Saturn

by Ben Bova

  "Cardenas," Vyborg repeated. "I don't like having her here. Her and her nanomachines."

  "And the Lane girl," said Kananga, touching his once-swollen cheek. "She has got to be put away. Permanently."

  "She should be executed for Romero's murder," Morgenthau said.

  "Better that she kills herself trying to escape," said Kananga.

  "Yes, probably so."

  "What about Cardenas?" Vyborg insisted.

  Morgenthau took a deep, sighing breath. "I don't like her, either. She could become a troublemaker."

  Then her face lit up. "Nanotechnology! Suppose we find that Dr. Cardenas is cooking up dangerous nanobugs in her lab?"

  "She's not."

  "But the people will believe she is. Especially if we find that Romero was murdered by nanomachines."

  Despite her reliance on Newtonian mechanics, despite her assurances to Timoshenko and the other two men of her minuscule crew, Captain Nicholson felt her insides tensing as the countdown clock ticked off the final seconds.

  The screens were all boringly normal. Nothing seemed wrong with their trajectory. The dust abrasion was a worry, but it was only slightly above predicted limits. The approaching iceball was following its predicted path, a safe two hundred thousand kilometers away from the habitat.

  Still...

  "Thirty seconds to orbital insertion," said the computer's synthesized voice.

  I know that, Nicholson replied silently. I can read the countdown clock as well as you, you pile of chips.

  "Abrasion level rising," Timoshenko called.

  It was still within acceptable limits, the captain saw. Yet it was worrisome, despite her assurances.

  "Ten seconds," said the computer. "Nine ... eight..."

  Nicholson glanced up from her screens. The three men looked just as tense as she felt, all of them hunched over their consoles.

  What if something breaks down? she asked herself. What could I do about it? What could anyone do?

  "Three ... two ... one. Orbital insertion."

  The navigator looked up from his console, his worried frown replaced by a wide grin. "That's it. We're in orbit. On the nose, to five nines."

  Timoshenko called out, "The abrasion rate is decreasing rapidly."

  Nicholson allowed herself a tight grin. "Congratulations, gentlemen. We are now the forty-first moon of Saturn."

  Then she got up from her chair, noticing the perspiration that made her blouse stick to her back, flung her arms over her head and bellowed a wild, ear-splitting, "Yahoo!"

  Like most of the other residents of the habitat, Manuel Gaeta watched the final orbital maneuver on his video. With Kris Cardenas beside him.

  "It's really gorgeous, isn't it?" she murmured, staring at the image of Saturn with its bands of many hues swirling across the planet's disc, and its rings hanging suspended above the equator, shining brilliantly in the light from the distant Sun, casting a deep shadow across the planet's face.

  The rings were tilting as they watched, almost as if they were coming up to meet the approaching habitat, becoming narrower and foreshortened with each passing second until they were nothing more than a knife edge slashing across Saturn's bulging middle. stable orbit achieved: the words flashed out over the planet's image. "That's it," Gaeta said. He turned and gave Cardenas a peck on the lips.

  "We should do something to celebrate," Cardenas said, without much enthusiasm.

  "They're going to have a big blowout right after Eberly's installed in office," Gaeta said, equally glum.

  "I don't feel like going out."

  "I know. Having those security mugs tracking us is a pain. Gimme a couple of beers and I'll knock them both on their asses."

  "No you won't," Cardenas said firmly. "No alcohol for you. Tomorrow you're going out to the rings."

  "Yeah. Tomorrow."

  Neither one of them mentioned it, but they both knew that after Gaeta's stunt in Saturn's ring system, he would be leaving the habitat and heading back to Earth.

  INAUGURATION

  "She's got to be eliminated," Morgenthau said firmly. "And the Cardenas woman, too."

  Eberly walked beside her at the head of the procession that wound along the central footpath of Athens down to the lakeside, where the inauguration ceremony would be held. Behind them, at a respectful few paces, strode the tall, long-limbed Kananga and Vyborg, looking like a hunchbacked gnome beside the Rwandan. Behind them marched several hundred of their supporters. Even though every member of the Security, Communications, and Human Resources Departments had been told to attend the inauguration, hardly half of their staffs had bothered to show up.

  "Eliminated?" Eberly snapped, trying to hide the fear that was making his inside flutter. "You can't eliminate someone of Cardenas's stature. You'll have investigators from Earth flying out here in torch ships to see what happened."

  Morgenthau cast him a sidelong glance. "Neutralized, then. I don't want her working on those damnable nanomachines here."

  Without breaking stride, Eberly said, "You don't want? Since when are you giving the orders here?"

  "Since the very beginning. And don't you forget it."

  "I'm the one being inaugurated," Eberly said, with a bravado he did not truly feel. "I'm going to be installed as the leader of this community."

  "And you will do as I tell you," Morgenthau countered, her voice flat and hard. "We know you tried to sell us out. You and your posse." She broke into a low chuckle.

  "That was a necessary tactical maneuver. I never had any intention—"

  "Don't add another lie to your sins. I could have you removed from this habitat and sent back to your prison cell in Vienna with just a single call back to Amsterdam."

  Eberly bit back the reply he wanted to make. They had reached the lakeside recreation area, where hundreds of chairs had been set in neat rows facing the band shell stage. A few dozen people were already seated there. Professor Wilmot sat alone up on the stage, looking somewhere between weary and bored. The band musicians that were lounging off at one side of the stage picked up their instruments and arranged themselves into a ragged semblance of order.

  Eberly stopped at the edge of the last row of mostly empty chairs. Everything was as he had planned it. This was the moment he had worked for ever since that meeting in Schönbrunn Prison. He had planned out every detail of this inauguration ceremony. The only thing he could not control was the yawning indifference of the habitat's people. That, and Morgenthau's hardening attitude toward him. All the details are perfect, Eberly said to himself, but the day is an utter failure.

  Turning to Morgenthau, he said, "You'll have to walk three paces behind me."

  "Of course," she said, with a knowing smile. "I know how to play the role of the subservient woman."

  Eberly took a deep breath. It's going to be like this forever, he realized. She's going to make my life a hell on wheels.

  Outwardly, though, he appeared to smile and pull himself up to his full height. He hesitated at the last row of chairs until he caught the bandleader's eye. With a nod, Eberly started marching down the central aisle between the empty chairs. Halfway between his second and third steps the band broke into a halfhearted rendition of "Hail to the Chief."

  Holly watched the inaugural ceremony from her own apartment, deeply uncertain about what her future had in store. Malcolm tried to go against Kananga and got nowehere. What will he do once he's officially installed in office?

  What will Kananga do?

  Holly decided she couldn't wait for them to make up their minds. She grabbed a few clothes, stuffed them into a tote bag, and headed for the door of her apartment. I'd better be where they can't find me, she told herself, until I know what they're really going to do.

  Her phone buzzed. She put the bag down and pulled out the handheld.

  Raoul Tavalera's face appeared on the tiny screen. He looked bone-weary, disheveled.

  "Holly? You okay?"

  "I'm fine, Raoul," she replied, nodding. "But I
can't really talk with you now."

  "I'm worried about you."

  "Oh, for..." Holly didn't know what to say. She felt genuinely touched. "Raoul, you don't have to worry about me. I can take of myself."

  "Against that Kananga guy and his goons?"

  She hesitated. "You shouldn't get yourself involved in this, Raoul. You could get into deep trouble."

  Even in the minuscule screen she could see the stubborn set of his jaw. "If you're in trouble, I want to help."

  How to get rid of him without hurting his feelings? Holly blurted, "Raoul, you're really a special guy. But I've got to run now. See you later."

  She clicked the phone off, tucked it back into her tote, picked up the bag and left her apartment. I don't want to hurt him, she told herself. He's too nifty to get himself tangled up in this mess.

  There were only two security people following her as she walked down the empty path: a chunky-looking guy and a slim woman who was either Hispanic or Asian—it was hard for Holly to tell which, at the distance from which they followed her. Both wore black tunics and slacks, which made them stand out against the village's white buildings like ink blots on a field of snow.

  She grinned to herself. I'll lose those two clowns as soon as I pop down into the tunnels.

  She never noticed the third security agent moving far ahead of her. But he tracked her quite clearly. Every item of Holly's clothes had been sprayed with a monomolecular odorant that allowed the agent to track her like a bloodhound.

  "You're missin' the inauguration," Gaeta said.

  Cardenas shrugged. "So I miss it."

  Gaeta's massive armored suit stood like a grotesque statue in the middle of the workshop floor. The chamber hummed with the background buzz of electrical equipment and the quiet intensity of specialists going about their jobs. Fritz and two of his technicians were using the overhead crane to slowly lower the bulbous suit to a horizontal position and place it on its eight-wheeled transport dolly. It looked to Cardenas like lowering a statue. A third technician had crawled inside the suit: Cardenas could see his sandy-brown mop of hair through the open hatch in its back. Off at a console against the workshop wall, Nadia Wunderly was tracing the trajectory of the ice-covered asteroid that was making its last approach to the main ring before falling into orbit around Saturn. Berkowitz shuttled nervously from one to another, recording everything with his handcam.

  Gaeta walked slowly to the diagnostic console and bent over it to study rows of steady green lights intently.

  He's really trying to get away from me, Cardenas said to herself. I shouldn't be here. I shouldn't be distracting him now. I should leave him to focus completely on his job.

  Yet she stayed, shuffling uneasily, uncertainly, as the men around her went through their final tasks before wheeling the suit down to the airlock where they would stow it aboard the shuttle craft that would take Manny to the rings.

  As Gaeta watched them gently lowering the suit, Cardenas realized that the contraption would be his home for the next two days. He'll have to live inside it, work inside it... maybe die inside it.

  Stop it! she commanded herself. No blubbering. He's got enough to worry about without you crying all over him.

  It took an enormous effort of will, but finally Cardenas heard herself say, "Manny, I'd better get back to my apartment. I—" She stopped, then touched his strong, muscular shoulder and kissed him lightly on the lips. "I'll see you when you get back," she said.

  He nodded, his face deadly serious. "In two days."

  "Good luck," she said, barely able to move her hand from his shoulder.

  "Nothing to worry about," he said, making a smile for her. "This is gonna be a walk in the park."

  "Good luck," she repeated, then abruptly turned away from him and started walking toward the workshop door. Her mind kept churning, He'll be all right. He's done more dangerous stunts than this. He knows what he's doing. Fritz won't let him take any unnecessary chances. He'll be back in two days. In two days it'll be all over and he'll be safe.

  Yes, said a voice in her mind. And then he'll leave the habitat, go back to Earth, leave you for good.

  "Therefore," Professor Wilmot was saying, "in accordance with this community's Principles of Organization, I declare the new constitution to be the deciding law of this habitat. I further declare that you, Malcolm Eberly, having been duly elected by free vote of the population, are now officially the chief administrator of this habitat."

  The few hundred people scattered among the chairs spread across the grass rose to their feet and applauded. The band broke into "Happy Days Are Here Again." Wilmot gripped Eberly's hand limply and mumbled, "Congratulations, I suppose."

  Eberly grasped the podium's edges and looked out at the sparse audience. There sat Morgenthau, in the front row, eying him like an elementary school teacher waiting for her pupil to recite the speech she had forced him to write. Kananga and Vyborg sat behind her.

  Eberly had composed an inauguration speech, liberally cribbed from the words of Churchill, Kennedy, both Roosevelts, and Shakespeare.

  He looked down at the opening lines, in the podium's display screen. With a shake of his head that was visible to everyone in the audience, he looked up again and said, "This is no time for fancy speeches. We have arrived safely at our destination. Let those who are Believers thank God. Let all of us understand that tomorrow our real work begins. I intend to file a petition with the world government, asking them to recognize us as a separate and independent nation, just as Selene and Ceres have been recognized."

  There was a moment of surprised silence, then everyone jumped to their feet and applauded lustily. Everyone except Morgenthau, Kananga, and Vyborg.

  LAUNCH

  Raoul Tavalera watched the orbital insertion and Eberly's inauguration from his apartment, although he barely noticed what the images displayed. He was thinking about Holly. She was in trouble, and she needed help. But when he had offered to help her, she had turned him down flat.

  The story of my life, he grumbled to himself. Nobody wants me. Nobody gives a friggin' damn about me. Mr. Nobody, that's me.

  He was surprised at how much pain he felt. Holly had been kind to him, more than kind, since he had first come aboard the habitat. He remembered the dates they had had. Dinners at the Bistro and even Nemo's, once. That picnic out at the endcap, where she told me about old Don Diego. She likes me, he told himself, I know she does. But now she doesn't want me to be with her. Why?

  He tried phoning her again, but the comm system said her phone had been deactivated. Deactivated? Why? Then it hit him. She's on the run again. She's trying to hide from Kananga and his apes. That's why she deactivated her phone, so they can't track her.

  Slowly, Tavalera got up from the chair in which he'd been sitting most of the day. Holly's in trouble and she needs help, whether she thinks so or not. My help. I've got to find her, help her, show her she's not alone in this.

  For the first time in his life, Raoul Tavalera decided he had to act, no matter what the consequences. It's time for me to stop being Mr. Nobody, he told himself. I've gotta find Holly before Kananga's baboons do.

  Focus, Gaeta told himself. Blot out everything from your mind except the job at hand. Forget about Kris, forget about everything except getting this stunt done.

  He stood at the inner hatch of the airlock, surrounded by Fritz, Berkowitz, and Timoshenko, who would pilot the shuttlecraft to the rings. The other technicians were behind him, checking out the suit for the final time.

  Berkowitz had microcams mounted on the walls around the airlock enclosure, inside the airlock chamber, even clipped to a headband that matted down his stylishly curled and tinted brown hair.

  "How does it feel to be undertaking the first human traverse through Saturn's rings?" Berkowitz asked, almost breathless with eager intensity.

  "Not now, Zeke," said Gaeta. "Gotta concentrate on the work."

  Fritz stepped between them, a stern expression on his face. "He can't
do interviews now."

  "Okay, okay," said Berkowitz amiably enough, although disappointment showed clearly in his eyes. "We'll just record the preparations documentary-style and put in the interviews over it afterward."

  Gaeta turned to Timoshenko. "It's going to be just you and me out there."

  "Not to worry," Timoshenko said, totally serious. "I'll get you to the B ring, then swing through the Cassini division and pick you up on the other side of the ring plane."

  Gaeta nodded. "Right."

  "Suit's all primed and ready to go," said one of the technicians.

  "Any problems?" Gaeta asked.

  "The pincer on your right arm is a little stiff. If we had a couple hours I'd break it down and rebuild it for ya."

  "You won't be needing the pincers," Fritz interjected.

  "It works good enough," the tech said. "Just isn't as smooth as it oughtta be."

  Gaeta thought, If it's good enough for Fritz it'll be okay.

  But Fritz said, "I'm going in for a final check."

  Gaeta smiled and nodded. He had expected that. There were three standards of acceptability in this world: average, above average, and Fritz. His chief technician's keen eye and finicky demands had saved Gaeta's life more than once.

  Sure enough, Holly eluded her trackers after less than half an hour in the tunnels. She had ducked through an access hatch, clambered down a ladder, and then scooted light-footedly along the lower tunnel until she came to the big valve on the water line. Holly knew that this pipeline was a backup and not in use except when the main line was down for inspection or repair. So she tapped out the combination code on the hatch's electronic lock and crawled into the dark pipe, closing the hatch after her without making a sound.

  She couldn't stand up inside the pipe; couldn't even get up to a kneeling posture. She slithered along on her belly almost effortlessly. The pipe was dry inside, its plastic lining smooth and easy to slide along. Her only problem was estimating distance in the dark, so she used a penlight to show her where the hatches appeared. Holly knew to the centimeter the distances between hatches. When she had crawled half a kilometer, she stopped and broke open one of the sandwich packs she had brought with her.