Saturn Run

by John Sandford

  There. It. Fucking. Was.

  Three little dots in a row. If this was an instrumentation glitch, then both telescopes were hallucinating exactly the same way.

  Sandy punched in a new group of commands: calculate the current deceleration rate and position, combine it with those from three hours earlier, extrapolate an orbit.

  EXTRAPOLATION: THE OBJECT WILL ACHIEVE SATURN ORBIT IN 13 HOURS.

  The supervisory working group was meeting to argue about targeting priorities, when Sandy knocked on the door and stuck his head in. McGill was up at the whiteboard, writing down lines of mathematical symbols. He caught the words “synchrotron radiation” and “anomalous jets.” Whatever that meant—whatever it was, it seemed to impress the working group. As they turned from the whiteboard to look at Sandy, Fletcher rolled his eyes back into his skull. Then, with an effort, he controlled the reaction and said, with poorly concealed impatience, “What is it, Sanders?”

  Sandy, knowing precisely how much he’d begun to irritate Fletcher, put on his best toothy smile and asked, “How’s it going, big guy?”

  Fletcher ground his teeth. “I’m in a meeting here, Sanders, as you can see. If you could come back in an hour, or maybe tomorrow . . .”

  “The computer found a critical anomaly in Chuck’s Eye and Medium Eye images,” Sandy said. “I thought I should tell you before I called the LA Times.”

  In the momentary silence, one of the postdocs said to Fletcher, “He’s looking at the test images from the vibe fix.”

  Fletcher muttered something to himself, which might have included the word “prick,” and asked Sandy, “Well, Sanders . . . did you get a report?”

  Sandy peered at the piece of paper in his hand, as if he were having trouble reading it, and said, “The computer said there’s a critical anomaly. It says there is an object approaching Saturn, that it is real, that it is kilometers long and across, that its spectra is UV-rich-hot, and that it is emitting hydrogen.”

  Slight pause for effect; Sandy knew he was now the center of attention and didn’t mind milking it for another fraction of a second.

  “Oh yeah, it’s decelerating, and it will achieve Saturn orbit in thirteen hours.”

  The Real Scientists all looked at each other, and then Fletcher said, “Give me that paper.”

  A minute later, he said, “We need to run a confirming series.”

  “Done that,” Sandy said, holding up a second sheet.

  Fletcher looked even more annoyed, started to snap out something, and thought better of it. He took a deep breath. “Okay, and what did that tell us?”

  Sandy handed him the second sheet of paper.

  The working group stampeded down the length of the table to crowd behind Fletcher’s rounded shoulders, as they all read the paper together. After a minute, somebody said, “Sweet bleedin’ Jesus.”

  Fifteen hours later, Fletcher, exhausted from hyperactivity and lack of sleep, scrubbed his balding pate with his fingernails, looked around at the others in the room—the working group plus a couple of Astro Ultra Stars, plus a thin, dark-eyed man from Washington who had managed to scare the shit out of everybody in Astro—and said, “So, what we’re saying is . . . Sanders Heacock Darlington made the most important scientific discovery in history? That asshole?”

  “He couldn’t change a fuckin’ tire,” somebody said.

  “Maybe not,” said the man from Washington, who scared them all. “But he found an alien starship.”

  3.

  President Amanda Santeros tapped her pen, rapidly and unconsciously, against her teeth, as she skimmed the executive summary. She was a thin woman, narrow-shouldered with expertly coiffed dark brown hair. She wore a blue suit and a gold necklace with small turquoise cabochons, a gesture toward her home state of New Mexico. A hint of Chanel No. 5 hung about her, barely discernible through the odors of the waxes and cleaners that kept the Oval Office spotless, sanitary, and bug-free.

  There were eight people with her: Senator Anson Sweet, the Senate Majority Leader; Representative Frances Cline, the Speaker of the House; Admiral Paula White and General Richard Emery, the chairwoman and vice chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff; Gene Lossness, director of DARPA; Jacob Vintner, her chief science adviser; and Ed Fletcher, of the Caltech Astrophysics Working Group, who’d arrived in Washington from Pasadena an hour earlier on a private hopjet, accompanied by the thin, dark-eyed man.

  The man was named Crow. He didn’t sit next to Fletcher. He didn’t sit next to anybody. The President looked at her science adviser and said, “Jacob: an alien starship? I mean, really?”

  Vintner, a fat man with a shiny bald head and small blue eyes, was more than a little nervous. He’d known Santeros since she was in college, had mentored her since graduate school, had been her official science adviser and unofficial confidante throughout her political ascent. It had all been interesting and some of it had been crucially important. None of it had been like this: he felt like a bit player in a bad sci-fi movie.

  “We can’t think of what else it could be,” he said. “Once we had a trajectory for it, we looked at the Large Synoptic Survey database and tracked it back a few weeks. It’s gotta be from interstellar space. Our oldest photographs showed it already decelerating, with a residual velocity above one percent of c.”

  “A little bit more in English?” That was White, the chairwoman. Good military mind, not so strong in physics.

  “One percent of the speed of light. It was already slowing down two weeks ago,” Vintner said, “but was still traveling in excess of three thousand kilometers a second.”

  White nodded: “So, basically, moving a hundred times faster than anything we’ve ever built. That doesn’t make it alien. I mean, we could build something that fast, right? Somebody could.” She meant China.

  Lossness, the DARPA director, chimed in. “Yeah, but we couldn’t make anything very big. Takes a lot of energy to go that fast. This thing is kilometers in size. It’s like, ahh, a million times more massive than the biggest rocket we’ve ever built. It’s hundreds of times the size of an aircraft carrier.”

  The President: “Nobody on Earth built that. We’d know about an industrial base that large.”

  Lossness said, “That’s correct.”

  Santeros turned to Fletcher: “You’re the guy who found this thing, right? What else do we know about it?”

  Fletcher, both exhausted and ebullient, fidgeted a moment, rubbed his bald spot for good luck, and said, “My group of researchers discovered it. Actually, one of the grad students brought it to my attention. He was the one who found it first in some test photos from the Sky Survey Observatory.”

  “Why isn’t he here?” Santeros asked. “Too busy for me?”

  Fletcher shook his head. “No, ma’am. To be frank, he’s a kid who looks at a monitor and matches photos. He doesn’t know much about anything. He’s scientifically incompetent, personally irresponsible, and only got the job because his family is enormously rich—his father’s given Caltech a couple of buildings, and we’d like to get a couple more. The kid’s got a degree in art or something, and spends most of his time surfing and playing guitars. He wouldn’t have anything to contribute.”

  Crow stirred, as if about to say something, but then he didn’t.

  “But not so incompetent that he couldn’t recognize a starship when he saw it,” Santeros said. “And not so irresponsible that he didn’t know enough to bring it to you, am I right?”

  “The computer did most of that,” Fletcher said. “What he did was, he walked down the hall with a piece of paper in his hand.”

  Santeros: “Okay, so what is it doing right now? This starship?”

  “We don’t know. Not in detail. The best we can determine, it’s settled into orbit within Saturn’s rings. We think it may have rendezvoused with something. There’s a moonlet about there, embedded in one of the
rings. Whatever that is, it’s too small for us to make out any details. We see a few flickers in the images, just pixels in size, which make us think that maybe there’s some activity going on there.”

  “What about the moon it rendezvoused with?”

  “We don’t know much about that, either,” Fletcher said. “The Saturn ring system is lousy with these little moonlets. There are hundreds of them, maybe thousands. Most of them we’ve never looked at in detail. This is a pretty typical one, dim and not perturbing the ring system too much, so it’s pretty small and low mass, not something particularly interesting that we’d be paying attention to.”

  “Either that, or it’s something big, hollow, and painted black,” Emery mused.

  “And that’s what you got?” A wrinkle appeared in Santeros’s forehead, which was not usually a good thing for people speaking with her.

  Lossness spoke up. “Madam President, we’re looking across more than a billion kilometers of space and we just can’t see details that small. This thing is huge by human engineering standards, but on the astronomical scale of things it’s almost insignificant. If we hadn’t accidentally caught it in a calibration run, we’d never have even noticed it.”

  Santeros nodded: “Which means that nobody else knows about it?”

  “Very likely not,” said Lossness. “We know how big and how good the best telescopes in the world are, and what they can see. We still put more money into astronomical research than anybody else, we have the best instruments, and we got very, very lucky. There’s always a chance somebody else got lucky, but the odds are a thousand to one against.”

  Santeros turned to Crow and asked, “What’s our security status?”

  Crow said, “We’re off to a decent start. Dr. Fletcher told his working group that if any of them spoke a word of this to anyone, including husbands, wives, significant others, or any one-night stands they were trying to impress, he’d run them out of the astrophysics community,” Crow said. “He apparently succeeded in shutting them down until I got there. I rounded up the same bunch, told them we’d given this the highest military and civilian classifications, and if they talked about it, they would be charged with treason and executed. I was not funny about it.”

  “Were they impressed by the threat?” Santeros asked Fletcher. “Shutting up academics is like trying to herd cats.”

  “They were . . . quite impressed,” said Fletcher. “Mr. Crow scared the shit out of them.”

  “Good. That’s one of the reasons he works here,” the President said.

  Crow said, “I have to tell you, ma’am—it’s gonna leak. It’s too big. There are lots of Chinese working at Caltech and they are patriots. Chinese patriots. They are far beyond smart. Sooner or later, one of them’ll get a whiff of this and it’ll wind up in Beijing. We’ve got some time, but not an unlimited amount.”

  “Give me an estimate,” Santeros said.

  Crow looked down at his hands for a moment, calculating, then said, “Anything between tomorrow and a year from now. Unless something unusual happens, I don’t believe it’ll be close to either end of that line. If we put our smartest security people on it—guys who won’t go out there waving their guns around trying to shut everybody down and drawing a lot of attention because of that—I’d give you either side of a bet on seven months. Assuming that the aliens don’t call us up.”

  “Huh. That . . . uh . . .” The President turned to Emery, the vice chairman of the Joint Chiefs. He was a mild-looking man wearing old-fashioned glasses, with short, sandy hair. He looked more like a college professor than a man who’d directed the early glory days of the Argentine Incursion. “Richard, what’s the military’s assessment?”

  “Gene and I ran this past a couple guys at the think tanks, and, amazingly, people have already considered scenarios like this and looked into their implications.”

  “Which are?”

  “They’re pretty scary, ma’am.”

  —

  “Ray guns?”

  “No. Bad movies notwithstanding, they wouldn’t need them. The geniuses aren’t scared by ray guns, they’re scared by the ship itself.”

  Fletcher started, and muttered to himself, “Oh my, yes.” Vintner nodded and, surprisingly, so did Crow.

  Santeros glanced around the room, settled her gaze on her science adviser, and asked, “Jacob, what’s making all of you twitch?”

  “Ma’am, what I said earlier about how big this thing was and how fast it could go . . . If it ran into something, it would pack a monstrous wallop. You remember about that asteroid that hit the earth sixty-five million years ago, down by the Yucatàn, and wiped out all the dinosaurs? If that starship were to hit us at the speed we know it’s capable of, intentionally or accidentally, it would be like that. Worse than that.”

  Santeros’s eyebrows went up: “You’re serious. That thing could wipe out all life on Earth? Just by running into us?”

  “Well, no, it probably wouldn’t wipe out all life on Earth. Just the majority of all living organisms, and about 99.9 percent of all individual land animals. Most land species would go entirely extinct. We might be one of them. The best we could hope for is that we’d only be bombed back into the Bronze Age. That’s all assuming that the mass is what we think it is. If the mass is radically different—if it turns out to be a big hollow shell—then the impact would be much different. But we don’t think it’s a big hollow shell.”

  “We couldn’t deflect it or blow it up?”

  “We might be able to figure something out if we had a lot of time . . . but we probably wouldn’t have a lot of time, if it was aimed at us deliberately. We can barely see this thing at Saturn. If we got lucky enough to detect it right at that range . . . and that would be saying something . . . we’d have a little less than four days to figure out what it was doing, and to get ready for it. That’s if it never went faster than what we’ve seen. But we don’t really know how fast it can go—we’ve only seen it decelerating. So, if it could go, say, four percent of c, we’d only have a day to get ready. If it can reach twenty percent of c, we’d only have a few hours.”

  They all thought about that for a moment, then Santeros said, “So, to sum up, the simple existence of a starship constitutes an essentially unstoppable threat to human survival. We don’t know how real or how likely that threat is. Is that correct?”

  Everybody nodded.

  “We need to find out,” she said.

  White, the chairwoman, interjected, “Let’s not forget for a moment that whoever these aliens are, they’ve got some tech that we don’t.”

  Lossness, the head of DARPA, said, “We don’t have it, but we can see it from here. A hundred years out, we could build that ship if we had the funding.”

  Emery said, “That’s fine, Gene, but we don’t have it now, and that’s the trouble.” He turned to the President. “The problem isn’t with the aliens. The big problem is, if the Chinese get there first, they may wind up in possession of hard technology that’s a hundred years ahead of ours. In terms of soft tech, biology, chemistry, who knows? They could be a thousand years ahead or ten thousand years. That would not be good. You get advanced-enough technology, and there’s always a way to turn that to a strategic advantage. Always. Imagine the situation if the Chinese had our current computers, and we were stuck with a bunch of old Microsoft Inquirers.”

  Santeros: “So now we’ve got two reasons to get out there. To get our hands on next century’s technology before the Chinese do, and to find out if the aliens plan to ram us.” She turned to Vintner, her science adviser: “Is that even possible, Jacob? For us to get out there?”

  “I’ve been talking to Janetta Jojohowitz, and Gene’s been talking to his people. They’ve pulled in their smartest guys, made it entirely clear this is at the absolute highest level of classification, fed them a cock-and-bull story about wanting to one-up China’s Mars
mission, and then asked them if they had any ideas for getting a mission to Saturn really fast. What they’ve brainstormed at the moment are broad concepts, half-baked ideas. But, yeah, they say it’s doable . . . given the highest priority and a year or so to prepare.”

  Fletcher jumped in. “Ma’am, I’m no intelligence operative, but are we sure that the Chinese ship is going to Mars? Is there any possibility that they spotted one of these aliens five years ago, and are on their way to Saturn? I mean, are we really, really sure it’s going to Mars?”

  White said, “Yes. We’ve seen their specs and their engines and we’re watching the work in great detail. This is all . . . secret . . . so keep your mouths shut, but yeah: it’s going to Mars. In fact, the mission’s purpose is to establish a permanent colony there. Which is the reason they are being so secretive about it.”

  Fletcher leaned back: “And they don’t know about this, this thing out at Saturn?”

  Emery: “Apparently not.”

  Crow reminded them, “Not yet. They will.”

  —

  Santeros turned back to White. “So, from our perspective the immediate problem is the Chinese, not the aliens.”

  “As we see it,” said the chairwoman. “But really, it’s all guesswork. We assume that any race that could build a ship like this, is at least rational. You’d almost have to be, to do the work involved in building the ship. What isn’t guesswork is that we have this competition going with the Chinese. Japan, Russia, and Brazil are on the fence . . . and boy, it’d sure be nice that if somebody gets a hundred years of new tech, it’d be us. At least, you know, until we transit into the post-conflict world.”

  Lossness nodded. “As Crow said, it’s gonna leak. The Chinese are just over a year away from launching their Mars mission. Their ship could be rerouted to Saturn without much work. Basically, they were already planning a long-duration mission to Mars, what with all the equipment and personnel needed to establish a permanent facility there, so they’ve got the supplies and the crew. If they rerouted, well, they’d be nearly ready to go. Offload a bunch of colony equipment, throw in a bunch more mission-relevant supplies, that’d be most of it.”