“Bring the vid. And boy, I’d love to go to Mars. If you can find me a slot . . .”
Sitting outside his condo, Sandy’s wrist-wrap told him that his ride had been held up on the 110, because some underclassman had dropped a bowling ball off a bridge. Traffic had resumed, and the underclassman was being pursued through the Avenues, where he wouldn’t be caught. Sandy hoped the cops were watching all available bowling balls. Having a sixteen-pound Brunswick blow through your windshield could seriously screw up your trip to Disneyland.
Eight or ten minutes later, his wrist-wrap told him his ride was turning the corner, and he got to his feet. A black limo, unmarked. The car hummed to a stop, and a driver got out of the front. A rear door slipped open, and the truck lid popped. Sandy said, “I got it,” threw his bags in the back, kept the coffee, and climbed inside.
The driver got back in, the door slid shut. Sandy nodded at the woman who sat opposite him, and put the coffee cup in a cup holder.
The woman was a redhead, a spectacular example of the species, and it took only a moment for her name to register: Cassandra Fiorella, chief science editor for the Los Angeles Times, and the daily on-air science correspondent and producer for the biggest netcast on the West Coast.
She was stunning: red hair, green eyes, and the rest of the package wrapped in a slippery green-black jumpsuit. Her face showed none of the stress lines of plastic surgery; she was wearing a charm necklace with gold endorsement charms from Apple, IBM, MIT, Stanford, Mitsubishi Heavy Industries, and EuroBank, and in the center, a big fat green diamond that matched her eyes. Crow had not told him that she was on board.
She didn’t introduce herself—you’d have to be an idiot not to know who she was—but gave him a low-wattage smile and said, “You’re Sanders Darlington.”
“Yup.”
“Where have you worked? Crow didn’t tell me much about you. Except for an assistant videographer’s stint on Naked Nancy, I couldn’t find your professional résumé.”
“Well, that’s about it,” Sandy said.
She frowned: “I don’t believe it. For this trip? There must be something else.”
Sandy had been outrageously rich since childhood, living in L.A. Some of the most beautiful women in the world had made the effort to say ‘hello’ to him. While he’d taken advantage of that, from time to time, he’d also learned that behind a certain percentage of great beauty, there lurked a wicked witch of the west. He got that vibration from Fiorella.
He said, “Well, I won the 2064 Oscar for the best manual projection of a naked producer into the Pacific Ocean.”
“I saw that, too.” Fiorella nibbled a little lip gloss from her lower lip, then shook her head. “You bought your way on.”
Sandy shrugged.
“This is absurd,” she said. “I will tell the President that. I’m supposed to be on-camera, recording this for the whole future of mankind, and I’ve got to work with an inexperienced daddy’s boy who’ll inevitably mess it up, and not only that, has a history of violence—”
“Hey, Cassie?” Sandy smiled at her and said, “Go fuck yourself.”
She blanched. Nobody talked to her like that. “What did you say?”
“I said, ‘Go fuck yourself.’ I don’t need any ego rages from the talent. You just get the makeup right, sweetheart, and practice reading without crossing your eyes, and I’ll see that you’re looking good. But I gotta tell you, this little rant just took you a step down from ‘looking great.’”
With her face bright red with anger, Fiorella crossed her arms and looked away from him. Sandy knew this wasn’t over. There’d be consequences. Someone with Fiorella’s creds wouldn’t take that lying down. Well, tough shit. As they headed up the 210, Sandy closed his eyes and dozed off.
The Mojave Spaceport was unseasonably cool: at 10 A.M., the thermometer was only slowly climbing past ninety-four. The sun, though, was starting to burn. Sandy let Fiorella haul her case out of the back of the limo—she wasn’t talking to him—and then threw his personal duffel on one shoulder and rolled the bigger equipment case along behind.
They’d been dropped at the far end of the terminal. Inside the doors, Sandy found himself in a private waiting room. Through glass doors on the far wall, he could see a larger waiting room, with more people in it.
Crow was sitting on a bench, looking at a tablet: he glanced up when they walked in, and raised a hand to them. Fiorella made a beeline for him and Sandy heard her say, “Mr. Crow, we’ve got to talk . . .”
The two other people included a short, round blonde, who hadn’t looked up when they walked in, probably the power engineer, Rebecca something, and a large black man with white hair, who was clutching a nylon travel case, and had to be the anthropologist. The blonde was pounding on a tablet; the big man looked like he needed somebody to talk to. Sandy went that way, stuck out a hand, and said, “You’re John Clover, you’re more important than I am, so how about if I suck up for a while?”
“I could use some good suckin’ up,” Clover said, as they shook hands. “You must be the rich kid.”
“Not only that, but I’m good-looking, have a terrific singing voice, and women find me irresistible,” Sandy said, as he dropped into the chair next to Clover. “For the most part, anyway. I’ve already pissed off half the women on this flight.”
Now the blonde looked up at him, glanced over at Fiorella, back to Sandy, and said, “If you keep talking over my work, here, you’ll have pissed off all of them.”
Clover said to the blonde, “Let me tell you something, honey—”
“I’m not a honey,” Becca snapped.
“Of course you are, and I’m a southerner, so I get to call you that,” Clover said. “What I’m gonna say is that they are about to strap a twenty-megaton nuclear weapon to our asses and blast them into orbit. Y’all ought to be sweating it out. Like me.”
Sandy smiled at that and said, “A twenty-megaton nuke?”
“Might as well be, as far as we’re concerned, you know, if it blows,” Clover said.
“Ah, it’s not going to blow,” Sandy said. “A fortune-teller in Venice told me that I’d suffer a long, lingering, painful death.”
“Good, good,” Clover said. “I’m reassured.”
He had a case by his feet; the contents meowed. Becca looked at it and asked, “You’re taking a cat?”
“Only way I’d go,” Clover said. “You got a problem with that?”
“No. Actually, I don’t,” Becca said.
Sandy shrugged. “Neither do I. Long as it doesn’t shit in my shoes.”
“I can’t promise anything,” Clover said.
Crow strode toward Sandy, typing on his handslate, not looking at it. He bent over and said, quietly, “Don’t fuck with her.”
“She started it. I’m tired of people assuming that I’m incompetent because I’m rich. I—”
“Don’t . . . fuck . . . with . . . her.”
“All right, all right. I’ll go easy,” Sandy said.
“Good answer.”
Sandy muttered, “I just gotta remember, journalism school grads can be touchy about their lack of intelligence.”
Crow said, “Actually, it’s a double major in economics and general science. From Stanford.”
“Jesus. Is everybody on this trip a genius?”
“Pretty much,” Crow said. “Except maybe you and me.”
“But we’ll have guns.”
Crow brightened. “Yes. Yes, we will.”
—
A woman in a Virgin-SpaceX sky-blue flight attendant’s uniform walked into the waiting room and said, swinging her face between the two groups, Crow-Fiorella and Sandy-Becca-Clover, “Mr. Crow, everybody, the crew has completed their preflight check. You’re free to board the shuttle.”
They did.
Five humans and one c
at went out the back of the terminal to a canopied, air-conditioned people-mover that hauled them out to the shuttle, followed by another shuttle with people from the other waiting room.
The Virgin-SpaceX shuttle was called Galahad, and featured horizontal takeoff and a maximum pull of 2.2 gees. Seating twenty-four, not including the flight crew of five, it wasn’t much different in overall size than a commercial hopjet. What caught the eye were the retractable wings, now just stubs on the fuselage, the unusually large and long engine nacelles, and the broadened belly, the better to hold more fuel and evenly distribute the heat on reentry.
The shuttle rested in its launch stage, a less conventional-appearing aircraft. A pilotless drone, not much bigger than the shuttle, it was essentially a cradle slung between two large engine and fuel tank cylinders with oversized air intakes. Four stubby fore and aft wings projected outward from the cradle. Heavy on the muscle and light on the brains, the launcher was commanded by the flight crew during the first stage of ascent and by ground control after it separated from the shuttle.
The Galahad ferried people from Mojave into low Earth orbit. That was the hardest part, energy-wise, but also the shortest part of the trip. Takeoff to orbit took half an hour. The shuttle couldn’t take them all the way to the station in its thousand-kilometer-high orbit, though; not enough fuel. Once in orbit, Galahad would dock with an orbital tug that would take it the rest of the way to the station, an energetically easier jaunt but one that would take another four hours. Not much different than the flight from L.A. to Sydney.
Crow and Fiorella had been up before, hitching rides on space-available seats. Fiorella had spent two weeks at the station, while Crow had only been up two days. The other three had never been.
They boarded the shuttle on a mobile escalator; inside, the space was a little cramped, but the seats were large and extraordinarily comfortable. Smartfoam cushions, supported by a powered carbon-fiber skeleton, monitored a hundred pressure points and molded themselves to their backs and butts.
Clover was looking nervous; the flight attendant came and smiled at him, whispered something. Clover nodded, and she gave him a bottle of water and something else. Pills, Sandy thought. Clover popped them, and two minutes later, said something funny to Fiorella, who was sitting across the narrow aisle from him, and the TV lady laughed.
Good pills.
When everybody was seated, the flight attendant said, “I know some of you haven’t been up. In front of you, there’s an oxygen mask capsule. They have been sanitized since the last flight. The slightly astringent odor you may smell is actually a sealer, should you need to press your face into the mask. When we reach maximum acceleration, you’ll feel as though you weigh twice as much as you do now—we’ll be pulling two gravities, or two gees, as we say. There may be a sensation of suffocation. You won’t be suffocating, but you may feel that kind of pressure. Simply press the tab under your right thumb and a mask will extrude. Don’t worry about moving toward it—the face-recognition system will find you. Breathe normally. Don’t try to remove your safety harness—that won’t help. If any of you are feeling even the slightest bit nervous, we have some excellent calming medications available. Feel free to ask.”
She went on for a while, and when she finished, Sandy asked her, “How about Mr. Snuffles?”
“Mr. Snuffles is asleep,” she said.
“Snoring like a chain saw,” Clover said over his shoulder. And, said the man who moments before had been sweating like a Miami sneak-thief, “let’s light this motherfucker up.”
Really good pills.
10.
Becca was annoyed with herself. She was about to take a trip that maybe one person in a million got to make, that every techie dreamed of, and she couldn’t stop thinking about heat flow integrals. A symptom, she thought, of her obsessiveness. On the job, it worked to her advantage. At times, though, it got in the way.
Like now. Intellectually, she’d love to get the full launch experience. But the heat problem . . . it nagged, and nagged, and nagged.
She’d been running herself ragged. The government had tried to make her life as easy as possible. The transfer from Minneapolis to Georgetown had been seamless. Her new condo was a slightly scary demonstration of the government’s ability to read a single individual’s habits and tastes, purely through available databases.
Because it was perfect, right down to the smart door.
The door read her implants, unlocked and opened itself, and closed itself behind her. She could mumble out a shopping list—for anything, from food to clothing—and the door would arrange for it to be delivered, and then would keep an eye on the delivery cart. It was like having a perfect invisible doorman, whom she never had to be nice to or remember on holidays.
The government apparently also got her a housekeeper, although she’d never met that person: the only reason she knew of his/her existence was that when she got home, her clothes had been washed and ironed, and the apartment was spotless. If she dropped a crumb from the always-available crumb cake, and left it on the counter, the crumb would be gone the next time she got home.
The only thing the door, and the government, couldn’t get her was the one thing she most desperately needed: time. There was plenty of money—she’d told Vintner that she needed a better workslate, and six hours later, she got the best one that she’d ever heard of. He just couldn’t get her another three hours in the day, or an extension on the flight deadline.
Planetary alignments defined the launch window. The shortest and fastest trip meant launching in November, only eight months away, or December of the next year. Santeros wanted to go this year, but every engineer involved had told her that was impossible. Doing it in twenty-one months would be hard enough.
What was causing her sleepless nights, and obsession with integrals, was that she wasn’t convinced that twenty-one months was enough time. Pushed by presidential imperative, the DARPA engineers were proposing what at first glance seemed like a harebrained scheme: take the two habitat modules from U.S. Space Station Three, build it a new back end with a nuclear power plant and some heavy-duty electric-ion rockets called VASIMRs, strap on several thousand tons of water to provide oxygen and hydrogen for the VASIMRs, and off they went to Saturn.
Except that they wanted to get this all built in less than two years and they wanted the trip to take less than five months. And that was mildly insane.
No laws of physics were broken, it was simply an impossibly tight deadline and an unreasonably large amount of power. If they’d told her she had three years to get the ship built, and two years to get to Saturn, no sweat.
That’s what she told them.
In turn, they fed her details of the Chinese Mars mission, and just how good the Chinese were at large-scale orbital spaceship construction, and how long they thought they had before the Chinese might find out that something was up at Saturn, and how fast the Chinese might be able to get there once they did.
With an ETA of a little over two years, the DARPA brains were pretty confident they could beat the Chinese. Five years? Might as well not even try.
Rock and a hard place.
The amount of power involved was unreasonable. Not impossible, just unreasonable, comparable to the amount used by the entire Twin Cities.
The reactors themselves weren’t a problem. There were designs dating back to the twentieth century that could generate enough heat in a space not much bigger than her kitchenette. She knew how to get that heat out of the reactor with a pressurized liquid sodium cycle; that was also well-understood tech. Getting the turbines and generators down to a workable size was a bit of a do, but Vintner had people working on that and they claimed they had the matter in hand.
But what came after the turbines?
There are some laws of nature that can’t be ignored: thermal electric power plants generate lots of waste heat. Gigawatts of it have to go som
ewhere out of the system, and Becca didn’t have the luxury of building some honking big cooling towers to dissipate it. Size and weight were at a premium, and you couldn’t carry along all that cooling water to boil off. The water alone would weigh millions of tons.
So now she was using the super-slate to run simulations for increasingly unlikely and experimental cooling systems and getting more and more frustrated with it. She heard the flight attendant talking about the flight schedule, but paid no attention. What to do with the fucking heat? How do you get it out?
The possibilities were looking thinner and thinner: she almost didn’t notice that she was being spoken to, until the flight attendant touched her arm. “Everything okay, Dr. Johansson? You all set for takeoff? You look uncomfortable. Is the seat adjusting correctly for you?”
“It’s fine. I was running some engineering stuff in my head.”
“Most people don’t do their best thinking under two-plus gees. Maybe you should just relax and enjoy the flight up. You’ll have plenty of time once we make orbit to do work.”
Not really, Becca thought, as the flight attendant moved away.
Time!
The intercom pinged a two-minute warning. The cabin attendant took her station at the front of the cabin, looking back at them. A backward-facing seat, pulling negative gees? That had to hurt, Becca thought. The flight attendant must be tougher than she looked.
The thirty-second warning sounded. Becca took a last look around and saw green lights blink on over every seat in the cabin: smartcams scanned each seat and verified that there were no loose objects lying about and that each passenger was safely positioned and properly strapped in. The last preflight check complete, the computer system unlocked and armed the engines. The pilot started the cradle’s engines and the cabin filled with the throaty two-tone note of turbine whine and exhaust thunder.
Takeoff was a lot like that of any commercial jet. The Galahad accelerated a little harder and lifted off the runway sooner, but then the shuttle reared back and started on a thirty-degree climb as the hybrid engines throttled up. They passed the ten-kilometer altitude mark at better than Mach 1, a minute and a half into the flight. The acceleration picked up, and the monitor over the flight attendant’s head said 2.2 gees of force were pushing Becca back into her chair.
Saturn Run Page 8
