Saturn Run

by John Sandford

  There were fireworks.

  Earth had never seen a show like the one the Chinese put on. State-of-the-art hypergolic engineering was married to pyrotechnic expertise that stretched back fifteen hundred years. A thousand kilometers above the earth, a round of chrysanthemum bursts three kilometers wide blossomed in gold, pink, and white.

  People didn’t need vid feeds. Everybody on Earth within line of sight of the ship got a clear view of the display of Chinese history, culture, and power. Even with unaided eyes, earthbound humans on the night side of the planet could see multicolored pinpricks and puffballs of light as the ship passed overhead. With simple binoculars, they could see intricate starbursts, fountains, and sculptural fireballs. The show went on for nine orbits of the earth. Nine times, as the ship passed into sunlight, the fireworks ceased; nine times, as the ship passed into Earth’s shadow, they resumed. Over eighteen hours, seven billion people saw a show of glorious and unprecedented scale.

  In the President’s office, Crow conferred quietly with the others.

  “Ten minutes,” somebody said.

  American intel had projected the likely ignition time. Intelligence had been right about the launch date, and they were pretty sure of the tech, but nothing else was certain. Until the Chinese actually launched, nobody in the U.S. had a solid handle on the Chinese’s target arrival date at Saturn. The best guess was two years and change.

  Whatever they had planned, the Chinese were confident enough to be broadcasting live from orbit. Not that it would have done them much good to try to keep the launch secret, but usually they maintained a polite fiction of silence until after a launch. This time, the Chinese had a full professional broadcast crew in orbit, not far from the Odyssey, and they were letting the whole world watch from fifty-yard-line seats.

  The Odyssey was roughly over Beijing, bathed in midday sun. The running commentary from the announcer on board the broadcast ship was interrupted by another voice: subtitles on the Oval Office display identified it as that of the Odyssey’s commander, Captain Zhang Ming-Hoa. He reported to Beijing that all final checks were complete and launch would commence in 10 . . . 9 . . . 8 . . .

  Seven seconds later, the monitor flared white for a fraction of a second until the cameras could compensate. For a fleeting millisecond, Crow wondered if the ship had exploded, even half hoped it had. That would solve a lot of problems. But, no, it was those ten massive nuclear engines coming online, their fiery blue-white exhaust much more brilliant than the surface of the sun. The ship started to move away, steadily picking up speed. Within a minute, it was nearly two kilometers away from the cameras, receding at two hundred kilometers an hour. By space travel standards, it was a snail’s pace, but it looked impressive on the big screen.

  The status display from U.S. tracking reported that the Celestial Odyssey was accelerating at a tenth of a gee, adding one meter per second of velocity each and every second. That was pretty much what DARPA had expected, or at least hoped. The Chinese hadn’t souped up their engines. They seemed to be more or less the same as they had been for the Mars mission. The big question was, how long would they keep firing?

  “All right, everybody out,” Santeros said to the watchers in her office. “I’ll stop down at the situation room every once in a while.”

  Crow, Lossness, Vintner, and top military and congressional personnel shuffled out of the office, and walked down to the situation room for the waiting game. In an hour, the Odyssey, now on the night side of the earth, had reached escape velocity.

  “No surprise there,” a general said. “Christ, I could use a drink.”

  The Chinese engines needed to burn for at least two hours to send the ship to Saturn. The tracking status predicted that if the Chinese cut their engines after two hours, it would take them over seven years to reach Saturn. No one in the situation room expected that to happen, and no one was disappointed.

  Three and a half hours after launch, the engines were still firing. Vintner and Lossness looked at each other and then at Crow, who shrugged. Trajectory status reported a velocity of nearly twenty kilometers per second and a transit time to Saturn of under two years. This was shorter than what the ostensibly knowledgeable experts had predicted.

  Santeros walked in, talking on a handset, spotted Crow, and her eyebrows went up. Crow nodded toward a monitor. The ship was too far away to be anything but a searing blue-white pinpoint of light, but there was no sign of an engine shutdown. The Odyssey continued to accelerate away from the earth.

  “Where are we at?” Santeros asked when she got off the handset.

  “Still moving,” Lossness said. “They’re gonna get there in a hurry.”

  “How big a hurry?”

  “Can’t tell yet, but they’ve already exceeded our projections.”

  Santeros lingered, watching the screen, then, after two minutes, said to Crow, “Call me.”

  With every passing minute, the Odyssey’s ETA to Saturn dropped. The five-hour mark passed. Suddenly, the blue-white speck disappeared; it took the cameras a second to adjust, but then, distantly and dimly, a tiny image of the ship could be made out on the monitor. The Odyssey had completed its ejection burn and was free-falling toward Saturn. Status numbers completed their final update. The Chinese nuclear thermal engines had imparted an extraordinary twenty-kilometers-per-second delta-vee to the Odyssey. The projected transit time to Saturn was a year and a half, with an ETA in late April of 2068.

  Crow pulled up the timeline for the Nixon. If they stayed on schedule, they’d be launching by the end of 2067, which would have them to Saturn just about the same time as the Chinese. Not good. He called Santeros, and five minutes later he, Vintner, and Lossness were back in the Oval Office.

  “This isn’t acceptable,” Santeros said. “Best case, we and the Chinese are there at the same time, and that’s a powder keg waiting to blow up in our faces. Worst case, our schedule slips and they beat us to whatever’s out there. We need to get there faster. I don’t care how you make it happen, but make it happen.”

  She looked up into thin air and said, “Gladys, tell the kitchen to send fresh pots of coffee to Vintner’s office, then meals for Crow, Vintner, and Lossness.” The White House computer pinged acknowledgment. “Jacob, Gene, figure this out. Call in whatever resources you need. Crow, I want you in on this so you can report back to me and in case any of their ideas have security implications we need to be on top of. By the morning briefing, I want to know how we’re going to beat the Chinese to Saturn.”

  Crow had been running on catnaps for two days, trying to stay on top of last-minute intelligence about the Chinese launch. More stim pills.

  Two hours later, in Vintner’s office, the three of them were well-caffeinated and fed, but they weren’t any happier. Crow massaged his forehead. “So, really, there’s no way to speed up the trip? Neither of you geniuses can come up with anything?”

  Lossness grimaced. “Not enough to matter. Constant-boost trajectories eat up energy like a son of a bitch. If we could figure out how to up the ship’s power by fifty percent, it wouldn’t trim more than a month off the travel time, and that’s still too close for comfort. And, anyway, we can’t do it.”

  Vintner looked up from his third cheeseburger—Crow marveled, where did the man put it all?—“Gene, any chance your guys didn’t optimize the trajectory for the shortest trip?”

  “You’re kidding, right? Fastest is what we asked for—fastest is what we got. But if it will make you happier . . .” Lossness checked the time. “It’s the middle of the night in California . . . he should be home. I could call our orbit maven at JPL.”

  “Do it,” Crow said.

  A few minutes later, a sleepy-looking David Howardson peered at them from a vid screen. “This is Dave. Hey, Gene . . . Ah, let me guess. The timetable’s shot.”

  “In spades. Any chance in hell that you didn’t pull together the faste
st trajectory for our ship?”

  Howardson gave him a look.

  “I didn’t think so,” Lossness said.

  “I take it there’s no possibility of making the ship significantly faster, right?” Howardson asked. He was pulling up ship’s specs and orbital simulations on his slate while he talked.

  “Not in the time we have left,” Lossness said. “Sorry to wake you. We need to get back to brainstorming before Santeros has us dismembered.”

  “Hold on a sec.” Howardson was reading through his logs. “I’m looking at the simulation optimization you requested six months back. It’s the right answer—it gets you there fastest, which is what you asked for. You wanted the fastest trip because it reduces the expenditure of life-support supplies.”

  “Yeah?”

  “But now you’ve changed the question. Implicitly, anyway. You don’t want to get there fastest, you want to get there soonest. Right?”

  Crow interjected, “What’s the difference?”

  Dave was dragging orbital curves around on his screen, fiddling with launch dates and noting arrival times. “The difference is that you’ve got so much delta-vee in this ship that you’ve got a huge launch window. It’s like the better part of five months. The fastest trip is at the end of that launch window, sometime in December of next year. But you could launch as early as, mmm, July? I’ll have to do some numbers to nail it down. You’ll still get to Saturn. It’s just that the trip takes longer. But let me see . . . mmm, it’d only take about a month longer. If you’re able to launch in July, that’d buy you four months on the ETA. You get to Saturn for Christmas—that’s a rough guess, of course. I’d need to run a finer-grained simulation.”

  Gene said, “Get on it.”

  Howardson grinned. “There is one catch, though.”

  Crow asked, “What?” in a tone that suggested he didn’t want to hear about catches.

  The grin disappeared. “The ship’ll be doing a flyby of the sun. If you launch in late July, Saturn will be on the far side of the sun. You don’t launch out, you launch in, right toward the sun, swing past it and let its gravity bend the ship’s trajectory so that it’s on target for Saturn on the far side.”

  “How close are we talking?” Lossness asked.

  “Couldn’t say quite yet. Looking at my pictures here, I’d say somewhere inside the orbit of Mercury, maybe as little as 0.2 AU.”

  “Thanks. Get back to me when you’ve got the refined model.” Lossness logged off the connection.

  Vintner looked at Lossness. “Can we advance the schedule that much? Launch in nine months instead of fourteen?”

  Lossness nodded. “Pretty much got to, pending Dave’s finished simulation. And we’ll need a design mod for close solar operations.”

  Crow: “I’m guessing your engineers are gonna love that.”

  Becca got a call from Vintner just before dinnertime. From the background, she could tell he was in his private office, which was little more than a cubbyhole. He used it for private conversations.

  “Hey, Becca. Is this a good break point?”

  “Hiya, Jacob. As good a time as any,” Becca said. “We finished another control simulation. We’re doing good here.”

  “You may not feel that way in a minute. I’ve got news you’re not gonna like.”

  “Santeros scrubbed the mission?”

  “That’d make life simpler, not harder. She’s advanced the launch date by five months. You’ve got nine months to get ready.”

  Becca responded, and when she ran out of breath, Vintner asked cheerfully, “All done? ’Cause, you know, you were repeating yourself there at the end. I think you said ‘bitch’ at least four times and ‘motherfucker’ five or six.”

  “Funny. What in the hell is she doing?” Becca asked. She could feel the heat in her face: she must be glowing red on Vintner’s screen.

  Vintner filled her in on the Chinese mission status and the planning session on the night before. “So that’s the size of it. I’m sending you Howardson’s new trajectory model right now.”

  Becca blinked up the plots and the time markers, read through them. “Okay, that’s clever. Cutting it a little close to the sun, aren’t we?”

  “Yeah, the ship design guys’ll have to rig up a heat shield for the close approach, so we don’t overload our cooling systems. Shouldn’t be a big deal. We’ll deploy an aluminized plastic film parasol that will reflect ninety percent of the extra sunlight. We’ll jettison the parasol on the way outbound. And speaking of heat, how will this impact your cooling system?”

  Becca hummed for a minute. “Well, absent any clever tricks, it’ll diminish my thermal outflux by, I’m guessing, maybe twenty-five percent for about two weeks. Only while we’re within about a quarter AU of the sun. We’ll have to cut back on thrust, but that shouldn’t cost us more than a couple of days and we’re picking up, what, four months, after we add back in the extra flight time? Couple days one way or another won’t make a difference.”

  Vintner nodded. “I’ll leave it to you to coordinate with the propulsion engineers and get a modified thrust profile to Howardson to plug into his model.”

  “Jacob, do we need all five months? I mean, do we really have to launch at the beginning of the launch window?”

  Vintner sighed. “Honestly, I don’t know. Probably not. But this is turning into more of a race than we had planned, and we don’t know what we’re going to find out there or how long we’re going to have to stick around investigating it before heading back to Earth. We don’t want to collide with the Chinese—that’s a party Santeros wants to avoid.”

  “Okay.”

  “Which leaves the big question. Can you complete your part of the project in nine months?”

  Becca asked, “What happens if I say no?”

  “Santeros doesn’t like to be told no. If I have to tell her you’re not up to it, she’ll send me off hunting for a replacement,” Vintner said. “If I hunt long enough, eventually I’ll come across someone who’ll say yes, just for the opportunity.”

  Becca sighed. “No doubt. But they won’t be able to do it. There’s not enough time for them to come up to speed on my design and not enough time for them to come up with one of their own.”

  Vintner nodded. “That’s pretty much my take on it. Even if you don’t think you can do it, the odds are still better if you do it than if someone else tries. So, what the hell. Say yes.”

  Becca fidgeted. Buying into a schedule she didn’t believe in was a plausible path to professional suicide. On the other hand, quitting in midstream would also trash her reputation. Game theory, she thought. If I quit now, I keep my professional integrity and it’s a sure loss. If I stick it out, there’s a chance I might be able to pull it off and no one will know that I was blowing smoke. A guaranteed loss vs. a possible win.

  “I’ll give it a try.”

  “Thanks. I’d love to be able to tell you that nobody will hold it against you if you can’t pull it off, but we both know that’d be a lie. If we don’t beat China to Saturn, we’ll all be pilloried. The President will tank and she’ll make sure we’re all in the handbasket with her. Talk to you later.”

  Vintner hung up.

  Becca threw her coffee cup across the room where, unsatisfactorily, it bounced without shattering off a whiteboard and landed in a corner of the carpeted floor. Fuck it, she was done for the night. She shut down her workslate, pushed back her chair, and walked out of the office. Tomorrow was going to begin an unrelenting hell. Tonight she was going to study some margaritas.

  15.

  Sandy had spent a week working on the vid for the first test of the Nixon’s power plant. In fact, he’d worked right through New Year’s Eve, three days earlier. Fiorella, as it turned out, was a genius at explaining complicated technical matters in terms that anyone could understand, and occasionally even laugh at. />
  As with Becca Johansson’s solution for dissipating waste heat from the reactors . . .

  Sandy launched his egg from the central axle and took it a kilometer out. In the past year, the metamorphosis of USSS3 station into the Richard M. Nixon had come a long way. He’d documented all of the major construction activities, the vid instantly relayed groundside. If anything went wrong, if there were any problems, analysis of the vid might give clues for possible fixes.

  The Nixon was obviously a reworked USSS3. It still had three parallel tubes, side by side and spaced a hundred meters apart. The two outer tubes, each a hundred meters long, still contained the ship’s living quarters and were still known as Habitats 1 and 2. The center tube, the axle, contained storage and the shuttle bay.

  The axle, instead of stopping where it intersected the rear connecting elevator tubes, continued back for another two hundred and seventy meters. About halfway back on the extended axle—all of it still zero-gee—were the engineering section and the twin reactors of the nuclear power plant. At the aft end, another hundred meters away from the reactors, the VASIMRs were still under construction. Between the reactors and the engineering system were a cluster of spherical tanks that would hold the thousands of tons of water that would make up the reaction mass for the VASIMRs.

  And then there was Becca’s answer to the waste heat problem. In the nine weeks since the Chinese had launched, she’d moved heaven, Earth, and no small number of recalcitrant engineers. Between Engineering and the reactor modules, two four-hundred-meter-long masts projected out from the center axle, from Sandy’s viewpoint, one “up,” one “down.” At the end of each mast was what Sandy, who had done some sailing, thought of as a spar—but which also looked like the crossbar on a capital letter T.

  Two more beams, the same length as the top spars on the T, projected out “horizontally” for a hundred meters on both sides of the axle. They held the extrusion nozzles for the molten radiator alloy that Becca Johansson would use to cool the reactors. The “T” spars would re-collect the now-frozen alloy, effectively thin sheets of foil, and send it back to the reactor.