Saturn (36 page)

Edouard Urbain watched the final few minutes of the voting in the privacy of his quarters with a strange mixture of disappointment and relief. Eberly had clearly won, that much was certain early in the afternoon. But Urbain waited until the voting ended, at 17:00 hours, before finally accepting the fact that he would not be the director of the habitat.

He almost smiled. Now I can get back to my real work, he told himself. I will no longer be distracted by these political monkeyshines.

Yet he felt close to tears. Rejected again. All my life I have been turned away from the top position. All my life I have been told that I am not good enough to be number one. Even Jeanmarie turned against me, in the end.

And more, he realized. Now I must face this crazy stuntman and his demand to go to the surface of Titan. Eberly will support his demand, of course. I will have to ask the IAA to inform Eberly that they will not permit it. I will have to show everyone back on Earth that I am not strong enough to keep a simple adventurer from contaminating a pristine new world.

Tears blurred his eyes as he commanded the phone to contact Eberly. I must congratulate him and concede my defeat, Urbain thought. Another defeat. With more to come.

Ilya Timoshenko had no difficulty making his concession message. Sitting at the bar in the Bistro surrounded by a gaggle of supporters
—
mostly engineers and technicians
—
he used his handheld to call Eberly.

"You've won and I'm glad," he said to Eberly's pleased image. "Now let's get this bucket into its proper orbit around Saturn."

Eberly laughed. "Yes, by all means. We're all counting on you and the technical staff to bring us into Saturn orbit tomorrow."

While Eberly's supporters celebrated his victory with an impromptu picnic out by the lake, Holly was still in Wilmot's apartment, using his computer to comb through the habitat's personnel files. It took several hours, but at last she had a list of fifty men and women whom she thought could serve as her posse.

As she sent the list to Eberly at his quarters, she wondered how good her idea really was. Would the people she had selected actually agree to serve as a posse? It was so hard to pinpoint attributes such as loyalty and responsibility from a person's dossier. Most of the people aboard the habitat were far from being "establishment" types. They weren't misfits, as Pancho had called them, but they were definitely free thinkers, self-starters, unwilling to accept discipline imposed by others.

I hope this works, Holly thought. She realized that her very life depended on it.

The victory party was getting rowdy. Several of Eberly's supporters had brought coolers of home-brewed beer to the lakeside picnic and now the celebrants were getting noisier and more obstreperous, laughing uproariously at almost anything, sloshing beer over one another's heads, even wading into the lake fully dressed, giggling and staggering like college students.

Normally, Eberly would have basked in the adulation of his supporters. He didn't drink, and no one dared to douse him with beer or anything else, but still Eberly would have enjoyed every millisecond of the hours-long picnic. Except that he knew what was coming after the party ended.

So despite the smile he wore, in the back of his mind he was thinking that he would have to deal with Kananga, and that was going to be far from pleasant. Dangerous, more likely.

Morgenthau seemed rather pleased, despite the drunken antics of the staggering, boisterous crowd. Even snaky little Vyborg chatted happily with a few of the glowing-eyed young women that clustered about him, Eberly noted. Power goes to some people's heads; in other people, power goes straight to the groin.

Morgenthau shouldered her way through a throng of well-wishers crowding Eberly, a plastic cup in her chubby hand. Nonalcoholic, Eberly was certain. Probably lemonade. The crowd melted away. Are they being respectful, Eberly wondered, or do they realize that she views all this frivolity with infinite distaste?

Once the others had moved out of earshot, she quietly asked Eberly, "Enjoying your triumph?" A knowing smile dimpled her broad face.

He nodded soberly. He had been careful to drink nothing stronger than iced tea all through the picnic.

"Now our true work begins," she said, in a lower voice. "Now we bring these people under control."

Eberly nodded again, less enthusiastically. He knew that she meant that he too would be under control, as well. Her control. I've done all this work and she thinks she's going to be the true power.

He wondered if Wilmot and Holly would turn out to be strong enough to help him.

The following morning, fifty puzzled men and women crowded into the largest conference room in the administration building. Holly, escorted by Gaeta and Cardenas, left Wilmot's quarters to join them, after a detour to their own apartments for a shower and change of clothes. They could see Kananga's security officers following them at some distance, hanging back but watching their every move as they spoke into their handhelds for instructions from Kananga. Holly thought of vids she had seen of hyenas tracking a herd of gazelles, waiting for a weak one to falter so they could pounce.

Eberly met them at the building's front door and together they walked past the Human Resources offices, where Morgenthau should have been, to the conference room.

There weren't enough chairs in the conference room for everyone, and the fifty people Holly had selected were mostly on their feet, making the packed room feel hot and sweaty with the press of too many bodies. And they were decidedly unhappy.

"What's going on?" one of the men demanded as soon as Eberly stepped through the door.

"Yeah, why do you want us here?"

"We're not gonna miss the orbit insertion, are we? It's set for a few hours from now."

Eberly made a placating gesture with both hands as he squeezed through the group and up to the head of the table. Holly, with Gaeta and Cardenas still flanking her, waited near the door.

"Hey, isn't that the fugitive?" someone said, pointing at Holly.

"The security people want her."

"She must've turned herself in."

Holly said nothing, but it frightened her to be considered a fugitive, a criminal who has to be turned over to the authorities.

"What's she doing here?"

"Maybe Eberly's got her to give herself up."

"Then why're we here? What's he want with us?"

Gradually, they all turned toward Eberly, who stood in silence behind the unoccupied chair at the head of the table, his hands gripping the chair back, waiting for their mutterings to cease.

At last he said, "I've asked you here because I need your help." Pointing down the table to Holly, he said, "Miss Lane has been falsely accused. Colonel Kananga is the one who should be arrested."

"Kananga?"

"But he's the chief of security!"

"That's why I need you," Eberly said. "I want you to form a committee, a posse. We will go to Kananga's office and arrest him."

"Me?"

"Us?"

"Arrest the chief of security?"

"This has gotta be some kind of joke, right?"

"What about the rest of the security staff? You think those goons are gonna stand by and let us arrest their boss?"

Eberly said, "The fifty of you should be enough to discourage the guards from interfering. After all, they aren't armed with anything more dangerous than their batons."

"I heard they're all martial arts specialists."

"I don't see why I have to get involved in this. You're the chief administrator now. You do it."

"As chief administrator, I am drafting you to serve
—
"

"The hell with that! I'm not going to get my face punched in just because you've got a gripe with the security chief. Get some other suckers to do your dirty work!"

One of the women said, "Anyway, you're not really the chief administrator yet, not officially. Not until Professor Wilmot swears you in."

"But I
need
you to arrest Kananga," Eberly pleaded. "It's your duty as citizens!"

"Duty my ass! You wanted to be head of this community. You do your duty. Leave me out of it."

"Do it yourself," a bellicose red-faced man thundered. "We didn't ride all the way out here to Saturn to help you set up a dictatorship."

"But
—"

They turned away from Eberly and began filing past Holly through the door, grumbling and muttering.

"Wait," Eberly called uselessly.

Hardly any of them even hesitated. They hurried by, leaving the conference room, most of them avoiding Holly's eyes as they left.

Eberly stood at the head of the table, watching them leave. Morgenthau has all the offices bugged, he realized. Kananga will know about this failure before the last of them leaves the room.

Unheeding of politics, uncaring of human aspirations and activities, oblivious to the hopes and fears of the ten thousand people aboard the habitat,
Goddard
fell toward the ringed planet, gripped in Saturn's massive gravity well, sliding down into its preordained orbit just outside the ring system.

Half a million kilometers away, a jagged chunk of ice-covered rock half the size of the habitat was also falling into an orbit that would bring it squarely into Saturn's brightest, widest ring.

In the tidy, efficient command center, Timoshenko scowled at the data his console screen showed him.

"We're picking up more dust than predicted," he said.

Captain Nicholson nodded, her eyes fixed on her own screens. "Not to worry."

"It's causing abrasion of the hull."

"Within acceptable limits. Once we're in orbit we'll be moving with the dust and the abrasion level will go down."

Timoshenko saw that the navigator and first mate both looked more than a little worried, despite the captain's calm assurance.

"If the abrasion causes a break in one of the superconducting wires," the first mate said, "it could cause our radiation shielding to fail."

The captain swiveled her chair toward him. She was a small woman, but when her square jaw stuck out like that she could be dangerous.

"And what do you want me to do about it, Mr. Perkins? We're in free fall now. Do you expect me to put her in reverse and back out of Saturn's gravity well?"

"Uh, no ma'am. I was just
—
"

"You just attend to your duties and stop being such an old maid.

We calculated the abrasion rate before we left lunar orbit, didn't we? It's not going to damage our shielding."

The first mate bent his head to stare at his console screens as if his life depended on it.

"And you," she turned on the navigator, "keep close track of that incoming iceball. If there's any danger here, that's where it is."

"It's following the predicted trajectory to within five nines," said the navigator.

"You watch it anyway," snapped Captain Nicholson. "Astronomers can make all the predictions they want; if that thing hits us we're dead meat."

Timoshenko grinned sourly. She's a tough old bitch, all right. I'll miss her when she leaves.

And then he realized, When she and the other two leave I'll be the senior man of the crew. Senior and only.

Vyborg hissed, "He's sold us out. The traitor has sold us out."

Kananga, watching the real-time display of Eberly's failed meeting with his unwilling posse, laughed aloud. "No," the Rwandan said. "He
tried
to sell us out. And failed."

They were in Morgenthau's office. From behind her desk she turned off the spy camera's display, then hunched forward in her creaking chair. "So what do we do about him?" she asked.

"He's a traitor," Vyborg insisted. "An opportunistic turncoat who'd sell his mother's milk if he thought he could make a penny out of it."

"I agree," said Morgenthau, her expression grim. "But what do we do about him?"

Still smiling, Kananga said, "That's what airlocks are for. Him and the girl, as well."

"And Cardenas?" Morgenthau asked. "And the stuntman? And Wilmot and anyone else who opposes us?"

Kananga started to nod, then realized what she was saying. He rubbed his chin thoughtfully.

Vyborg said, "We can't execute everyone who disagrees with us. Unfortunately."

"Yes," said Kananga. "Even my best people would draw the line somewhere."

"So we have to control them, rather than execute them," Morgenthau said.

"Can we control Eberly now? In a few hours he'll be installed as leader of this community."

"It means nothing," Morgenthau assured him. "You saw how those people reacted to his plea for their help. These malcontents and freethinkers won't raise a finger to support him against us."

"They elected him."

"Yes, and now they expect him to run things without bothering them. They don't want to get involved in the messy work of being active citizens."

"Ahh," said Kananga. "I understand."

"As long as we don't bother the people, they'll let us have a free hand to run things as we see fit."

"So Eberly has the title, but we make certain he has no power?"

"Exactly. He'll have to jump to our tune, or else."

"And Wilmot?"

"He's already out of the way."

"Cardenas? The stuntman?" Vyborg asked.

"The stuntman will be leaving after his performance. He'll go out on the ship that's bringing the scientists from Earth."

"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.
s
table 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.