Saturn Rukh (4 page)

Rod and Chastity looked around at the standardized control deck arrangement. Both were glad that they would be operating familiar equipment during this new and dangerous journey. The triangular room had three touchscreen consoles, one at each apex of the triangle. Right above each touchscreen was a heads-up holoviewport. The holoviewport acted as a normal viewport providing a view of what was outside during the critical landing phases on the surface of Luna and Mars, while at the same time superimposing navigation and status information on that view. For other operations requiring pilot control, the holoviewport could replace the outside view with any other outside view obtained from cameras placed at strategic points around the ship, allowing the pilot to observe the process of docking the ship nose-first or landing the ship tail-first.

The seat before the engineering console was occupied. The person at the scottyboard swung around on the swivel arm that held the cushioned seat for the console and started to unbuckle himself.

“Don’t bother for me,” said Chastity, waving a hand at him. But he did anyway and floated free with a bow. He was a young Japanese man, wiry in build, with long artistic fingers.

A very handsome gentleman,
mused Chastity to herself.
Reminds me of Mr. Sulu. It’ll be a pleasure sharing watches with him!

“This is Seichi Takeo, Chass,” Rod said, doing the introductions. “And Seichi, this is our pilot, Chastity Blaze.”

“I’m glad you’re going to be part of the crew, Seichi!” said Chastity cheerfully. Wanting to get things off to a friendly start, she pulled him over by their handshake, and touching his cheek with her long-nailed beflagged and bejeweled left hand, she gave him a peck on the other cheek. Seichi grinned widely in obvious pleasure and started to blush.

“I have read much about you, Miss Blaze,” said Seichi eagerly, giving another bow. “You did the pioneering work on magnoshielded engines.”

Rod turned to look at Chastity. “You did? I didn’t know that,” he said in surprise.

“I’m trying to forget it,” replied Chastity grimly. “Just causes me ulcers. It was for my master’s thesis. I came up with a design for an externally applied picket-fence magnetic field geometry that prevents a high-temperature plasma from reaching the walls of a reaction chamber or nozzle bell. That was in the days before meta. The only use for a magnoshielded engine at that time was handling the plasma from a fusion rocket, but no one had any good ideas for making a fusion rocket work— still don’t. MIT didn’t think it would be worth the money to patent the magnoshield concept, and I didn’t have the money to do it myself. Two months later, a worldwide patent was filed in Japan under the first-to-file rule. What really jerks me is that large chunks of technical detail—even the drawings!— were taken directly from my thesis, which was available at the MIT library, but not yet published in the open literature.”

“That doesn’t sound fair ...” said Rod.

“Fair or not, it’s legal,” said Chastity. “At least that’s what the MIT lawyers said, pointing out that “improvements” had been made on my original ideas. There wasn’t a damn thing I could do about it. How is one little person going to fight a big corporation like Mitsubishi?”

There was a long pause as Rod looked anxiously at Seichi. The pleased smile that had been on Seichi’s face faded away.

“Seichi!” cried Chastity, concerned. “What’s the matter?”

“Seichi is an employee of Mitsubishi,” said Rod.

Chastity couldn’t help herself—a frown flickered over her face. “What!?” she exclaimed angrily. She quickly tried to get herself under control. Certainly, Seichi would not have been involved in the piracy of her idea. But when Seichi saw the frown on her face and heard the angry tone in her voice, he stiffened and buckled himself back into the chair.

“It has been a pleasure meeting you, Miss Blaze,” he said, swiveling away from them to face the console screen, “but Jeeves and I must now return to our task of checking out the reactor.”

Chastity didn’t know what to do or say next. She and Rod stayed silent and watched over Seichi’s back at the holoviewport as Seichi’s supple fingers played over the icons on the touchscreen. The image coming from the holoviewport was obviously not the direct view to the stars outside; instead, it was a close-up view of a cylinder about the size and shape of a large oil drum with a number of pipes and cables coming out of it. One end was connected through a flexible metal hose to another object about the same size, but instead of being a compact cylinder, this was obviously a rolled-up heat-pipe radiator array. Moving around among the plumbing was a small maintenance robot, looking like a metallic six-legged Manx cat with three-pronged flexible pincers for feet. It had the name tabby painted on its back.

“Have Tabby remove the safety pin on the reactor controller, Jeeves,” said Seichi.

“Very well, sir,” said the voice persona of the ship’s computer. The front paw of the robot reached for a metal rod with a red streamer attached to it and pulled it out of the cylinder. Seichi looked down at the display in the center of the touchscreen console in front of him. In the console display was a lower-resolution image of the view in the holoviewport, colored in the false colors of an infrared imager. Most of the image was in black and dark grays, except for the maintenance robot, which had a dark-red body and yellow leg-joints.

“Bring the reactor up to minimum level for checkout, Jeeves,” said Seichi.

“How far away is that reactor?” whispered Chastity to Rod. “I don’t see any shielding!”

“It doesn’t have any shielding,” said Rod. “But don’t worry, Chass, the reactor is out in a compartment in that donut-shaped module, hundreds of meters away from us.”

“Oh! Right...” said Chastity, now remembering the details of the briefing she had received on the nuclear reactor power supply. “That’s far enough away for a checkout. When we get to Saturn, we’ll be hanging a kilometer below it and the hydrogen in Saturn’s atmosphere will do the shielding.”

Slowly, as the three watched, the infrared image of the reactor on the touchscreen console changed color from black to gray to dark red.

“Radiation level nominal, sir,” intoned the voice of Jeeves. “Generated electrical output power level within specifications.”

“Start the pumps in the secondary cooling loops to the radiator,” commanded Seichi. The rolled-up array of heat-pipe radiators now took on the dark-red glow as the outside of the reactor cooled down to a gray color again.

“That’s as far as we can go with live testing, Jeeves,” said Seichi. “Close it down and reinsert the safety pin.” Seichi pointedly kept his back turned and his head down, staring fixedly at the infrared image screen and not turning around to talk to them. Rod coughed nervously during the hiatus while Chastity looked up at the ceiling. That was when she saw that something was missing.

“What’s happened to the emergency escape hatch?” asked Chastity, pointing upward. “There’s supposed to be a hatch here to let us out the nose in case the airlock malfunctions.”

“The escape hatch in the nosecone was replaced with a tether reel,” said Rod, glad that the subject had changed. He headed for the ladder. “Let’s go outside again and I’ll show you.”

At the bottom of the ladder, the two astronauts entered the airlock, shut the inner door, turned their backs on each other, and started stripping down to get into their spacesuits again.

“I really goofed up there, didn’t I,” said Chastity, as she put her coveralls and underwear into her locker and reached for her cooljohns.

“Considering he’s our scotty, you sure did,” said Rod, repeating her motions. “Mitsubishi contributed the crew module and reactor to the consortium, so they got to pick one of their engineers as a crewmember. Seichi was the designer for the reactor—it’s a specialized plutonium burner—and has spent the last six months getting briefed on the crew module so he can act as the ship’s engineer.”

“Plutonium burner?” queried Chastity, as she hooked up the plumbing inside her suit.

“According to Art, that’s one of the reasons it makes financial sense to get meta from Saturn instead of overcoming the objections of the environmental freaks and extracting it from the natural gas wells. The Earth has an excess of plutonium, Japan especially. It would make sense to burn it in reactors to provide electrical power, but the antiwar, antinuclear, and green groups have made that politically impossible. So, Space Unlimited will be given all the plutonium it needs to provide the energy that will end up in the meta—and get paid to take it!—as long as the plutonium leaves the Earth and never comes back again.”

“The radioactive waste is going to end up contaminating Saturn,” said Chastity, hooking up her backpack. “I’m sure some planet-hugger is going to object to that.”

“They already have,” said Rod, closing his suit. “But Art just told the earth-huggers that they had a choice. Either convince the planet-huggers to shut up, or he was going to back out of the deal—and all that plutonium would be left on Earth. He got his way. The planet-huggers got something, however; they got to name the biologist for the crew.”

“We have a greenie on the crew?” said Chastity, reaching for her helmet.

“Yep. Sandra Green. Apt name for her. She’s a card-carrying member of the Peaceful Planet Protectors. Although there’s a violent fringe group in the organization that has triggered off a number of ‘peaceful’ bombs, most of the members of the organization are reasonable people.” Rod’s voice now came over the suit-to-suit radio link.

“Ready,” said Chastity through the link, not turning around.

“Me too,” said Rod. They turned and headed for the controls to the outer airlock door. Chastity watched as the door lowered in front of them like a drawbridge. After the ship had landed on the surface of Luna or Mars, the open airlock door served as a useful platform when raising and lowering equipment. The cable supports to the top of the door acted as railings as they floated outside. They clipped their second safety lines to the cable and unclipped their first lines from the inside safety rings.

“Up we go,” said Rod, pulling on the handholds up the side of the capsule. Chastity followed. At the top, Rod undid some latches and tipped over the nosecone portion of the ship on its hinge. The cone was a meter high and a meter in diameter at the base. A parachute was packed inside the cone. The shrouds of the parachute exited near the hinge into a channel that ran down the outside of the capsule. The one-meter-diameter hole revealed by removing the cone looked down onto a large reel of cable and a winding mechanism. One of Jeeves’s mechbots was visible inside, its six paws clamped securely to a support post, waiting patiently for a command. The six-legged housecat-sized mechbot had the name MOUSER painted on its back.

“The reel and tether,” said Rod. “Soon you’ll be an expert in using it. Think of it as a reusable retrorocket with an unlimited supply of fuel.”

Chastity commanded her suit to turn on her helmet light. Using the bright beam to illuminate the mechanisms below, she looked down.

“That tether looks mighty puny. Not even as thick as a clothesline.”

“Isn’t,” said Rod. “Only a half-centimeter in diameter when collapsed, but it’s made of the new hextube carbon polymer. Nothing but carbon-carbon bonds. It’s also using the latest design in failsafe multiline Hoytether structures. It’s so failsafe that it’ll never need repair during its lifetime—which is a hundred years’ worth of hits from micrometeorites and space junk. To prevent snags, the mechbot will clip off any cut strands each time the tether winds in. The first few kilometers are coated, to reduce chemical reactions with Saturn’s atmosphere. We’ll use that portion to hang the capsule under the balloon. The rest of the two hundred kilometers is bare, to cut down its weight. We’ll use that part to climb down Saturn’s rings.”

“What are those long metal spikes racked up around the wall?” asked Chastity.

“Meta-propelled penetrators,” said Rod. “When you want to make a temporary tether anchor to a passing rock or iceball.”

Chastity commanded off her light and Rod tilted the nosecone back over the hatch and latched it. They returned to their Jet-Do and flew back to the Boeing-Mitsubishi Assembly Station.

“Using the tether is going to require some close teamwork between the capsule pilot and the tether operator,” said Rod. “You and I are scheduled for a week or so on the tether whip simulator.”

“I’m pilot, so I get to run the capsule rockets and you can run the tether,” said Chastity.

“We’re going to cross-train,” said Rod. “At the end of the training, the testers will decide who is best at running what.”

“Say, I just got back from a long trip to Mars. When do I get my vacation?”

“It’ll have to wait. We leave in just four months.”

“What’s the hurry?”

“Launch window,” said Rod. “We want to leave when the Earth’s orbital velocity vector is pointing at Saturn—or at least where Saturn will be when we arrive one year later. That way we can take advantage of Earth’s thirty-kilometers-a-second orbital speed.”

“I see,” said Chastity, understanding instantly. “If we miss that window then we have to wait a whole year to the next one.”

“It’s a pretty wide window. Shouldn’t be any problem finding you a two-week vacation somewhere in there. The people that are going to get shortchanged are the two coming in from Mars. It’s going to be especially tough on Dan Horning. He’s got a wife and family on Earth that haven’t seen him in almost a year.”