“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, David. 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!”