was not.”

“Good. I really didn’t want to can your ass. But somebody will die.”

“Maybe nothing will happen . . .”

She snorted: “Jacob, this will be in history books. When they write the history of the Santeros Administration, this will be the third item. It will go viral, worldwide. They’re already cracking up in Beijing and Moscow. If I handle it just right, it will cost me only one percent of the vote in the next election. One-point-two million dollars, and there are underclassmen who work all day for eighteen dollars an hour. Jesus H. Christ.” She took a deep breath, then said, “Thank you for letting me scream at you, and not getting up in my face. I need to calm down.”

“A little yoga . . .”

“Yoga? Yoga? Gzzibit! Magrabbit! . . .” And she was gone.

Vintner turned on his office vid screen, which was tuned to CBSNN. He’d intended to click over to PBS, but that was unnecessary. The talking head—actually it was more of a talking-head-and-body, a woman so beautiful that she must have come from a different planet, possibly with the aliens—was saying in the most somber tones, “So we asked Johnson
Morton what he meant by that, ‘obviously would require sexually desirable physical characteristics,’ and this is what he told us . . .”

Cut to Johnson Morton, a fleshy young man with black hair combed straight back from his forehead, and eyebrows like woolly bear caterpillars; Morton knitted his fingers together and said, “We did a comprehensive study of the most desirable physical . . .”

From up and down the subbasement hallway, where the President’s temper tantrum had been overheard, people started laughing. Roaring with laughter. Back-slapping belly laughs.

Vintner closed his eyes for a brief prayer, that Santeros was in fact gone.

Then he started laughing himself, laughing until the tears came.

If Morton hadn’t gotten fucked in the course of his studies, he thought, that was about to change.

—

Early May.

Fiorella was in an EVA suit, floating next to a construction worker who was re-forming a wedge-shaped piece of the station’s superstructure on the habitat side of the reactor; Sandy was in an egg, twenty meters away, working his cameras.

The worker, whose name was Everett, and who came from Tacoma, Washington, gave a ten-second explanation of what she was doing, and then Fiorella moved away from her, just a bit, so that Sandy could keep her working in the background, but also close on Fiorella’s face.

“With two months to go until
Nixon
’s launch, this former space station is an around-the-clock hive of activity. With the whole world following the
Celestial Odyssey
—the Chinese ship has just passed the orbit of Jupiter—space has stopped being routine for a large fraction of humanity, for the first time in a century. Anyone with a pair of binoculars or even a small telescope can watch as dozens of construction workers like Everett finish the American ship.”

“I don’t like that sentence,” Sandy said on his direct link to Fiorella.
“I think it should be, space has stopped being routine for the first time in a century.”

They talked about that and Fiorella reworked it, and when it was done, they headed back inside.

The work outside was now so intense that getting egg time and suit time was becoming difficult; they wouldn’t get it at all, if the President hadn’t spoken directly to Fang-Castro about it. “This will either be a triumph or a disaster. If it’s a disaster, there’s nothing I can do about it. But if it’s a triumph, I want the credit, goddamnit, and that means you put the news people out there anytime they want to go. I’ll talk to them about keeping it to a necessary minimum, but if they think it’s necessary, you put them out there.”

The news links now had countdown clocks on their screens, and England’s
Daily Mail
announced a new construction disaster at the top of every cycle, along with rumors of zero-gravity orgies, secret contacts with the aliens (with photographs of Santeros talking with a meter-tall large-eyed silvery alien in the Oval Office), and rumors that the whole trip was a fraud by the Americans and Chinese, just as all twenty moon landings had been.

For the general public, what Fletcher had characterized as “the most important scientific discovery in history”—Sandy’s discovery of the starship—was increasingly lost in the noise: there wasn’t any starship, not anymore, just some scientists announcing there’d been one. There were no little green men coming to visit, no “To Serve Man” landings on the White House lawn or in the plaza of the Forbidden City. The starship was an abstraction that fascinated folks for a few weeks and then got pushed out of consciousness by the humdrum minutiae of daily life.

But when you could look up in the sky and see a spaceship being built,
that
was real.

Back inside, Sandy tracked Fiorella as she floated down the length of the center shaft, through Engineering. Sandy was floating as well, but behind him, one of the engineers, who was off-shift, was standing on the “floor” with gripping pads on his shoes, holding Sandy upright and
at the same time backing down the shaft, as Fiorella, given a shove by another volunteer, who had then slipped out of sight, floated toward them. Every minute or so, air resistance would start slowing Fiorella down, and they would start over.

“This all became very real for us with yesterday’s one-hundred-percent burn, our first full-fledged engine tests,” Fiorella said to the cameras. “The
Nixon
has four VASIMR engines, two coupled to each reactor/power subsystem. Each engine, full on, gobbles down over two and a half gigawatts of electricity. Combined, they suck up more juice than many major cities. What the
Nixon
gets for all that juice is thrust. For those of you with scientific minds, at launch, the VASIMRs will deliver over two hundred thousand newtons of thrust. That sounds like a lot, except each of the Chinese’s ten nuclear thermal engines produces five times as much thrust as
Nixon
’s entire complement.

“The
Nixon
is not a sprinter. At launch, it won’t even manage half a percent of a gee. The Chinese ship took off twenty times faster, the rabbit to the American tortoise. It couldn’t keep that up. After a handful of hours of that, the
Odyssey
had exhausted its reaction mass and was coasting on its trajectory to Saturn—as it still is.

“The
Nixon
is a marathoner. The nuclear-electric VASIMR system won’t shut down after a few hours or even a few days. It can run nonstop for months, accelerating the ship to the halfway point near Jupiter’s orbit and then continuously decelerating it until it arrives at Saturn. The VASIMRs will only add a handful of centimeters-per-second velocity to the
Nixon
every second. But there are a lot of seconds—more than eighty thousand in a day, two and a half million in a month. That adds up to a lot of velocity.”

“I think we might be getting too technical,” Sandy said.

“Hey: let me do this, you just run the cameras,” Fiorella said. “I’ve written in optional cuts. Some people will get the comic-book version, some of them will get the science.”

“If you say so.”

“I say so. How does my lipstick look?”

“It’s okay so far, but stay away from that left corner.” Fiorella had a tendency to chew the lipstick off her lower left lip. “Keep going.”

“I will have to say,” Fiorella said to the camera, “that as important as the tests were, they were spectacularly boring to look at. The engineers who were in charge of making the reactor play nice with the cooling vanes were successful, but once the sails were out, they didn’t look like much of anything but sheets of tinfoil, and the plasma exhaust from a VASIMR engine produces only the faintest of glows. You can barely see it even on the nightside.

“But make no mistake: this was a critical test and the
Nixon
passed it with flying colors. This was our first real space flight. We only raised our orbit by a hundred kilometers or so, but it was our first step, if only a baby step, toward the mysterious moons of Saturn.”

Sandy looked away from his cameras: “Moons of Saturn?”

“Well, we think we’re going to a moon.”

“But most people don’t know that, they think we’re going to the rings.”

“Sandy . . .”

Early June, six weeks before launch, and the new arrivals were becoming accustomed to their new world. More or less.

Barry Clark was a tall, thin, dark-haired biochemist, an associate professor at Ohio State. Chuck Freeman was a short, stocky, red-haired Marine Corps sergeant. Clark lived near the center of Habitat 2, and was walking down the hall to his room when he saw Freeman—who’d cross-trained as a maintenance tech—unloading a vending machine from a wheeled pallet.

There would be six vending machines in a small room in Habitat 2, so that those who lived there would not have to travel all the way to the Commons, in Habitat 1, to get a simple snack.

With the pallet in place just outside the vending room, Clark saw Freeman lift the heavy machine off the pallet and, taking backwards baby steps, maneuver it into place in the vending room.

“You work out, huh?” Clark asked, as he passed by. The vision of Freeman lifting the machine created a particular mental construct in Clark’s mind. The machines weren’t that heavy in space.

Freeman said, “Ah, it’s four hundred kilos down on Earth. Up here, only forty. Forty kilos, I can handle.”

“When will they be up and running?” he asked.

Freeman patted the machine. “Gotta plug them in and load them up. Four of snacks, two of drinks. If I’d had to carry this baby full of water, it would have been a different story. That’ll add another twenty kilos. Anyway, should have them up in an hour or so.”

“Terrific. Can’t do it fast enough for me.”

Clark went on to his room, where he spent some time reading papers from a seminar he’d continued to teach by vid while on the
Nixon
. An hour later, feeling peckish and a little thirsty, he stuck his head into the hallway and saw Sandy emerge from the vending room with a pack of crumbless crackers and a candy bar.

“Ah: it’s in.”

“About time,” Sandy said. He was working in the fab shop at the end of the habitat, and continued on his way.

Clark went into the vending room to check out the offerings. He was a biochemist, not a physicist, and though he could have explained the difference between weight and mass had he been given a few seconds to think about it, the concept was not right at the top of his mind when he pushed the button on the drink vending machine.

A bottle of Diet Coke was mechanically pushed into the descent tube. It slowly slid down, in the one-tenth gravity, halfway. And stopped. It wasn’t supposed to stop, not in a vending machine engineered for low-gee. Nonetheless, it stopped.

Clark said, “Goddamnit”—he really wanted the Diet Coke—and slapped the transparent plastic face of the vending machine. The bottle moved down perhaps a half centimeter. “Goddamnit . . .”

He slapped the machine a couple of times, then did what he’d done on other such occasions at Ohio State: he braced his feet, grabbed the top corner of the machine, and yanked it forward. But the machine weighed only one-tenth of what a similar machine weighed at Ohio State, and the whole thing lurched forward . . . with the same mass and momentum it’d have had on Earth. The mismatch between the real physics and Clark’s expectations threw him completely off balance. He fell on his ass, directly beneath the machine.

Clark would’ve been fine, maybe bruised but not broken, if he’d been thinking. The vending machine was falling a lot more slowly than it would have on Earth. It’d hurt when it hit him, but if he’d taken it flat the forty-kilogram effective weight wouldn’t have crushed him.

When you’re looking at what experience has previously told you is a half ton of vending machine coming down on you, you don’t think clearly. He tried to roll out of the way.

The machine was falling much more slowly than it would have on Earth, but it was still falling and Clark was still a little clumsy in tenth-gee.

He grabbed the side of the machine. It twisted. He twisted. He almost
made it. Not good enough. Forty kilograms of vending machine crunched, edge-on, into his feet, from his ankles to his toes, breaking several bones in the arch of his foot and pinning his feet to the floor.

Clark screamed and fell backwards. Because the machine was no longer moving, he could have picked it up except that he was badly positioned to do that, his two feet pinned and pain surging through his feet.

He tried to pull a foot out, by gripping an ankle and pulling, but the pain was too great and when he let go, he found his hand smeared with blood.

He screamed, “Help! Help!”

Sandy had just unlocked the door to the fabrication shop when he heard the machine hit the floor and Clark scream. He dropped his snacks by the door and ran back up the hallway to the vending machine.

Where the delicacy of real-world mental constructs revealed itself again.

Clark had long hair, and brushed it back out of his face as he struggled with his pinned feet. When Sandy ran up, he looked down at a dark-haired man with blood on his face, his feet pinned . . .

. . . by a wall. Two important Guapo leaders had been meeting in a village just off Rio Tinto. American intel had picked up word of the meeting, and had sent in an SSG squad to hit the two enemy big shots. They’d approached the village at three o’clock on a moonless morning, had isolated the targets using laser mikes, and at first light, three shooters had gone into the house where the two leaders were sleeping with their wives. The rest of the squad had set up on two other houses where the leaders’ bodyguards were asleep.

Somebody in the target house had gotten off a shot before they were wiped; the bodyguards came boiling out of the other two houses and were cut down by the waiting SSG members. Then somebody in one of the bodyguard houses had blown a satchel charge, suiciding, and a wall of splinters had punched through the dawn.

One of the splinters, longer than a hand and half as wide, had hit an SSG lieutenant named Roger Jackson in the throat. Jackson had been
one of the designated shooters, and had been running out of the house he’d just helped wipe, when the charge went off. In addition to being hit in the throat, his legs were pinned by a falling wall.

Which was where Sandy found him, running around from the other side of the leaders’ house. Jackson, a thin, dark-haired man, was pinned, blood on his face, looking up, trying to call out . . .

Jackson bled out in a little more than a minute, dying in the now-complete silence of the village. They had to leave him there, running ahead of the Guapo revenge squads, until they were picked up by gunships fifteen miles from the village.

The flashback lasted only a few seconds. Clark looked up at Sandy, crying, “Get it off me, get it off me,” not understanding why Sandy was clutching at the wall. The flashback was absolutely real—Sandy was there, on the Tri-Border, all over again, in the heat and the dust, the smell of blood and raw bloody human meat and chicken shit—and then, just as quickly, the flashback flickered out, and he was back aboard the
Nixon
.

He asked, “It’s going to hurt when I lift. Can you pull on your legs?”

Clark groaned, “I think so . . .”

Sandy lifted the machine; it didn’t weigh much even loaded with bottles of liquid. When it was upright, he called for help, and sat next to Clark until help arrived, and after they’d explained what had happened, he wandered off to the fab shop while Clark was carried to the med station in Habitat 1.

The fab shop was empty—a number of people used the shop, but he, Martinez, and Elroy Gorey were the only regulars—and Sandy dragged a chair around to the printer he’d been using, and sat down and picked up a partly printed arch-top guitar body.

The flashback at the vending room had been utterly real, and now little flickers of that day at the Tri-Border began scratching at his mind, like a guttering flame, hot, then gone, then hot again.

A half hour later, he wandered over to Habitat 1, down to his room, dug a case of meds out of his personal kit, popped a blue pill. The pills
worked well, but only by ironing out every little crack and fissure in his mind, leaving him feeling like a biscuit . . . a really bland, flour-and-water biscuit.

Can’t have this,
he thought, as he lay back on his bed. If the people running the
Nixon
understood his condition, they might unload him.

He needed the
Nixon
.

He really did.