“All right, then let’s table that idea,” Fang-Castro said. “But we’ll hold it in reserve. Dr. Greenberg, if I’m not convinced you can bring the system back online in less than a week, I’m likely to change my mind. Getting the engines back online is our first priority. Anything your people need, and any extra personnel you need, they’re yours. All of the ship’s resources are at your call. Coordinate with Mr. Francisco on this.”
She looked around the table: “Anything else? No? Then let’s do it. Mr. Darlington, you can shut down the recording. Mr. Crow, if you could linger a moment.”
When they were all gone, other than Crow, she asked, “Sabotage?”
He shook his head. “This time, I don’t think so. It was too uncontrolled, and if things had gone differently, could have killed the ship. I don’t think there’s a reasonable . . . mmm . . . process that a saboteur could have followed to create that result. I’ve been looking at it very carefully, talking to my people back on Earth, and we’re agreed on that. Our best guess is a fabrication flaw: at the end of fabrication, back on Earth, we were simply moving too quickly. Another month, we might have caught the flaw.”
“Good.” She smiled briefly and said, “You’re not nearly as paranoid as everybody thinks.”
He ventured a smile himself: “Too paranoid is as bad as not paranoid enough. We stand on a rather narrow ledge: that keeps it interesting.”
When he was gone, Fang-Castro, still in her chair, tapped her slate. A document had been winking at her all morning, and now she opened and scanned it, though she already knew most of it.
“. . . the impact of the molten metal slug on Dr. Johansson’s service egg quickly disabled it. The ship had high-bandwidth communication for 0.8 seconds before that channel went down. Consequently, we have full telemetry as well as the vid feed from the internal safety camera for that brief period. Dr. Johansson’s egg was facing the nozzle assembly when it blew out. The slug of metal hitting the egg was comparable to a front-end automobile collision at highway speed. As the egg was flung back at high velocity, Dr. Johansson’s body slammed into the forward console. Her forehead made full contact with the upper display. Her body rebounded backward, but there were no indications of voluntary motion in the fraction of a second before we lost vid.
“The impact possibly broke her neck, very probably gave her a fatal concussion, and at an absolute minimum knocked her out. There is no possibility she retained any consciousness.
“Low-grade status-sensor telemetry continued for another 3.1 seconds before cascading and catastrophic system failures disabled all communications from the egg. During that time, life-support monitors reported falling pressure in the cabin as well as rapidly increasing contamination of the air. We can’t tell from the incomplete data if this was smoke from onboard fires or ruptures of chemical lines or scrubbers that allowed toxins to enter the air system. Within seconds, at most, the air inside the cabin became fatally unbreathable and/or vented into space. If the impact did not kill Dr. Johansson outright, she died very quickly from asphyxiation or toxin inhalation.”
Ah well, Fang-Castro thought, as she filed the report.
Becca.
37.
Greenberg tilted back and closed her eyes, just for a second—though she didn’t know exactly how long the “second” lasted. The night before, she’d had the granddaddy of all cliché anxiety dreams: all the reactor tests were going wrong, every Level 2 tech had called in sick, she had totally forgotten Fang-Castro was showing up to inspect their progress, she really needed to pee, and on top of all that she’d somehow neglected to get dressed so she was floating next to the primary coolant control panel, naked, when Fang-Castro and Francisco entered the compartment.
None of that resembled the actual case.
The whole crew was running on illegal amounts of stims, but things were getting done. Short of any unexpected problems, they’d be moving again five days after the accident; maybe less.
Desperation was the mother of, well . . . something . . . and she desperately wanted to avoid cross-coupling asymmetric heat flows or any of the other dubious suggestions she’d heard. Previous discussions between Fang-Castro and the late chief engineer notwithstanding, Greenberg was going to run the power plant by the book.
What she was actually doing, she thought, was scheduling, rather than engineering. She’d read somewhere that the most successful generals were not the combat heroes, but those who could best manage traffic, and get fuel and food and ammunition to those who needed it.
Greenberg worked out ways to cut corners, to schedule work in parallel, even to schedule jobs by temperature. As much as possible, work that could be done on a hot heat exchanger was scheduled for the very beginning and very end of the repair queues. She’d been able to get some repair teams on the job within hours of the status meeting the morning after the accident, instead of having to wait a full day for the radiator metal reservoirs to come down to safe temps.
Conversely, as soon as all the fixes that demanded low-temp conditions were completed, she’d ordered the heaters turned on to bring the melt reservoir back up to operating temperature. She had given that word the night before, and currently was waiting on the inspection of the last of the high-temp work.
Becca might have been a tiny bit better as an engineer, Greenberg thought, but I’m a better manager. She was currently avoiding doing the one thing that Becca wouldn’t have avoided: she refused to get in the hair of people who already knew what they were doing and were doing it as fast as they could. Becca would have been on them with a whip, and that would have slowed things down.
She was still sitting with her eyes closed—only for a second—when her wrist-wrap tapped her, and she checked her slate: and she got the sign-off by the inspection team. Time to start making radiator ribbons.
She had a few new moves here, as well. Previously, they were in no hurry to fire up the engines—back then, a few hours one way or another hadn’t mattered. Now they did. Her magneto-dynamicists had burned up the models and figured out that radiator ribbons separated by more than ten meters didn’t really interact with each other. When it came to radiator sail stability, it didn’t matter whether Engineering extruded the ribbons one at a time or started up one in every dozen ribbons simultaneously. It required more people to monitor status boards when fifteen new ribbons got extruded at once, but that was all. She had the people . . .
She touched her comm controls, straight through to Fang-Castro: “Captain, we’re ready to start generating real power again. Should be about two hours from start until we have you at one hundred percent. Awaiting your command.”
“Thank you, Dr. Greenberg. Great job. You’re instructed to bring Reactor 1 up to full power.”
Greenberg: And now we’ll find out if I’m as good a power engineer as Becca thought I was when she made me her second.
Two hours later, she decided she was. Power-up came off without a hitch, and the Nixon began its long deceleration burn. They were still half a billion kilometers sunward of Saturn, but it would take until the end of January to kill all of the ship’s prodigious velocity. By then they’d have overshot their mark by nearly a hundred million kilometers.
The race to Saturn was far closer than the most pessimistic of the mission planners expected.
There’d been no earlier formal memorial ceremony for Rebecca Johansson: too many people who knew her well—the engineers—would have been unable to attend.
The memorial was held the evening of the restart.
Many people cried.
Sandy simply sat there, feeling—and looking, he thought—fairly stupid. In addition to messing with your hormones, the drugs did take out a piece of your brain.
Maybe he should just stay on them forever, he thought.
Real feelings had never really worked that well for him.
38.
Fang-Castro ran into Sandy as t
hey converged on the Commons. As the captain, she did not touch subordinates for good, legal reasons. Now she hooked Sandy’s shirt with a couple of fingers and pulled him aside.
“How are you? Dr. Ang told me you’re coming off the drugs.”
“Just in time for New Year’s,” Sandy said. Becca had been killed two months earlier; they were approaching the orbit of Saturn, though they wouldn’t be stopping there. And, “Thanks for asking, ma’am. I’m feeling fairly bad. Going through the brooding phase, as he calls it. The what-ifs. Dr. Ang tells me that’s good. I’m getting my mind back.”
“The post-traumatic stress . . . ?”
“I’ve dealt with it, you know, for a while. This is a bump in the road, but I’ll be okay.”
She touched his arm: “Very good. I pressed Mr. Crow on your previous service, so I’d know what I was dealing with. I have a good deal of admiration for you, Captain, and you are a most excellent cameraman, as well. I would be pleased to have you on any of my ships, even if you were in the army.”
“Thanks . . . I’ll remember that, ma’am.”
They went on to the New Year’s celebration.
—
New Year’s Eve aboard the Nixon was one for the record books, Fang-Castro thought, as she and Sandy entered the Commons. People had celebrated the coming of the new year for millennia, but never before in a spaceship over a billion kilometers from Earth.
And despite the cheerful dressing, there was a touch of melancholy to it, as well—they were still feeling the loss of their chief engineer.
But as Sandy had said, on the day of the accident, probably in shock but also in truth, dead was dead. Rebecca Johansson was slipping irretrievably into the past, and here, in the present, Phillip McCord, a Nobel physicist, the only Nobel on board, was serving as a most excellent bartender, pouring a most excellent champagne.
The champagne was courtesy of Fang-Castro herself. She’d had a few cases laid in to herald their year-end’s arrival at Saturn. It would have been impossibly wrong to let the combination of the holiday season and the successful completion of their voyage go uncelebrated. The occasion was, unfortunately, not quite the one she’d planned.
Her first officer was standing at the observation window, and she wandered over to him. “Evening, Salvatore.”
“Evening, ma’am.” An uncomfortable look flitted across his face: her use of his first name.
“This is a party. Relax.”
“Trying to, ma’am. It’s quite a view, isn’t it?” He nodded toward the window.
Once every minute, the living modules’ rotation brought Saturn into view. It was an awesomely beautiful sight, hanging so close by that you could almost reach out and touch it. Except that it wasn’t. The nearness was an illusion; Saturn was twenty-one million kilometers away.
That was half the distance from Earth to Venus, a distance at which you’d expect to see planets as nothing more than pinpoints of light. Saturn, though, was huge, so that even at this distance, the flattened sphere looked to be two-thirds the size of Earth’s moon.
The crew members could easily see its lovely bands of tawny clouds; the sharp-eyed might even convince themselves they could make a disk out of the orange, Mars-sized moon called Titan.
Most mesmerizing, of course, was the massive, pearly ring system, half again as wide as the full moon. People had no trouble seeing the fine dark band of the Cassini division splitting the A and B rings, and fine grooves within the rings themselves.
Because of the breakdown at turnover, the Nixon was still traveling at seventy kilometers per second out of the solar system. This was the nearest they would come to the magnificent planet for some time. It would be another month before the crippled propulsion system could bring them to a halt, ninety million kilometers beyond their goal. It would take almost two more months to fly back in and establish an orbit around Saturn . . . assuming that nothing else went wrong.
Francisco was thinking along the same lines, and said, as the planet rotated out of sight, “We’re cutting it fine, aren’t we?”
“We play the hand we’ve been dealt,” Fang-Castro said. She looked up at the massive view screen at the end of the Commons. The picture showed a hundred thousand people jumping up and down in Times Square. Just for this single night, they’d gone to what Martinez was calling “Eastern Standard Fake Time.” The scene they were watching on the screen had taken place more than an hour earlier, but it was just coming in now. “Four minutes until the ball drops. I’m going to go mingle. If you have a moment, go say something cheerful to Darlington, if you please. When we sing ‘Auld Lang Syne’ . . .”
“I will do that, ma’am.”
The minutes counted down, and when the ball hit bottom, everybody but Fang-Castro got kissed at least once, and then Darlington, in his best singing voice, and with Martinez’s arm wrapped around his shoulders, and Fiorella’s around his waist, led the way:
“Should auld acquaintance be forgot . . .” And others began to join in, “and never brought to mind . . .”
There was melancholy, at least some: they were so far from everything, farther than any human had ever been from home. And then there was applause, and the party really began.
Five minutes after the ball fell—time for the singing and the kissing—the vid message came in from Santeros.
“I can’t honestly say I can really appreciate how you all must feel, so far from home,” the President said, from the huge view screen. “But yours is one of the most important missions ever undertaken by mankind, and for the future of your country. I wish you—I wish all of us—the very, very best in the New Year. Please, please be safe: America treasures each one of your souls. I tried to come up with some substantial way to reward the members of your crew for your efforts. I could hardly find anything appropriate, but I can say, and this will be announced publicly tomorrow, that each and every one of you has been awarded the Presidential Medal of Freedom, the highest non-military award your nation has.”
She paused, to allow for applause, and though she’d recorded the message eight hours earlier, she got it: the Commons erupted in cheering and applause, and the President smiled into it.
“In addition to that—Mr. Martinez, Mr. Darlington, would you approach Captain Fang-Castro now? Thank you.”
Fang-Castro, puzzled, looked at the two smiling men as they came to stand on either side of her.
The President continued: “At my direction, and with the concurrence of the Congress and the secretary of the navy, Naomi Fang-Castro is hereby promoted to the permanent rank of rear admiral. Gentlemen, if you’ll do the honors.”
Fang-Castro actually felt a little sag in her knees. She looked at the grinning Martinez and Darlington, who stepped in front of her and showed her the golden shoulder boards with the single star of a rear admiral (lower half).
“You fabricated these down in the shop, didn’t you?” she asked.
“Yes, ma’am,” Martinez said. “Carbon fiber—probably the most resilient shoulder boards ever made. We put some excellent sticky tape on them, so they won’t come off until you want them to.”
He and Darlington pressed them over her regular boards, and they stuck there, just as Martinez promised.
Then the President said, “I’m sure you’ve already done this, but join me now:
“Should auld acquaintance be forgot . . .”
39.
Launch plus a hundred and ninety-five days, eighty million kilometers from Saturn. It was February 7, 2068, back on Earth, but that didn’t mean as much to the crew as it used to. The Nixon had become their world. It was on its way back in to Saturn, had been for a week. Their velocity was up to a piddling twenty kilometers per second and would only get a bit higher; reaction mass was in short supply. They still had eighty million kilometers and six weeks to go before they’d get to Saturn.
Crow sat with his feet o
n his desk and tapped at his slate, looking at the numbers even though he already knew them all, and they wouldn’t change. Six weeks: and it wouldn’t be long after that when the competition showed up. Fang-Castro wanted to have some idea where they stood with the Chinese before that happened.
Crow had been working all of his contacts, both those with access to human intelligence and the techies who pulled things down out of the sky and up out of the buried fiber-optic cables that connected Chinese military installations.
He was met with very little resistance—one middle-level CIA bureaucrat had objected to what he called the “over-allocation of resources to this single project,” and a half hour later had taken a call from the director, in person, in which he learned that the director had taken a call from the President, in person, and the President had mentioned the bureaucrat’s name, and not in a kindly fashion. Did the bureaucrat have Arctic-quality survival gear? If not, he might start looking into some.
Resistance melted like ice cream on a hot sidewalk.
Even with good cooperation, Crow didn’t know much more now than he’d known when he started.
But he did know a few things.
One thing he knew for sure: there was one person on board who was as unhappy as he was: Admiral Naomi Fang-Castro. She had all his reasons and then some. He was responsible for ship security? Fang-Castro was responsible for the ship, period. He looked at the time, sighed, and walked down to her private office, tapped the comm button by her door. A moment later her voice said, “Come.”
He nodded and said, “Admiral,” and took his chair; Fang-Castro poured a cup of tea and pushed it toward him. It had become a ritual they both enjoyed, when enjoyment was on the table.
“Anything?”
Crow shook his head. “No. It’s driving me crazier than it is you. I truly believe we have a spy on board, who has some method of communicating with the Chinese. Probably the Chinese.”
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