Saturn Run (24 page)

Elroy Gorey and Joe Martinez were sitting in the garden—a space dedicated to hydroponics, growing lettuce, cabbage, spinach, kale, arugula, tomatoes, cucumbers, and peas, all overlaid with the light stink of fertilizer—and working through a few country tunes, Martinez on guitar, Gorey on fiddle. Crow showed up with his bass, plugged in, and they rocked along for twenty minutes or so.

When they took a break, Martinez asked Crow, “You ever going to find that Easter egg?”

Crow shook his head: “I don’t expect so. There’s still some smart guys working on it, but the thing is, what we’ve found out is that there are a lot of undetectable ways of doing what was done. That we could scrape the computers clean, and there are ways they could still get at us.”

Gorey: “So the other reactor . . . that could go out, too?”

Crow shook his head: “We don’t think so. We’re not entirely sure, but we suspect there may be some kind of physical component to this whole thing. That it might not be purely software. But we don’t know.”

“Wish you would,” Martinez said. “I don’t like running on one cylinder.”

“Neither do I,” Crow said.

“The thing is . . . the whole competition doesn’t make any sense,” Gorey said. “If we get out there first, or the Chinese get out there first, and one of us gets amazing tech, what’s the winner going to do with it? If the Chinese build a time machine, our intelligence guys will have the specs in three weeks, anyway.”

“Yeah? What if they go back through time to, like, 1200
A.D.
and they discover North America, and when Columbus shows up, it’s wall-to-wall Chinese?” Martinez asked.

“Won’t be any time machines,” Gorey said. “We’re right at the end of
physics. Everybody knows it. Not much left, and one of the things that’s not left is time travel.”

“Good thing, too,” Crow said. “We’ve fucked up about everything else we’ve touched, we don’t need to fuck up the time stream.”

Sandy stuck his head in the door and asked, “Tomato?”

Gorey asked, “You got a note from Fang-Castro?”

Sandy wheedled: “Elroy, I’ve been talking to Fiorella about doing a feature on the garden, but I can sink that in one minute. I’m not saying I will, because I’m a good guy, but I’m telling you, she needs some convincing.”

“I might be able to spare one tomato,” Gorey said. “If nobody talks.”

“He made my bass,” Crow said. “I won’t talk.”

“Me neither,” Martinez said.

“I want a big one, and juicy, but not overripe,” Sandy said. “And maybe a couple of lettuce leaves.”

“Picky, picky, picky . . .”

—

Sandy knocked on Becca’s cabin door and she popped it open. She was sitting on her bunk. The Go board and two bowls of Go stones, half black, half white, took up most of the space on a small table.

Unlike the chess nuts at Harvard, Becca had proven to be cheerfully patient with his beginner status: he was even starting to improve. She’d gone from spotting him eight stones, to seven, though he suspected that he’d never be playing her even-up. It was that whole brain thing, he thought, and the differences in cerebral structure that probably went to early childhood or even to genetics. She visualized whole towns with buildings and apartments and bicycle racks, a useful ability in Go. He couldn’t do that.

But she couldn’t let go of that structure. She’d seen him drawing, freehand, different concepts for guitars that he was manufacturing with Martinez, and asked him to teach her a little drawing. As it turned out, she could draw neither a straight line nor an accurate curved one. She insisted on drawing what she knew, rather than what she saw, a tendency not easily curable.

They’d talked about those differences: he’d argued that a mind that could build and contain an entire town, right down to the wallpaper in the apartments, was a winner at Go. She’d said, “There’s a part of Go, at a level higher than I’m at, that involves intellectual release. . . . I can’t do that, but you can.”

“Maybe,” he said doubtfully.

In any case, he pushed through the door carrying two paper bags and a covered plate that smelled of hot buttered toast and tofu bacon, though the tofu bacon was indistinguishable from the pig kind.

“What’s that?” Becca asked.

“Got a contraband tomato from Elroy,” Sandy said.

He rolled the tomato out of the smaller sack and popped the lid on the covered plate. Four slices of hot buttered toast, six strips of crispy bacon.

“Oh my God, BLTs. Real ones,” Becca said. “You should have gotten one for yourself.”

“Yeah, you try to eat one bite more than your share, you’re gonna be in a fistfight,” Sandy said. “And . . . I got beer. I bought Wagner’s ration.” Jim Wagner, a navigation tech and Sandy’s backup photographer, didn’t drink. Didn’t like the taste of alcohol, he said; but he had no difficulty in collecting his ration, and selling it to the highest bidder.

“If Fang-Castro finds out he’s selling his ration, she’ll kick his ass,” Becca said. “Somebody could get enough beer together to get drunk.”

“Yeah, but who’s going to tell her? Besides, if you really wanted to get drunk, you could just save your own ration for a few days.”

“When you’re right, you’re right. Pop me one of those babies.”

—

Four days past perihelion and thirty-six days into their flight, the
Nixon
was now a safe fifty million kilometers from the sun, and shipboard life, despite the two-day furor over the orgy club, had resumed its previous level of boredom. Sandy would’ve thought that impossible.

The
Nixon
was still too close to the sun for extravehicular sorties, but the risk to the ship from solar misbehavior had diminished. The
giant metal radiator sail protected the living and engineering modules from the killing heat of the receding sun; they’d also block the brunt of any soft radiation or charged particle winds that might blow their way. X-rays were still a risk, if there were major flare, but that was about it.

Sandy handed Becca the first of the four beers he had in the sack, and they ate the BLTs in companionable silence, and finally settled behind the Go board. Sandy had a seven-stone handicap. He’d thought about the game during the day, had reread part of a famous Go instruction book by Nicholai Hel that he’d downloaded from the Internet, and confidently began to lay out his handicap.

This time—and maybe because she drank three of the four beers—it took her almost an hour and a half to beat him.

—

When it was over, Becca pursed her lips thoughtfully and said, “You know, Sandy, I think you’re actually getting the hang of this. Maybe you should move up to a six-stone handicap.”

He grinned. “Or maybe I should stay with seven stones and get to win a game, for once.”

“That’s probably not going to happen, not yet,” she said.

“You really like to win, don’t you?”

“The business I’m in, when I’m right, you bet. Keeps power plants running, keeps people alive. And I’m just about always right. On the big points, anyway.”

Sandy looked at her thoughtfully. “Isn’t that kind of self-aggrandizing?”

Becca was taken aback for a second, by both the thought and the vocabulary.
Damn,
she thought.
I keep forgetting he’s not stupid, just lazy. Harvard degree. Gotta remember that.

“Sandy . . .” She paused for a moment, organizing her thoughts before responding. “I have to be. You are a rich, handsome, privileged, white guy. You get to play on the easy level. If you gave a crap, people would take you seriously, automatically, because guys like you get that
as a freebie. I’m a short, blond woman who was raised Minnesota Nice, plus I have a cute face and I’m fat! How seriously do you think I’d get taken in the world if I didn’t regularly throw it in their faces?”

Sandy’s gaze was fixed on her; it was a little unnerving when he focused like that. “But wouldn’t people like you better if you weren’t quite so, um . . .” He fumbled for a word. Becca interrupted him.

“What? Assertive? Aggressive? Pushy? Do you really think people will pay more attention to my technical advice, my expertise, if it comes from a nice Minnesota girl? Really?”

Sandy held up his hands, palms outward. “Okay, okay. I get it.”

Her eye ticked, which meant she was checking the time. “Speaking of winning, we could probably squeeze in another game before lights-out.”

Sandy didn’t say anything, just looked at the board for several seconds.

“Yoo-hoo, Sandy?”

“So . . . I’ve been thinking . . .” He paused.

She looked at him impatiently. “Aaaaaannnd? Tick tick tick . . .”

What the hell, he thought: she was the blunt sort: “Have you considered the possibility of the two of us having sex?”

Becca blinked and then she laughed, a real laugh. “Wow, so that’s how you smooth Harvard stud-muffins woo your women? Who knew! Be still, my heart.”

“Look, there didn’t seem to be any . . . if this pisses you off . . . I’m saying, I’m not real big on pressure, it’s, uh . . . I don’t think our friendship . . . or the Go, for that matter . . .”

“Hold it, hold it, hold it. Did I say no?”

Sandy relaxed just a trifle. “I thought you might be about to. Especially after the freak-out with the orgy club.”

“Did fantasizing about the orgy club get you to this? Because if it did . . .”

“No, no, no, nothing like that. You’re a good-looking woman—”

“I’m fat . . .”

“So you’re round. That’s fine with me. Doesn’t mean you aren’t cute, except when you’re slicing me up for something. . . . Anyway . . .”

She looked him up and down, deadpan. “Tell you what. Take off those clothes and I’ll decide if I like what I see. Then I’ll let you know.”

Sandy shrugged again. “See, what you probably don’t know is, I’m the least body-shy person you’ve ever met.” He sat back down and started to unzip his softboots.

“Wait, wait, that was kinda a joke. You really . . . want to do this?”

“You really want to play another game of Go?”

“Fuck no,” she said, pulling her shirt over her head. “Hurry.”

—

“What do you think?” she asked forty-five minutes later.

“About what?”

“About the fuckin’ quality control, dumbass.”

“I give us a B-plus.”

She propped herself up on her elbow and said, looking down at him, “Excuse me? A B-plus? I’m pretty sure I haven’t had as many partners as you have, so my statistical baseline is not as long—”

“B-plus is as good as it’s ever been, for the first time,” Sandy said. “This was most excellent. Check the time.”

She did the blink thing: “Oh, yeah. We’ve got time for more . . .”

The ship’s computer wasn’t very smart. Under the captain’s orders, it killed lights in Becca’s cabin at 23:00. After checking to make sure that Becca was in her bed, it periodically checked to make sure that she mostly stayed in bed until it turned the lights back on at 7:00 each morning.

It didn’t check to see if she was alone—it could have, but it hadn’t been told to. Nor did it have any way to make sure she was actually asleep. That night, mostly, she wasn’t. Neither was Sandy.

Early in the morning, Sandy woke, bumped around in the dark until he’d located his clothes, sat on his Go chair to tie his shoes.

Becca said, “That was pretty amazing.” Then, “Okay, that’s a cliché, what you’re supposed to say the next morning so nobody’s ego gets bruised. But, really, I mean it.”

Sandy groped for her in the dark, kissed her. “What you said. It was
amazing. You were amazing. We were both amazing. How come nobody ever told us low-gee sex would be that good?”

“Damned if I know. Maybe it’s like a rite of passage. Or maybe they’re just afraid that if they told us when we came on board, we wouldn’t get any work done. We’d be too busy humping.”

“I don’t think they’re that subtle,” Sandy said. “If they’d actually thought about it, it’d have been included in our shipboard-life manual.”

“So . . .”

“We need an encore, if you’re up for it,” Sandy said. “Maybe like, mm, a couple hundred encores.”

“I’m definitely up for it, but we’ve got to be careful after what happened with the orgy group.”

“We’re not an orgy group,” Sandy said.

“Still . . .”

“Gotcha. And you’re right. Discretion. Nobody says nothin’ about nothin’.”

“I . . .” she began, then stopped.

“What?”

“I kind of want to tell you about something that involves you and Fiorella.”

“Don’t,” Sandy said. He pressed a finger to her lips, happy that she couldn’t see his face in the dark. The Hump Pool was up to a hundred and ninety thousand. “I don’t want to hear her name again. Not from you.”

“Well . . .”

“Please. Promise.”

“Okay. Her name shall never pass my lips again.”

“Excellent,” Sandy said. “Now, I sneak out and creep down to the Commons, like I was up early, on my way to breakfast.”

“Kiss me again.”

Sandy arrived at the Commons two minutes later. There were few people in the room, and he got a tray, some heart-healthy cereal that tasted like cardboard, and some heart-healthy reconstituted simulated
free-range chicken eggs, scrambled, that tasted like yellow stuff with salt on it, and looked around.

Crow was sitting by himself, as he usually was, but squinting in Sandy’s direction. Sandy carried his tray over, put it on the table, and said, “How’s it goin’, big guy?”

Crow looked at Sandy’s fresh, pink, relaxed face for another moment, then said, unconsciously mimicking the executive officer, “Ah, Jesus.”

Sixty-eight days after launch, five hundred million kilometers from Earth, and three hundred seventy million kilometers from the sun, Fang-Castro was methodically paging through her morning reports—boring morning reports—when her door pinged.

She had no appointments scheduled. On the other hand, the new open-door policy, instituted after the orgy fight, was her idea. “Come in,” she said.

Crow stepped into the room carrying a slate. “Apologies for the interruption.” He lifted the slate. “Vintner’s calling. The President wants to chat. Now. With both of us.”

“Bad news?”

“That’s usually the case when they surprise me,” Crow said. “Another alien coming in? I don’t know.”

“Let’s get it over with.”

“I’ll set up the channel and secure the room.” The presidential seal on Crow’s slate display was replaced by a rapidly changing diagram, mostly in green, with orange highlights.

Fang-Castro’s lips turned up at the corners, amused by his intensity. “You think my office might be bugged?”

Crow’s eyes flicked up to hers, then back to the display. “Of course it is. I’m making sure that nobody else has bugged it.”

Fang-Castro’s slight smile disappeared.

“All right, we’re ready at this end. Now we wait,” Crow said. Earth was half a billion kilometers away. It would take most of an hour for Crow’s go-ahead to reach the Oval Office and for them to respond. “I’ll be in the Commons.”

“I presume you have business to keep you occupied?” Fang-Castro said. “You’re welcome to stay here, if you wish.”

Crow nodded. “Thank you. I will, it’s quieter than the Commons,
and not as lonesome as my quarters.” Fang-Castro poured herself another cup of tea, and poured one for Crow. She pushed it across her desk. “Indulge yourself, Mr. Crow. It’s an especially good vintage.”

The dark-eyed man looked up, came to some kind of decision, and leaned forward and picked up the delicate china cup. He sniffed, slurped, and held the brew for a moment in his mouth. Fang-Castro almost believed there was a momentary look of pleasure on his thin face.

“Very good,” he said. “Yes, very, very good. Thank you.” He returned his attention to his slate, cradling the cup in one hand.

They worked in an almost comfortable silence for an hour. The encrypted signal from the Oval Office was picked up by the ship, routed to Crow’s slate, decrypted, and sent to Fang-Castro’s office screen, and only to her office screen. Vintner was in the foreground of the vid image, with Santeros and DARPA director Lossness in the background.

“Good morning, Captain Fang-Castro, Mr. Crow,” said the President’s science adviser. “Not good news, I’m afraid. The Chinese did another midcourse correction burn, but this one was considerably longer than we expected or even knew that they were capable of. They’ve picked up three kilometers per second. JPL says it’s advanced their Saturn ETA by over three weeks. They’re now expected to arrive at Saturn near the first of April.”

Lossness loomed on the screen. “The deep space network indicates that they also jettisoned some material or sections of their ship both before and after the burn. We don’t know if this was planned from the beginning or is some sort of contingency plan, or if it’s an act of desperation. If they had that much additional reaction mass in their original burn budget, we’d have expected them to use it on launch. It would’ve bought them a lot more time.”

Vintner took over again. “We believe it’s probably some combination of all those motives. Likely they jettisoned as much mass as they could before the burn to lighten the ship and take best advantage of the thrust, and then they threw away some extra tankage afterwards. Our guess is that they’ve burned into the reaction mass they need to decelerate. They
need to drastically reduce their dead weight if they’re going to have enough delta-vee to achieve Saturn rendezvous.

“We’ve developed several possible scenarios. The first is simply as described. In that case, they’re going to be hampered on their return to Earth. They’ll have less dry weight, but probably considerably less reaction mass, what with the jettisoned tankage. In that contingency, they’ve decided the crew can live with a several-year return trip, or they’re planning a rescue mission to meet the returning spacecraft.

“The second possibility is that the
Celestial Odyssey
is an intentionally staged vehicle, and the return spacecraft was always planned to be much smaller than the outbound one. That seems unlikely, given the advanced state of construction on their ship when they decided to convert it from a Mars transport to a Saturn mission, but it’s possible.

“A third possibility is that this was planned as a one-way mission from the beginning, that the Chinese didn’t think they had enough time to prepare a round-trip ship. The Chinese are now well along on construction of their second Mars transport. Maybe it was also repurposed, as a follow-up mission to bring back whatever the first ship found.”

Santeros barely moved a hand, but all attention turned to her. “There is an additional possibility that most concerns me and should concern both of you. The Chinese may have no contingency return plan, and they are now on what amounts to a one-way run. In that case, they may be planning on the kindness and generosity of the U.S. for a lift home.” Santeros smiled without humor. “Or they may attempt to commandeer the
Nixon
. You obviously need to keep all of this in mind. I would like your reaction to all of the possibilities that we’ve mentioned, in the next day or two, and any other possibilities that occur to you. We won’t need a back-and-forth discussion like this one—just send your reactions along, and we’ll look at them when they get here.”

Vintner closed. “Even with all that’s happened, you’re still scheduled to beat the Chinese to Saturn by over two months. Short of getting Reactor 2 back online”—the science adviser looked questioningly hopeful—“we don’t think this affects your outbound mission plans. We thought it
important that you know as soon as possible. We’ll keep this channel live for the next two hours, in case you need to get back to us with any questions or observations. Over to you.”

The view of the Oval Office was replaced by the presidential seal and the word “Suspended.”

Fang-Castro turned in her chair and said, “Stay, Mr. Crow, while I get Dr. Johansson.” Fang-Castro called the engineer and said, “Becca, I’d appreciate it if you could come to my office at your earliest possible convenience.”

Becca and Sandy were having lunch in the Commons. The past month got to the Awkward-Couple-Having-Frank-Conversations phase. Becca saw an opening and went for it. “Sandy, why did you hit on me? No BS.”

Sandy looked embarrassed. “Well, honestly? Because you’re cute . . .”

“That can’t be the only reason.”

“And because I liked you and you seemed to like me, and because I was pretty sure you’d say yes. And . . . you talked to me like I was a real person and not a wad of money.”

“That I’d say yes?” Becca rolled her eyes. “Boy, do you have any idea what comes out of your mouth? Really?”

“I knew you’d jump on that, which isn’t fair—”

“What?” Her implant pinged her. The message from the captain on her subcutaneous earplug saved Sandy from hearing exactly what Becca’s reply would have been. She swallowed her words, along with the last of a sandwich. “That’s the captain. Gotta go.”

“Think about being fair,” Sandy said.

“Fair? Oh, later.”

—

On her way to Fang-Castro’s office, Becca thought about the pros and cons of their relationship.

Plus points: the sex was fabulous and shipboard duties were actually giving her time to address the urge. The boy was easy to talk to. He
respected what she did, and didn’t think he was more important than her job. And he was interested in repeat performances. Big, big plus.

Minus points:
he can be an amazing ass, when he tries. Even when he doesn’t try.

Which, she sighed, was pretty much what she’d been told in advance, so it wasn’t like she could feign surprise to herself.

And back to the plus point: so many repeat performances!

Conclusion? What the hell, she didn’t really have any more reason to kick him out of bed now than she’d had to not get in bed with him in the first place. So far, the sex and company were definitely worth the aggravation.

But what was that thing about being fair?

Was he suggesting that she was unfair?

He’d plainly said . . .

—

Fang-Castro’s door pinged. “Come in.”

Becca stepped through, where she found Fang-Castro and Crow sitting together.

“What’s wrong?” She scowled. “The ship’s fine.”

Fang-Castro held up a placating hand. “Easy, Becca. Mr. Crow and I just received some unfortunate news from Jacob Vintner. It seems the Chinese ship did an unexpected midcourse burn that’s advanced their arrival time at Saturn by more than three weeks. That still gives us a two-month lead over them, but it’s making the President a little nervous. We’re wondering how your investigations are going . . . about squeezing more performance out of the engines?”

“Huh.” Fang-Castro caught a mutter, something about “armchair, backseat-driving politicians.” Becca took a chair, and looked up at the ceiling for a moment, ran through the possibilities. “We’ve got more simulations to run. We’ve already decided that we don’t want to kick up our acceleration burn. This late in the trip, it wouldn’t buy us much time, anyway. But we’re thinking we might be able to squeeze out more
deceleration after turnaround. If we can stay at maximum velocity longer, that’ll shave off some time. I’ll tell the guys we’re gonna do it and run the numbers tonight.”

When Becca had gone, Crow said, “Were you aware that Johansson is involved in a sexual relationship with Darlington?”

“Yes. They seem to be conducting themselves with some discretion, so it’s fine with me. I understand it’s had a pretty powerful negative effect on the Hump Pool.”

“So you’re also aware of the Hump Pool.”

“Part of the job description, Mr. Crow. I have not bet on it, of course. People believe that I have . . . mmm . . . monitoring sources which they might not have.”

“They think I do, too. I’ve been informally approached to monitor the situation, vis-à-vis Fiorella. I refused.”

“If that pool hits a half million . . .”

“It’ll take off. I gotta say, if that goddamn Darlington’s taken an interest in Fiorella, as well as Johansson . . . it’d be a shame if that blew up, if our movie star beat the shit out of our chief engineer.”

“I think I might bet on the engineer, in that case,” Fang-Castro said.

“You’d lose,” Crow said. “Check Fiorella’s in-depth dossier sometime. She was running a street gang in Bakersfield when she was twelve. But I’m not too worried. I don’t think anybody’s going to attack anybody, not over Darlington. As for the Hump Pool, there might be some trouble there, if it gets big enough. I’ll keep an eye on it.”

“Do that—and keep me informed.”