Saturn Run

13.

Fiorella’s broadcast on the first night got a six-share nationally, and a two-share worldwide, as the first comprehensive on-site vid from what would become America’s first interplanetary ship. For her blog, a six-share was terrific. A worldwide two-share was even better.

From there, it should have dropped off fairly sharply. But at midnight, Pacific time, she was running a twelve-share worldwide, meaning that twelve percent of the people in the world who were watching television were watching her.

Vid Ultra Stars were lucky to get an eight. An analysis by Public Analytics implied that it was the cross-breeding of Serious Science News with the sensuality of the photography that kept people looking. A hack collective had blown the images to one thousand percent in an attempt to isolate actual nipple pigmentation, and had reported that it may have been some kind of chemical composition overlaid on Fiorella’s epidermis. It wasn’t clear whether the hackers had ever heard of makeup.

Becca didn’t notice any of that. She got back to Georgetown and took up residence at the National Center for Mathematics. Somehow, the designs would go better, she thought, if the supercomputer were in the next room, so she could yell at the support techs if necessary.

Clover learned that there was a twenty-two-pound underage on the next Virgin-SpaceX flight up, and got Crow to send up a cold case with a giant sack of raw medium shrimp, an uncooked chicken, a bag of rice, a box of smoked pork sausage, bottles of olive oil, Worcestershire sauce and New Mexican red sauce, onions, garlic, a couple of green bell peppers, celery, tomatoes and bay leaves, some chicken stock, sea salt and three kinds of pepper and a variety of other spices. Fang-Castro and Tomaselli were invited to the Midnight Special, as Clover called it, a secret dinner out of sight in the back of the cafeteria, and when they were done, Fang-Castro said, “Okay, we’re going to need some extra freezer room for specialty cooking… what would you call it? Can’t say, ‘Jambalaya for Important People.’”

“Rations,” Clover said. “Special rations for morale purposes.”

“Exactly. Rations,” Fang-Castro said. “God, this could kill my waistline.”

Sandy bought two more Reds on his own, and had a long talk with Leica about optical glass for the new vid ports on the egg. Leica could produce the glass over the next six months or so and guarantee that it would meet stress requirements. They also offered an endorsement. Sandy turned it down; not that he wasn’t flattered, but he didn’t like the idea of wearing labels, and didn’t need the money. After being turned down, Leica offered the loan of a half-million-dollar ultra-zoom, which he took. He called Martinez with the glass specs. Martinez said, “Yeah, I can do that, but they’re quite a bit bigger than I’d expected.”

“Believe me, it’s been thoroughly worked out by some of the top guys in the vid field,” Sandy said.

By that, he meant Gunnery Sergeant Cletus Smith, who told him, “As a rule of thumb, figure out how big you need them. Then double that. Then double that again. You’ll wind up using all of it.”

Outside the eggs, in space, he would carry his Reds in a special housing, adopted from dive housings. He got in touch with a French dive manufacturer and made arrangements to pay for three housings, to include battery-driven heaters and Leica glass. The housings would cost him forty thousand dollars each, but Sandy didn’t care: it was faster if he paid himself, rather than wait for government approval.

The dive manufacturer offered an endorsement. Sandy almost turned it down, but then thought of his surfer friend pushing brooms in Caltech’s Astro building. “Listen, if you endorse a friend of mine—he’s big in the surf world—I’ll talk about your dive gear when we get back and maybe we could do a vid on the equipment we use up there.”

The deal was done; Sandy was walking down the hall the next morning when the surfer/janitor exploded from a machine room, off a crowded corridor, and wrapped him up in a hug and kissed him on the cheek. “Man…”

“They’re looking at us strangely,” Sandy said.

Sandy also needed every picture he could get, and every analysis he could find, of the environment in Saturn space. What was the light like? Would there be dust problems?

His best secure access to the information on Saturn’s environment was through the Astro center, and Fletcher, with Crow’s encouragement, unhappily gave him a closet-sized office with nothing but a shaky wooden table, an uncomfortable chair, and a computer port.

“The thing is, he’s got to look at this stuff, since he’ll be spending so much time out in the environment,” Crow told Fletcher. “We can’t have a guy who’s going to Mars being caught doing in-depth research on Saturn. He needs a computer with your security shield on it.”

Sandy left the crappy furniture in the hall and brought in his own. He was working there late one night when he heard people running in the hallway, and looked out and saw an Astro Senior Star go by—a fat guy, running like an Olympian, really pumping his knees—and out of simple curiosity, followed.

The fat guy knew Sandy was cleared for Saturn work, and so didn’t shoo him away as he called Fletcher, and sputtered into the secure phone.

Crow’s wrist-wrap had a nasty urgent alert that sounded like a frog in agony: “BREET BREET BREET… You have an urgent phone message. Do you wish to hear it? BREET BREET BREET. You have an urgent phone message. Do you wish to hear it? BREET…”

“Okay, okay, goddamnit, I’m awake. Shut up. Who is it? What time is it?”

“Five o’clock in the morning, March twenty-sixth. Call from Sanders Darlington listed Most Urgent no details…”

Two in the morning on the West Coast. Whatever was happening there, Sandy didn’t think it could wait until later.

“Answer.”

Sandy came up: “Crow?”

“This had better be good.”

“Sorry to bust you at this time of the morning, and you would have heard in the next couple hours anyway, I think, but I thought since I had the direct line—”

“What the hell is it?”

“The starship’s leaving.”

“Shit!” Crow fumbled for the bottle of stim pills on the nightstand. “You mean it’s gone?”

“It’s going. It fired up its engines about twenty minutes ago. It’s already got enough velocity to break orbit, and it’s looking like it’s vectoring well out of the plane of the solar system. The smart boys think it’s leaving for good.”

“And now everybody and their cousin can see the goddamned thing?” Crow popped three stim pills, one more than the max.

“That’s what they’re saying. Well, not exactly that. They’re saying that at Saturn’s distance it’d only look like about a twentieth-magnitude star. You’d need several meters’ worth of telescope to detect it.”

“So maybe we’re going to get lucky, again?” Crow didn’t much believe in luck, not the good kind, anyway.

“No. Listen, I don’t know the details about this stuff, but they’re saying that it’s burning a lot hotter than when it came in. It’s putting out a load of 511 keV gamma rays. I asked one of the other grad students. That means—”

“Shut up, kid, let me think for a sec.”

“But 511 keV—”

“SHUT UP!” Crow took a breath; sleep deprivation and stim pills weren’t conducive to clear thinking. Calm down.

Sandy kept his mouth shut.

After a moment Crow said, “Sorry I yelled at you. We’ve got gamma ray satellites and detectors up the wazoo to ferret out any evidence of folks playing with Bad Things. So does every other major power. Some of those systems will see this. At first they’ll just think it’s another false alarm from some gamma ray burster out in another galaxy, but they’re going to figure out pretty fast it isn’t. Five hundred and eleven keV, that’s the signature of electron-positron annihilation, and you bet we look hard for that. We do not want anyone screwing around with measurable amounts of antimatter on Earth.”

“So, what?”

“So no change in what we’re doing. We still need to find out what the hell the little green men have been doing at Saturn, and what they rendezvoused with and what they left behind.”

“And how they’re making a whole lotta antimatter, apparently.”

“Yeah, and how they’re storing it. Hey: thanks for the call. Keep your ear to the ground out there. I gotta call Santeros and a few other people.”

Crow disconnected and thought for ten seconds, then put in an urgent call to Fang-Castro. USSS3 kept to the same time as Washington, D.C. She was unlikely to be happy to hear from him.

The moment her bleary-eyed face appeared on the screen, he said, “Sorry about the early hour, Captain, but there’s been a sudden change of plans. The starship has departed Saturn, and if the entire world doesn’t know that already, it very soon will. Accordingly, I’m upping the security level at USSS3. I need to take some immediate steps.”

While he was talking, he was thumbing instructions into his phone.

Fang-Castro was now fully alert. “I imagine so, Mr. Crow. What exactly are you planning?”

“Within the next few minutes, we’ll be locking down your computer systems and Earth links. Everyone except you will need a new password, which we’ll provide as we finish vetting your personnel. In order to keep essential station functions running, nobody currently logged in will be kicked off yet, but they will be in thirty minutes. You will have admin status and can assign new 6V passwords to personnel you deem necessary and absolutely trustworthy, to keep the station running. Please keep it to a minimum. Any passwords you assign will also have to be updated every twenty-four hours, until we get the personnel completely vetted and permanent new passwords assigned.”

“Are you expecting trouble, Mr. Crow?” She was tapping the pad by the phone. “I’m rousing our security detail, such as it is, right now.”

“I don’t know about trouble,” Crow said. “I mean that literally: I don’t know. That’s why I’m casting such a broad net. We need to isolate and remove all foreign nationals and non-citizens from the station. I have a list of those personnel… sending it to you… now. Until we can ferry them off the station, make sure that these people are always in their quarters or under the visual supervision of your security people or mine. Under no circumstances are they to be allowed access to the computer systems, not even for personal business. If they have personal or research files on the computer, I’ll see that they get forwarded to them promptly and in full once they’re groundside. Nobody in particular is under suspicion. Anyone I had doubts about was reassigned off the station weeks ago. This is purely precautionary.”

Fang-Castro gave him an appraising look. “So noted, Mr. Crow. I appreciate getting the heads-up before you shut down my station.”

Crow was not oblivious. “I hear you, Captain. The station remains under your authority. I apologize if I implied otherwise, but this is a bit of an emergency. Now I gotta talk to Santeros. I’ll be in touch again, soon as I can.”

Crow checked the time: 5:20. The President normally rose at 5:45. Good. He thumbed her private direct access number. It was a necessity of the job, rousting the high and mighty out of bed.

Nothing would ever get him to admit that he enjoyed it.

By the time Crow made his prediction that everybody would soon know about the aliens, that fact was already history. Near-Earth space was filled with an assortment of civilian radiation telescopes and a multinational network of radiation-detecting arms-control satellites.

Simultaneous with the Sky Survey Observatory seeing the starship engine’s ignition, the arms control array had picked up a faint but statistically significant increase in the 511 keV background. Near-instantaneous analysis by security computers did not point to a terrestrial origin so, following a tradition that went back the better part of a century, the data was passed on to the astronomers’ computers.

Some of those instruments were already on top of it. Their “first alert” radiation scopes talked directly to a slew of fast-response telescopes that covered everything in the electromagnetic spectrum from ultra-high-energy gamma rays to long band radio wavelengths. The new gamma ray source was identified and localized in less than a minute.

In less than five, phones started ringing in the offices and by the bedsides of any astronomers who had the faintest interest in this kind of astronomy. The telescopes were looking at something new. This source wasn’t showing anything like a normal time vs. brightness curve in any wavelengths. It was unlike a gamma ray burster or supernova or any other known astronomical object.

It took only a few more minutes for the position of the new source to be refined enough to be able to tell that it was moving and that it had obvious parallax—telescopes on different parts of the earth and in different parts of the sky were seeing it in slightly different locations relative to the background of stars.

The difference was a lot bigger than experimental error. Though the source might be extraterrestrial, that meant it was damn close by astronomical standards. It not only looked like it was close to Saturn, it was close to Saturn. It took even less time to determine that the motion was changing. The source was accelerating.

The ball finished dropping twenty minutes after first detection. By then, no fewer than five different astronomers’ working groups had back-extrapolated the trajectory, which is what they were already calling it, having stopped thinking of it as a natural object. The source had departed from a specific point in Saturn’s rings.

The International Astronomical Union had clear protocols for how to handle detection of extraterrestrial intelligence (DETI). Everyone with enough brains to call themselves an astronomer agreed that if this didn’t qualify as a plausible detection, then nothing would, until they were shaking hands with the little green men themselves.

All of that instantly became the worst-kept secret in scientific history.

In another hour, a dozen different astronomy departments at a dozen top universities had figured out that what was going up must have previously come down. The data-mining began in earnest. There was a lot to be mined; the assortment of sky survey and space watch telescopes generated zettabytes of new imagery across a wide swath of the electromagnetic spectrum every day. It was exactly like looking for a needle in a haystack.

The thing about that: once you knew you were looking for a needle, metaphorically speaking, the looking got a lot easier. You could toss out anything that was too long, or too broad, or too heavy, or that wasn’t made of metal, and so on. The astronomers had some idea of what this needle would look like. It would only be a matter of time, working their way back from the present through the archived data, before they found it.

It took less time than anyone would’ve guessed. Knowledge of the discovery hadn’t just gone viral, it was pandemic. An enterprising grad student at UC Berkeley whipped out a new code module for the BOINC-XV crowd-sourcing research network.

The download demands for it crashed the UC servers in short order, but before that happened it was already mirrored on seven thousand sites around the world. By the middle of the morning, millions of amateur astronomers were meticulously combing through the fodder. In Cedar Rapids, Iowa, 12:23 P.M. local time, a bedridden comet- and asteroid-hunter named Jenny Wright found the needle in an astronomical haystack dated February 9.

So much for the DETI protocols. The news blogs carried every known detail of the historic discovery. Real information being nowhere sufficient to satisfy the insatiable monster, the news conduits were replete with every imaginable speculation and hypothesis about the significance of all of this. Most of it, of course, was ignorant nonsense, but that didn’t stop every crackpot from trying to claim his fifteen minutes of fame nor inhibit some willing journalist from giving it to him. It was all that everyone, everywhere, wanted to hear about.

The interest was so intense and universal there was even talk of canceling a World Cup soccer match. Just talk, as it turned out.

The official statements that evening from every major government around the world were both terse and vague. The one-paragraph press release from Washington summed them up: “The President is consulting with top experts and advisers on this unprecedented and momentous discovery. It is engaging her fullest attention. As soon as we have a fuller grasp of the situation, we will keep you fully informed.”

It was bullshit, but the public didn’t know that and the press couldn’t be sure.

Until the following morning, anyway.

It didn’t take a rocket scientist—or even an astronomer—to figure out that the surprise U.S. announcement on February 11, just two days after the arrival of the mysterious starship, about joining the Chinese on their mission to Mars and repurposing U.S. Space Station Three for interplanetary travel hadn’t been a coincidence.

Nor, for that matter, the least bit honest.

It was all over the AM news coverage. The White House had no comment. The more hysterical pundits talked of a major diplomatic rift between the United States and China, maybe even the possibility of a war.

Their apocalyptic anticipations were dashed by the Chinese government’s press release. It merely expressed deep disappointment that the U.S. had acted in such bad faith and that given that behavior, they most sorrowfully had to withdraw from any cooperative efforts to explore Mars, as if there had been any in the first place.

Private diplomatic communiqués were more heated, but what they really boiled down to, once the oblique language and the political posturing were stripped away, was this: “You had a big secret and you didn’t tell us.”

“You would have done exactly the same thing in our shoes.”

“Fuck you.”

That was the end of it.

The other world political blocs had more predictable responses. The European Union, the Russian Confederacy, the Conclave of African States, India, Brazil, even the United Central American States, a staunch U.S. ally, condemned China and the United States for “attempting to monopolize alien technology.” They decried their exclusion from the planned missions and demanded to be allowed some measure of participation.

The United States and China had identical responses to these challenges. They ignored them.

Space watchers noted that activity around USSS3 abruptly increased, while construction efforts on the Chinese Mars ship just as abruptly ceased. Presumably Mars was off the table for the Chinese—hardly surprising when they might find aliens, and alien technology, at Saturn.

Within two weeks, construction activity resumed at the Chinese ship, but it appeared to be operating in reverse. Based on the boost and flight profiles of the Chinese cargo ships and orbital tugs, they were stripping their ship.

Anything related to colonizing Mars—hardware, landing and ground supplies, living quarters, and support for a decent-sized colonization party—all of it was going, stuck in an orbital dump several kilometers off the ship. Security had tightened up massively around both countries’ missions, so good firsthand information was impossible to come by, but this much was obvious to any observer with a decent telescope.

The Chinese were adding extra tankage both internally and externally to their ship. More reaction mass for their nuclear thermal rocket engines. That meant more velocity and a shorter trip to Saturn. How much shorter was still anybody’s guess.

Externally, the ship would not wind up looking a lot different. A bit beefier, a bit stockier with the additional tanks, but still pretty much the same deep space cargo hauler, refitted for speed rather than capacity. A smaller crew, but with longer-duration life support. Nothing radical or unpredictable there.

USSS3 was another matter. It was undergoing a major makeover. Beams and spars hundreds of meters long were being constructed in near-station space. The main axle of the station was being extended two hundred meters and there were several major construction sites along the length of it. The Americans were assembling new modules and adding reaction-mass tanks. Unlike the Chinese mission, the station had never been designed for space flight; it was a lot harder to guess what all these changes would mean.

Nobody outside the highest circles of the U.S. and Chinese governments was entirely sure what was going on. The activities were taking place in total public view and complete public silence.

All anyone could be sure of, and again, it didn’t take a genius to figure it out, was that the U.S. and the Chinese were in a race to Saturn and hell-bent on making sure the other didn’t get there first.

The Chinese launched first.