Saturn Run

9.

Three weeks after the alien ship was spotted, Sandy was going up.

He’d been allowed two packs—a big one for equipment, a small one for clothing and personal effects. At eight in the morning, he popped the door on his condo, hauled the bags outside, sealed the door, jacked the alarms to the highest settings, and carried his bags and a paper cup of coffee through the complex gates and out to the curb, to an empty bus bench.

The sky was light gray: the marine layer hadn’t burned off yet, so the L.A. basin hadn’t had a chance to heat up. Sandy sipped his coffee and kicked back a bit. Might as well relax and enjoy the moment.

He lived in a condo complex built around an enormous swimming pool, and populated by affluent, good-looking people. Most affluent people were good-looking, not because they inherited the right genes, but because the surgery was so good and painless and safe.

From outside, the apartment complex might have been a tropical jungle: something painted by Winslow Homer on one of his Caribbean trips, he thought. The complex also had tight security, another benefit: he’d once been dropped off by a drunk friend, drunk himself and mostly naked, and when he’d tried to cross the wall, he found himself surrounded by armed guards in about six seconds.

They hadn’t been fooling around; they’d run a DNA check on him before they let him back in his apartment. He didn’t live in a place where you just dropped in.

Sandy hadn’t had that many moments to relax in the two previous weeks. After making his deal with Crow, he was flown to Maryland, to the Defense Information School at Fort Meade, where he was turned over to a harsh, hawk-nosed marine gunnery sergeant named Cletus Smith, who didn’t care for Jesus hair or burnt-orange GnarlyBrand pants or RhythmTech overshirts.

The gunny was not happy: “I don’t know exactly what’s up, Dingleberry…”

“That would be Darlington…”

“…Darlington, but I don’t like it. It wasn’t done right. I got some freshly made West Point asshole shoving security papers down my throat, I got the sergeant major yapping at me, my schedule’s screwed for the next six months, I was supposed to start an advanced vid class…”

The gunnery sergeant was wearing the usual uptight marine camo uniform, which had some kind of special marine name that Sandy didn’t remember, and as ex-army, really didn’t care about. He reached forward and slipped two fingers inside the placket on the sergeant’s shirt, and gave it a tug.

“Gunny, gunny, gunny,” he said, leaning toward the sergeant until their noses were only six inches apart. “Nobody gives a shit what you think or how inconvenient it is, or what Mrs. Cletus or the Cletus rug rats think. But you should give a shit what I think—because if you don’t have me up to Ultra Star vid status in two weeks, Major General Harrington will be down here with a fuckin’ power mower. Guess whose ass gonna be grass?”

Few marines had ever had their placket tugged; Smith was not one of them, and his nose turned white. “Get your fingers the fuck outa my…”

Sandy broke in: “…and if you ever give me any serious shit, I will personally take your skinny, ignorant peckerwood Marine Corps ass outside and stomp a new mudhole in it, to replace the mudhole you already got.”

Smith stared at him for a moment, then showed a very tight grin: “They didn’t tell me you’d been in the service, and the hair fooled me. Argentina?”

“The whole cruise,” Sandy said. The whole cruise was insider code for those who had been shot up.

“I was on that boat,” Smith said. He took a step back. “All right. You can call me Clete. Let’s take a look at your gear….”

Ten straight days of hard work—and a Marine Corps haircut: Jesus hair didn’t work all that well in weightless conditions.

Maybe he wasn’t Ultra Star when he finished, but Sandy was two thousand percent better than he had been, and he hadn’t been bad to begin with. Cletus Smith had been a combat videographer, and had actually filmed himself being shot down in a Marine Blackfoot IV helicopter; he rode the vid right into the ground, with commentary, although the commentary had been suppressed for the good of the Corps. Smith said, at the end of their last day, “Y’all come back: I got more.”

“Clete, I wish I could take you with me,” Sandy said, as they slapped hands. “Once I get some space under my feet, I’ll be looking for ideas.”

“Bring the vid. And boy, I’d love to go to Mars. If you can find me a slot…”

Sitting outside his condo, Sandy’s wrist-wrap told him that his ride had been held up on the 110, because some underclassman had dropped a bowling ball off a bridge. Traffic had resumed, and the underclassman was being pursued through the Avenues, where he wouldn’t be caught. Sandy hoped the cops were watching all available bowling balls. Having a sixteen-pound Brunswick blow through your windshield could seriously screw up your trip to Disneyland.

Eight or ten minutes later, his wrist-wrap told him his ride was turning the corner, and he got to his feet. A black limo, unmarked. The car hummed to a stop, and a driver got out of the front. A rear door slipped open, and the trunk lid popped. Sandy said, “I got it,” threw his bags in the back, kept the coffee, and climbed inside.

The driver got back in, the door slid shut. Sandy nodded at the woman who sat opposite him, and put the coffee cup in a cup holder.

The woman was a redhead, a spectacular example of the species, and it took only a moment for her name to register: Cassandra Fiorella, chief science editor for the Los Angeles Times, and the daily on-air science correspondent and producer for the biggest netcast on the West Coast.

She was stunning: red hair, green eyes, and the rest of the package wrapped in a slippery green-black jumpsuit. Her face showed none of the stress lines of plastic surgery; she was wearing a charm necklace with gold endorsement charms from Apple, IBM, MIT, Stanford, Mitsubishi Heavy Industries, and EuroBank, and in the center, a big fat green diamond that matched her eyes. Crow had not told him that she was on board.

She didn’t introduce herself—you’d have to be an idiot not to know who she was—but gave him a low-wattage smile and said, “You’re Sanders Darlington.”

“Yup.”

“Where have you worked? Crow didn’t tell me much about you. Except for an assistant videographer’s stint on Naked Nancy, I couldn’t find your professional résumé.”

“Well, that’s about it,” Sandy said.

She frowned: “I don’t believe it. For this trip? There must be something else.”

Sandy had been outrageously rich since childhood, living in L.A. Some of the most beautiful women in the world had made the effort to say ‘hello’ to him. While he’d taken advantage of that, from time to time, he’d also learned that behind a certain percentage of great beauty, there lurked a wicked witch of the west. He got that vibration from Fiorella.

He said, “Well, I won the 2064 Oscar for the best manual projection of a naked producer into the Pacific Ocean.”

“I saw that, too.” Fiorella nibbled a little lip gloss from her lower lip, then shook her head. “You bought your way on.”

Sandy shrugged.

“This is absurd,” she said. “I will tell the President that. I’m supposed to be on-camera, recording this for the whole future of mankind, and I’ve got to work with an inexperienced daddy’s boy who’ll inevitably mess it up, and not only that, has a history of violence—”

“Hey, Cassie?” Sandy smiled at her and said, “Go fuck yourself.”

She blanched. Nobody talked to her like that. “What did you say?”

“I said, ‘Go fuck yourself.’ I don’t need any ego rages from the talent. You just get the makeup right, sweetheart, and practice reading without crossing your eyes, and I’ll see that you’re looking good. But I gotta tell you, this little rant just took you a step down from ‘looking great.’”

With her face bright red with anger, Fiorella crossed her arms and looked away from him. Sandy knew this wasn’t over. There’d be consequences. Someone with Fiorella’s creds wouldn’t take that lying down. Well, tough shit. As they headed up the 210, Sandy closed his eyes and dozed off.

The Mojave Spaceport was unseasonably cool: at 10 A.M., the thermometer was only slowly climbing past ninety-four. The sun, though, was starting to burn. Sandy let Fiorella haul her case out of the back of the limo—she wasn’t talking to him—and then threw his personal duffel on one shoulder and rolled the bigger equipment case along behind.

They’d been dropped at the far end of the terminal. Inside the doors, Sandy found himself in a private waiting room. Through glass doors on the far wall, he could see a larger waiting room, with more people in it.

Crow was sitting on a bench, looking at a tablet: he glanced up when they walked in, and raised a hand to them. Fiorella made a beeline for him and Sandy heard her say, “Mr. Crow, we’ve got to talk…”

The two other people included a short, round blonde, who hadn’t looked up when they walked in, probably the power engineer, Rebecca something, and a large black man with white hair, who was clutching a nylon travel case, and had to be the anthropologist. The blonde was pounding on a tablet; the big man looked like he needed somebody to talk to. Sandy went that way, stuck out a hand, and said, “You’re John Clover, you’re more important than I am, so how about if I suck up for a while?”

“I could use some good suckin’ up,” Clover said, as they shook hands. “You must be the rich kid.”

“Not only that, but I’m good-looking, have a terrific singing voice, and women find me irresistible,” Sandy said, as he dropped into the chair next to Clover. “For the most part, anyway. I’ve already pissed off half the women on this flight.”

Now the blonde looked up at him, glanced over at Fiorella, back to Sandy, and said, “If you keep talking over my work, here, you’ll have pissed off all of them.”

Clover said to the blonde, “Let me tell you something, honey—”

“I’m not a honey,” Becca snapped.

“Of course you are, and I’m a southerner, so I get to call you that,” Clover said. “What I’m gonna say is that they are about to strap a twenty-megaton nuclear weapon to our asses and blast them into orbit. Y’all ought to be sweating it out. Like me.”

Sandy smiled at that and said, “A twenty-megaton nuke?”

“Might as well be, as far as we’re concerned, you know, if it blows,” Clover said.

“Ah, it’s not going to blow,” Sandy said. “A fortune-teller in Venice told me that I’d suffer a long, lingering, painful death.”

“Good, good,” Clover said. “I’m reassured.”

He had a case by his feet; the contents meowed. Becca looked at it and asked, “You’re taking a cat?”

“Only way I’d go,” Clover said. “You got a problem with that?”

“No. Actually, I don’t,” Becca said.

Sandy shrugged. “Neither do I. Long as it doesn’t shit in my shoes.”

“I can’t promise anything,” Clover said.

Crow strode toward Sandy, typing on his handslate, not looking at it. He bent over and said, quietly, “Don’t fuck with her.”

“She started it. I’m tired of people assuming that I’m incompetent because I’m rich. I—”

“Don’t… fuck… with… her.”

“All right, all right. I’ll go easy,” Sandy said.

“Good answer.”

Sandy muttered, “I just gotta remember, journalism school grads can be touchy about their lack of intelligence.”

Crow said, “Actually, it’s a double major in economics and general science. From Stanford.”

“Jesus. Is everybody on this trip a genius?”

“Pretty much,” Crow said. “Except maybe you and me.”

“But we’ll have guns.”

Crow brightened. “Yes. Yes, we will.”

A woman in a Virgin-SpaceX sky-blue flight attendant’s uniform walked into the waiting room and said, swinging her face between the two groups, Crow-Fiorella and Sandy-Becca-Clover, “Mr. Crow, everybody, the crew has completed their preflight check. You’re free to board the shuttle.”

They did.

Five humans and one cat went out the back of the terminal to a canopied, air-conditioned people-mover that hauled them out to the shuttle, followed by another shuttle with people from the other waiting room.

The Virgin-SpaceX shuttle was called Galahad, and featured horizontal takeoff and a maximum pull of 2.2 gees. Seating twenty-four, not including the flight crew of five, it wasn’t much different in overall size than a commercial hopjet. What caught the eye were the retractable wings, now just stubs on the fuselage, the unusually large and long engine nacelles, and the broadened belly, the better to hold more fuel and evenly distribute the heat on reentry.

The shuttle rested in its launch stage, a less conventional-appearing aircraft. A pilotless drone, not much bigger than the shuttle, it was essentially a cradle slung between two large engine and fuel tank cylinders with oversized air intakes. Four stubby fore and aft wings projected outward from the cradle. Heavy on the muscle and light on the brains, the launcher was commanded by the flight crew during the first stage of ascent and by ground control after it separated from the shuttle.

The Galahad ferried people from Mojave into low Earth orbit. That was the hardest part, energy-wise, but also the shortest part of the trip. Takeoff to orbit took half an hour. The shuttle couldn’t take them all the way to the station in its thousand-kilometer-high orbit, though; not enough fuel. Once in orbit, Galahad would dock with an orbital tug that would take it the rest of the way to the station, an energetically easier jaunt but one that would take another four hours. Not much different than the flight from L.A. to Sydney.

Crow and Fiorella had been up before, hitching rides on space-available seats. Fiorella had spent two weeks at the station, while Crow had only been up two days. The other three had never been.

They boarded the shuttle on a mobile escalator; inside, the space was a little cramped, but the seats were large and extraordinarily comfortable. Smartfoam cushions, supported by a powered carbon-fiber skeleton, monitored a hundred pressure points and molded themselves to their backs and butts.

Clover was looking nervous; the flight attendant came and smiled at him, whispered something. Clover nodded, and she gave him a bottle of water and something else. Pills, Sandy thought. Clover popped them, and two minutes later, said something funny to Fiorella, who was sitting across the narrow aisle from him, and the TV lady laughed.

Good pills.

When everybody was seated, the flight attendant said, “I know some of you haven’t been up. In front of you, there’s an oxygen mask capsule. They have been sanitized since the last flight. The slightly astringent odor you may smell is actually a sealer, should you need to press your face into the mask. When we reach maximum acceleration, you’ll feel as though you weigh twice as much as you do now—we’ll be pulling two gravities, or two gees, as we say. There may be a sensation of suffocation. You won’t be suffocating, but you may feel that kind of pressure. Simply press the tab under your right thumb and a mask will extrude. Don’t worry about moving toward it—the face-recognition system will find you. Breathe normally. Don’t try to remove your safety harness—that won’t help. If any of you are feeling even the slightest bit nervous, we have some excellent calming medications available. Feel free to ask.”

She went on for a while, and when she finished, Sandy asked her, “How about Mr. Snuffles?”

“Mr. Snuffles is asleep,” she said.

“Snoring like a chain saw,” Clover said over his shoulder. And, said the man who moments before had been sweating like a Miami sneak-thief, “let’s light this motherfucker up.”

Really good pills.