Saturn Run

4.

A thousand kilometers above the Washington machinations, Captain Naomi Fang-Castro wrapped up the last meeting of the day, a report on the ongoing repairs to backup electrical storage units. The repair work was fine, but there was a shortage of critical parts, caused by a continuing army inspector general’s examination of the Earth-bound support bases.

The bases wanted to show that they were fully stocked and ready to go for any emergency, and if they drew down stock lists to support U.S. Space Station Three, then they wouldn’t be at one hundred percent. Since Fang-Castro was in the navy, she didn’t have the clout she might have had if the support bases had been run by the navy.

“I’m going to be begging again,” she said to her executive officer, Salvatore Francisco. “I’ve got to find somebody in the Pentagon who can squeeze Arnie Young.”

Brigadier General Arnie Young was the commander of the support bases.

“Talk to Admiral Clayton. He’s a sneaky prick,” Francisco said.

“That’s a thought. The problem is, he always wants some payback. I don’t want to become one of his girls.”

They’d make another round of calls in the morning, they decided, and gave it up for the day.

Fang-Castro headed home, carrying her briefcase. She was quiet, serious, short, and slight; the first impression she conveyed was that of the quintessential forty-something Chinese woman, despite being fourth-generation American. Her parents had brought her up with a traditional, antiquated propriety.

She was nowhere near as frightening as the name “Captain Fang” led some to believe, before meeting her… as long as you weren’t standing between her and her objective, as long as you didn’t ignore one of her suggestions.

The captain’s “suggestions” were not optional. Very few made the mistake of thinking so, a second time. The space station was a comfortable and safe environment, entirely surrounded by near-instant death. Nobody had yet died under her command, and everyone agreed that as unpleasant as her wrath could be, it beat the alternative.

Fang-Castro’s home was in Habitat 1, Deck 1 of USSS3, known as the Resort. The Resort had simulated gravity, equivalent to a tenth of Earth’s, created by the rotation of the habitats, and real private quarters instead of dorms and sleep-cubbyholes. A select few of the quarters even had two rooms. One even had a window.

Fang-Castro loved her window. After a long command shift, she’d sit in her easy chair, raise the vid screen and the stainless steel shade behind it, dim the room lights, and let her mind drift with the stars, and sometimes the dime-sized sun, and at other times the massive soft expanse of the earth, as they all slowly swept past the window once a minute, the markings of a cosmic clock.

It was a near-daily ritual, and she joked that that window was her one addiction.

Her fiancée didn’t like it. The window made Llorena Tomaselli queasy. She’d logged seven months in space as a computer maintenance tech, and she was fine in confined spaces like cable tunnels, but having the whole universe rotate about her, like she was some lesser goddess, gave her mild vertigo. Fang-Castro knew that while she was at work and Tomaselli was home, the shade stayed tightly closed and projected a pleasant Earth scene, someplace in Italy’s Campania. When Fang-Castro was home alone, the stars were always there. When they were both home, they negotiated.

Tomaselli was cooking. As Fang-Castro entered the suite, she smelled stir-fry for dinner—sprouts, jerked mock duck, ginger, hot peppers, and platanos—with rice and red beans on the side. Her stomach rumbled impatiently. She wasn’t an obligate vegetarian, and vegetarianism wasn’t obligatory in space, especially not if you were the station commander. Meat was hard enough to come by, though, that it was easier just to put it out of one’s mind.

“Tough day?” Tomaselli asked, when Fang-Castro dumped her briefcase.

“Too long, too messy. It was a nibbled-to-death-by-ducks day.” She yawned, stretched, and said, “Smells terrific.”

“It is terrific,” Tomaselli said. “Want a drink?”

“I’ll get it—maybe a margarita. You want one?”

“Sure, but take it easy on the salt. The last time—”

The security phone in the bedroom pinged; that almost always meant trouble. “Ah, really…?”

“Go get it, I’ve got some work to do here yet,” Tomaselli said. “Won’t be ready for ten minutes, anyway.”

“I’m sorry, dear, I’ll make it quick.”

“What if the station’s ass just fell off?”

“Then it’ll be even quicker.”

Fang-Castro stepped into the bedroom and called up the screen, expecting to see the watch commander and the control deck. Instead, she saw the Oval Office, Jacob Vintner, and Gene Lossness. The President was there, too, in the background, reading something. Before they could ask, she hit the door-close and privacy firewall buttons on her slate.

“Captain Fang-Castro, Gene and I need to talk to you about a new assignment,” Lossness said. “The President is here, too.”

The President lifted a hand in the direction of the camera, without looking up from what she was reading.

Fang-Castro was careful: “Okay.” Something serious was up. She did not travel in this bureaucratic stratum.

“We’re about to ask you some big questions. We’re on a tight deadline, and we’re going to need an answer right now. And when I say ‘now,’ I mean, this minute.”

“Quickly, then. Dinner’s waiting.”

Vintner looked momentarily nonplussed and then plunged in. “We need to repurpose the station for interplanetary flight. Rework the habitats, strip off the physical plant, add engines and reaction-mass tanks and a new command section. We’d like your opinion on the feasibility of doing this in the next twenty-two months. We’d also like you to take on the assignment of mission commander.”

“Can I give a quick call to my chief engineer?”

“Absolutely not. We need your assessment, and only yours, right now.”

Fang-Castro looked down at her hands, thinking. “Okay,” she said again. Stalling, as her mind ran through the possibilities and implication. “Engineering could probably cope, but life support won’t handle a long-duration mission.”

“This won’t be long. A year at most, and your life support’ll be beefed up along with everything else.”

Fang-Castro said, “I can see where this is going. You want to beat the Chinese to Mars. But we’ll need to do this in a lot less than twenty-two months, and we’ll need some kind of landing craft, not to mention…”

In the background, the President reached away from her reading, touched something, and her face suddenly dominated the view screen: she was looking straight at Fang-Castro.

“Captain, this isn’t a Mars mission. You’ll be going to Saturn.”

“What? Excuse me, ma’am, but that’s… What happened?”

The camera’s view angle slipped back and focused on Vintner, who filled her in on the previous day’s events.

Fang-Castro gaped: “A starship?”

“Exactly,” Vintner said. “Will you take the assignment? You know the station, you know how to work with both military and civilians. This will not be a military operation. There’ll be a modest complement of military on board, but fundamentally this is a science mission and Gene says you’re very good with scientists.”

“I need to discuss this with my fiancée.”

“Sorry, but this is most secret. You can’t discuss it with anyone.”

“Then I have to say this: if I can’t tell her what’s up, I’d have to decline. We’re planning to get married two months from now. We don’t keep secrets from each other, and we don’t lie to each other.”

Vintner looked at Lossness, who shrugged, and suddenly the President’s face was back. “What if it was me who told the lie? You’d only have to… prevaricate. All married people do that, as you must know—I see you were married once before.”

“I’m not sure I understand…”

“What if you told her that I was going to make a big speech tomorrow—about how we were going to Mars, to assist the Chinese in their Mars mission, if needed, and to do our own orbital surveys.”

“But we’re not…”

“No, but that’s what I’m going to say tomorrow. To everybody on the planet. Eventually, the secret will leak, and then… you’ll have to deal with it when it happens. But there’s not much difference between a long, slow trip to Mars and a long, fast one to Saturn. And your little prevarication wouldn’t look like much, next to my big one.”

“That seems pretty technical, I mean, on an emotional level.”

“Screw a bunch of emotions. If your relationship can’t survive a little white lie, then it probably can’t survive, anyway,” Santeros said. “Might as well get it over with.”

Fang-Castro had a snappy comeback to that, but suppressed it. Santeros’s husband was known as Happy Frank, as was his penis, which had reportedly traveled to places it shouldn’t have. Instead, Fang-Castro said, “Listen… I, uh…” She put a finger to her lips, thought for a few seconds, realized that she desperately wanted to go. She said, “I’ll take it. I’ll go.”

The President smiled and said, “Excellent. We want you pretty badly.” And she was gone again.

Vintner said, “I apologize if I seemed a little… pushy, but we’ve been under a lot of pressure with very little sleep for the past couple days.”

“Apology accepted,” Fang-Castro said. “Let’s get down to it. What kinds of mods are we talking about? What’s our propulsion system going to be? Who is handling recruiting of the ship’s complement and scientists? I have some current personnel I’d like to have vetted for this, particularly my Number Two…”

Ninety minutes later—it seemed like ten—Fang-Castro closed the screen, raised the security firewall, and took a deep breath. Ruined dinners were a point of discord in their relationship and there was some making-nice to be done: Tomaselli took her cooking seriously, and this wouldn’t be their first ruined dinner.

Back in the common room, Tomaselli was immersed in a book. She didn’t look up. The window shade was drawn. Not good signs.

Fang-Castro said, “I need to tell you something that falls under your top secret clearance. It comes with a warning from the President: you’ll be prosecuted if you say a word about this to anyone but me, before tomorrow at one o’clock.”

Tomaselli was pissed, but she wasn’t stupid: some things were more important than dinner. “What?”

“The President says we’re going to Mars,” Fang-Castro said. “I made them agree that I could tell you, before the announcement. They want me to take the job, and I accepted. I’d never dictate to you, Llorena, and I know this will be a long separation… but it wouldn’t start for a couple of years. I would be desperately sad to… leave you behind.”

“Mars? You made who agree?”

“Santeros… and a couple of high-level bureaucrats,” Fang-Castro said. “That’s who I was talking to.” And, “Listen, I’m really sorry about your dinner.”

“Oh, fuck the beans, Naomi,” Tomaselli said. “What in God’s name just happened?”

Fang-Castro said, “I don’t have the details, because nobody does. All I got was a lot of engineering questions. Maybe we’ll get some details tomorrow, when Santeros makes her big speech.”

Little white lies.