Saturn Run

by Stanley Salmons

  “You are a sensitive person, Danny,” she said. “Don’t apologize. I will explain to you.” She flashed glances to either side to make sure no one was near enough to overhear.

  “I am Lebanese – I was born in Beirut. My father was killed and my mother married again, to a man she met when she was working at the French Foreign Office. We moved to Paris with him when I was just eleven years old. His name was Robert Delveaux. So you see it is from him that I get my name.”

  “I see.”

  It seemed an unremarkable explanation, which did little to account for her initial reaction, and he was satisfied. However, she went on:

  “I cannot remember much about my real father now; Robert Delveaux became my father. I adored him. He had come to marriage late in life – he was in his forties – and he could not believe his good fortune to have a ready-made family. When he came home he would leave his work and worries behind him at the office and he and I would read or play chess or we would all go for walks along the Seine, and he would take us to interesting places and explain their history. Sometimes I would see my mother just looking at the two of us and smiling with tears in her eyes. It gave her much joy to see how we loved each other.

  “I went to good schools and I started to learn English. I have always been good with languages. I spoke Arabic with my mother, French with my father and my friends; now I was speaking English, too. I can still speak, read and write all three.

  “Maman thought I would study languages but I was more interested in mathematics and engineering, so I started at the Ecole Polytechnique. I was really happy there.”

  Dan had a feeling of growing alarm. The happiness she was talking about didn’t tally with the emotional tension he could sense building inside her. Those dark eyes were growing more and more sad and her mouth had started to quiver. He wanted to stop her but she drew herself up with an effort and continued.

  “Then Papa had to go to Athens on a short diplomatic mission. Maman had never been to Greece so they decided to go together. She called me from Athens. They were having such a lovely time.” Her voice went flat. “On the way back the plane crashed. They were both killed.”

  His heart fell six floors and cold currents shivered through his back. He reached impulsively for her hand. “Neraya, I’m so sorry. Oh my God, what can I say?”

  She attempted a small, brittle smile but her beautiful eyes were swimming with tears.

  “I left Paris as soon as I could. Too many memories. I wanted to travel far, far from there. I spent many hours searching the WorldNet, looking for a place I could go. Then I discovered the Space Fleet Academy course. It looked interesting. They had a small international entry. My qualifications were more than enough for admission. So that’s how I got here.” She looked at him anxiously. “Danny, you won’t say anything…”

  “Jeez, Neraya, you know you don’t have to ask me that. This is strictly between us and there it’s going to stay.”

  “Thank you. The girls are very sweet but they are so young. In years I am not so much older but I feel I have lived a whole lifetime longer than them. You too are young but I feel there is pain in you as well.”

  Dan wondered how she had picked that up. “You’re right, Neraya. I’ve lost my family too – not as tragically or as suddenly as you did but just as surely. We’re alone in the world, you and I.”

  Her eyes were brimming again and she dabbed at them impatiently with a tissue, then crumpled it in her hand. She had a lot of trouble controlling her voice. “It is not worth to love someone, Danny,” she burst out. “They leave or they die and the pain, it is too great.”

  “I don’t know, I’ve never loved like that. But if it happens to you I’m not sure you can do much about it. It’s the way we’re made.”

  “I expect you are right.” She was silent for a moment. “Thank you for listening to me.”

  “You don’t have to thank me. No one should have to carry a burden like that alone. That’s what friends are for.”

  “Yes. We are friends, aren’t we, Danny?” She looked into his eyes, as if seeking confirmation there.

  “Of course we’re friends. Let’s always be friends.”

  “Always is a long time, Danny.”

  “Always,” he said emphatically.

  Later on the group was getting up and preparing to leave and generally milling around near the door, when Karl Stott sidled up next to Dan.

  “Word of advice, Larssen, old boy. Stay away from Neraya.”

  Dan blinked incredulously. “I’m sorry?”

  “I said stay away from Neraya.”

  “You know, I’m not altogether sure I understand what you’ve just said. It sounded almost like you were warning me off her.”

  Stott’s mouth tightened. “That’s exactly what I was doing. I’m moving in there and I don’t want you in my way.”

  Dan fought to control his anger. “I’ll tell you what, old boy,” he said between his teeth. “I think Neraya is intelligent enough to make her own decisions.”

  “Be careful, Larssen. People don’t get in my way. Not for long.”

  Dan had no proprietorial rights over Neraya but he felt a fierce need to protect her from the likes of Stott. He didn’t think for a moment she would accept this arrogant oaf’s advances, but he had a big mouth and it wouldn’t help her if he included her in his imaginary conquests.

  “Listen here, Stott,” he hissed at him. “You harm that girl or her reputation in any way and you’ll sure as hell wish you hadn’t. Do I make myself clear?”

  Stott’s eyes flashed angrily. “Don’t say I didn’t warn you, Larssen,” he said, and melted back into the crowd.

  8

  Space Fleet Academy saw its primary task as training pilots, and the foundation course contained a whole range of relevant disciplines, including mathematics, physics and astrophysics, geography, geology and planetary geology, navigation, communications, computing, and instrumentation.

  The instructors rotated between groups. The cadets saw little of the fierce Dr Claymore after their induction and most of their instructors were quite informal. The one Dan liked best was Craig Chapman. An ex-pilot, he didn’t mind straying from the syllabus for a while to show them how a topic fitted into the context of a flying job. On one occasion he went further than that and gave them some unexpected insights into long-haul space travel. At the time Dan regarded this as a necessary step in his education. He had no idea how relevant it was going to become.

  “Right, ladies and gentlemen,” Chapman said. “I thought we’d spend a little time today talking about shuttles. In your fourth year you’ll go out to the International SpacePort and you’ll spend six weeks or more up there, flying shuttles and learning to dock them. You’ll have stationary docks, moving docks, and rotating docks, and you’ll approach them in every possible orientation. Then you’ll do it all over again. By the end of three weeks you’ll be bored witless – everyone is. So why do we spend so much time on shuttles?”

  He looked questioningly around the class but there were no offers.

  “I’ll tell you: there isn’t a single interplanetary craft that can land. Whether you’re a spaceliner carrying people or a spacefreighter carrying cargo, you never descend from orbit, so your payload has to be brought up to you by shuttle. Let’s take an extreme example: the new E-Class Spacefreighter. Now I’ve never flown one of these, and neither has anyone else because they’ve only just gone into production, but they’ll be in service by the time you come out of the Academy. The general layout’s common knowledge and it’ll be a good illustration of what I’m trying to say.”

  He started to sketch with a stylus on the pad set into the front desk, and the cadets watched the drawing progress on the wall screen behind him. It consisted of three long cigar shapes.

  “The E-class is a triple hull.” He pointed at the middle shape. “Here’s your living pod. It houses the Flight Deck, Observation Deck, living quarters, cryodorm, main life support systems, communications,
control, data banks – everything you need to keep you alive and on task. It’s flanked by two long cargo pods.” He tapped the other two outlines. “Two hundred and four cargo holds, 102 each side.”

  Bunny frowned. “Sir, just how long is this thing?”

  “About a mile.”

  The cadets looked at each other.

  “The cargo holds don’t communicate with each other and every one of them has its own dock. So in theory every hold could be rented by a different company. In practice, of course, a company rents a number of holds, maybe twenty or even fifty. The point is, they have to send a freight shuttle to dock on each hold. Every company needs at least one shuttle and they often operate several. That’s a lot of pilots. The companies expect Space Fleet Academy to meet their needs, so the Academy puts a lot of emphasis on that part of the training. There you are. Simple.”

  “If the holds are rented by different companies, how can they stop the shuttles docking with the wrong ones?” asked Liam, who was sitting next to Bunny.

  “Good point, Mr Gowan. The holds are identified with large letters and numbers. Each one has an access code. If it’s the wrong hold you can’t dock successfully. That’s one reason you need so much practice docking. If there’s a problem you have to be sure it’s the code – not just you making a pig’s breakfast of it.”

  The cadets grinned. Chapman continued:

  “A company only has access to its own holds; it doesn’t even know what’s in the others. That’s how the carrier guarantees security. But there’s one man who has access to every single cargo hold, as of right. Do you know who that is?”

  Stott was sitting in the second row with a couple of his cronies. He looked around the class, eyebrows raised, as if he knew the answer and just wanted to see if anyone else did. It irritated Dan and it probably irritated Craig Chapman because he put him on the spot.

  “Mr Stott?”

  “The carrier’s representative, obviously.”

  “I meant during the flight.”

  “Oh.”

  “Anyone else? No? I’ll tell you, then. It’s the pilot. He has overall responsibility for the rest of the crew, the cargo and the entire flight so he needs to know what’s there and that it’s safely stowed. It’s a big responsibility – their lives may depend on it. He can delegate, of course, but he’ll want to keep an eye on the more critical cargo himself. There’s no rush – it takes two to three weeks to load a spacefreighter that size. He supervises the loading and he has access to the holds throughout the flight. All the cargo holds are pressurized and environmentally controlled, by the way. Makes them easier to load and unload and easier to inspect. Often as not it keeps the cargo in better shape, too. Some types of machinery, for instance, don’t tolerate space vacuum very well.”

  “Sorry, I didn’t follow that. How he can access the holds during the flight?” Bunny asked.

  “Hey Bunny, he just strolls round outside and takes a peek,” jeered Stott, and his cronies chortled.

  Liam turned round angrily. “Shut up, Stott, she was only asking.”

  Chapman intervened. “Okay, okay. It’s a perfectly reasonable question, Miss Marshall.” He drew a series of lines connecting the central living pod to the two cargo pods. “The whole thing’s held together by a series of tubes. They’re angled like this, some forward, some backward, because that makes the structure more rigid. The tubes are easily big enough for a man to walk through, in fact they’re designed for it.” He pointed to the drawing. “Say your pilot wants to inspect Cargo Hold 19. He comes along the living pod, and where each access tube meets it there’s a door. He goes to the door with the number ‘19’ on it. It’s an airlock – for safety in case of a bad meteorite hit, for example. He goes through the airlock, down the access tube, and at the other end, where it meets the cargo pod, there’s an airtight door. You don’t need a full airlock there, just a door that’ll seal off the access tube if it loses pressure. Through that and he’s into Cargo Hold 19. Okay?”

  Bunny nodded.

  “The whole structure is pretty strong for its size: it’ll withstand high forces, particularly in the fore-and-aft direction, but you could never land something like that: it would just flex; the access tubes would buckle and the whole thing would collapse. That’s why you guys have to learn how to pilot shuttles.”

  The cadets were quiet as they absorbed the information.

  “Those big freighters use plasma drives, don’t they?” Dan asked.

  “That’s right, Mr Larssen,” Chapman replied, “two nice big plasma engines. They’re carried in a couple of nacelles here”, he added a pair of short ellipses to the diagram, “above and beyond the rear of the living pod.”

  “What I was wondering was, how different are they to chemical propulsion systems?”

  “You mean from the pilot’s point of view?”

  “Yes,” Dan said.

  “Okay, you’ll be dealing with propulsion systems later in the course so I’ll only say a bit about this now. To my mind the plasma engine’s the most important invention of the last hundred years – in fact I can’t imagine how we could have expanded into space without it. Plasma doesn’t give you the scorching acceleration of a chemical unit. The big difference is that these drives can go on and on for an hour or more, accelerating you up to a really high cruising speed, which is what you need when you’re travelling long distances. Your Auxiliary Propulsion Units are chemical, of course, but you only use the APUs at either end of the journey. They’re mainly there for course corrections and attitude changes.

  “There’s another important difference. With your modern chemical propulsion systems you have fine control of speed and acceleration. You don’t have that with plasma drives – you can’t blip them. What that means is, you’ve got to calculate the exact timing and duration of your burn, otherwise you’ll end up being where you don’t want to be.”

  “I’m not sure I understand that,” put in Liam. “Does it matter if you get up to cruising speed a few minutes earlier or later?”

  “You’re only thinking about acceleration. There’s more to it than that. You’ve got to decelerate at the other end.”

  “Of course. How do you do that with a plasma drive?”

  “You have to turn the whole craft end for end, and then you fire up your drives again. If your destination’s a planet or a large moon you’ll normally use the APUs at the last moment to kick into orbit. If there’s a Space Dock you’ll time it so you go into stationary partnership. But whatever you do, you sure as hell want to get it right. And I mean spot on.”

  Most of the cadets nodded vigorously but Liam still looked puzzled.

  “Well is that really true, sir?” he asked. “You wouldn’t be taking a big freighter like that to an unmanned destination, so there’ll be space tugs at the other end, won’t there? Couldn’t they bring you in if you got it slightly wrong?”

  “All right, but how wrong is slightly wrong? Remember, you’re going very, very fast, typically eighty thousand miles an hour. You may have been travelling for weeks or months but if you start your burn twenty seconds late you’ll overshoot by four or five hundred miles. You may not have enough fuel left to close that distance. Space tugs have limited range, so they can’t bring you in. You could be wrong in other ways. You might start your burn right on time but it’s too short by one percent. You know what happens then? You pass your target at nearly a thousand miles an hour. No space tug is going to be able to rendezvous with that either.”

  “Those are quite big errors, though,” Liam persisted. “You’re not going to be that far out are you?”

  “Of course you’ll try not to be. But there’s plenty of scope for things to go wrong after your ship’s been exposed to vacuum, differential heating, cosmic rays, micrometeorites and God knows what-all. You do your best but you can’t foresee everything.”

  Liam raised his eyebrows. “You make it sound risky, piloting something like that.”

  “Of course it’s risky. It
’s damned risky. Who said it wasn’t?”

  9

  By the end of the first year Dan Larssen was at or near the top of his class in every module of the course. His earlier uncertainties had vanished; he entered the second year confident of his abilities, well liked by his instructors and by most of his fellow cadets. His future seemed assured.

  Then it all went wrong.

  It started with the “farmer’s boy” incident. By now Dan had developed a thorough-going dislike of Karl Stott, his hostility heightened by Stott’s lecherous intentions towards Neraya. The rivalry became open. Stott never allowed ignorance of a subject to stop him from voicing his opinions and he expected people to take notice of them because he was the Fleet-Admiral’s son. This presented frequent opportunities to put him down and Dan seldom overlooked them. Few of the other students had much time for Stott’s overbearing manner and they came to enjoy the verbal sparring in class, the more so as Dan invariably came off best. If he played his cards right Stott would get furious and dig himself an ever deeper hole and the other students would start laughing and shouting, and the instructor would have to intervene and settle them all down again.

  On this particular occasion the tutorial was on planet habitability and terraforming. The instructor, Dr Bartlett, had started by posing an interesting question. “You have landed on a hitherto unexplored planet in another solar system. What measurements should you make to determine whether this planet has the potential for sustaining human habitation?” This led them into a discussion about soil characteristics and their suitability for different crops. It was a subject on which Stott knew even less than usual but he held forth just the same. When he’d finished, Dan simply started to make points of his own.

  “Sir, may we assume there’s water around?”

  “Oh yes, I think you should assume that.”

  “Then a lot would depend on whether the soil had supported plant life before. If it had there’d be a good chance that it would have the right texture for retaining moisture. If not you might have to condition it in some way, otherwise the water would just run through it. Water content’s important: you might need to contain evaporative losses, depending on ambient temperature and pressure and humidity and the nature of the soil surface. Also you may have to adjust the pH or restrict yourself to crops that can tolerate acid or alkaline conditions. Then there’s the presence of elements like phosphorus and magnesium. If the soil hasn’t got them you’ll have to bring them in, and that could be expensive.”