Saturn Run (4 page)

“That’d be a hell of a long mission,” Fletcher said. “Mars is a fifty-million-kilometer run. Saturn is a billion and a half. Two, three months to Mars’d become, ummm, five years or so to Saturn.”

Santeros said, “That would give us some time, right, Gene?”

—

Lossness said, “Well, my guys were tossing around trip durations of under a year. The thing is, if the Chinese find out what’s happening before they launch, they can soup up their ship. They’d need a longer initial burn, so they’d need a lot more reaction mass. But they’d be offloading weight by not taking the colony along. Strapping on additional mass-tanks in space isn’t as big a job as it is here on Earth.”

Fletcher said, “We’re a little unlucky about the launch window here, if Mr. Crow is correct. If we could keep this secret until the Chinese launch for Mars, then it would be too late for them to recover. We could take our time building a ship, and there’s nothing they could do about it.”

“Except shoot it down,” Emery said.

Santeros said, “Based on Mr. Crow’s best guess, we can’t assume they won’t find out. And we can’t afford a gamble. We have to win this one. Jacob? Those half-baked ideas? I want them fully baked by this evening’s meeting. I don’t care what kind of carrots or sticks you have to wave to get the answers, I want to know exactly what we can do and how fast we can do it. Clear?”

Nobody said anything for a long moment, then Santeros looked over at the politicians, Sweet and Cline, who’d been listening carefully, but carefully not making notes. “If we build a ship on a crash basis, can we get the funding through on the black budget?”

Sweet said, “Yes,” and Cline nodded.

Sweet said, “Francie and I had a word before the meeting started. You can have as much as you want. We should talk to McCord over at the Treasury and Henry at the Fed. It may be possible to do it completely off-budget, though we might have to do a little . . . creative bookkeeping.”

“The security circle’s getting pretty large,” Crow said.

Santeros: “You see any way to avoid that?”

Crow thought a moment. “No. I’m just sayin.’ I need to create a security group, right now. I need the authority to pull anybody I need out of the security establishment. I think I know enough smart guys to do this—at least, I know enough smart guys who know enough smart guys. But I need a budget and I need a letter from you. I need the authority to kick whatever ass needs it, and I mean up to Cabinet secretary, four-star rank.”

The President tapped out a note on her pad: “I’ll get the letter to you within the hour. We’ll want to launch your group no later than tomorrow.”

Crow nodded: “Yes, ma’am. No later than.”

Santeros stared down at a briefing paper on the desk in front of her, then said, “Ladies and gentlemen, this is the biggest thing since the atomic bomb, in terms of turning the world around. We need to stay all over this, all the time. This becomes the number one national priority, and you eight are my working group. We’ll bring in more people as we need them. I’m going to ask Jacob to act as the chief of staff for the group, at least for now. Everything should go to him, and he’ll talk to me. I’m going to clear my schedule for tonight, and I need all of you to come up with outlines of what you can contribute to this project, and I need to be briefed again, then. That includes exactly how we’re going to get to Saturn before the Chinese. We need that settled. Not tomorrow. Tonight.

“As I see it, Dr. Fletcher, you’ll be in charge of monitoring the Saturn site with your telescopes. You military people will build the ship: work out your system. Paula and Richard, work with Gene on this. Senator Sweet and Representative Cline will take care of the money. Crow will handle security. Is everybody good?”

Fletcher lifted a hand and she nodded at him.

“There is one tiny problem with my group. The intern who spotted this . . . object. He could be a security issue.”

“The incompetent one.”

“Scientifically incompetent,” Fletcher said. “Unfortunately, he’s not
simply dim. He seems to be quite knowledgeable about the media and he’s somewhat irresponsible, in my view. I don’t think he was as impressed with Mr. Crow as the others were.”

“He’s a loose cannon,” Santeros said. “Mr. Crow specializes in loose cannons.”

“With all due respect, ma’am, Sanders Heacock Darlington—”

“Are you shitting me?” Santeros said, showing surprise for the first time. “Barron Darlington’s kid?”

“I’m afraid so,” Fletcher said. “He’s got an ocean of money, he’s about to inherit a lot more, and nobody has ever taught him that he has to be responsible about anything. You can’t scare him, because he’s apparently never encountered anything that he needs to be scared of. And his father, as you know, is heavily wired into Washington.”

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.

“Tough day?” Tomaselli asked, when Fang-Castro dumped her briefcase.

“Too long, too messy. It was a nibbled-to-death-by-ducks day.” She yawned, stretched, and said, “Smells terrific.”

“It is terrific,” Tomaselli said. “Want a drink?”

“I’ll get it—maybe a margarita. You want one?”

“Sure, but take it easy on the salt. The last time—”

The security phone in the bedroom pinged; that almost always meant trouble. “Ah, really . . . ?”

“Go get it, I’ve got some work to do here yet,” Tomaselli said. “Won’t be ready for ten minutes, anyway.”

“I’m sorry, dear, I’ll make it quick.”

“What if the station’s ass just fell off?”

“Then it’ll be even quicker.”

—

Fang-Castro stepped into the bedroom and called up the screen, expecting to see the watch commander and the control deck. Instead, she saw the Oval Office, Jacob Vintner, and Gene Lossness. The President was there, too, in the background, reading something. Before they could ask, she hit the door-close and privacy firewall buttons on her slate.

“Captain Fang-Castro, Gene and I need to talk to you about a new assignment,” Lossness said. “The President is here, too.”

The President lifted a hand in the direction of the camera, without looking up from what she was reading.

Fang-Castro was careful: “Okay.” Something serious was up. She did not travel in this bureaucratic stratum.

“We’re about to ask you some big questions. We’re on a tight deadline, and we’re going to need an answer right now. And when I say ‘now,’ I mean, this minute.”

“Quickly, then. Dinner’s waiting.”

Vintner looked momentarily nonplussed and then plunged in. “We need to repurpose the station for interplanetary flight. Rework the habitats, strip off the physical plant, add engines and reaction-mass tanks
and a new command section. We’d like your opinion on the feasibility of doing this in the next twenty-two months. We’d also like you to take on the assignment of mission commander.”

“Can I give a quick call to my chief engineer?”

“Absolutely not. We need your assessment, and only yours, right now.”

Fang-Castro looked down at her hands, thinking. “Okay,” she said again. Stalling, as her mind ran through the possibilities and implication. “Engineering could probably cope, but life support won’t handle a long-duration mission.”

“This won’t be long. A year at most, and your life support’ll be beefed up along with everything else.”

Fang-Castro said, “I can see where this is going. You want to beat the Chinese to Mars. But we’ll need to do this in a lot less than twenty-two months, and we’ll need some kind of landing craft, not to mention . . .”

In the background, the President reached away from her reading, touched something, and her face suddenly dominated the view screen: she was looking straight at Fang-Castro.

“Captain, this isn’t a Mars mission. You’ll be going to Saturn.”

“What? Excuse me, ma’am, but that’s . . . What happened?”

The camera’s view angle slipped back and focused on Vintner, who filled her in on the previous day’s events.

Fang-Castro gaped: “A starship?”

“Exactly,” Vintner said. “Will you take the assignment? You know the station, you know how to work with both military and civilians. This will not be a military operation. There’ll be a modest complement of military on board, but fundamentally this is a science mission and Gene says you’re very good with scientists.”

“I need to discuss this with my fiancée.”

“Sorry, but this is most secret. You can’t discuss it with anyone.”

“Then I have to say this: if I can’t tell her what’s up, I’d have to decline. We’re planning to get married two months from now. We don’t keep secrets from each other, and we don’t lie to each other.”

Vintner looked at Lossness, who shrugged, and suddenly the
President’s face was back. “What if it was me who told the lie? You’d only have to . . . prevaricate. All married people do that, as you must know—I see you were married once before.”

“I’m not sure I understand . . .”

“What if you told her that I was going to make a big speech tomorrow—about how we were going to Mars, to assist the Chinese in their Mars mission, if needed, and to do our own orbital surveys.”

“But we’re not . . .”

“No, but that’s what I’m going to say tomorrow. To everybody on the planet. Eventually, the secret will leak, and then . . . you’ll have to deal with it when it happens. But there’s not much difference between a long, slow trip to Mars and a long, fast one to Saturn. And your little prevarication wouldn’t look like much, next to my big one.”

“That seems pretty technical, I mean, on an emotional level.”

“Screw a bunch of emotions. If your relationship can’t survive a little white lie, then it probably can’t survive, anyway,” Santeros said. “Might as well get it over with.”

Fang-Castro had a snappy comeback to that, but suppressed it. Santeros’s husband was known as Happy Frank, as was his penis, which had reportedly traveled to places it shouldn’t have. Instead, Fang-Castro said, “Listen . . . I, uh . . .” She put a finger to her lips, thought for a few seconds, realized that she desperately wanted to go. She said, “I’ll take it. I’ll go.”

The President smiled and said, “Excellent. We want you pretty badly.” And she was gone again.

Vintner said, “I apologize if I seemed a little . . . pushy, but we’ve been under a lot of pressure with very little sleep for the past couple days.”

“Apology accepted,” Fang-Castro said. “Let’s get down to it. What kinds of mods are we talking about? What’s our propulsion system going to be? Who is handling recruiting of the ship’s complement and scientists? I have some current personnel I’d like to have vetted for this, particularly my Number Two . . .”

Ninety minutes later—it seemed like ten—Fang-Castro closed the screen, raised the security firewall, and took a deep breath. Ruined
dinners were a point of discord in their relationship and there was some making-nice to be done: Tomaselli took her cooking seriously, and this wouldn’t be their first ruined dinner.

Back in the common room, Tomaselli was immersed in a book. She didn’t look up. The window shade was drawn. Not good signs.

Fang-Castro said, “I need to tell you something that falls under your top secret clearance. It comes with a warning from the President: you’ll be prosecuted if you say a word about this to anyone but me, before tomorrow at one o’clock.”

Tomaselli was pissed, but she wasn’t stupid: some things were more important than dinner. “What?”

“The President says we’re going to Mars,” Fang-Castro said. “I made them agree that I could tell you, before the announcement. They want me to take the job, and I accepted. I’d never dictate to you, Llorena, and I know this will be a long separation . . . but it wouldn’t start for a couple of years. I would be desperately sad to . . . leave you behind.”

“Mars? You made who agree?”

“Santeros . . . and a couple of high-level bureaucrats,” Fang-Castro said. “That’s who I was talking to.” And, “Listen, I’m really sorry about your dinner.”

“Oh, fuck the beans, Naomi,” Tomaselli said. “What in God’s name just happened?”

Fang-Castro said, “I don’t have the details, because nobody does. All I got was a lot of engineering questions. Maybe we’ll get some details tomorrow, when Santeros makes her big speech.”

Little white lies.