Saturn Run

16.

Becca ran all night on coffee, junk food, and stims. If the spectacular radiator failure, recorded for all posterity by that goddamn videographer, turned out to be an unsolvable fatal flaw in her engineering… guess who’d be America’s chosen dumbass for the next hundred years?

The vid of the heat exchange extruder bar had given them some clues to the problems, but not the details. The vid had been valuable—but she hadn’t been aware that the videographer had also been doing news vid, even as he was recording the technical stuff.

All Becca had to do was close her eyes, and she’d see that gorgeous redheaded creature on the screen, gold flecks in her eyes, as she sat in her egg, unnaturally calm. “We’ve had a disaster here. The first trial of the critical heat exchangers in America’s Saturn ship…”

And the vid flew backwards in time to show the ribbons of superheated metal exploding into space. It was, Becca had been told, the single most-watched vid of the current century except for those of the 9/11 Twin Towers attacks and the Houston Flash.

The logs on her work screens wandered in and out of focus. She rubbed her eyes; no sleep for the wicked. She’d eliminated the control sensors and magnets as the source of the problem. The data said they were up to the task, they just hadn’t been provided proper control. The problem still might turn out to be an oscillation in the ejection nozzles for the heat exchanger, but she was betting on the supercomputer array.

At high ribbon run speeds, it was probably getting swamped with data and the granularity of the modeling just wasn’t fine enough to deal with it. Which meant more supercomputers—easy enough to come by with an unlimited budget—and better, finer-grained control code. None of it would come with a snap of her fingers, but later today, she’d meet with the code monkeys and rake them over the coals.

She pulled up the logs for the nozzles. Even if it turned out that they weren’t misbehaving, the cleaner they operated the easier it would be for the supercomputers to control the ribbons. She’d started looking for a signal in the noise, when she got beeped for a priority call that overrode her privacy block.

“Yeah, who? I’m busy and I’m not happy, so don’t be wasting my time.”

“Dr. Johansson, President Santeros here. I’m even less happy than you are. Yesterday’s fiasco looked bad. You need to—”

Becca cut her off. “That was not a fiasco. It was an experiment, a test. The first one on an untried system. The system failed. The data will tell me why it failed.”

“Dr. Johansson, don’t interrupt me again! Not unless you want to be looking for a new job.”

Becca had heard about Santeros’s temper; this was a small sample of it. But, ever since she’d been the fat little blond kid, she’d hated being pushed around. Now that she was a fat little blond adult, she didn’t like it much better. It got her Midwest backbone up. She knew the smart thing would be to smile, apologize, and kowtow.

“Good luck with that,” she snapped. “You want to find a replacement for me, you’re welcome to try. At this late date, it’s only gonna push your launch back by a year.”

Santeros was turning red.

“One more thing,” Becca said. “You’re not my boss. You want me fired, call my boss. Right now, YOU are wasting MY time. Stop trying to bully me and let me do my job.”

She hung up. Not my best career move. I should probably start packing my stuff. Or keep working on these logs until they come and kick me out. Eh, screw it. I need a break.

Becca kicked out of her chair and headed to the commissary. Reflexively she tried to shove the door behind her as she left, but it just slid closed with a soft hydraulic snick. Can’t even slam a goddamned door in this place, she fumed.

A thousand kilometers down, Santeros looked at her science adviser. “That little bitch just hung up on me! She’s history, Jacob. Get a replacement on board and get rid of her.”

Vintner glanced over at Crow, who raised one thin, dark eyebrow. Otherwise his face remained a carefully composed blank. Vintner suppressed a smile. “Madam President, I say this with all due respect… Uh, no.”

“That wasn’t a request, Jacob.”

“Planning to fire me, too? I’m your adviser—let me advise. First, she’s right. The only thing replacing her will do is to set us back by more time than we can afford. You replace her, the Chinese get to Saturn first.”

“Meaning I’m supposed to put up with that?”

“Yes. That’s what I mean. You were elected President, not the Red Queen. You chop off her head, you’ll be cutting off your own at the same time. Let it go.”

Santeros looked like steam might start flowing off her forehead, but then she slowly cooled off, and finally smiled. “All right.”

Crow raised a finger.

Santeros asked, “What?”

Crow said, “I don’t think we should rule out sabotage as an explanation.”

“Do you have any evidence to support that, Mr. Crow?”

He shook his head. “Nothing. Barely even a feeling. But there are so many holes a saboteur could slip something through, so many moving parts. And God help us, how many times have we proven in the past that it’s impossible to vet everyone perfectly? Plus, everything—the hardware, the software, even the procedures and protocols, are prototypes that are getting tested and debugged in the field. So many places for things to go wrong, for an unwanted modification to be snuck in.”

Santeros said, “Jesus. This radiator thing hurts. This really hurts. I don’t see what we can do here.”

“I don’t know that I’ll ever have more than a hunch, but in the meantime I’d be a lot happier, from a security point of view, keeping the devils I know,” Crow said. “Minimize personnel changes. Like Johansson.”

After talking with Santeros, Becca was bouncing off the walls.

Literally.

In 0.1 gee, it wasn’t hard to go careening about unless she paid a lot of attention to controlling her actions, and right now she wasn’t feeling much like controlling anything. She was pissed. She wasn’t really hitting the walls hard enough to hurt, but it felt good to be slamming something. The corridor was empty of other crew members, so all that got bludgeoned were the walls.

She lurched into the commissary and ran full tilt into a large male figure. They both bounced back in low-gee arcs, as their sticky boots lost their grips on the floor, like two cartoon characters. A lidded zero-gee coffee mug traversed its own lazy trajectory across the room.

“Oh, God, I’m sorry…” the guy said.

“Damnit, look where you’re…” She landed, regained her footing, and looked at the human obstacle she’d just bounced off of. It was the Hollywood pretty-boy videographer guy. Oh, lovely.

“Uh… Are you okay?” Sandy asked her. “You don’t look okay.”

“I’m fine. I just got myself fired, that’s all,” Becca snapped.

“Over the accident? That’s… I didn’t think—”

“No, I’m gonna be fired because I just told the President to go fuck herself.”

Sandy stared at her, agape, for a second, then started laughing. “You told Santeros to go fuck herself? Oh, I like that.”

Becca could feel her face getting even hotter.

Sandy put up his hands. “Whoa. I’m not laughing at you. It’s what you did. Man, I wish I could’ve seen her face. Hey, you wanna grab a mug and tell me about it?” And he laughed again, an infectious laugh.

Becca found herself smiling at him. Oh, what the hell. The day after she left, it would be all over the station, anyway. Screw discretion, there ain’t any to be had. “All right. I can do that.”

Sandy retrieved his coffee cup from the other side of the room and they eased into a table and belted down. She let her mug warm her hands and inhaled the steam. Her shoulders were starting to unknot, a little bit. She managed a smile. “So. That vid from yesterday wasn’t terrible. The technical stuff, I mean, not the news stuff. The news stuff—”

“What do you mean not terrible? I’ll tell you what, Johansson, that was about as close to perfect as—”

“Why don’t you call me Becca? It’s Sandy, right? Sanders? Sandy?”

“It’s Sandy,” he said. “About that vid…”