Saturn Run Read online

  ALSO BY JOHN SANDFORD

  Rules of Prey

  Shadow Prey

  Eyes of Prey

  Silent Prey

  Winter Prey

  Night Prey

  Mind Prey

  Sudden Prey

  The Night Crew

  Secret Prey

  Certain Prey

  Easy Prey

  Chosen Prey

  Mortal Prey

  Naked Prey

  Hidden Prey

  Broken Prey

  Dead Watch

  Invisible Prey

  Phantom Prey

  Wicked Prey

  Storm Prey

  Buried Prey

  Stolen Prey

  Silken Prey

  Field of Prey

  Gathering Prey

  KIDD NOVELS

  The Fool’s Run

  The Empress File

  The Devil’s Code

  The Hanged Man’s Song

  VIRGIL FLOWERS NOVELS

  Dark of the Moon

  Heat Lightning

  Rough Country

  Bad Blood

  Shock Wave

  Mad River

  Storm Front

  Deadline

  G. P. PUTNAM’S SONS

  Publishers Since 1838

  An imprint of Penguin Random House LLC

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  New York, New York 10014

  Copyright © 2015 by John Sandford

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  Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data

  Sandford, John, date.

  Saturn run / John Sandford, Ctein.

  p. cm.

  ISBN 978-0-698-41167-8

  1. Space ships—Fiction. 2. Quests (Expeditions)—Fiction. I. Ctein, photographer. II. Title.

  PS3569.A516S28 2015 2015024637

  813'.54—dc23

  This is a work of fiction. Names, characters, places, and incidents either are the product of the authors’ imaginations or are used fictitiously, and any resemblance to actual persons, living or dead, businesses, companies, events, or locales is entirely coincidental.

  Version_1

  CONTENTS

  Also by John Sandford

  Title Page

  Copyright

  Dedication

  Chapter 1

  Chapter 2

  Chapter 3

  Chapter 4

  Chapter 5

  Chapter 6

  Chapter 7

  Chapter 8

  Chapter 9

  Chapter 10

  Chapter 11

  Chapter 12

  Chapter 13

  Chapter 14

  Chapter 15

  Chapter 16

  Chapter 17

  Chapter 18

  Chapter 19

  Chapter 20

  Chapter 21

  Chapter 22

  Chapter 23

  Chapter 24

  Chapter 25

  Chapter 26

  Chapter 27

  Chapter 28

  Chapter 29

  Chapter 30

  Chapter 31

  Chapter 32

  Chapter 33

  Chapter 34

  Chapter 35

  Chapter 36

  Chapter 37

  Chapter 38

  Chapter 39

  Chapter 40

  Chapter 41

  Chapter 42

  Chapter 43

  Chapter 44

  Chapter 45

  Chapter 46

  Chapter 47

  Chapter 48

  Chapter 49

  Chapter 50

  Chapter 51

  Chapter 52

  Chapter 53

  Chapter 54

  Chapter 55

  Chapter 56

  Chapter 57

  Chapter 58

  Chapter 59

  Chapter 60

  Chapter 61

  Chapter 62

  Chapter 63

  Chapter 64

  Chapter 65

  Epilogue

  Authors’ Note

  CTEIN DEDICATES THIS NOVEL TO PAULA BUTLER

  SANDFORD DEDICATES IT TO BEN, DAN, AND GABRIEL CURTIS, HIS GRANDSONS

  1.

  FEBRUARY 9, 2066

  From ten kilometers out, the Sky Survey Observatory looked like an oversized beer can. Yellow-white sunlight glittered from the can’s outward side, while the other half was a shifting fun house reflection of the pale blues and pearly cloud streaks of the earth, a thousand kilometers below.

  The can was not quite alone: an egg-shaped service module, human-sized, encrusted with insectile appendages, ports, windows, and cameras, was closing in on it. Storage lockers and canisters surrounded the base of the egg. Had there been any air around it, and anything with ears, the faint twang of country music might have been heard vibrating through its ice-white walls: “Oh, my ATV is a hustlin’ on down the line, and them tofu critters are looking mighty fine. . . .”

  The handyman was making a house call.

  The Sky Survey Observatory carried four telescopes: the Big Eye, the Medium Eye, the Small Eye, and Chuck’s Eye, the latter unofficially named after a congressman who slipped the funding into a veto-proof Social Security bill. The scopes stared outward, assisted by particle and radiation detectors, looking for interesting stuff.

  All of the SSO’s remotely operable telescopes, radio dishes, and particle sensors, all the digital cameras and computers, all the storage systems and fuel tanks and solar cells, lived at the command of astronomers sitting comfortably in climate-controlled offices back on the ground.

  Until the observatory broke. Then somebody had to go there with the metaphorical equivalent of a screwdriver.

  One of the groundhuggers called, “Can you see it?”

  Joe Martinez said into his chin mike, “Yeah, I can. Holy cow. Something really whacked that motherfucker.”

  “What! What? Joe, what—”

  “Just messin’ with you, Bob.”

  “Hey, Joe? I’m pushing the button that cuts off your air.”

  “Didn’t know you had one of those.”

  “You don’t mess with astronomers, Joe. Cutting the air in three-two-one . . .”

  —

  Martinez was a handyman; his official title was chief of station operations, which meant that he kept the place running.

  He hadn’t had much to do except drink coffee and read the current Guitar Riffs for the last couple of hours, waiting to make the approach to the SSO. Barring some weird million-to-one mishap, his trajectory was fixed by the laws of physics and the impulse from the low-velocity rail-gun at the station; the computer said he was exactly on track. He sucked down some more of the decaf, his fingers unconsciously tapping out a counterpoint to the Blue Ridge Bitches, the band he currently favored.

  Martinez wasn’t a scientist. He did mechanics and electronics, a little welding, a lot of gluing, the occasional piece of plumbing, and sti
ll more gluing. He had a degree in electromechanical engineering, but there were days when he thought he should’ve gotten one in adhesives. His engineering and academic background, combined with an instinctive love of machine tools, made him a quick study, but he didn’t have much interest in building new machines.

  On the ground, he messed around with electric guitars, video games, propeller-driven airplanes and wooden speedboats. He loved real hardware even more than he loved his computer, and he did love his computer. If he could build it, fix it, refurbish it, or just plain tinker with it, he was happy.

  But he was happiest up in the sky, where he did a little of everything; he was the world’s best-paid handyman.

  Bob Anderson came back: “What do you think?”

  “I can’t see anything,” Martinez said. “I mean, nothing unusual.”

  “Good. You going manual?”

  “As manual as I can, anyway. And that would be . . . now.”

  He flipped the arming switch on the thruster joystick. Checking the intercept lidar—less than five meters a second of residual velocity, very good—he played the cradle’s thrusters. Practice born of hundreds of runs made his actions nearly unconscious, like riding a bicycle. His eyes took in the instrument readings while his fingers responded with bursts of thrust. It was safer, he’d told Amelia, his third ex-wife, than driving to work.

  “What happens,” she’d asked, “if everything fails? I mean, if everything fails down here, when you’re driving to work, you go in a ditch. What if everything fails out there?”

  Well, then, he’d said, he’d get a free tour of the universe and would still be on tour when the sun finally died, a few billion years from now. She hadn’t laughed. Then or later.

  Martinez had. As the shrinks had noted, isolation didn’t worry him.

  “Radar says you’re there,” said Anderson.

  “Close. Just a bit further.”

  —

  The egg’s attitude matched that of the SSO—there wasn’t any particular “upright” in space, but there had been when the can was put together on Earth, and the lettering on the side of it appeared in the proper orientation to Martinez’s eyes. There’d been few visitors to read the lettering—in the eleven years that the observatory had been functioning, there’d been thirty visits, by fewer than a half-dozen different people, one egg at a time.

  Of those thirty visits, Martinez had made eighteen. Most of the instruments and scopes were modular, boosted up into space as self-contained operational units, ready for deployment.

  Some assembly was required. The instruments had to be fitted into the can, periodically serviced, and upgraded as new and better cameras, computers, and memories were invented. The SSO was the finest piece of astronomical machinery ever produced, and Americans—or the astronomical fraction of them—were committed to making sure it was equipped with the best the taxpayers could afford.

  On this trip, Chuck’s Eye was getting an eye exam along with a new camera: Chuck had developed a tic. The vibration could have come from one of the servos inside the camera housing. It could have come from a wire that had worked free from its housing because of the heat-cold cycles. It could have come from any number of things, but whatever the cause, it had to be stopped. The cost of stopping it could vary from nothing at all, to a million bucks or so. The people on the ground were praying for “nothing at all,” since Congress was in one of its semi-decadal spasms of cost-cutting.

  Martinez’s right hand played on the sensor panel, bringing up his work tools and assists. At the index finger’s command, power flowed to the servos on the manipulator arms and energized the tactile gloves. The thumb flipped a switch and dozens of tiny directional spotlights flicked on all over the exterior of the egg, banishing the darkness between the egg and the can—in space, flashlights were almost as vital as oxygen.

  His right little finger swiveled the lights, bringing them to bear. Years of misspent youth at game consoles had given him reflexes and manual dexterity that a jazz saxophonist might have envied. As his right hand continued to play the instruments, his left worked the joystick, bringing the egg in close and slow. He circled the can one time, making a vid, then eased the egg to a stop relative to the observatory.

  Slowly, slowly, a mere millimeter a second, that was the trick. There wasn’t any danger to the observatory; the SSO’s own navigation computers could easily compensate for a bump, firing the observatory’s thrusters and running its orientation gyros to bring it back on point. But why waste the can’s limited fuel supply on a sloppy docking?

  With the very faintest snick, the grappler on the egg latched onto one of the docking sockets that were all over the can’s skin. This particular socket was adjacent to the Chuck’s Eye instrument hatch. Once tied in, Martinez ran a last confirming test on the safety and security cameras. Everything inside and out was recorded during one of these house calls, because you never knew when a detail you missed might just save the job . . . or your life.

  “We show you docked,” Bob said. “Good job. Barely a jiggle.”

  “That’s why you hired a pro,” Martinez said. “You looking at the vid?”

  “Yeah, we’re running it against the last scan, and so far we see no changes, no anomalies,” Bob said. Three seconds of silence. “Okay, the scan is finished, we see nothing at all on the exterior.”

  “Good. Go ahead and cut the juice.”

  “Cutting the juice: juice is cut. You’re clear.”

  —

  Killing the SSO’s power was a safety precaution, not for Martinez, who was well isolated and insulated in his egg, but for Chuck’s Eye: an accidental short or surge during servicing could result in one of those million-dollar repairs the groundhuggers were praying to avoid.

  A moment later, a ground-based scope specialist named Diana Pike, whom Joe had never met, but with whom he often worked, called back and said in her familiar southern accent, “We’re good, Joe. Want to look for that tic, first?”

  “Hey, Di. Yeah, I’m putting some pucks out now.” Martinez used a spidery remote arm to drop a few micro-seismometer pucks on the can’s skin and the outer case of Chuck’s Eye. The bottom of the pucks had a layer of an electro-phosphoprotein adhesive, a synthetic based on the natural adhesive used by barnacles. With a tiny electrical current running through the adhesive, it would stick to almost anything; when the current shut off, the adhesive effect vanished. They were called Post-its. What that had to do with yellow pop-up reminders on a workslate screen was anybody’s guess.

  “Okay, Di, we’re set up here,” Martinez called. “Give me a rattle.”

  “Here y’all go,” Pike said. “Three-two-one. Now.”

  Two opposing thrusters fired on the can, each for just a tenth of a second and so closely spaced that a human eye couldn’t have told them apart. The can shuddered.

  “Okay. We’re cycled. You see that?”

  Martinez said, “Yeah, yeah, I see it.”

  —

  Martinez was watching his monitor readouts—the people on the ground were seeing the same thing—where the reports from the micros were popping up, giving him a directional reading on the vibration. It was near the surface of the superstructure, which was good, but outside the seismo array. “I’m gonna have to juggle some pucks,” Martinez said. “Wait one.”

  He moved his micros, and called back to Pike: “Give me another cycle.”

  “Cycling, three-two-one. Now. Cycled.”

  Martinez looked at his monitor and called back, “It’s right near the surface. I’d say it’s between walls. I’m repositioning the pucks and moving a scope out to take a look.”

  “It’s the insulating foam.” Pike was hopeful.

  “Probably. I’m moving the pucks . . .”

  Another shot and the micros gave him a precise location, within a half centimeter of the source of the vibration. He moved a
macro lens in and looked at the surface of the observatory. “There’s no external defect,” he said.

  “Good,” Anderson said. If it had been a micrometeorite, the repairs could have been a bigger problem. They’d never had one penetrate both skins, but the possibility was always there.

  “Gonna cut a hole,” Martinez said.

  The process took an hour. Martinez drilled a three-millimeter hole in the meteorite barrier, then peeked inside with a fiber optic. As they’d suspected, some of the foam used as insulation between the two walls had shaken loose on Chuck’s Eye. There’d probably been a fracture during construction, or one created when the can was boosted into space; years of heat-cold cycles had finally shaken it loose. Martinez gave it a new shot of foam, specially formulated for this precise repair—they’d done three others just like it—sealed it with a carbon-fiber patch, and was done.

  That had been the tricky bit. The next part, a monkey could do:

  “Breaking out the camera package,” Martinez said.

  “Okay. Got you down for the package extraction.”

  —

  The new package for Chuck’s Eye was less a single instrument than a spider’s-head complex of primary and secondary eyes, operating at all wavelengths from the mid-infrared to the far ultraviolet. Chuck’s Eye was like the scout that ran ahead of an expedition in the Old West, taking in a wide field of view and maintaining a lookout for unusual objects and events. The bigger, more impressive Eyes would do the research that mattered, but Chuck’s Eye would be the first to catch a new supernova or gamma ray burst, or whatever else might show up.

  The cameras were modular and self-contained, and the new camera module looked exactly like the old one. Joe yanked the old one, slipped the new one into the rack, flipped the locking clamps, and pinged Anderson:

  “I got the old camera package out of the rack and the new one seated. It looks fine. Bob, you can power up again. Everything looks good here.”

  “Looks good here, too. Powering up.”

  And it was good. The repairs fell into the “nothing-at-all” category. Another of the mission scientists came on and said, “That’s nice work, Joe. We’ve run fifty cycles, got no vibes, and the new camera is online. You can go on home.”

  “I’m gone,” Martinez said.