Saturn Rukh (36 page)

~ * ~

“Buying the polar regions of Saturn for some ‘things,’ “ remarked Dan when he heard about the proposed solution. “It sounds to me like the deal the Dutch did to the Indians— buying Manhattan for some beads.”

~ * ~

6

TURN FOR THE WORSE

“Emergency! Reactor shutdown in progress!”

Rod’s eyes didn’t even blink when Jeeves’s loud warning blared throughout the control deck. Ignoring Chastity as she scrambled up out of her habitat in her blue nightgown and powered up the scottyboard, he went into his test-pilot-in-trouble mode as he methodically scanned the indicator icons on his pilot console.

“Plenty of time,” he reminded himself, keeping physically calm while his brain raced through his various options. “Think first, act later.” A few seconds prior to Jeeves’s warning, Rod had felt the deep “twang” that came every time a bubblefloater or other prey animal struck the Hoytether hanging below Peregrine. A strike happened at least once every hunt dive. Almost all of the strikes hit the tether directly. The failsafe design of the Hoytether kept the multiline structure from parting, and usually the worst that happened was that Mouser would have to climb down and replace damaged lines in that sector of the tether. This time, however, the bubblefloater must have struck the reactor complex at the end of the tether.

Rod waited until Jeeves had completed the reactor shutdown and connected the capsule power lines to the onboard meta-powered thermoelectric generator.

“Status report, Jeeves,” he said quietly, once he had completed his scan of the screen.

“Strike on radiator fins of sole remaining secondary cooling loop,” replied Jeeves. “Cooling loop pressurization lost. I have Tabby inspecting the damage.”

Both Rod and Chastity had their eyes glued to the screens in front of them, trying to make sense of the moving video images coming from one of the camera “eyes” of the mechbot down on the reactor. Tabby came to a halt and the video image stabilized on their screens. Through the wet guck of the innards of a smashed bubblefloater dripped a silvery trickle of liquid sodium-potassium alloy droplets. The drops flashed brightly as they traveled, leaving behind a trail of desiccated burnt flesh covered with white streaks of sodium-potassium hydroxide.

“That blows it!” growled Chastity. “Good thing there’s no oxygen in Saturn’s atmosphere or all that hot hydrogen being generated would have added an explosion and fire to our list of problems.”

“Jeeves. Any chance of Tabby fixing the leak?” asked Rod, knowing full well the answer—for Seichi had tried hard to find a way before finally deciding he would have to go down himself.

“The mechbots are not capable of making the repair,” replied Jeeves. Both Rod and Chastity felt the heavy hand of fear tighten around their hearts as they faced the grim realization that it might take another human sacrifice to enable the survivors to return home.

“Is a human capable of making the repair?” asked Rod, facing the fear head on. The fear changed to despair at the reply.

“The cooling loop cannot be repaired. There is insufficient coolant to recharge it.”

There was a long pause as both Rod and Chastity thought in vain for alternative solutions to their predicament. Chastity punched at the keyboard as she asked Jeeves to compute something for her. The nimble trimmed fingers of her right hand moved gracefully over the letter and number icons on the touchscreen, their rapid dance alternating with the taps of her long left index fingernail at the Shift and Function icons.

“The backup power system is burning sixty kilos of meta a day,” she remarked as she noticed the indicator at the top of the scottyboard. “We can’t afford that. We need every bit of meta we have for powering the main rockets if we’re going to get off this godforsaken planet. Jeeves! Can you bring up the reactor and operate it without the cooling loop? Every watt of electricity the reactor can supply means that much less meta will be lost.”

“The reactor is not designed to be operated without the secondary cooling loops operational,” replied Jeeves.

“She didn’t
ask
you that!” yelled Rod, beginning to lose control in the face of what looked like an increasingly hopeless situation. “Bring up the reactor without the cooling loop and get every watt you can out of it!”

“Such an option is not allowed by safety regulations,” replied Jeeves in a level voice.

“Why don’t you work on trajectory options, Rod?” suggested Chastity, trying to get the situation back on track. “Assume you’ll have available all the meta presently in the fuel tanks. I’ll work with Jeeves and the Mission Control people back on Earth, and get that reactor up one way or the other.”

~ * ~

Three hours later, the five remaining crewmembers of
Sexdent
met in the galley. It was dinnertime, but no one was particularly hungry. They just picked at their food as Rod and Chastity reported what they had been able to come up with.

“The reactor is up and running,” reported Chastity. “With the secondary cooling systems nonfunctional, it’s operating at internal temperatures well beyond what it was designed for. The Mitsubishi engineers predict a random failure in the reactor control system producing either a meltdown or an irreversible shutdown within an estimated mean time to failure of about one year. Of course, since the failure would be a random event, it could happen sooner than that, or later than that.”

“With the string of bad luck we’ve been having, it’ll probably be sooner,” said Pete dejectedly. “I was really looking forward to spending my billion. Too bad I can’t use it to buy a new reactor.”

“How much electricity is it generating?” asked Rod. “Is there enough to power the capsule and still make meta? I’m going to need every drop.”

“Sorry,” Chastity replied, biting a recently crimsoned lip and blinking eyelashes black with fresh mascara. She had deliberately taken the time to freshen her makeup before their communal dinner in order to brighten things up. There was no need for her to look dowdy even though the news she was bearing was bad. “We barely have enough to run the capsule. I’ve shut down all the mechbots, turned off the high-power transmitter link to Earth, and shut down or reduced everything else I thought I could get away with.”

“I noticed it was colder in here than it used to be,” said Sandra.

“We’re still having to burn a little meta in the backup generator to carry the load,” replied Chastity. She turned to Pete. “I know the main part of the meta factory is shut down,” she said. “But the scottyboard says there is still some power being drawn.”

“Air circulators and chemsyns,” replied Pete. “I leave the chemsyns on all the time and have them producing ethanol when I’m not using them for something else.”

“Right after we finish eating, go out and close everything down,” said Rod. “We can’t afford to waste meta making booze.” He paused, and a grim look came over his face. “Although we might as well use the meta for making booze. I certainly can’t use it to get us out of here.” He took a deep breath and everybody stopped to listen to their commander.

“To get to Titan’s orbit, where our return fuel waits for us, requires a launch velocity of thirty-seven kilometers per second, counting air drag and gravity losses. We’re at twenty-one degrees north. Since Saturn is rotating and we’re moving with it, we’re already traveling at nine klecs, so we need the meta rockets on
Sexdent
to boost us an additional twenty-eight klecs and we can get out of here. But that only puts us in an elliptical orbit with its peak altitude at Titan’s orbit. To circularize the orbit and come to a stop at the fuel depot will require another burn at apogee of four klecs. The total mission delta vee we need out of the rockets is thirty-two klecs. Unfortunately, to do those two bums requires that we start out with ninety-six tons of meta in our fuel tanks and we only have sixty tons.”

“How about Space Unlimited sending a rescue ship?” asked Sandra with a perturbed frown. “They got us into this mess, they should get us out.”

Chastity was tempted to remind Sandra that she was getting paid a billion dollars
because
it was a risky mission. Instead, she replied, “Art Dooley and the Space Unlimited crew back in mission control are working on the problem. Don’t forget that
Sexdent
was a custom-made ship, especially the extralarge first two stages. It looks like it would take almost a year before a vehicle with a similar ability could be cobbled together, and then it would take another year before it could get here. So rescue is at least twenty-four months away. Even after they get here, they can’t rescue us without us doing our part. No ship exists that could drop all the way down into Saturn’s cloud deck to pick us up and fly back out again without refueling. We landed with empty tanks. We’re going to have to meet them at least halfway, by getting ourselves into as high an orbit as possible.”

“Well, at least we’ve got sixty tons of meta,” continued Sandra. “How far will that sixty tons take us?”

“Out to the G ring, just outside the joint orbit of the twins, Janus and Epimetheus,” replied Rod. “Good enough for a rendezvous with a rescue ship, but a
long
way from Titan and our fuel resupply.”

“Can we pull a tether whip around Janus like we did on Helene on the way in?” asked Sandra.

“Yeah!” said Pete. “Once we get to one of the lower moons we can use the tether to climb up out of Saturn’s gravity well just like we climbed down.”

“Unfortunately, we’ve only got one penetrator left,” replied Chastity. “And the maximum boost we could get from Janus won’t be enough to get us to Titan’s orbit.”

“We can still use the tether at the top of our trajectory to latch on to Janus and circularize ourselves so we don’t fall back into the atmosphere and burn up,” said Rod. “Of course, we don’t want to do that until the rescue ship arrives, since we’ll have to leave the reactor behind when we take off and live off our leftover meta.”

“I’ve been doing some calculations myself,” interjected Dan, the features of his face taking on an even more somber countenance as he continued. “We have food left for only eighteen months”—he paused—”and that estimate takes into account the fact that Seichi is no longer sharing meals with us.”

“We can stretch it out... make it last twenty-four months,” said Sandra bravely.

“I’m sure we could make the food last,” replied Chastity. “Perforce, if nothing else. But the real difficulty is making the reactor and Hoytether last. Even if the reactor doesn’t fail on us, one of these days a really big bubblefloater is going to hit the tether and snap it, and we’ll lose the reactor power that way. Combining the reactor failure probability with the tether failure probability, the Space Unlimited engineers and I calculate the estimated combined lifetime is less than six months. The minute either one of them goes, we’ve had it. We’ll have to start burning meta to keep alive, and pretty soon we won’t have enough fuel left to make it up to a decent altitude so the rescue ship can reach us.”

“How about lightening the ship—throwing stuff overboard?” suggested Sandra.

“Not a bad idea,” said Dan, brightening up. “We’ve already taken some mass off. I’ll have to ask Jeeves to get the exact figure, but I would guess that I hauled almost two tons of shit off
Sexdent
before we started our drop down the rings.”

“That’s a start,” said Rod, also brightening up. “I’d forgotten about that. I’d been assuming that
Sexdent
massed fifty tons dry. If the correct number is forty-eight tons, then the amount of fuel we need to finish off the mission is only ninety-two tons. We’re at that point in the exponential of the rocket equation curve where each ton of ship mass we can dump means almost two tons less fuel we need.”

Sandra looked at Dan. “Those bags of waste you got rid of used to be food at one time. How much more food have we ‘converted’ since we’ve been down here?”

“Yeah!” said Pete. “We certainly don’t need to haul shit to orbit.”

“There’s more than food to consider,” said Rod, also turning to look at Dan, more seriously this time. “How much of
Sexdent’s
mass is consumables? They’re the easiest thing to dump.”

“I’ll have to work with Jeeves to get the exact numbers,” said Dan. “But from what I can recall, we started out with about six tons of water, five tons of air, most of it nitrogen, and five tons of food. We ate about two tons of food on the way out and I got rid of that in Titan’s orbit. We’ve probably eaten about another ton in the six months we’ve been down here and we can certainly dump that.”

“Do we really
have
to carry all that water and air, Doc?” asked Rod. “Can’t we keep just a small amount and recycle it?”

“We do recycle, of course,” answered Dan. “But there’s a minimum needed just to fill the recycling systems so they’ll function. Let me check with Jeeves.” Putting down his dinner, he went to the engineering sector, opened the door, and started punching at the icons on the console inside.

“While you’re at it,” said Pete, “why don’t you ask Jeeves how much equipment we can dump. There are a bunch of spare parts and nonessential pieces of equipment in the storage and engineering sectors. Make sure you include the weights and steps in our habitats that we used for our morning exercises when we were in free fall.”

“Include the habitats, too,” said Rod. “We don’t need beds in free fall.”

Dan turned around with a frown on his face. “The habitats and the exercise equipment are essential to our long-term health—”