Saturn Run (The Planetary Trilogy Book 1)

by Stanley Salmons

  His tongue flickered over dry lips.

  There is a way but it’ll make me a massive target for the attacking ships.

  No choice, it’s now or never.

  He fired up the auxiliary propulsion units, grabbed the control stick and started to roll the whole freighter over to the right. He was watching the attitude readouts as he executed the manoeuvre, but he knew exactly when the ships had approached within range because the freighter started to quiver as it was hit by incoming shell fire. He stole a quick glance at the monitor screen. It displayed the cloud of debris he’d seen earlier, the larger pieces apparently moving upwards because of the rolling of the ship. He returned his attention to the readouts, holding the control stick steady and gritting his teeth as the hull was hammered by yet more shells. Then something caught his eye and he glanced again at the monitor. It was the last thing he wanted to see: an incoming torpedo. There was nothing he could do but keep the ship rolling; he couldn’t take avoiding action and he had no countermeasures.

  He held his breath and braced himself for the impact. The whole Flight Deck lit up with the explosion and instants later the ship shuddered from stem to stern as if shaken by a heavy hand, and a hailstorm of bits and pieces rattled on the hull. It took a moment or two to dawn on him that the ship was still flying. The torpedo must have homed in on one of those pieces of debris and detonated short of the real target. But not that short.

  The big freighter continued on the slow roll about its axis and he felt the shocks as more shell rounds found their mark.

  Come on, baby, come on!

  At last the port side was coming down to face the oncoming ships. And the port side had a full complement of torpedoes.

  “Port bays acquire individual targets. Fire at will!”

  Shells and torpedoes streamed out. There was another blinding pyrotechnic display, followed by a pattering of yet more fragments on the ship. By the time his aching eyes had recovered some sort of night vision it was to see that once again he was alone in space.

  He exhaled and rubbed a hand over the back of his neck. It came away shining with sweat. The attack was over, but there was no time for self-congratulation.

  Damage assessment first.

  He displayed a diagram of the ship, colour coded for pressurization. Four of the tubes connecting the living pod to the port cargo pod had been breached and two adjacent port cargo holds were losing pressure fast. Nothing could be done about that; he just hoped the cargo in those holds would survive the cold and vacuum of space. The next thing was a quick systems check. He found that a computer in the damaged section had been bypassed by the network. Otherwise the ship had emerged remarkably unscathed. That was the value of surprise. Finally he checked the navigation system. The ship was still on course.

  The obvious thing to do next was transmit the coordinates to Mission Operations with a request that they pass them straight to Customs. He hesitated.

  If I tell the folk in Mission Ops about the attack they’ll be asking how I can still be around. I don’t want them to know I’ve armed the freighter, not yet anyway. There are still a few ways I could get killed between here and Saturn and at the moment I could still go down as a hero instead of a reckless maverick. That won’t make any difference to me, but it’d matter to Neraya. I can’t do that to her.

  On the other hand if don’t put in a report, that factory will just carry on churning out Blaze and peddling it to the unfortunates on Earth.

  In his mind’s eye he saw yet again the shadowy, tortured figures in the vapour-laden streets under the arches, living out what remained of their lives in pain, sickness and confusion. He was haunted by the memory of his role in that sordid trade. He couldn’t atone for that – but he could try to put a stop to it.

  He composed a message to send as a discrete, encoded packet to Mission Operations on his specially assigned communications channel.

  “SOLAR WIND. ENCOUNTERED NINE UNIDENTIFIED SHIPS FIFTY-ONE THOUSAND FIVE HUNDRED KILOMETRES BEYOND MARS ORBIT. NARROWLY EVADED HOSTILE ATTACK. NOTIFY CUSTOMS WITH VIEW TO INTERCEPTING SUSPECTED ILLICIT DRUG FACTORY AT OR NEAR FOLLOWING COORDINATES.”

  Then he inserted a lookup that would take the coordinates from the correct line of the computer log and transmitted the message.

  They’d know now he’d departed from the Flight Plan, but they’d assume that the ship’s surveillance system had woken him from cryosleep. They’d wonder how he’d evaded a hostile attack but let them wonder. That was as far as he was prepared to go.

  And then he stopped to think.

  Mars orbits at about 228 million kilometres from the sun. Let’s say the orbit is roughly circular, which is good enough for a quick estimate… He spoke to his wrist communicator.

  “Multiply 228 million by 2π.”

  The answer came up: it was about 1400 million kilometres.

  Okay, that’s the rough length of the orbit. What are the chances of me crossing the orbit within even 1000 kilometres to either side of that drug factory? It’s about 1 in 700,000. Do I believe in odds like that? Do I hell! This was no chance encounter. Were they deliberately tracking every freighter coming from Earth orbit or did those guys know when and where I’d be passing? Difficult to see how they could know, the entire operation’s been under wraps from the outset. Even I didn’t know where I was going until Trebus told me a few weeks ago.

  He sighed.

  I suppose the bottom line is, I’ve come through it and I’m still alive and on course, so I should put it behind me.

  He looked around the Flight Deck but there was nothing more he could do. The rest of the trip would take over a year, so this was as good a time as any to prepare for cryosleep.

  First he sent a conventional message to Mission Ops to say he was entering cryosleep. That should stop them coming back to him with questions. Next he had a shower and cleaned his teeth. Still naked, he went to the cryodorm and placed a clean uniform next to one of the chambers. He opened the lid, sat down inside, attached all the monitoring leads and tubes, and activated the computer sequence. Then he self-administered the injection, lay back, and waited for it to take effect.

  48

  When the computer awoke him from cryosleep his first thought was that the cryosleep sequence had been aborted and they were still just beyond Mars orbit. Then as he sat up in the opened chamber he became aware of the thick pounding in his brain, the disagreeable tingling sensation in the palms of his hands, the soles of his feet and his joints. He felt feverish, shivering not because he was cold but because he felt cold in one place and hot in another. It was cryosleep syndrome all right.

  Slowly it penetrated his foggy mind that if he’d been woken from cryosleep they must be approaching the Saturn system. He detached the tubes and electrodes, stepped out of the chamber, and pulled on his uniform. Then he hurried up to the Observation Deck, pausing at the Flight Deck only to flick off the insistent warning alarm that was drilling a hole in his head. As the clamshell doors retracted he was already looking out, fully expecting to see the luminous ball of Saturn glowing ahead of him among the stars. It wasn’t. He had a moment of panic – he must be off course! He descended to the Flight Deck and looked at his position. The ship had travelled a full astronomical unit since he’d settled into cryosleep. That would place them at about 2.6 astronomical units from the Sun, somewhere between the orbits of Mars and Jupiter. What was the problem? There was nothing there except for—

  Except for the asteroid belt.

  He was suddenly wide awake. Remembering the warning alarm he looked at the guidance monitor. It was flashing a red rectangle with the words “SOLUTION CANNOT BE COMPUTED”. He changed the display to see what the problem was. And he caught his breath.

  There were two large asteroids directly in his flight path. The deep-space forward-directed radar had picked them up and the guidance system had tried to compute a new course, within the allowable fuel envelope for the trip. It was saying it was impossible to miss both of them.

>   The asteroids weren’t travelling together, they were just lined up very badly behind one another. What the hell were they doing there? Everyone knew there were objects in the belt that were as big as the freighter – or bigger – and that meant charting the course very precisely, using the very latest asteroid maps. Maps can go out of date, of course. Jupiter’s gravity could stir up the asteroid field, asteroids could collide, an asteroid from somewhere at the edge of the solar system could pass through the belt on an eccentric orbit. They’d loaded the latest asteroid maps, hadn’t they? If the situation had changed since, someone should have registered it, especially if it involved objects of this size. He shook his head. None of that mattered right now; he had to deal with the situation in front of him.

  He fought down the temptation simply to haul the freighter out of its present flight path. Although that would eliminate the immediate danger the fuel costs of regaining his trajectory would – the computer was telling him – exceed his limited reserves. Without sufficient fuel to complete the trip he’d be left drifting helplessly through space. On the other hand it would be equally disastrous if he collided with the asteroids and not just because of the damage. His flight path was virtually in the ecliptic: the plane in which the Earth – and most of the other planets – orbited the sun. That included Jupiter. On his present course he would be crossing the orbit of Jupiter before the giant planet was in the same sector. But Jupiter was on the approach, all the same, with a mass more than three hundred times that of the Earth. Obviously its gravitational pull had been factored in during flight planning. If he should be delayed or disabled or merely knocked off course by hitting one or other of the asteroids he could find himself a lot closer to Jupiter than he wanted to be. At best he’d be pulled way off trajectory. At worst…well, the StarTrader scenario didn’t bear thinking about.

  While all this was flashing through Dan’s head he was searching the computer’s memory banks. Whoever had written this guidance software had put in a simple error-catching routine that displayed “SOLUTION CANNOT BE COMPUTED” and sounded the alarm. The idiots didn’t give a pilot what he really needed, which was an informed choice of alternatives. But he had a program that did – the program that Neraya had written back in their days at the Academy, to solve the very first problem they’d tackled together. That problem had been to avoid one asteroid, and they’d managed to extend it to two. They couldn’t generalize it to more than two because it became so computationally intensive that they couldn’t run it on the facilities then available to them. Wherever he went he’d always kept that program with him. At one time he might have rationalized that it was a lovely piece of writing and you never knew when an object – not necessarily an asteroid – might turn up in your flight path. The real reason, as he was now happy to concede, was that it reminded him of her. He found the program, called it up, and ran it, feeding it the matrix of data from the deep space radar.

  While it was computing he interrogated the radar for more information about the asteroids. It came soon enough and it wasn’t encouraging. One was as big as a city block. The other was somewhat smaller but far more irregular in shape. It could have been formed by accretion from smaller fragments. It didn’t make much difference. He was travelling at eighty-one thousand miles an hour. A collision with either one wasn’t survivable.

  Neraya’s program finished computing. It confirmed there was no solution but it also listed the possible corrective actions, starting at the top with the preferred ones. It showed that if he changed course now he could miss the first asteroid, the larger of the two. The longer he left it the more drastic the correction required, and the further off course he would end up. Without hesitation he entered the change of course into the nav computer and pressed “EXECUTE”. The auxiliary units fired and he waited, breathing hard, until they’d finished. He checked the instruments carefully to make sure the manoeuvre had been completed properly. It had. On this new course he should just miss the first asteroid. After that there was only one problem. The new course would run him straight into the second asteroid.

  His mind raced. He had to get the damned thing out of the way. What about Station Saturn? How would they be dealing with objects like this? That’s what the torpedoes were for, of course. The torpedoes. Were there any left? He’d equipped all the bays for the encounter with Rostov’s fleet but by the time he’d brought the port bays to bear for the second volley there were only three ships left to target. There should be five torpedoes left!

  He checked the port bays. There were three left. That didn’t surprise him. With the ship still rolling a couple of torpedoes could have gone off course; the targets would then have been acquired and destroyed by two of the backups. He knew what kind of payload those torpedoes carried because he’d seen what just one of them could do to a C-class freighter. Three of them should be a match even for a tough lump of rock. The trouble was, they were mounted on the port cargo pod; he had no way of firing them in a forward direction.

  And then an idea began to take form.

  The moment we’re safely past the first asteroid I could use the auxiliary propulsion units to turn Solar Wind around to the right. That way we’d be travelling broadside on, with the port bays – and the torpedoes – facing ahead. The snag is it would make the ship a huge and highly vulnerable target and we’d fly like that right into the cloud of fragments from the explosion. It’d be like hitting a thousand smaller asteroids. The ship’s already taken a pounding from the pirate attack. I’d be a fool to assume it could take a lot more.

  Wait a bit. I can’t avoid those fragments entirely but I’d be less of a target if I swung back to normal orientation the moment the torpedoes were launched.

  Would there be time? From the radar he had the range of each asteroid, so he could get his transit time from the first to the second and calculate the average yaw rate needed to swing the ship broadside on and back again. He worked it out quickly, using his wrist communicator. The result made him wince. He could do it, but only by stressing the flight frame beyond its intended design envelope. The powerful APUs were on the ends of the cargo pods. They would be firing to alternate sides, exerting a torque on the mile-long freighter that the space tug manoeuvres hadn’t even approached. Then the torque would need to be reversed to stop the rotation. Finally the whole exercise would have to be repeated to return the ship to its normal attitude, all within that short transit time. He gritted his teeth. He had to take the chance. He recalled the flight to Veracruz when he’d pushed a supersonic liner close to its limits; he would just have to hope that the engineers were equally conservative when they wrote the specifications for this Spacefreighter.

  There’s another problem, though. How do I guide the torpedoes in? There’s nothing for them to home in on, no heat, no ionization trail. Laser guidance is out – no way can I manhandle one of those big megalasers up to the Flight Deck even if I could get to one in the cargo hold, which I doubt. Radar?

  He accessed the cargo inventory, brought up the torpedo launch guidance system, and asked for specifications. The screen displayed “THIS INFORMATION IS CLASSIFIED. ACCESS TO AUTHORIZED PERSONNEL ONLY. ENTER USER CODE”.

  Oh yeah, that’s why I insisted on access to the entire computer system.

  He entered the user access code Hal had given him. The screen blanked for a moment, then came up with: “SPEK MULTIFACTORIAL GUIDANCE TORPEDO SYSTEM”.

  I’m in.

  For a few frenzied moments he scanned for details of the radar guidance mode. He found it: it was the launcher that transmitted the outgoing beam; the missile homed on any reflections from the target. He chewed his lip.

  That’s fine in space because the only thing around that’ll reflect the beam back is the target. But it doesn’t help me because by the time we’re approaching the target I’ll have swung the ship back to normal attitude and the launcher system will be pointing sideways again.

  What can I use? I’ve got the deep-space radar. That’s a high-frequency, hi
ghly directional radar beam as well and it points forward. Is the receiver in the missile sensitive to that frequency band? Where can I find out? The equipment inventory, of course. God, that’s huge, it’ll take ages. There simply isn’t time. If I’m going to do this I have to go for it now and hope to hell it works.

  A change on the monitor caught his eye.

  The deep-space radar had locked onto the asteroids and directed the forward visual scanner at maximum zoom. The monitor was now displaying a visual on the first asteroid – the larger of the two.

  Oh shit.

  It was a huge stony mass, pock-marked with craters. Even as he looked it was growing in size at a frightening rate – and it seemed to be right in their path.

  A disturbing thought crossed his mind. The course he’d set was the one computed by Neraya’s program. It was an elegant program but it had never been tested in a real-life situation.

  Suppose there’s a bug in it? Suppose it hasn’t compiled properly on this computer? He watched the screen, transfixed by the sight of that colossal ball of rock, getting ever larger.

  Something’s been left out, but what? No use asking. Too late.

  49

  He switched to manual and took the controls. At this closing speed there was nothing he could do about the heading but he might be able to bank the ship as they got nearer to the asteroid to make full use of any gap that appeared.

  He held the control stick and balanced the pedals, eyes glued to the monitor, on which the asteroid was turning slowly, so big now that it almost filled the screen. It looked like there was a chance they might pass to the left and below it. He banked twenty degrees to the right. Then another ten degrees.

  There is a curious detachment about watching a catastrophe unfold on monitor screens, a sense of danger at one remove. When something pulled at the edge of his vision and he looked up from the monitor he saw the actual object with the naked eye. A chill ran through his body down to his toes. He watched, mesmerized, as it tumbled lazily through space, already impossibly large and expanding more and more rapidly. Finally it was just a blur of rock rushing silently towards him. It raced up and over the Flight Deck. He ducked instinctively, eyes squeezed tight shut, every muscle in his body tensed for the impact.