Saturn Run

40.

Fang-Castro’s implants pinged. Her eyes popped open as she tried to remember why. Then, Ah!

She slipped out of bed, dressed in her plain tan NWUs as quietly as she could, stepped out of the bedroom, closed the door, left the cabin, and walked down to the Commons. There were a dozen other people there, mostly the night shift, picking up coffee, along with a few day-shift workers who appreciated historical markers, even if they couldn’t particularly see, feel, hear, smell, or taste this one.

Most of those were looking out through the big port window. Fang-Castro got an orange juice and went that way, watching a countdown that popped up on a corner of the screen, something like the New Year’s countdown.

Hours before, they’d begun to bend around Saturn. In three minutes, they’d close that first loop: the official seal on the fact that they’d shed enough of their excess velocity and achieved a closed orbit around the enormous planet, bound by Saturn’s gravitational pull.

They were late. The original plan had placed them at Saturn for Christmas. Instead they’d arrived just in time to celebrate the start of spring. Like that mattered, 1.3 billion kilometers from home.

What mattered was that the Chinese were only two weeks behind them.

Two minutes, one minute, ten seconds, zero.

“There it is,” somebody said, and there was a smattering of applause.

“It’s a big deal, ladies and gentlemen,” Fang-Castro said. “We’re there.” She watched the planet swinging by for another moment, then walked back to her cabin. Fiorella would be doing a brief rendezvous broadcast in the morning, and Fang-Castro wanted to look good.

Sandy said, “Anytime…”

His egg had been basically unrepairable after being hit by the molten radiator metal, but he, Martinez, Elroy Gorey, and a couple of other techs had pulled the undamaged Leica optical glass off the old egg and reinstalled it on another one. He wasn’t using the Leica glass at the moment, because the standard egg glass softened Fiorella’s image.

Fiorella was floating fifty meters away, and Sandy slowly closed from a wide-angle image of Saturn, and a slice of its rings, to a close-up of Fiorella’s face.

Fiorella said, picking up from what Fang-Castro had said a couple of times in that morning’s interview, “Rendezvous—it was a big deal. For those of us who witnessed the entire project, it’s hard to believe that only two years ago, most of us would never have thought we’d leave the surface of the earth. For those of us who had, we’d gone no further than Earth orbit, a trip that takes not much longer than an ordinary jet flight from Los Angeles to London. But to think we’d be orbiting a planet over a billion kilometers from home! A bare year ago, the Chinese construction of a Mars transport had been state of the art: just a few months to Mars, if you caught the right launch window. This new technology, encapsulated in the Richard M. Nixon, could make that run in a third of the time and it could fly almost anytime it wanted. How proud President Nixon would be if he could see us now!”

She went on for a while, talking of the frustration of crawling back to Saturn after the ninety-million-kilometer overshoot—though a funny definition of “crawl.” Twenty-five kilometers per second was roughly twenty-five times faster than the speed of a standard rifle bullet, but compared to the flight out, at a hundred and fifty kilometers per second, it felt like crawling.

“As beautiful as it is, it will take us a week to move in from this preliminary orbit to what we hope and believe will be an alien space station. Saturn is gorgeous, but its rings are nothing more than a beautiful buzz saw of orbiting debris, mostly water-ice, with some rocks included. Our destination is technically called the C Ring’s Maxwell Gap, near the innermost part of the ring system. The gap itself is almost entirely free of debris—but to get there, we’re going to have to avoid the saw blade. This will be the most delicate part of our whole flight: this crew is up to it, but you’ll want to stay tuned. Aliens on tap!”

Three-two-one. “Okay… we’re out,” Sandy said.

“Look at my lipstick.”

“It’s fine. You gonna change blouses?”

“Yes, and I’ll get rid of the necklace and mess up my hair. This has to look as informal as possible.”

When they were ready, and she’d changed, Sandy said, again, “Anytime.”

Fiorella flashed her Number 1 smile: “Hi, kids. As I suppose most of you know by now, the third-graders at La Canada Elementary School in La Canada-Flintridge, California, and the fifth-graders at Hillside Elementary in Cottage Grove, Minnesota, have made a special request that was forwarded to us by President of the United States Amanda Sentaros… Oh, Jesus, I fucked that up… Santeros, Santeros, Santeros…”

“Yeah, and now you do need to check the lipstick,” Sandy said. “When you fix that, pick it up at, uh… special request…”

“Okay.” She fixed the lipstick. “How’s that?”

“Good. Do it anytime.”

“…Cottage Grove, Minnesota, made a special request that was forwarded to President of the United States Amanda Santeros. The kids asked for a tour of Saturn’s rings, and that’s what we’re going to give you guys, right now.”

Santeros spoke to Crow and Fang-Castro in one block of verbiage, because of the time elapse in the transmission back and forth:

“I’m fully aware of the dangers of trying to get into the alien object too quickly. That has been repeatedly pressed upon me by my scientific advisers, to the point of being tiresome. I leave to you the tactical details of doing that, but would remind you that we’ve lost a lot of time. A lot of time—and our Chinese friends and allies are coming in fast. We still don’t know exactly what they are doing, but do not underestimate the dangers here. We are pressing the Chinese government for details of what they expect from us, if anything, but they are being remarkably reticent. Mr. Crow is aware of the many scenarios we have been discussing, and can provide the command with details of these discussions, but I say again: you must move as quickly as possible, now, and you must take great care in any approach from the Chinese. With the time lag we have in the broadcasts, we may not be able to provide timely advice, or provide… timely discussion with the Chinese… over any difficult situations you may encounter. We’re counting on you to act in the best interests of the United States….”

When she was done, Fang-Castro said, “Oh, boy.”

“Yes,” Crow said. “That was a very complicated way of saying, ‘If you screw it up, you’re on your own.’”

The trip from Earth to Saturn had been the fastest done by any human-built craft, ever—so fast that collision with even a brick-sized object would have been a disaster. But space was remarkably empty, even of sand-sized objects.

Saturn’s ring system was another matter. The rings were only tens of meters thick, but that space was filled with icy objects of all different sizes. If the Nixon crossed the densest rings it would inevitably be struck multiple times by hail-sized and larger—much larger—ice balls moving at many kilometers per second relative to the ship.

Their goal, the alien mystery, orbited Saturn within the translucent C Ring’s Maxwell Gap. The Nixon could safely orbit within that region, twenty-seven thousand kilometers above Saturn’s cloud tops, if it could get there.

The Maxwell Gap was near the innermost edge of the huge ring system. Between the gap and deep space was a fifty-thousand-kilometer disk of icy projectiles. If the Nixon tried to come into Saturn on a straightforward equatorial path in the plane of the rings, it would be sliced in two by a twenty-meter-thick buzz saw of ring-particle impacts before it got one percent of the way in.

Instead, the ship approached on a vector that was tilted at thirty degrees to the ring plane, decelerating the whole way on an inward spiral, reminiscent of the one that had taken them out of Earth orbit.

It was a week’s work for the VASIMRs to slow the ship enough to bring it into a circular orbit that threaded the Maxwell Gap; along that spiral trajectory the ship had to cross the ring plane many times. Each ring encounter lasted only a few milliseconds, but they were potentially lethal ones.

Fortunately, Saturn’s rings weren’t uniform. They were divided into thousands of ringlets and lesser gaps, like grooves on a giant celestial record. The inbound trajectory wasn’t a simple smooth spiral. The deceleration was carefully modulated and timed so that each ring crossing would pass through one of those myriad smaller gaps that subdivided the ring system.

Ship’s navigation had carried the burden of responsibility for this segment of the flight. This was not the usual preset deep space trajectory, determined well in advance of the flight. From far off, Saturn’s rings appeared stable and fixed, but those ringlets performed a constant and chaotic dance with gravity. Gaps would shift kilometers inward or outward. Sometimes they disappeared entirely. Changes could happen in weeks, sometimes days; it was impossible to plan out a precise trajectory far in advance of the Nixon’s arrival at Saturn.

So the nav crew actually had to “fly” the ship in, working with a constant stream of communication between the astronomers, Navigation, and Engineering. Navigation would say where they hoped to take the ship, the astronomers would tell them what gaps were close to their desired path, Navigation would calculate a course correction, and Engineering would execute it or tell them it wasn’t feasible and they’d better look for a different gap.

It was nerve-racking. Haggard didn’t begin to describe the flight crew’s appearance by week’s end.

The majority of the ship’s complement, who weren’t involved in the life-and-death decisions, had an entirely different experience. They were entranced. Saturn, ten times the size of the earth, was a beautiful object to behold. When the Nixon made its first pass by Saturn, outside the F Ring, the flattened disk of Saturn, all by itself, spanned a fifty-degree field of view and the rings, the most gorgeous planetary system known to humanity, filled the sky.

People couldn’t get enough of the spectacle. The Commons was always packed to capacity. Anyone whose duties didn’t require them to be elsewhere crowded to see the amazing sight that swept past the window. They marveled at the huge pearly-white arcs of the rings and the perpetually fascinating colors of Saturn’s cloud bands striped with tawny hues of oranges, ochers, tans, salmons, more different and delicate colors than most of the crew had names for.

The ring crossings were even more popular, if that were possible. Approaching from the sunlit side, the rings grew ever bigger in the window until they occupied the entire view. Unbelievably detailed and striated, rings became ringlets, ringlets parsed into sub-ringlets, ever-finer textures that grew and grew and then suddenly they were through the ring and looking at empty space. Half a rotation of the living modules, and the rings came back into view, sometimes glowing with ghostly pale backlighting from the sun. Where Saturn’s shadows fell across the rings, they were visible only as dark sweeping silhouettes that blocked out the distant stars.

The flight crew’s anxiety never managed to infect the spectators. Intellectually, the spectators knew that ring crossings were one of the riskiest parts of the mission. They just didn’t feel it. They’d survived a close pass by the sun, a crippling accident at the orbit of Jupiter that had killed one of their own and nearly ruined the mission, months in space far beyond the reach of the rest of humanity, and here they were. Deep in their emotional cores, they knew nothing would go wrong.

They were right. Nothing did go wrong. The ship took some minor hits from some minor bits of ice in the gaps. Nothing the structured foam hulls and carbon composite skeletons couldn’t handle, and nothing that service egg jockeys couldn’t repair once they were settled in.

Each pass through the potentially hazardous ring gaps came more quickly on the heels of the last. The first ring crossings were separated by a day and a half. Just before the Nixon finally settled into the inclined circular orbit that threaded the Maxwell Gap, the crossings were three and a half hours apart.

Then they were close.

“What do we know?” Fang-Castro asked.

They were gathered in the Commons, which had been declared temporarily off-limits to anyone not invited—not because there were any secrets, but because there wasn’t enough room for everybody who wanted to attend. The chairs were mostly occupied by the science crew, along with representatives from Navigation and Engineering. Sandy was recording the meeting, which was being transmitted directly back to Earth on an encrypted link.

“We’re poking at it with everything we’ve got,” said Barney Kapule, a ranging and surveillance expert, one of two on board. The two had been chosen for their expertise in operating the onboard telescopes and the associated cameras. Everything they saw in their scopes was on its way back to Earth within milliseconds.

What had appeared two years earlier to be idle speculation by Richard Emery, the vice chair of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, was close to spot-on.

“This is no moonlet,” Kapule said. “Our primary object is the size of a minor moon, an oblate spheroid a good five kilometers in diameter.” He tapped his slate and a vid of the object popped up on the oversized Commons vid screen. “It has minimal perturbing effect on the rings, so it has to be very low in density. In other words, we think it’s hollow, so it’s not a natural object. Whether it ever was a natural object, we don’t know yet. The surface is irregular. At this distance, we can’t tell if it’s natural weathered material, you know, roughened up by occasional small impacts over the years, or an artificial shell with a lot of hardware stuck on the outside.”

“Why can’t we see it better?” John Clover asked.

“Because it’s dark—not exactly stealth-black, but the surface is very, very dark, shading to a lighter gray at both of the poles,” said Candace Frank, Kapule’s associate. She touched her slate and brought up a different view of the object. “Whether or not this was intentional camouflage, it made the primary difficult to pick out in the Maxwell Gap as anything more than a minor moonlet. But it is more, a lot more. Not only do we have the primary, but it has a substantial retinue of dozens of additional moonlets, considerably less than a hundred meters in size. They appear to orbit in a fixed formation with the primary, and statistically there’s no possibility that the formation is natural. They were placed where they’re at. Whether they’re physically connected or just station-keeping, we can’t tell at this distance, but they’re all associated with each other.”

“In other words, we don’t have one alien object, we got a whole bunch of them,” Fang-Castro said.

“Even more than we’ve been talking about,” Kapule said. A new view came up, one that seemed sprinkled with salt. A group of thin red rings popped up, surrounding each white grain. “We’re seeing hundreds, and maybe thousands, of pixel-sized glitters of light that move between the primary and its moonlets and out into the rings and back again. Whatever they are, they’re always moving, like a swarm of bees around a hive… not to suggest anything invidious here.”

“What are the patterns?” Fang-Castro asked. “Is that a defense system?”

“Yes, we have an analysis,” said Don Larson, the mathematician and former founder of the orgy club. “To go back to the bee metaphor, it’s more like they’re gathering honey and bringing it back to the nest, rather than performing any kind of defensive maneuvers. They’re not particularly fast… fast enough, but not way fast… and their actions are deliberate, rather than random. Even if not designed for defense, they could certainly be used that way. To see them at this distance must mean that they are some meters in diameter. If they are metallic, and if enough of them hit the Nixon as quickly as they are moving now, they could tear us apart. It’d be like being hit by cars driving at highway speeds. In other words, they seem to be gathering honey, whatever that is, but like honeybees, they could bring out the stingers.”

Fang-Castro shook her head. She wanted none of that. The Nixon was not an armored warship.

Over the next several days, the steady minuscule thrust of the Nixon’s engines gradually warped its orbit, changing its inclination until the Nixon was orbiting within the Maxwell Gap in the plane of the rings. Simultaneously, they crept up on the alien constellation. Navigation and the surveillance people fed a steady stream of vid to the computers, where image analysis software tracked the motion of each of the bees. Sophisticated statistical modeling looked for any changes in the pattern of their collective motions, any indication that they were responding in any fashion to the approaching spaceship.

From Earth, they got a steady stream of essentially useless speculation about the nature of the constellation: the scientists on the Nixon saw everything hours before the earthbound analysts, and by the time their speculations got back to the ship, it had all been thought of.

Fang-Castro said to Crow, quietly, “David, the politicians and the military seem strangely quiet.”

“By design, I think,” Crow said. “Almost anything they say, the Chinese would pick up, one way or another. Not the encrypted stuff, but just chatter in the hallways. Which tends to be fairly accurate, if you’re in the right hallway.”

None of the analysis picked up changes in the behavior of the alien artifacts. The bees appeared to be as oblivious to the presence of humanity in the solar system as the starship had been two years earlier. Still, the Nixon held back, stabilizing its position at three hundred kilometers from the constellation. This was plenty close for the Nixon’s best telescopes—they could see ten-centimeter details on the alien facilities and the bees.

And they launched two recon shells, basically small, slow rockets equipped with cameras and designed to be extremely visible to radar and even visual detection, the better to signal peaceful intentions. The recon shells did a complete loop around the station, broadcasting a three-hundred-sixty-degree view of it.

They watched for a day. The nature of most of the bees became apparent, although the ultimate purpose of their activities was still mysterious. Most were ice-catchers. They hunted for ring debris. Some of them looked for chunks of ice comparable to their own size, latched onto them with grapples, and hauled them back to one of several moonlets. Others had large scoops and swept up ice gravel and sand, the way a whale scooped up plankton. This was also ferried to the moonlets. Another much smaller group of bees shuttled containers of some kind between the moonlets.

None of the bees seemed to be equipped with armaments, not even so much as a cutting laser. The same seemed to be true of the moonlets and the five-kilometer primary. The surfaces were mostly natural rock, porous regolith dotted with various alien assemblages that were mostly unrecognizable. A few were clearly antennae of some kind or another; none looked anything like a beamed energy or projectile weapon. The constellation seemed to be entirely unarmed.

The primary rotated slowly with a period of four hours, further evidence of its artificial nature. A natural moon this close to Saturn would’ve been tidally locked, just as Earth’s moon was to its parent planet.

At Fang-Castro’s command, the Nixon moved closer, then paused again. During the primary’s second rotation, after the move, the Nixon’s computers spat out an anomalous delta.

A previously jet-black spot on the surface of the primary had turned light gray. During the third rotation things began to get genuinely weird. The black spot was now bright white and surrounded by concentric rings in rainbow colors. When the polychrome target came over the horizon on the fourth cycle, it was glowing dimly.

As the primary’s rotation brought it around toward the Nixon, the glow brightened and coruscated until it could be seen with the naked eye through the windows of the Nixon, sparkling in the distance like a glass crystal spinning on a string and catching the sun.

The glow began to fade again after the target passed the median line until it was almost extinguished by the time the target had rotated past the horizon.

The fifth rotation repeated the light show of the fourth. The message was clear: “We know you’re here.”

Who or whatever “we” meant.

Naomi Fang-Castro took slow, shallow breaths and sipped her tea as her most senior crew members took their seats for the morning briefing, chatting with each other, making last-minute slate checks. Her face was calm, peaceful in its thoughtfulness.

That was entirely for show.

Aliens were no longer a distant, hypothetical consideration, not with Nixon parked next door to the primary. When everybody was settled, she put down her cup, and the chatter ended; the crew had learned early on that this was the signal that the meeting was about to begin.

“We’re skipping the usual status reports,” Fang-Castro said. “Have them recorded before dinnertime. I assume everything is nominal. Our sole business this morning is to decide on our next move. John, what’s your take on what we know?”

Clover put down his triple-strength espresso, put his fingertips together, and said, “They’re inviting us over for coffee and Danish.”

“This is being recorded, John, so…”

“I’m somewhat serious. Look at their behavior… and lack of it. They take no apparent notice of us until we settle into our position. They keep doing business as usual. There’s no evidence of weaponry or hostility. The colored lights are not in any apparent way a warning. We don’t know what those colors mean in their culture, obviously—white is for mourning in Korea, black is for mourning in the West—but it seems likely that given the colors they’ve chosen, which they probably know are attractive to us, they’re inviting us in, rather than warning us away.”

“Where does that conclusion come from?” asked Martinez. “That those colors are attractive?”

“Our astronomers have done an analysis of the colors, and they are quite pure, they are very specific wavelengths—there’s nothing in the UV or IR ranges, as though they were spattering us with everything. That suggests that they know what wavelengths we see, and that… give me a little rope here… suggests that they may very well know which ones we like,” Clover said. “So we show up, but we do nothing. Eventually, they take the initiative. They set up a pretty little light show, designed to catch our eye, and just in case we’re really thick, it shines brightest when it’s pointed directly at us. Then they sit back and wait. How could that not be taken as an invitation?”

Imani Stuyvesant, the exobiologist, waved a stylus. Fang-Castro nodded at her. “Are you sure? Maybe that is the wavelengths they see best. Or maybe they don’t even see the patterns the same way we do. Honeybees and birds see flowers a lot differently than we do.”

Clover smiled and tapped his fingertips together. “If you were talking about human equivalents, Imani, you could be right. But aliens, I’d say it’s pretty much guaranteed that they won’t see exactly the way we do. There are all kinds of animals on Earth that don’t see exactly the way we do. What would be the odds that the alien sensory apparatus, their eyes, would respond anything like ours? The astronomers and physicists started taking measurements like mad when it began”—Clover nodded companionably toward Bob Hannegan—“and all they saw was visible light. No other kinds of radiation. It was tailor-made for our eyes. The light show was purely for our benefit.

“So I just gotta figure, if they know that much about our physiology, they have some idea of how we respond to stimulus. The word that came to mind when I saw that display? Pretty. It was a sparkly, colorful, enticing bit of eye candy. It was presented to us the way we’d hang a shiny bauble on a string and hold it up before a baby, just to get the kid to reach out for it. You really think that was coincidence? Or miscommunication?”

Clover continued: “Remember, they could have been looking at our TV shows for a century. Beings who could build these artifacts and travel between stars almost certainly have some sense of curiosity, or self-preservation. If they could see our TV signals, they surely would have at least looked at them. Any analysis of our TV signals would tell them a lot about us: not just the culture, but our level of tech and everything else. Everything we do winds up on TV.”

Martinez raised a stylus: “What if it’s a deliberate trap?”

Clover shrugged. “Could be, but why go to the trouble? They can build starships that use antimatter for fuel. If they wanted to smack us upside the head, it’s not like there’s much preventing them from doing so. Why play games? It’s like the question of why they didn’t accelerate an asteroid into the earth, to wipe us off the face of the planet. They could, but they haven’t. That suggests they don’t want to.”

Fang-Castro pulled the argument back in. “If the aliens are intentionally deceiving us, I don’t think there’s anything we can do about it. That’s the bottom line. So we can sit out here and dither, or we can go in. We keep watching and analyzing, of course, but we’re not going to turn around and head home.” She allowed herself to show a bit of a smile. “So, I agree with John that we’ve received an invitation to reach out. We are going to reach. I won’t risk ship-critical personnel in the first team we send to the primary. Unless anyone has a relevant objection, I will assign Captain Barnes to command the first contact team. He has combat command experience and is also heavily trained in combat trauma medicine. His second will be Lieutenant Emwiller, for the same reasons. Bob Hannegan and Imani Stuyvesant will cover physics and exobiology, John Clover will see to the cultural issues, Sandy Darlington to make the record. Ms. Fiorella will probably try to assassinate me for not including her in the trip, but I’m afraid she’ll have to wait. Sandy, your first duty will be documentary, but if you should have a moment to make some vid that Ms. Fiorella can use, I’m sure she will appreciate it.”

“I will keep those priorities in mind,” Sandy said.

“Good. Do that.” Fang-Castro turned to Martinez and said, “Joe, I’m sorry, but you’re not on this run.” His face fell. “Next to Dr. Greenberg, you are the single most vital person to keeping this ship running. If things work out as we hope, you’ll have plenty of future opportunities, but for this expedition I want you to pick one of your assistants, whoever has the most experience flying a bus.”

“Elroy would be good for it. He’s good in space and has a lot of on-the-spot creativity, and I know he’s anxious to get out there.”

“Done, then. Tell Mr. Gorey.” She looked around the room, which included several members of the contact team. “I want you all to be ready to go in six hours. Do what you need to get ready. I would suggest naps. And, Mr. Crow?”

“Yes?”

“I believe you’ll find Ms. Fiorella out in the hall. Disarm her, and send her in.”