Saturn Run

31.

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.”