Saturn Run

7.

Dr. Rebecca Johansson hurried past her workstation, grabbed her coat, let her implants turn her computer off—do not look at the waiting e-mails. The implants were already talking to the door and clicked the rems app. The radiation monitor flashed green, which meant she wasn’t noticeably radioactive this evening, and that was a good thing.

She indicated the “out” app and the door popped open after registering her ID. In the hall she clicked on the elevator app, waited impatiently for the car, said, “Station,” when it arrived, and dropped six floors to the Northfield nuke’s underground shuttle station.

The ten o’clock train arrived three minutes after she walked onto the platform. She scampered aboard, sank into a seat, and sighed. She was twenty minutes from downtown Minneapolis, not much to see on the way but endless tracts of suburban houses. Way too late for sanity’s sake, and Senior Star power engineers didn’t get overtime. If only, she thought. With double and triple time on her usual hours, she’d be retired in five years.

But then what? She actually liked the work. Liked the action.

Two minutes out from the Nuke, too tired to read, Becca stared into the window at her own ghostly reflection. A door opened between her car and the second car and a young man moved up and took a seat across from her. A doctor, she thought, a surgeon, heading north to the Cities from the Mayo Clinic in Rochester, where the shuttle tracks ended. He glanced up briefly and she quickly flicked her eyes away, hoping he hadn’t seen her seeing him.

People were always trying to chat her up. It wasn’t always a half-baked mating ritual. People simply found her approachable: Partly it was that pure Minnesota-Scandinavian look, and a plump, finely featured face with a fresh-scrubbed pale pink complexion. She was, she sometimes thought in despair, “cute,” like a doll you won at the state fair. Combine that with being both short and… plumpish… and the whole ensemble screamed, “I am sweet and I am inoffensive, and I am no threat, and so I don’t have to be taken seriously because no one this cute and plump ever is.”

Becca did not like being dismissed. She did not like to be thought of as inconsequential. She’d worked too hard to get where she was, through a grueling Ph.D. program at MIT, and now was known as one of the best-trained and cleverest high-density power engineers ever to come down the pike.

The young man was still there, sitting across from her, a pleasant smile fixed on his face, and she thought, Enough! Time for a positive thought or two.

Work was going well. The hours were way too long, but the intellectual challenges were irresistibly seductive. Designing power flows for a reactor core that had one-quarter the volume and ten times the power density of anything previously used in a commercial plant was… exciting.

She was doing great and novel work; better still it was conservative work. Power utilities liked conservative thinking. Their job was to reliably deliver electricity twenty-four hours a day, not get Nobel prizes for innovation.

There were no new tricks in her flow designs. The cleverness lay in how well she’d been able to optimize and integrate so many different techniques. Massive-scale heat pipes with fractal fluidic passages to pump the energy from the fissioning fuel into the boiling superheated fluids that drove the generator turbines. Thermomagnetic liquids and magnetic pumps and transformers to siphon the waste heat. Micro-evaporative heat exchangers to dump it into convective radiators and, ultimately, the air.

That was just a fraction of what she’d thrown at the problem. No one technology, not even two or three, could manage so many gigawatts of thermal energy in a confined space. The core would’ve melted down in minutes. Put them all together, get them all tuned up, and get them all working in concert. It was the difference between an instrumental solo and a full symphony orchestra, engineering-wise.

Her mood was lightening as the train rolled through the old airport site, now a condominium complex, made a quick stop, and then out the other side and on toward the downtown towers where Becca lived.

The doctor—or maybe he was a nurse, or a technician—was still sitting across from her. Glancing at her from time to time.

He would, she thought, wait until they got off the train, then he’d hit on her. But her mood had lightened, and her stop was always busy, so there’d be no threat. She’d be nice to him, she thought, and maybe—he was good-looking, although, come to think of it, his neck was a little thick—hold out some hope. A cup of coffee in the morning? But she had to be to work at six…

Maybe she should find just a sliver of life outside work? Time for coffee with a good-looking surgeon?

Twenty minutes and twenty seconds after leaving the Nuke, the train rolled into the Hennepin Avenue station under downtown Minneapolis. Becca got to her feet and headed for the door. The surgeon—yeah, right—shuffled off after her.

On the platform, she half turned, expecting him to be there, with an approach. And he was. He smiled and held up an ID pack. He said, “I’m Robert Klipish with the FBI. We didn’t want to startle you or attract attention, but we have some people who need to talk with you.”

She felt her mouth hanging open as she winked her implant at the ID. A green light ticked in a corner of her eye: the ID was real. “Some people?”

He gestured across the platform, where two men and a woman were moving toward them, in a V formation, the woman at the point. She was neither chubby nor cute. She was athletic, and the three moved in a way that you might expect a school of sharks to move. As the woman came up, Becca noticed that sometime in the recent past, she’d had her nose broken.

“What did I do?” Becca blurted. She grasped for something, anything.

“You didn’t do anything, as far as I know,” Klipish said. “I was told to make sure that nothing happened to you, after you left work. I was told that if you got a hangnail, I’d be reassigned to Texas.” He twinkled at her.

“Not that,” Becca said, putting a hand on his sleeve.

The woman who was coming up said, “Bob, stop twinkling at her.” The woman held up her phone and flashed her ID. “Dr. Johansson, my name is Marla Clark. Pleased to meet you. You have a meeting.”

“A meeting? Right now?”

“Not exactly right now, but first thing in the morning, in Washington, D.C.,” Clark said. “By the way, we assume you’ll need a moving company, though you don’t really have all that much. We’ve contacted two that have been approved by Homeland Security.”

Becca: “A moving company?” And how did they know she didn’t have that much?

The next morning, Becca was fifteen hundred kilometers from home. She’d been snatched, politely but firmly, and shoved into a private hopjet that had delivered her to the D.C. airport barely an hour later, a little after one o’clock in the morning, EST. Her “entourage”—she decided to think of them that way, instead of as her “handlers” or, worse, “captors”—had been pleasant, solicitous of her comfort, and entirely uninformative.

They’d hustled her off to a terrific hotel, where she was deposited in a luxury suite that contained a fresh change of clothes, which were her size and even her style, which struck her as efficient, considerate, and creepy. Clark had come with her. She recommended a hot shower before going to bed. “I’ve put in a seven o’clock wake-up call for you, so you won’t be late for the meeting.”

“What meeting?”

“The meeting,” Clark said with a shrug.

Nine hours after getting on the train in Northfield, Minnesota, she was sitting in a White House waiting room decorated with paintings of former First Ladies. Clark was no longer with her, but another woman, this one named Marsden, from the same tribe as Clark, handed her a cup of coffee and said, “Relax.”

“If you were in my shoes, would you relax?” Becca asked.

“I don’t know exactly what shoes you’re wearing,” Marsden said. A navy officer was walking across the room toward them, and she added, in a low voice, “But if this guy is coming for you, my answer would be, ‘No.’”

The officer was coming for her. His name was Rob, he was a lieutenant commander, and he shook her hand pleasantly and said, “You’re up, you can bring your coffee,” and to the escort, “I’m told she’ll be half an hour or so.”

Santeros was on her feet, talking to a fat man, when Becca was ushered into the Oval Office. Santeros smiled at her and waded across the carpet, extending a hand.

“Dr. Johansson, Rebecca,” she said. “Good of you to come, on such short notice.”

“Happy to,” Becca said, biting back a less polite reply: Did I have a choice?

Santeros gestured to the fat man. “This is Jacob Vintner, my science adviser. We’re going to have to make this quick. I brought you here because the United States needs your skills. We want you to design the power management system for a twenty-thermal-gigawatt reactor, and we need it rather quickly. Might you be interested? We want you badly enough to have rushed you here like this, but you’re free to decline. We do have other candidates.”

“I’m currently committed to a project with Minnesota Power—”

“We’ve already talked to your employer and they’re happy to give you an indefinite leave of absence, with no loss of position or seniority, in the national interest,” Santeros said.

“What kind of power plant is this?”

Vintner said, “We can’t really go into the details because of national security. All I can—”

“Wait a minute,” Becca said, jabbing her finger at Vintner. “This has got to be for the Mars mission! You need a big honkin’ reactor, I bet. Hot damn. Okay, I’m in, on one condition.”

Santeros asked Vintner, “Why do all these people have conditions?”

Vintner said, “Because they’re important enough to have them, I guess.”

Santeros was amused. She turned back to Becca and asked, “What’s yours, Rebecca?”

“If I build your power plant, I get to go along.”

Santeros nodded: “Okay.”

Vintner, the bureaucrat: “Before we give you any more details or address your speculations, which we cannot confirm at this moment, we’re going to need you to sign some documents.” He handed her a slate.

“If this is about clearance, I’m already cleared for nuclear work,” Becca said.

“We know that. This is a higher level of clearance. You were vetted for it last night,” Vintner said.

Santeros walked around behind her desk, sat down, looked at a screen, tapped it a couple of times, and said to Becca, “Sit and read it.”

Becca sat and gave it a quick scan. Boiled down to a few words, it said that if she talked out of turn, she was going to jail. She signed it, touched the ID square with her thumb, and handed it back to Vintner.

Santeros offered up the barest of smiles. “So we can give you a detail—and please remember what you just signed. We’re not going to Mars—we’re going to Saturn.”

“Saturn?” Becca was dumbfounded. “Why Saturn? You can’t just be one-upping the Chinese. Jupiter’d be closer. What’s at Saturn?”

Santeros said to Vintner, “You’re right. She is pretty smart.” And to Becca: “More by accident than anything else, one of our astronomical observatories saw what we believe to be an alien starship going into Saturn—and we believe there’s something else there, possibly a station.”

“Holy shit!”

“Exactly. I’m sure you can work out the implications.”

“But…” Becca rubbed her forehead with a knuckle, thinking, then said, “It’ll take us years to get out there.”

“Not with the power plant you’re going to design,” Vintner said.