Saturn Rukh (13 page)

“Next stop is the Maxwell Gap,” Chastity announced. “We’ll be there in four-and-a-half hours.”

“We’ll be going right over the ‘spoke’ region on the B ring,” said Sandra. “With any luck, we’ll actually be able to see what the spokes are made of.”

Unfortunately, no spokes developed in the region they were passing over, so it was a disappointed Sandra who turned her console over to Seichi for the next maneuver.

“This one is going to be easier than the last one,” said Chastity, as she set up her console. “It’ll only be seven minutes at a little over a gee. Then Rod needs to do a burn of about a minute, and we’ll be on our way down the next rung.”

Confidently, Chastity sent out another penetrator toward the moonlet they had chosen in the Maxwell Gap. It was a perfect shot—the penetrator hit right in the middle of the crater Chastity had chosen, just as the length of the tether reached its two-hundred-kilometer maximum length. The image in the holoviewport in front of Chastity turned black as the penetrator sank deep into the icy surface of the moonlet. She increased the tension on the tether, the gee level in the capsule started to rise, then suddenly the holoviewport image returned—-the view was now that of a rapidly disappearing moonlet, almost as if the previous scene were being ran backward. Then, as the shock wave returning down the cable hit the capsule, they suddenly found themselves back in free fall.

“Damn!”
swore Chastity, pulling her right hand out of the tether controller and slamming both fists on the sides of the console in frustration, the metal bracelets on her left wrist clattering against the plastic. “The penetrator didn’t hold! You’d better get us out of here, Rod.”

“Damn again ...” she said more softly, looking at the broken nail on the little finger of her left hand.

Sitting behind her, Dan heard the news he had been dreading. They would have to return home. Although they would be paid three hundred million for the thirty-month mission, they would not get the full billion unless they carried out the entire mission successfully—or died in the attempt. Pamela was not going to be happy.

Rod, right hand resting on his joyball controller under the pilot console, left hand poised over the touchscreen, did nothing for a while. His calm test pilot brain was going quickly through all the various options before he took any action. Then he made up his mind.

“I’m going down,” he said softly. He turned the joyball, and
Sexdent
rotated until it was traveling backward along its trajectory. He lifted on the suspended sphere and the dozen jets in the base of the spacecraft roared into flame as ton after ton of meta was poured into their bellies to be exhausted as a highspeed reddish-purple plasma of ionized atoms.

When Chastity heard the rockets roar, she felt a tidal wave of fear rise from the pit of her stomach and flood through her body out to the tips of her fingers. She knew the fuel margins that were needed for this mission. The reason that they had climbed down the rings of Saturn using the tether was that they couldn’t carry enough fuel to do the job entirely using rocket power. They would need more than two-thirds of their initial 120-ton fuel load for the final burn that would lower their velocity to match the velocity of the upper atmosphere. The number of tons of meta they were supposed to have in their fuel tanks before they attempted the final burn was etched in her memory—88 tons. She found the box on her console that indicated the fuel level. As the seconds passed, the number clocked quickly downward: 95 ... 94 ... 93 ...

“How long is this burn supposed to last?” asked Chastity quietly after a full minute had passed and the number had gotten down to 91.

“Two minutes,” replied Rod, holding the throttle steady at three gees.

The fear came back even stronger as the seconds ticked by and the fuel level dropped below 88 and continued down.

“I sure hope he knows what in hell he’s doing,” whispered Chastity to herself. She wanted to grab the control away from Rod and use the last bit of their fuel to get them out from the inexorable pull of the giant orange planet filling her viewport—out to Titan where they had fuel waiting to take them safely home. But her test pilot training kept her from interfering. She had failed on her part of the task and she now had to trust Rod’s judgment.

“I bet you’re wondering if I know what in hell I’m doing,” said Rod over the roar of the dozen engines beneath them. “I’m just using a little of our ten-percent fuel margin to stay on the mission timeline, that’s all.”

Chastity watched wide-eyed as the numbers on the fuel indicator kept on dropping. Just as they were reaching eighty tons, Rod pulled down on the joyball and the roar ceased.

“There,” he said calmly, monitoring his screen as Seichi checked out and shut down the auxiliary pumps and control systems of the dozen engines, one after the other. “We’ll be hitting the upper atmosphere in about three hours.”

“That’s what I’m afraid of,” said Chastity. “Is eighty tons going to slow us down enough?”

“I think we have a little more than that,” said Rod. He used the differential motor between the crew module and the fuel module to put some rotational gees on the fuel tanks to settle the meta out around the periphery. “Eighty point three tons,” he said finally.

“And we need eighty-eight tons to land without stressing the heat shields,” she said. “They’re going to get pretty hot—”

“It’s not as bad as you think,” said Rod. “Now that I’ve used up our fuel margin, we don’t have to use fuel to decelerate that fuel, so we come out ahead.”

“As long as I come out of it
with
my head,” said Chastity. “How far will 80.3 tons take us?”

“Too complicated for this tired old head to figure,” said Rod. “Jeeves? Could you calculate that for me?”

“Our arrival velocity at periapsis will be 27.3 kilometers per second,” said Jeeves. “Since the surface velocity of Saturn is 9.9 kilometers per second, a burn of 17.4 kilometers per second will be required. That will necessitate the expenditure of 79.3 tons of fuel.”

“See,” said Rod serenely. “A whole ton of fuel left over.”

“Less than one-percent margin instead of ten percent,” said Chastity. “You cut that one pretty close. You’d better be equally good during the big burn.”

“That’s your job,” Rod reminded her. “As commander, my job will be coordinating the activities of all the crew during the landing phase. Besides, didn’t the simulator lab techs tell us that you were the better rocket pilot as well as better tether controller? I want the best person at the controls when we attempt the landing—especially since my life depends on it.”

He was right, Chastity remembered. There would be a dozen things that needed to be done during the landing phase. Piloting the capsule was only one of them. “I guess I’d better brush up, then,” she said, turning to the console and setting it up in simulator mode. “The real thing comes in three hours.”

An hour and a quarter later, Rod got a personal video message from Art Dooley. Art was alone in his office. His face was stern.

“Are you alone?” said the image. “If not, restart this message when you are.” There was a long pause, then Art looked up again. “I’m in business to make money. A
lot
of money. When you are trying to make a lot of money, you run some risk of losing what you have. I am ready accept that loss—of
money!
I am not willing to lose people’s lives just to make
me
money! This mission is dangerous enough without you taking unnecessary risks. You should have aborted when Chastity missed her target. I would have lost a small fortune, but I wouldn’t have minded a bit. Fortunately, you were lucky this time. But don’t do anything risky again—not on my account, at least.”

Rod had to agree that Art was right, and sent him a short apology.

~ * ~

Two hours later, everyone was strapped into their acceleration couches. Saturn filled the viewports as Chastity kept the ship’s nose pointed downward. Her left arm, normally festooned with a multitude of bracelets, now bore only a single solid-silver-hinged bangle that held tight to her wrist where there was no chance that it would activate an icon on her touchscreen during their critical descent.

“The equatorial region looks pretty smooth,” said Sandra. “You wouldn’t think that the winds blow the hardest there.”

“Smooth is what I’m looking for,” said Chastity. She twisted the joyball and the nose tilted away from the vertical to look in the direction they were traveling.

“You can pick any target point you want, Chass,” said Rod. “Saturn’s so big that it really doesn’t matter much when you do your bum.”

“Everybody comfortably settled and ready?” said Chastity, checking the clasp on her bangle. “We’ll be pulling three gees for almost ten minutes.”

“Let’s get it over with,” said Dan nervously.

“Light the candle, little lady,” said Pete.

Sandra’s eyes were shut tight.

Chastity rotated the
Sexdent
around until it was traveling backward. The only thing in their field of view now was a thin line that marked the rings—almost directly overhead. Carefully lining up her yellow trajectory arrow on the console screen with the blue course line that Jeeves had plotted, she lifted up on the throttle and the main engines roared into life. They were pushed into the cushions of their couches at one gee.

“All engines at nominal performance,” reported Seichi from the engineering console, his eyes scanning over his scotty-board.

“Thank you for your report, Mr. Takeo,” said Rod, in his most commander-like voice. “Increase gees, Ms. Blaze.”

The incongruous formal commands brought a grin to Chastity’s face as she raised the joyball even higher in the controller and the acceleration level rose to three gees, and stayed there.... After a number of minutes a groan escaped Sandra’s lips, followed by a mild curse from Dan. Then there were more minutes of strained silence overlaid on the continuing background rumble of the roaring engines. The black sky outside the viewports started to glow. The ship shuddered slightly as the air thickened and flakes of glowing dust streaked off out of view. Still the engines roared and the pressure on their bodies rose as Saturn slowly added its gravity pull to the slowing spacecraft.

“Heat shield at one thousand kelvin,” reported Seichi. “Twelve hundred ... fifteen hundred—”

“Twenty seconds to cutoff,” interjected Chastity over Seichi’s reports. “Ten... nine ... eight...”

“About time!” added Pete through clenched teeth.

Suddenly the rockets faltered.

“Out of fuel!” yelled Chastity, hastily pulling back on the throttle.

“Good enough!” replied Rod. “Seichi—close the heat shield ports over the engine nozzles, then shut down those main engines carefully, we’ll need them to get back up. Chass—switch your controller to the vernier system. We’ve got a few hundred kilograms of meta in those tanks. Keep the heat shield below five thousand K if you can.”

The intense pressure of the high deceleration forces disappeared. But in their place was not the pleasant sensation of free fall that they had all grown used to. Instead, there was the fractional-gee acceleration that came from being in a falling elevator—an elevator that wobbled erratically back and forth as it dropped through the air, leaving a glowing trail of ionized gas and melting ablative material behind it. They passed quickly through a thin cloud layer.

“The heat shield temperature has peaked,” said Chastity. “We’ve reached terminal velocity at this altitude.”

“Time to pop the chute,” said Rod, pressing an icon on his console. The nosecone of
Sexdent
took off in a jet of hot helium gas, pulling the parachute with it. Everyone held their breath and watched upward through the viewports as the streamer of cloth climbed skyward ...

... and blossomed into a beautiful white flower.

“The prettiest sight I’ve ever seen,” said Pete with relief.

The shock of the opening parachute rattled through the structure, as the multiline tether from the parachute pulled up another, thicker skein of fabric, this time made of clear plastic. On and on it unwound around the conical capsule. It ended with two thumps as two metallic canisters followed it up to the sky, pulling along after them the multiline tether from the nose of the ship. The clear plastic also inflated and slowed their fall, but although they fell more slowly now, they still fell... and would continue to fall until the balloon inflated.

“Get that reactor up and running, Mr. Takeo,” commanded Rod, but Seichi was already active at his scottyboard. Chastity punched a red icon on her screen. There was a jerk upward as the load was lightened. “Heat shield away!” she announced.

~ * ~

Far below and far away, Petro heard a strange sound through the ultrasensitive hearing chamber that stretched along the leading edge of Petru’s wing. It was a screeching sound that started high in the clouds and then softened to a whistling sound, somewhere above and off in the distance. As time stretched on, a second sound started below the slowly falling whistling sound. The second sound grew louder and more shrill as it fell straight downward until it disappeared into the distant depths of the hot hell below them. It moved much faster than any other falling object that Petro had ever heard.

“What was that?” said someone in the hunting formation.

“Nothing you should scan,” replied Petro irritably. He had yet to have his first turn in the feeding region near the center of the hunting cone, and the hunger twinges in Petru’s gizzard made him easily annoyed. “Keep your pings focused ahead— where the food is!”