Saturn Run

by John Sandford

  “All those analysts at the NSA, there are supposedly tens of thousands of them, they can’t find anything?” Fang-Castro asked.

  “That’s not the problem,” Crow said. “There are no countermeasures that can keep me from collecting information, but there are countermeasures. Ninety-nine percent of the information we’re taking in is actually noise, or active disinformation. The opposition knows they can’t prevent us from tapping in, not entirely and not for very long, so they try to bury us. I can see the forest for the trees, but almost all of the trees are fakes. They are there to lead us down the wrong path. Admiral, everyone lies. All the time.”

  Fang-Castro: “You’re saying there’s no way to ferret the truth out of the noise?”

  “I’m not quite saying that. We have tools. Contextual analyses, time-stamp discontinuities, tail-thread stubs, meta-patterns, and a lot more that the supercomputers can throw at the problem. Most of the time they’ll tell me what’s a bogus plant and point me toward the one true oak. But this time we’re playing for the highest stakes in at least half a century, maybe ever, and everyone’s pulling out their A Game. The disinformation is fierce and sophisticated.

  “My best thread says the Chinese are behind the sabotage. That might be true. It might also be a plant by one of the other geopolitical unions, who wouldn’t mind seeing the relationship between the two superpowers get chillier, especially if one of them, or both, is about to acquire starship tech. It could even be disinformation by a faction within the Chinese government. Santeros doesn’t have a monopoly on hawks.”

  “What about sabotage on the Chinese ship?”

  “Don’t know. Anyone with a decent-sized infrared telescope could figure out that we had a problem when our heat signature and trajectory changed. Post-launch-boost phase, the Celestial Odyssey has mostly been in free fall. If they’re having propulsion system problems, they wouldn’t be anywhere as obvious. Maybe that midcourse burn of theirs was a glitch, not a plan. We just don’t know.”

  “So that’s it?”

  Crow hesitated, and hesitated some more, and his eyes went down then cut toward her, and finally he said, “On New Year’s, just for that night, you told me I could call you Naomi. I need to call you Naomi again. Just for a few minutes—this is way off base, but . . .”

  “You’re not going to make a pass at me?” She was amused.

  So was he. “If your preferences were different . . . you’re probably my type. But no. I’m not gonna make a pass.”

  “So call me Naomi. For a few minutes.”

  “Thank you, Naomi. I’ve been involved with discussions between the President and her advisers. They believe it’s not necessary to bother you with them. So I’m putting my ass in your hands, so to speak.”

  The intelligence nets on Earth, along with the agencies’ science people, Crow told Fang-Castro, had determined that the Chinese ship’s midcourse burn had not only advanced their arrival time by weeks, it had seriously hampered their plans for establishing orbit around Saturn. They would go into the Saturnian system five kilometers per second hotter than they’d planned. The intelligence coming in suggested that the burn had been devised under direct pressure from the general secretary.

  “The problem is, Naomi, that the Celestial Odyssey may not have the reaction mass to kill enough velocity to achieve a close orbit around Saturn. It’s possible that they’ve been able to lighten their ship enough to make some kind of orbit, but that is not likely,” Crow said.

  “Why wouldn’t our people tell me that?” Fang-Castro asked.

  “Because it’s equally unlikely that the Chinese decided to go ahead and commit suicide. They’re up to something and the intelligence guys think that smells like trouble for us. The reason they’re not talking to you is, they want to decide how we react. They don’t want you getting out the law books and deciding on what to do about a distress call, they want to decide. They’ve worked up a bunch of different scenarios, including saying, ‘Fuck it, let ’em die.’ Depending on what we find at the alien site, of course.”

  “I wouldn’t do that—let them die,” Fang-Castro said.

  “But what do you do if Santeros, backed by the secretary of the navy, calls Francisco and tells him that you’ve been relieved of command, and he’s the new commander—and ‘fuck it, let ’em die’?”

  “Francisco wouldn’t do it,” she said. “That’s why he’s my Number Two.”

  “But what about your Number Three, Naomi? And so on.”

  They sat and stared at each other for a moment.

  Then she asked, “What if the Chinese planned for the midcourse option in advance, and they’ve got a leaner, meaner ship that can make it to Saturn, establish orbit, and make it back?”

  “That’s the best case. That’s what we’re hoping for. But honestly? Nobody thinks it’s likely. Burning through the extra reaction mass when they left Earth orbit would have bought them a lot more time than the midcourse burn. Everybody now agrees that was a Plan B. Another possibility is that they’re going to orbit much farther out, well beyond Saturn’s rings. That’ll reduce the delta-vee requirements for establishing orbit, but it would leave them with a several-day trip time between their ship and the alien whatsit. That’s more than inconvenient, it’s unpredictably dangerous. They don’t have any more ideas than we do what or who is there, or what the environment is like around the alien station.”

  “Somebody suggested to me that they might have some kind of small return ship attached to the Celestial Odyssey.”

  “We’ve discarded that idea: more intelligence,” Crow said. “They’ve got a couple of buses, like ours, to get them back and forth from the alien site, but that’s it. No way the buses could get the Chinese crew back to Earth. They’re also talking about other possibilities—that they’ll loop around Saturn, use what delta-vee they’ve got to get into a closed orbit around the sun, that might pull them close enough to Earth for a rescue mission.”

  “I was twiddling with my slate, with John Harbinson, and . . . mmm . . . that would take them years,” Fang-Castro said. Harbinson was the onboard nav guru. “Would they have enough consumables to do that?”

  “Unlikely. The thing is, we can’t discard the possibility that they are really down to Plan C. In other words, acts of desperation. In that case, there’s a fair possibility that whatever they’ve got planned won’t work. Best-case scenario from Santeros’s point of view is that their ship gets destroyed. Worst case is that it survives, with the crew alive, but it can’t establish close Saturn orbit. In that case, they start screaming for help.”

  “And we could help them, once we take on water for reaction mass.”

  “Let me say this in Chairwoman White’s voice: ‘We know the crew on board the Celestial Odyssey is mostly military, and real military, guys who’ve been fighting Islamorads in the Western Provinces for years. We’re gonna give those guys access to the most advanced ship the U.S. has ever built? Plus, whatever we find in Saturn’s rings? Is that even under consideration?’”

  Fang-Castro smiled at Crow’s mimicry, and asked, “Crow, is Crow really your name?”

  “No.”

  “You might as well tell me what it is—I can always look for your smiling face in the academy yearbooks.”

  “It’s Crowell. David Crowell,” Crow said. “Nobody’s called me either name for years. Even my wife called me Crow.”

  “I guess it goes with the job,” Fang-Castro said.

  “Yeah. Anyway, White is furious at the very thought of allowing Chinese troops on the Nixon. That’s what she calls them—Chinese troops.”

  “International law says I would have to help if the Chinese ask, and I can do it. If I don’t, I could be charged with murder. Rightfully so, in my opinion.”

  “And that, Naomi, is why they’re not talking to you. They want to decide.”

  “I’ll tell you what, Dav
id. It appears to me that we’re looking at the first real interplanetary bureaucratic clusterfuck.”

  “Yes. And I’ll tell you what, Naomi: if push comes to shove, and I do mean shove—I’ll back you up. All the way. I will.”

  40.

  Fang-Castro’s implants pinged. Her eyes popped open as she tried to remember why. Then, Ah!

  She slipped out of bed, dressed in her plain tan NWUs as quietly as she could, stepped out of the bedroom, closed the door, left the cabin, and walked down to the Commons. There were a dozen other people there, mostly the night shift, picking up coffee, along with a few day-shift workers who appreciated historical markers, even if they couldn’t particularly see, feel, hear, smell, or taste this one.

  Most of those were looking out through the big port window. Fang-Castro got an orange juice and went that way, watching a countdown that popped up on a corner of the screen, something like the New Year’s countdown.

  Hours before, they’d begun to bend around Saturn. In three minutes, they’d close that first loop: the official seal on the fact that they’d shed enough of their excess velocity and achieved a closed orbit around the enormous planet, bound by Saturn’s gravitational pull.

  They were late. The original plan had placed them at Saturn for Christmas. Instead they’d arrived just in time to celebrate the start of spring. Like that mattered, 1.3 billion kilometers from home.

  What mattered was that the Chinese were only two weeks behind them.

  Two minutes, one minute, ten seconds, zero.

  “There it is,” somebody said, and there was a smattering of applause.

  “It’s a big deal, ladies and gentlemen,” Fang-Castro said. “We’re there.” She watched the planet swinging by for another moment, then walked back to her cabin. Fiorella would be doing a brief rendezvous broadcast in the morning, and Fang-Castro wanted to look good.

  —

  Sandy said, “Anytime . . .”

  His egg had been basically unrepairable after being hit by the molten radiator metal, but he, Martinez, Elroy Gorey, and a couple of other techs had pulled the undamaged Leica optical glass off the old egg and reinstalled it on another one. He wasn’t using the Leica glass at the moment, because the standard egg glass softened Fiorella’s image.

  Fiorella was floating fifty meters away, and Sandy slowly closed from a wide-angle image of Saturn, and a slice of its rings, to a close-up of Fiorella’s face.

  Fiorella said, picking up from what Fang-Castro had said a couple of times in that morning’s interview, “Rendezvous—it was a big deal. For those of us who witnessed the entire project, it’s hard to believe that only two years ago, most of us would never have thought we’d leave the surface of the earth. For those of us who had, we’d gone no further than Earth orbit, a trip that takes not much longer than an ordinary jet flight from Los Angeles to London. But to think we’d be orbiting a planet over a billion kilometers from home! A bare year ago, the Chinese construction of a Mars transport had been state of the art: just a few months to Mars, if you caught the right launch window. This new technology, encapsulated in the Richard M. Nixon, could make that run in a third of the time and it could fly almost anytime it wanted. How proud President Nixon would be if he could see us now!”

  She went on for a while, talking of the frustration of crawling back to Saturn after the ninety-million-kilometer overshoot—though a funny definition of “crawl.” Twenty-five kilometers per second was roughly twenty-five times faster than the speed of a standard rifle bullet, but compared to the flight out, at a hundred and fifty kilometers per second, it felt like crawling.

  “As beautiful as it is, it will take us a week to move in from this preliminary orbit to what we hope and believe will be an alien space station. Saturn is gorgeous, but its rings are nothing more than a beautiful buzz saw of orbiting debris, mostly water-ice, with some rocks included. Our destination is technically called the C Ring’s Maxwell Gap, near the innermost part of the ring system. The gap itself is almost entirely free of debris—but to get there, we’re going to have to avoid the saw blade. This will be the most delicate part of our whole flight: this crew is up to it, but you’ll want to stay tuned. Aliens on tap!”

  Three-two-one. “Okay . . . we’re out,” Sandy said.

  “Look at my lipstick.”

  “It’s fine. You gonna change blouses?”

  “Yes, and I’ll get rid of the necklace and mess up my hair. This has to look as informal as possible.”

  When they were ready, and she’d changed, Sandy said, again, “Anytime.”

  Fiorella flashed her Number 1 smile: “Hi, kids. As I suppose most of you know by now, the third-graders at La Canada Elementary School in La Canada-Flintridge, California, and the fifth-graders at Hillside Elementary in Cottage Grove, Minnesota, have made a special request that was forwarded to us by President of the United States Amanda Sentaros . . . Oh, Jesus, I fucked that up . . . Santeros, Santeros, Santeros . . .”

  “Yeah, and now you do need to check the lipstick,” Sandy said. “When you fix that, pick it up at, uh . . . special request . . .”

  “Okay.” She fixed the lipstick. “How’s that?”

  “Good. Do it anytime.”

  “. . . Cottage Grove, Minnesota, made a special request that was forwarded to President of the United States Amanda Santeros. The kids asked for a tour of Saturn’s rings, and that’s what we’re going to give you guys, right now.”

  —

  Santeros spoke to Crow and Fang-Castro in one block of verbiage, because of the time elapse in the transmission back and forth:

  “I’m fully aware of the dangers of trying to get into the alien object too quickly. That has been repeatedly pressed upon me by my scientific advisers, to the point of being tiresome. I leave to you the tactical details of doing that, but would remind you that we’ve lost a lot of time. A lot of time—and our Chinese friends and allies are coming in fast. We still don’t know exactly what they are doing, but do not underestimate the dangers here. We are pressing the Chinese government for details of what they expect from us, if anything, but they are being remarkably reticent. Mr. Crow is aware of the many scenarios we have been discussing, and can provide the command with details of these discussions, but I say again: you must move as quickly as possible, now, and you must take great care in any approach from the Chinese. With the time lag we have in the broadcasts, we may not be able to provide timely advice, or provide . . . timely discussion with the Chinese . . . over any difficult situations you may encounter. We’re counting on you to act in the best interests of the United States. . . .”

  When she was done, Fang-Castro said, “Oh, boy.”

  “Yes,” Crow said. “That was a very complicated way of saying, ‘If you screw it up, you’re on your own.’”

  The trip from Earth to Saturn had been the fastest done by any human-built craft, ever—so fast that collision with even a brick-sized object would have been a disaster. But space was remarkably empty, even of sand-sized objects.

  Saturn’s ring system was another matter. The rings were only tens of meters thick, but that space was filled with icy objects of all different sizes. If the Nixon crossed the densest rings it would inevitably be struck multiple times by hail-sized and larger—much larger—ice balls moving at many kilometers per second relative to the ship.

  Their goal, the alien mystery, orbited Saturn within the translucent C Ring’s Maxwell Gap. The Nixon could safely orbit within that region, twenty-seven thousand kilometers above Saturn’s cloud tops, if it could get there.

  The Maxwell Gap was near the innermost edge of the huge ring system. Between the gap and deep space was a fifty-thousand-kilometer disk of icy projectiles. If the Nixon tried to come into Saturn on a straightforward equatorial path in the plane of the rings, it would be sliced in two by a twenty-meter-thick buzz saw of ring-particle impacts before it got one percent of t
he way in.

  Instead, the ship approached on a vector that was tilted at thirty degrees to the ring plane, decelerating the whole way on an inward spiral, reminiscent of the one that had taken them out of Earth orbit.

  It was a week’s work for the VASIMRs to slow the ship enough to bring it into a circular orbit that threaded the Maxwell Gap; along that spiral trajectory the ship had to cross the ring plane many times. Each ring encounter lasted only a few milliseconds, but they were potentially lethal ones.

  Fortunately, Saturn’s rings weren’t uniform. They were divided into thousands of ringlets and lesser gaps, like grooves on a giant celestial record. The inbound trajectory wasn’t a simple smooth spiral. The deceleration was carefully modulated and timed so that each ring crossing would pass through one of those myriad smaller gaps that subdivided the ring system.

  Ship’s navigation had carried the burden of responsibility for this segment of the flight. This was not the usual preset deep space trajectory, determined well in advance of the flight. From far off, Saturn’s rings appeared stable and fixed, but those ringlets performed a constant and chaotic dance with gravity. Gaps would shift kilometers inward or outward. Sometimes they disappeared entirely. Changes could happen in weeks, sometimes days; it was impossible to plan out a precise trajectory far in advance of the Nixon’s arrival at Saturn.

  So the nav crew actually had to “fly” the ship in, working with a constant stream of communication between the astronomers, Navigation, and Engineering. Navigation would say where they hoped to take the ship, the astronomers would tell them what gaps were close to their desired path, Navigation would calculate a course correction, and Engineering would execute it or tell them it wasn’t feasible and they’d better look for a different gap.

  It was nerve-racking. Haggard didn’t begin to describe the flight crew’s appearance by week’s end.

  —

  The majority of the ship’s complement, who weren’t involved in the life-and-death decisions, had an entirely different experience. They were entranced. Saturn, ten times the size of the earth, was a beautiful object to behold. When the Nixon made its first pass by Saturn, outside the F Ring, the flattened disk of Saturn, all by itself, spanned a fifty-degree field of view and the rings, the most gorgeous planetary system known to humanity, filled the sky.