Saturn Run

38.

Fang-Castro ran into Sandy as they converged on the Commons. As the captain, she did not touch subordinates for good, legal reasons. Now she hooked Sandy’s shirt with a couple of fingers and pulled him aside.

“How are you? Dr. Ang told me you’re coming off the drugs.”

“Just in time for New Year’s,” Sandy said. Becca had been killed two months earlier; they were approaching the orbit of Saturn, though they wouldn’t be stopping there. And, “Thanks for asking, ma’am. I’m feeling fairly bad. Going through the brooding phase, as he calls it. The what-ifs. Dr. Ang tells me that’s good. I’m getting my mind back.”

“The post-traumatic stress…?”

“I’ve dealt with it, you know, for a while. This is a bump in the road, but I’ll be okay.”

She touched his arm: “Very good. I pressed Mr. Crow on your previous service, so I’d know what I was dealing with. I have a good deal of admiration for you, Captain, and you are a most excellent cameraman, as well. I would be pleased to have you on any of my ships, even if you were in the army.”

“Thanks… I’ll remember that, ma’am.”

They went on to the New Year’s celebration.

New Year’s Eve aboard the Nixon was one for the record books, Fang-Castro thought, as she and Sandy entered the Commons. People had celebrated the coming of the new year for millennia, but never before in a spaceship over a billion kilometers from Earth.

And despite the cheerful dressing, there was a touch of melancholy to it, as well—they were still feeling the loss of their chief engineer.

But as Sandy had said, on the day of the accident, probably in shock but also in truth, dead was dead. Rebecca Johansson was slipping irretrievably into the past, and here, in the present, Phillip McCord, a Nobel physicist, the only Nobel on board, was serving as a most excellent bartender, pouring a most excellent champagne.

The champagne was courtesy of Fang-Castro herself. She’d had a few cases laid in to herald their year-end’s arrival at Saturn. It would have been impossibly wrong to let the combination of the holiday season and the successful completion of their voyage go uncelebrated. The occasion was, unfortunately, not quite the one she’d planned.

Her first officer was standing at the observation window, and she wandered over to him. “Evening, Salvatore.”

“Evening, ma’am.” An uncomfortable look flitted across his face: her use of his first name.

“This is a party. Relax.”

“Trying to, ma’am. It’s quite a view, isn’t it?” He nodded toward the window.

Once every minute, the living modules’ rotation brought Saturn into view. It was an awesomely beautiful sight, hanging so close by that you could almost reach out and touch it. Except that it wasn’t. The nearness was an illusion; Saturn was twenty-one million kilometers away.

That was half the distance from Earth to Venus, a distance at which you’d expect to see planets as nothing more than pinpoints of light. Saturn, though, was huge, so that even at this distance, the flattened sphere looked to be two-thirds the size of Earth’s moon.

The crew members could easily see its lovely bands of tawny clouds; the sharp-eyed might even convince themselves they could make a disk out of the orange, Mars-sized moon called Titan.

Most mesmerizing, of course, was the massive, pearly ring system, half again as wide as the full moon. People had no trouble seeing the fine dark band of the Cassini division splitting the A and B rings, and fine grooves within the rings themselves.

Because of the breakdown at turnover, the Nixon was still traveling at seventy kilometers per second out of the solar system. This was the nearest they would come to the magnificent planet for some time. It would be another month before the crippled propulsion system could bring them to a halt, ninety million kilometers beyond their goal. It would take almost two more months to fly back in and establish an orbit around Saturn… assuming that nothing else went wrong.

Francisco was thinking along the same lines, and said, as the planet rotated out of sight, “We’re cutting it fine, aren’t we?”

“We play the hand we’ve been dealt,” Fang-Castro said. She looked up at the massive view screen at the end of the Commons. The picture showed a hundred thousand people jumping up and down in Times Square. Just for this single night, they’d gone to what Martinez was calling “Eastern Standard Fake Time.” The scene they were watching on the screen had taken place more than an hour earlier, but it was just coming in now. “Four minutes until the ball drops. I’m going to go mingle. If you have a moment, go say something cheerful to Darlington, if you please. When we sing ‘Auld Lang Syne’…”

“I will do that, ma’am.”

The minutes counted down, and when the ball hit bottom, everybody but Fang-Castro got kissed at least once, and then Darlington, in his best singing voice, and with Martinez’s arm wrapped around his shoulders, and Fiorella’s around his waist, led the way:

“Should auld acquaintance be forgot…” And others began to join in, “and never brought to mind…”

There was melancholy, at least some: they were so far from everything, farther than any human had ever been from home. And then there was applause, and the party really began.

Five minutes after the ball fell—time for the singing and the kissing—the vid message came in from Santeros.

“I can’t honestly say I can really appreciate how you all must feel, so far from home,” the President said, from the huge view screen. “But yours is one of the most important missions ever undertaken by mankind, and for the future of your country. I wish you—I wish all of us—the very, very best in the New Year. Please, please be safe: America treasures each one of your souls. I tried to come up with some substantial way to reward the members of your crew for your efforts. I could hardly find anything appropriate, but I can say, and this will be announced publicly tomorrow, that each and every one of you has been awarded the Presidential Medal of Freedom, the highest non-military award your nation has.”

She paused, to allow for applause, and though she’d recorded the message eight hours earlier, she got it: the Commons erupted in cheering and applause, and the President smiled into it.

“In addition to that—Mr. Martinez, Mr. Darlington, would you approach Captain Fang-Castro now? Thank you.”

Fang-Castro, puzzled, looked at the two smiling men as they came to stand on either side of her.

The President continued: “At my direction, and with the concurrence of the Congress and the secretary of the navy, Naomi Fang-Castro is hereby promoted to the permanent rank of rear admiral. Gentlemen, if you’ll do the honors.”

Fang-Castro actually felt a little sag in her knees. She looked at the grinning Martinez and Darlington, who stepped in front of her and showed her the golden shoulder boards with the single star of a rear admiral (lower half).

“You fabricated these down in the shop, didn’t you?” she asked.

“Yes, ma’am,” Martinez said. “Carbon fiber—probably the most resilient shoulder boards ever made. We put some excellent sticky tape on them, so they won’t come off until you want them to.”

He and Darlington pressed them over her regular boards, and they stuck there, just as Martinez promised.

Then the President said, “I’m sure you’ve already done this, but join me now:

“Should auld acquaintance be forgot…”