Saturn Run

5.

Sandy let the van’s nav take him home; it was quicker that way, locking into fast-lane traffic across town to Pasadena. Zuma Beach had been a bust, with too many people, too few decent waves. And he’d been distracted: couldn’t be thinking about alien starships when your board was trying to kick your ass into the deep.

He’d left Argentina in a medevac chopper, spent the next six months at the San Francisco Army Hospital. When he got out, physically rehabbed and mentally stable, give or take a med or two, he’d started looking for a job that might engage him. He hadn’t found it. He was addicted to the rush of combat, but that was hard to find in civilian life. You could find jobs that were simply dangerous, but as dangerous as they might be, they were usually boring as well, until everything went sideways and you got killed.

He’d gotten a taste of the rush, running around L.A. with a news team and a camera, but after a while, it all seemed pointless: with nine billion people on Earth, anything that you could conceive of people doing to each other was being done. All the time. Taking pictures of it didn’t change anything.

His father, though a rich and conservative plutocrat, was a nice-enough guy. He worried that Sandy was drifting, and, when he inherited his grandfather’s money, would become another too-rich dilettante, wasting his life with sex, drugs, AR, and RhythmTech. He’d call every morning with suggestions, and finally had suggested a job that might engage Sandy’s intellect: “I think I found you something different over at Caltech.”

That hadn’t worked out, and Sandy started drifting again. He stayed away from the Alternate Reality games, as too stupid and too addictive. His VA medical monitor suggested more drugs, something that might chemically re-create the spark.

The Benz parked itself, and the phone component of Sandy’s wrist-wrap told the front door that he’d arrived. The door unlocked itself and disarmed the alarm. One step inside, he stripped off his damp T-shirt and dropped it on the floor, as the door closed itself. Another three steps and he stopped, then backed up to the door, passed his wrist-wrap over a faux-but-good Impressionist painting. The painting swung silently away from the wall, revealing a niche.

Sandy took the HK double-stack automatic out of the niche, turned it on, and selected the hard stuff without thinking, and asked, aloud, “Who’s here?”

“Crow.”

Crow. Sandy could smell him. Nothing offensive—mostly peanut butter—but not right for an empty apartment. Sandy followed the muzzle of the pistol into the kitchen, where Crow was sitting at the breakfast bar, handling the partly disassembled RED XV vid camera that Sandy had been refurbishing. A half-eaten peanut-butter sandwich sat an arm’s length away.

“Careful with the camera,” Sandy said. He dropped the gun on the kitchen counter with a metallic clank and pulled open the refrigerator. “I’ve been realigning the sensor and it’s not tightened down yet.”

“I can see that—I’ve worked with one of these before,” Crow said. “Looks like a full hardware alignment.”

“Yeah, it is. The actuators were screwed. And for Christ’s sakes, don’t get peanut butter on anything.”

“Sorry. I haven’t had much time to eat.”

Sandy nodded. “You want a Dos Equis? And, uh, I got a couple splits of champagne if you’re feeling girlie.”

“Dos Equis is good. So: I talked to Larry McGovern last night.”

“Yeah? I heard he got his birds.” Sandy handed Crow a bottle of beer, picked up the HK and turned it off, and leaned against the refrigerator door.

“Yes, he did. He’ll get a star in a couple of years, if he doesn’t send the wrong memo to the wrong guy.”

“He’s not really a memo guy,” Sandy said. “At least, he didn’t used to be, when he was a light colonel.”

“Still not. He says ‘hello.’ He doesn’t call you ‘Sandy,’ or ‘Lieutenant Darlington,’ by the way. He calls you ‘The X.’ Not ‘X,’ but ‘The X.’”

“Army bullshit,” Sandy said. “Anyway, what’s up with you? I assume this isn’t a practice burglary. Especially with the security they’ve got in this place.”

“No. We need to talk to you, about keeping your mouth shut. About not trying to blackmail us into letting you go on the mission.”

“What mission?”

“To Saturn. Leaves in a year or two.”

Sandy took his beer around to the couch that faced the breakfast bar, dropped into it, and said, “You’re really going?”

“Yeah.”

“Man, I gotta tell you—I want to go, and bad,” Sandy said. “What do I have to do to talk you into it? Or bribe you? How about a huge fuckin’ campaign contribution to Santeros? I could…”

Crow shook his head: “Nothing. You want to sign up, we’ll take you.”

Sandy thought about it for a minute, then asked, “Why?”

“Well, oddly enough, you precisely fit a slot on the ship. You’re a decent videographer, bordering on good, and you’ll be better than good by the time we leave. We need to document every millimeter of this thing. We’ll want it in the highest resolution. And we want it done by somebody who has demonstrated some guts—somebody who won’t cut and run because he’s about to be flamed by a bug—and somebody who has shown that he can keep his mouth shut. That’s one thing.”

“One thing? There’s another?”

“Yeah. There’ll be a few guns on board,” Crow said. “I’ll have one. You’ll have access to another one, if need be. Some weird shit could happen on this trip. There’ll be a lot of stress, probably a lot of argument, given the kind of people who’ll be aboard. Could have some psych problems. We think it’d be a good idea to have a hard-nosed security guy to back me up, if I need it.”

“I’m really not interested in killing anybody,” Sandy said. He took a hit of Dos Equis. “Not anymore.”

“If you got to the point where you had to kill someone, you’d most likely be saving the whole crew, as well as your own ass,” Crow said.

Sandy said, “Okay. That, I could do.”

“So. You wanna go?”

“Absolutely. The only thing is…”

Crow: “What?”

“I’m afraid that you’re setting me up,” Sandy said. “Fletcher’s told you that I’m entirely unreliable, that I couldn’t change a fuckin’ tire, and all that. That I smoke too much dope, that I screw my way through the Group…”

Crow waved it off: “We know what Fletcher’s going to say, and I know what Larry McGovern told me yesterday. Larry said that if I ever needed a backup, and I didn’t choose you when I had the chance, I was a fool. I’m not a fool. You couldn’t take any dope aboard the ship, for obvious reasons, but—”

“I don’t need it,” Sandy said. “I’m still worried that you’ll just lead me along, and then, at the last minute, after word about the mission has leaked… you’ll kick me off the mission. Like totally fuck me.”

“We considered that,” Crow said. “But, given the fact that you rather neatly fit a slot we need, and all your money, and the potential for fucking us back… we decided it’d be easier to play it straight.”

Sandy grinned at him: “I would have liked to have seen that decision get made. ‘Playing it straight’? That’s gotta be a first for Santeros.”

“We’re not that bad,” Crow said.

“Of course you are,” Sandy said.

Crow asked, “Why’d you drop the HK when you saw who it was? What if I’d come here to take care of our potential publicity problem?”

“You really do that?” Sandy asked.

“I’ll ignore that question,” Crow said. Then, a half second later, “Wait—I won’t ignore it. Of course I don’t do that. We don’t go around killing innocent people.”

Sandy nodded and said, “I keep the gun in case there’s still somebody who might try to collect the blood money. When it turned out to be you, I knew that the gun wouldn’t help. If you were here to kill me, it was a done deal. Though, when I think some more about it, you wouldn’t be here if I was going to be killed. There’d be an unfortunate surfing accident, or a semi-trailer’s nav would go crazy and cross the centerline…”

“Paranoid fantasy… science fiction.” Crow took a final pull on his beer, put down the bottle, and asked, “Would you be willing to go back under military discipline?”

“You mean reenlist?”

“You’d be reactivated. You’re still technically—very technically—in the reserve.”

“Could I be a major?”

“No, but you could be a captain,” Crow said.

“Would I have to wear a uniform?”

“Actually, we don’t want you to,” Crow said. “The only reason we want you under discipline is so that if… mmm… there were some difficult orders, the consequences would be more severe if you didn’t follow them. Orders from the President. Court-martial, instead of a bunch of surf rats on a jury from Venice Beach.”

“I could—”

“There’s a little more,” Crow interrupted. “We’d want you to stay under cover. Keep your current persona. The rich and flaky vid guy whose father probably bought him a job on the ship. In other words, we wouldn’t want people to know you’re actually Superman, until it’s time to leap over the building.”

“Let me think about that a second,” Sandy said. He thought one second, then brought out his toothy grin. “Okay. I’m in.”

“And you’ll do what we want.” A statement, not a question.

“I’ll tell you what, Crow,” Sandy said, the smile slipping away. “I’ll not only do what you want, I’ll do what you need.”