Whatever, those fast-flying ribbons had developed wobbles and the wobbles had grown uncontrollably until finally the whole control system collapsed under impossible demands and the ribbons started flying off in all directions.
He’d reached the end of the extruder bar and he clicked over to the engineering channel and asked, “You need another run on the extruder bar?”
Johansson came back almost immediately.
“If you can, give me a thermal image of the end of the bar where the instability started. Just leave it there for a while. Two minutes, anyway.”
“Doing that now,” Sandy said.
Fiorella called, “I don’t want to seem crass,” she began.
“Never bothered you in the past,” Sandy said.
“I’m laughing inside,” she said. “Tell me that you got at least a few seconds of our eggs floating in the background, when the thing blew.”
“Camera two was locked on you the whole way, and still is. The chaff is clearing out. If you want to motor over this way, we could do a tracking shot of you coming in, right up to your face. Dodge around a few pieces of the metal—that should look pretty spectacular.”
Fiorella asked, “Joe, can we do that?”
“Yeah, we can do it, but I still say he’s a crazy motherfucker.”
Crazy motherfucker I might be, Sandy thought, and it was all chaos theory in motion and one hell of a screwup: but, ohmigawd, that’s entertainment!
16.
Becca ran all night on coffee, junk food, and stims. If the spectacular radiator failure, recorded for all posterity by that goddamn videographer, turned out to be an unsolvable fatal flaw in her engineering . . . guess who’d be America’s chosen dumbass for the next hundred years?
The vid of the heat exchange extruder bar had given them some clues to the problems, but not the details. The vid had been valuable—but she hadn’t been aware that the videographer had also been doing news vid, even as he was recording the technical stuff.
All Becca had to do was close her eyes, and she’d see that gorgeous redheaded creature on the screen, gold flecks in her eyes, as she sat in her egg, unnaturally calm. “We’ve had a disaster here. The first trial of the critical heat exchangers in America’s Saturn ship . . .”
And the vid flew backwards in time to show the ribbons of superheated metal exploding into space. It was, Becca had been told, the single most-watched vid of the current century except for those of the 9/11 Twin Towers attacks and the Houston Flash.
The logs on her work screens wandered in and out of focus. She rubbed her eyes; no sleep for the wicked. She’d eliminated the control sensors and magnets as the source of the problem. The data said they were up to the task, they just hadn’t been provided proper control. The problem still might turn out to be an oscillation in the ejection nozzles for the heat exchanger, but she was betting on the supercomputer array.
At high ribbon run speeds, it was probably getting swamped with data and the granularity of the modeling just wasn’t fine enough to deal with it. Which meant more supercomputers—easy enough to come by with an unlimited budget—and better, finer-grained control code. None of it would come with a snap of her fingers, but later today, she’d meet with the code monkeys and rake them over the coals.
She pulled up the logs for the nozzles. Even if it turned out that they weren’t misbehaving, the cleaner they operated the easier it would be for the supercomputers to control the ribbons. She’d started looking for a signal in the noise, when she got beeped for a priority call that overrode her privacy block.
“Yeah, who? I’m busy and I’m not happy, so don’t be wasting my time.”
“Dr. Johansson, President Santeros here. I’m even less happy than you are. Yesterday’s fiasco looked bad. You need to—”
Becca cut her off. “That was not a fiasco. It was an experiment, a test. The first one on an untried system. The system failed. The data will tell me why it failed.”
“Dr. Johansson, don’t interrupt me again! Not unless you want to be looking for a new job.”
Becca had heard about Santeros’s temper; this was a small sample of it. But, ever since she’d been the fat little blond kid, she’d hated being pushed around. Now that she was a fat little blond adult, she didn’t like it much better. It got her Midwest backbone up. She knew the smart thing would be to smile, apologize, and kowtow.
“Good luck with that,” she snapped. “You want to find a replacement for me, you’re welcome to try. At this late date, it’s only gonna push your launch back by a year.”
Santeros was turning red.
“One more thing,” Becca said. “You’re not my boss. You want me fired, call my boss. Right now, YOU are wasting MY time. Stop trying to bully me and let me do my job.”
She hung up. Not my best career move. I should probably start packing my stuff. Or keep working on these logs until they come and kick me out. Eh, screw it. I need a break.
Becca kicked out of her chair and headed to the commissary. Reflexively she tried to shove the door behind her as she left, but it just slid closed with a soft hydraulic snick. Can’t even slam a goddamned door in this place, she fumed.
A thousand kilometers down, Santeros looked at her science adviser. “That little bitch just hung up on me! She’s history, Jacob. Get a replacement on board and get rid of her.”
Vintner glanced over at Crow, who raised one thin, dark eyebrow. Otherwise his face remained a carefully composed blank. Vintner suppressed a smile. “Madam President, I say this with all due respect . . . Uh, no.”
“That wasn’t a request, Jacob.”
“Planning to fire me, too? I’m your adviser—let me advise. First, she’s right. The only thing replacing her will do is to set us back by more time than we can afford. You replace her, the Chinese get to Saturn first.”
“Meaning I’m supposed to put up with that?”
“Yes. That’s what I mean. You were elected President, not the Red Queen. You chop off her head, you’ll be cutting off your own at the same time. Let it go.”
Santeros looked like steam might start flowing off her forehead, but then she slowly cooled off, and finally smiled. “All right.”
Crow raised a finger.
Santeros asked, “What?”
Crow said, “I don’t think we should rule out sabotage as an explanation.”
“Do you have any evidence to support that, Mr. Crow?”
He shook his head. “Nothing. Barely even a feeling. But there are so many holes a saboteur could slip something through, so many moving parts. And God help us, how many times have we proven in the past that it’s impossible to vet everyone perfectly? Plus, everything—the hardware, the software, even the procedures and protocols, are prototypes that are getting tested and debugged in the field. So many places for things to go wrong, for an unwanted modification to be snuck in.”
Santeros said, “Jesus. This radiator thing hurts. This really hurts. I don’t see what we can do here.”
“I don’t know that I’ll ever have more than a hunch, but in the meantime I’d be a lot happier, from a security point of view, keeping the devils I know,” Crow said. “Minimize personnel changes. Like Johansson.”
—
After talking with Santeros, Becca was bouncing off the walls.
Literally.
In 0.1 gee, it wasn’t hard to go careening about unless she paid a lot of attention to controlling her actions, and right now she wasn’t feeling much like controlling anything. She was pissed. She wasn’t really hitting the walls hard enough to hurt, but it felt good to be slamming something. The corridor was empty of other crew members, so all that got bludgeoned were the walls.
She lurched into the commissary and ran full tilt into a large male figure. They both bounced back in low-gee arcs, as their sticky boots lost their grips on the floor, like two cartoon chara
cters. A lidded zero-gee coffee mug traversed its own lazy trajectory across the room.
“Oh, God, I’m sorry . . .” the guy said.
“Damnit, look where you’re . . .” She landed, regained her footing, and looked at the human obstacle she’d just bounced off of. It was the Hollywood pretty-boy videographer guy. Oh, lovely.
“Uh . . . Are you okay?” Sandy asked her. “You don’t look okay.”
“I’m fine. I just got myself fired, that’s all,” Becca snapped.
“Over the accident? That’s . . . I didn’t think—”
“No, I’m gonna be fired because I just told the President to go fuck herself.”
Sandy stared at her, agape, for a second, then started laughing. “You told Santeros to go fuck herself? Oh, I like that.”
Becca could feel her face getting even hotter.
Sandy put up his hands. “Whoa. I’m not laughing at you. It’s what you did. Man, I wish I could’ve seen her face. Hey, you wanna grab a mug and tell me about it?” And he laughed again, an infectious laugh.
Becca found herself smiling at him. Oh, what the hell. The day after she left, it would be all over the station, anyway. Screw discretion, there ain’t any to be had. “All right. I can do that.”
Sandy retrieved his coffee cup from the other side of the room and they eased into a table and belted down. She let her mug warm her hands and inhaled the steam. Her shoulders were starting to unknot, a little bit. She managed a smile. “So. That vid from yesterday wasn’t terrible. The technical stuff, I mean, not the news stuff. The news stuff—”
“What do you mean not terrible? I’ll tell you what, Johansson, that was about as close to perfect as—”
“Why don’t you call me Becca? It’s Sandy, right? Sanders? Sandy?”
“It’s Sandy,” he said. “About that vid . . .”
17.
Fang-Castro sat back in her easy chair, drank her morning tea, gazed at the curved horizon of the earth displayed on her giant wallscreen, and sighed. She’d moved to new, single-room quarters and no longer had the pleasure of her living room window.
As part of the weight-saving measures for the Nixon, the design teams had reworked the living modules for more efficient use of space, paring them from their original hundred-meter length down to seventy. Compared to what was being done in the power modules, this was unglamorous reengineering, but eliminating the excess living space would cut the dry mass of the ship by twelve percent. It wasn’t a lot by itself, but it cut the requirements for power, heat disposal, and water for reaction mass, reducing the final size of the ship by a thousand tons.
For all that, it wasn’t asking a lot to give up a window, and her new quarters did have a wall-sized high-resolution 3-D screen, totally state of the art. But it wasn’t real, she thought sadly. It was like the sound system in her new quarters; recorded music sounded wonderful and was a delight to listen to, but nothing like a live performance. Unfortunately rank, along with its privileges, had to set a good example.
Fang-Castro had sent most of the crew ground-side, starting two weeks earlier at the end of January. After the non-essentials had departed the station, construction crews installed temporary bulkheads thirty meters inward of the front ends of the modules. They’d stripped the furnishings from the forward thirty meters and bled the air back into the station’s reserves.
Then they’d fabricated and attached support pillars between the axle and the modules just rearward of the cutting line. In the final preparation for the trimming, each module’s forward elevator shaft had been cut free and moved off to a safe distance. That final bit of prep had finished up yesterday, two days ahead of schedule, Fang-Castro noted. Everybody was working hard: no slackers allowed.
Her slate chimed: John Clover. “You called? I was in the bathroom.”
“Are you close by my quarters?”
“Yeah, I’m in mine. Just got back.”
“Stop in if you have a minute.”
And a minute later, her door chimed, and she said, “Come in,” which released the door.
Clover stepped in, with his cat sitting on his shoulder. He put the cat on the floor, and Fang-Castro got up, went to a drawer, took out a pack of salmon jerky, and gave a strip to the cat, who was expecting it.
Virtually everybody in the station was a technician of some kind: Clover wasn’t, and didn’t much care about tech. He was a thinker, and a conversationalist. Ever since their clandestine late-night dinner, they’d been meeting a couple of times a week, to chat. As might have been expected of a leading anthropologist, he was both intelligent and observant.
“Sit down,” she said.
He took his usual chair and said, “So—do we have an agenda, or are we ruminating?”
“Ruminating—I’m waiting to give them the go-ahead to start cutting up the place,” she said. “Let’s assume there are aliens at the station—a resident crew. Do we need to take weapons with us? If we do, what kind?”
“I’m not a shrink,” Clover said. “But we’ll need a few weapons on board, not for the aliens, but for the humans. As we get further out, there’ll be a lot of stress, and there’ll be some personal conflict. There may even be some good old-fashioned mating-ritual violence . . . too few women, too many alpha males. We’ll need some electrical stunners . . .”
Fang-Castro waved him down. “Let’s stick with the aliens. We’ve got the crew problems covered, I think.”
Clover nodded. “Okay. First—”
He was interrupted by a computer voice: “Incoming priority for Fang-Castro from Joe Martinez.”
Fang-Castro held up a finger, and took the call: “Joe?”
“We’re ready to go out here. We need you to give the order.”
“Recording with time-note: I’m ordering you to commence the quarters trim.”
“Thank you, ma’am. We’re starting now.”
Back to Clover: “So, do we need a weapons system to deal with the aliens?”
Clover said, “Basically, no. I’ve talked to Crow about this, and there are only a few ways to fight in space. Some of them are suicidal, so we rule those out. I haven’t been able to think of a situation in which we’d destroy our own ship as a method of attacking the aliens. There are some movie scenarios out there—the aliens are an evil life-form that preys on humans. Or they take over our minds and turn us into zombies with some kind of infectious virus and the only way we can save Earth is to blow up our own ship. But if the aliens really want to do that, why haven’t they done it? That’s the critical question. Why haven’t they done it? The fact is, we know they could have destroyed all life on Earth if they’d wanted to, long before this. Or even with this arrival—we only saw them by mistake. If they’d simply accelerated an asteroid into Earth, and we know they can do that, given the size of their ship, we probably wouldn’t even see it coming until too late. From all of that, I’d deduce that they don’t want to destroy us. Simply because they could have, anytime, and didn’t. So, we ignore the movie scenarios.”
“What if they don’t actively want to destroy us, but want to keep us away from their station?”
“That’s what I’ve been talking to Crow about. They’re a century ahead of us, maybe more. I can’t begin to guess what they’d have to stop us, but they’d sure have something! They might warn us off . . . or we might not even see it coming.”
“Bottom line, we can’t defend ourselves against them, if they get aggressive.”
“No. We can’t. That’s my feeling. We anthros are very good at war—maybe even better than they are. The overriding fact, though, is there really isn’t a very good way to fight in deep space. Fights would lead to annihilation, first of the fighters, and then later, of the warring ships or bases, or even the warring planets.”
“Not desirable.”
“For either side,” Clover said. “Suppose we get out th
ere and find a station. The existence of the station as a stopping point suggests that they really need the place. So what happens if we go out there, and they do something to piss us off? What happens when the next starship shows up, and the gas station has been burned down? They may represent a danger to us, but we also represent a danger to them. It seems to me, it behooves both sides to act with some . . . courtesy. Some rational approach to contact.”
“You’re suggesting we do nothing.”
“Nah. That’s not safe, either. They might be territorial and want to see how far they can push us. So, they give us a little whack. We give them a little whack back—but only once.”
“The problem with that is, the little whack could be the end of us.”
“I don’t think so. Look, once a planetary civilization reaches a certain point—the generation of radio waves, say—a lot of other things just naturally fall into place. Radio waves suggest a command of electricity, of course, and everything that comes out of that—internal combustion engines, airplanes, and advanced understanding of practical physics. They know we’re here. Even if they didn’t before, they know now. They could have been watching our TV programs all the way in. So if they give us a little warning shot, it’ll be small: I think. It’s not likely to happen at all. I think. I don’t really think they’d even take the chance. We could have detected these ships coming in fifty or a hundred years ago, but we didn’t. Why not? Probably because their visits are extremely rare. If they destroyed us, or our ships, then the next time they show up, we could have a nuke waiting for them. A nuke they wouldn’t even see until it would be too late to do anything about it. So there are reasons for them not to annoy us, just as there are reasons for us not to annoy them.”
Fang-Castro nodded. “I buy most of that: the aliens probably don’t want to kill us. You understand what our biggest problem could be . . .”
Saturn Run Page 15
