Saturn Run

14.

On the day before Halloween, the image of the Chinese ship filled the wall display in the Oval Office, as Santeros, Vintner, Lossness, and Crow watched the broadcast. The ship was impressively large, massing an estimated ten thousand tons. Originally called Martian Odyssey, it had been rechristened Celestial Odyssey for its new mission—to beat the U.S. to Saturn’s rings and to whatever the alien starship had rendezvoused with.

The Odyssey had been designed to be a cargo hauler, intended for routine runs to establish and support a Chinese colony on Mars. The ship could haul nearly three thousand tons of payload and deliver it to Mars in less than four months, with round-trips happening at year-and-a-half intervals when the Earth-Mars alignment was most favorable.

The Chinese plan had been to run it to Mars, unload the first colonists and colony supplies, stick around for a bit to make sure everything was working, and then make a slower run back to Earth. After six months in Earth orbit being maintained, refurbished, and resupplied, the Odyssey would be ready for another trip out. As dramatic and history-making as the first trip would be, Odyssey would then settle into a routine of unglamorous but vitally important cargo runs for the nascent colony.

Plans had changed.

The ship looked much the same, externally, as it always had: chunky and solid. American intelligence said the Chinese engineers had stripped every bit of unnecessary weight and filled most of the cargo bays with water and liquid hydrogen tanks, which would make up additional reaction mass for the lightbulb reactors.

The reactors would heat the reaction mass to nine thousand degrees Celsius exhaust plasma. Ten of those reactors collectively provided over ten million newtons of thrust. As big as that was, it was only one-third the size of the historic rockets that had landed humans on the moon nearly a century before; even so, they were by far the most powerful engines flying in space in 2066.

All in all, the reaction mass and reactors provided enough power and water to get the Odyssey to Saturn—but they weren’t enough to get the ship there and back, not quickly. The expectation was that the Chinese would harvest water from the moons and rings of Saturn.

The audience in the Oval Office was mirrored by seven billion other human beings, planet-wide. With all pretense of secret missions gone, the whole world was watching the final launch preparations for China’s Saturn mission. Someone in the Politburo with an excellent sense of Chinese history decided his nation’s thrust into an uncertain future needed solid traditional roots.

There were fireworks.

Earth had never seen a show like the one the Chinese put on. State-of-the-art hypergolic engineering was married to pyrotechnic expertise that stretched back fifteen hundred years. A thousand kilometers above the earth, a round of chrysanthemum bursts three kilometers wide blossomed in gold, pink, and white.

People didn’t need vid feeds. Everybody on Earth within line of sight of the ship got a clear view of the display of Chinese history, culture, and power. Even with unaided eyes, earthbound humans on the night side of the planet could see multicolored pinpricks and puffballs of light as the ship passed overhead. With simple binoculars, they could see intricate starbursts, fountains, and sculptural fireballs. The show went on for nine orbits of the earth. Nine times, as the ship passed into sunlight, the fireworks ceased; nine times, as the ship passed into Earth’s shadow, they resumed. Over eighteen hours, seven billion people saw a show of glorious and unprecedented scale.

In the President’s office, Crow conferred quietly with the others.

“Ten minutes,” somebody said.

American intel had projected the likely ignition time. Intelligence had been right about the launch date, and they were pretty sure of the tech, but nothing else was certain. Until the Chinese actually launched, nobody in the U.S. had a solid handle on the Chinese’s target arrival date at Saturn. The best guess was two years and change.

Whatever they had planned, the Chinese were confident enough to be broadcasting live from orbit. Not that it would have done them much good to try to keep the launch secret, but usually they maintained a polite fiction of silence until after a launch. This time, the Chinese had a full professional broadcast crew in orbit, not far from the Odyssey, and they were letting the whole world watch from fifty-yard-line seats.

The Odyssey was roughly over Beijing, bathed in midday sun. The running commentary from the announcer on board the broadcast ship was interrupted by another voice: subtitles on the Oval Office display identified it as that of the Odyssey’s commander, Captain Zhang Ming-Hoa. He reported to Beijing that all final checks were complete and launch would commence in 10… 9… 8…

Seven seconds later, the monitor flared white for a fraction of a second until the cameras could compensate. For a fleeting millisecond, Crow wondered if the ship had exploded, even half hoped it had. That would solve a lot of problems. But, no, it was those ten massive nuclear engines coming online, their fiery blue-white exhaust much more brilliant than the surface of the sun. The ship started to move away, steadily picking up speed. Within a minute, it was nearly two kilometers away from the cameras, receding at two hundred kilometers an hour. By space travel standards, it was a snail’s pace, but it looked impressive on the big screen.

The status display from U.S. tracking reported that the Celestial Odyssey was accelerating at a tenth of a gee, adding one meter per second of velocity each and every second. That was pretty much what DARPA had expected, or at least hoped. The Chinese hadn’t souped up their engines. They seemed to be more or less the same as they had been for the Mars mission. The big question was, how long would they keep firing?

“All right, everybody out,” Santeros said to the watchers in her office. “I’ll stop down at the situation room every once in a while.”

Crow, Lossness, Vintner, and top military and congressional personnel shuffled out of the office, and walked down to the situation room for the waiting game. In an hour, the Odyssey, now on the night side of the earth, had reached escape velocity.

“No surprise there,” a general said. “Christ, I could use a drink.”

The Chinese engines needed to burn for at least two hours to send the ship to Saturn. The tracking status predicted that if the Chinese cut their engines after two hours, it would take them over seven years to reach Saturn. No one in the situation room expected that to happen, and no one was disappointed.

Three and a half hours after launch, the engines were still firing. Vintner and Lossness looked at each other and then at Crow, who shrugged. Trajectory status reported a velocity of nearly twenty kilometers per second and a transit time to Saturn of under two years. This was shorter than what the ostensibly knowledgeable experts had predicted.

Santeros walked in, talking on a handset, spotted Crow, and her eyebrows went up. Crow nodded toward a monitor. The ship was too far away to be anything but a searing blue-white pinpoint of light, but there was no sign of an engine shutdown. The Odyssey continued to accelerate away from the earth.

“Where are we at?” Santeros asked when she got off the handset.

“Still moving,” Lossness said. “They’re gonna get there in a hurry.”

“How big a hurry?”

“Can’t tell yet, but they’ve already exceeded our projections.”

Santeros lingered, watching the screen, then, after two minutes, said to Crow, “Call me.”

With every passing minute, the Odyssey’s ETA to Saturn dropped. The five-hour mark passed. Suddenly, the blue-white speck disappeared; it took the cameras a second to adjust, but then, distantly and dimly, a tiny image of the ship could be made out on the monitor. The Odyssey had completed its ejection burn and was free-falling toward Saturn. Status numbers completed their final update. The Chinese nuclear thermal engines had imparted an extraordinary twenty-kilometers-per-second delta-vee to the Odyssey. The projected transit time to Saturn was a year and a half, with an ETA in late April of 2068.

Crow pulled up the timeline for the Nixon. If they stayed on schedule, they’d be launching by the end of 2067, which would have them to Saturn just about the same time as the Chinese. Not good. He called Santeros, and five minutes later he, Vintner, and Lossness were back in the Oval Office.

“This isn’t acceptable,” Santeros said. “Best case, we and the Chinese are there at the same time, and that’s a powder keg waiting to blow up in our faces. Worst case, our schedule slips and they beat us to whatever’s out there. We need to get there faster. I don’t care how you make it happen, but make it happen.”

She looked up into thin air and said, “Gladys, tell the kitchen to send fresh pots of coffee to Vintner’s office, then meals for Crow, Vintner, and Lossness.” The White House computer pinged acknowledgment. “Jacob, Gene, figure this out. Call in whatever resources you need. Crow, I want you in on this so you can report back to me and in case any of their ideas have security implications we need to be on top of. By the morning briefing, I want to know how we’re going to beat the Chinese to Saturn.”

Crow had been running on catnaps for two days, trying to stay on top of last-minute intelligence about the Chinese launch. More stim pills.

Two hours later, in Vintner’s office, the three of them were well-caffeinated and fed, but they weren’t any happier. Crow massaged his forehead. “So, really, there’s no way to speed up the trip? Neither of you geniuses can come up with anything?”

Lossness grimaced. “Not enough to matter. Constant-boost trajectories eat up energy like a son of a bitch. If we could figure out how to up the ship’s power by fifty percent, it wouldn’t trim more than a month off the travel time, and that’s still too close for comfort. And, anyway, we can’t do it.”

Vintner looked up from his third cheeseburger—Crow marveled, where did the man put it all?—“Gene, any chance your guys didn’t optimize the trajectory for the shortest trip?”

“You’re kidding, right? Fastest is what we asked for—fastest is what we got. But if it will make you happier…” Lossness checked the time. “It’s the middle of the night in California… he should be home. I could call our orbit maven at JPL.”

“Do it,” Crow said.

A few minutes later, a sleepy-looking David Howardson peered at them from a vid screen. “This is Dave. Hey, Gene… Ah, let me guess. The timetable’s shot.”

“In spades. Any chance in hell that you didn’t pull together the fastest trajectory for our ship?”

Howardson gave him a look.

“I didn’t think so,” Lossness said.

“I take it there’s no possibility of making the ship significantly faster, right?” Howardson asked. He was pulling up ship’s specs and orbital simulations on his slate while he talked.

“Not in the time we have left,” Lossness said. “Sorry to wake you. We need to get back to brainstorming before Santeros has us dismembered.”

“Hold on a sec.” Howardson was reading through his logs. “I’m looking at the simulation optimization you requested six months back. It’s the right answer—it gets you there fastest, which is what you asked for. You wanted the fastest trip because it reduces the expenditure of life-support supplies.”

“Yeah?”

“But now you’ve changed the question. Implicitly, anyway. You don’t want to get there fastest, you want to get there soonest. Right?”

Crow interjected, “What’s the difference?”

Dave was dragging orbital curves around on his screen, fiddling with launch dates and noting arrival times. “The difference is that you’ve got so much delta-vee in this ship that you’ve got a huge launch window. It’s like the better part of five months. The fastest trip is at the end of that launch window, sometime in December of next year. But you could launch as early as, mmm, July? I’ll have to do some numbers to nail it down. You’ll still get to Saturn. It’s just that the trip takes longer. But let me see… mmm, it’d only take about a month longer. If you’re able to launch in July, that’d buy you four months on the ETA. You get to Saturn for Christmas—that’s a rough guess, of course. I’d need to run a finer-grained simulation.”

Gene said, “Get on it.”

Howardson grinned. “There is one catch, though.”

Crow asked, “What?” in a tone that suggested he didn’t want to hear about catches.

The grin disappeared. “The ship’ll be doing a flyby of the sun. If you launch in late July, Saturn will be on the far side of the sun. You don’t launch out, you launch in, right toward the sun, swing past it and let its gravity bend the ship’s trajectory so that it’s on target for Saturn on the far side.”

“How close are we talking?” Lossness asked.

“Couldn’t say quite yet. Looking at my pictures here, I’d say somewhere inside the orbit of Mercury, maybe as little as 0.2 AU.”

“Thanks. Get back to me when you’ve got the refined model.” Lossness logged off the connection.

Vintner looked at Lossness. “Can we advance the schedule that much? Launch in nine months instead of fourteen?”

Lossness nodded. “Pretty much got to, pending Dave’s finished simulation. And we’ll need a design mod for close solar operations.”

Crow: “I’m guessing your engineers are gonna love that.”

Becca got a call from Vintner just before dinnertime. From the background, she could tell he was in his private office, which was little more than a cubbyhole. He used it for private conversations.

“Hey, Becca. Is this a good break point?”

“Hiya, Jacob. As good a time as any,” Becca said. “We finished another control simulation. We’re doing good here.”

“You may not feel that way in a minute. I’ve got news you’re not gonna like.”

“Santeros scrubbed the mission?”

“That’d make life simpler, not harder. She’s advanced the launch date by five months. You’ve got nine months to get ready.”

Becca responded, and when she ran out of breath, Vintner asked cheerfully, “All done? ’Cause, you know, you were repeating yourself there at the end. I think you said ‘bitch’ at least four times and ‘motherfucker’ five or six.”

“Funny. What in the hell is she doing?” Becca asked. She could feel the heat in her face: she must be glowing red on Vintner’s screen.

Vintner filled her in on the Chinese mission status and the planning session on the night before. “So that’s the size of it. I’m sending you Howardson’s new trajectory model right now.”

Becca blinked up the plots and the time markers, read through them. “Okay, that’s clever. Cutting it a little close to the sun, aren’t we?”

“Yeah, the ship design guys’ll have to rig up a heat shield for the close approach, so we don’t overload our cooling systems. Shouldn’t be a big deal. We’ll deploy an aluminized plastic film parasol that will reflect ninety percent of the extra sunlight. We’ll jettison the parasol on the way outbound. And speaking of heat, how will this impact your cooling system?”

Becca hummed for a minute. “Well, absent any clever tricks, it’ll diminish my thermal outflux by, I’m guessing, maybe twenty-five percent for about two weeks. Only while we’re within about a quarter AU of the sun. We’ll have to cut back on thrust, but that shouldn’t cost us more than a couple of days and we’re picking up, what, four months, after we add back in the extra flight time? Couple days one way or another won’t make a difference.”

Vintner nodded. “I’ll leave it to you to coordinate with the propulsion engineers and get a modified thrust profile to Howardson to plug into his model.”

“Jacob, do we need all five months? I mean, do we really have to launch at the beginning of the launch window?”

Vintner sighed. “Honestly, I don’t know. Probably not. But this is turning into more of a race than we had planned, and we don’t know what we’re going to find out there or how long we’re going to have to stick around investigating it before heading back to Earth. We don’t want to collide with the Chinese—that’s a party Santeros wants to avoid.”

“Okay.”

“Which leaves the big question. Can you complete your part of the project in nine months?”

Becca asked, “What happens if I say no?”

“Santeros doesn’t like to be told no. If I have to tell her you’re not up to it, she’ll send me off hunting for a replacement,” Vintner said. “If I hunt long enough, eventually I’ll come across someone who’ll say yes, just for the opportunity.”

Becca sighed. “No doubt. But they won’t be able to do it. There’s not enough time for them to come up to speed on my design and not enough time for them to come up with one of their own.”

Vintner nodded. “That’s pretty much my take on it. Even if you don’t think you can do it, the odds are still better if you do it than if someone else tries. So, what the hell. Say yes.”

Becca fidgeted. Buying into a schedule she didn’t believe in was a plausible path to professional suicide. On the other hand, quitting in midstream would also trash her reputation. Game theory, she thought. If I quit now, I keep my professional integrity and it’s a sure loss. If I stick it out, there’s a chance I might be able to pull it off and no one will know that I was blowing smoke. A guaranteed loss vs. a possible win.

“I’ll give it a try.”

“Thanks. I’d love to be able to tell you that nobody will hold it against you if you can’t pull it off, but we both know that’d be a lie. If we don’t beat China to Saturn, we’ll all be pilloried. The President will tank and she’ll make sure we’re all in the handbasket with her. Talk to you later.”

Vintner hung up.

Becca threw her coffee cup across the room where, unsatisfactorily, it bounced without shattering off a whiteboard and landed in a corner of the carpeted floor. Fuck it, she was done for the night. She shut down her workslate, pushed back her chair, and walked out of the office. Tomorrow was going to begin an unrelenting hell. Tonight she was going to study some margaritas.