Saturn Run (8 page)

Clover was looking nervous; the flight attendant came and smiled at him, whispered something. Clover nodded, and she gave him a bottle of water and something else. Pills, Sandy thought. Clover popped them, and two minutes later, said something funny to Fiorella, who was sitting across the narrow aisle from him, and the TV lady laughed.

Good pills.

When everybody was seated, the flight attendant said, “I know some of you haven’t been up. In front of you, there’s an oxygen mask capsule. They have been sanitized since the last flight. The slightly astringent odor you may smell is actually a sealer, should you need to press your face into the mask. When we reach maximum acceleration, you’ll feel as though you weigh twice as much as you do now—we’ll be pulling two gravities, or two gees, as we say. There may be a sensation of suffocation. You won’t be suffocating, but you may feel that kind of pressure. Simply press the tab under your right thumb and a mask will extrude. Don’t worry about moving toward it—the face-recognition system will find you. Breathe normally. Don’t try to remove your safety harness—that won’t help. If any of you are feeling even the slightest bit nervous, we have some excellent calming medications available. Feel free to ask.”

She went on for a while, and when she finished, Sandy asked her, “How about Mr. Snuffles?”

“Mr. Snuffles is asleep,” she said.

“Snoring like a chain saw,” Clover said over his shoulder. And, said the man who moments before had been sweating like a Miami sneak-thief, “let’s light this motherfucker up.”

Really good pills.

Becca was annoyed with herself. She was about to take a trip that maybe one person in a million got to make, that every techie dreamed of, and she couldn’t stop thinking about heat flow integrals. A symptom, she thought, of her obsessiveness. On the job, it worked to her advantage. At times, though, it got in the way.

Like now. Intellectually, she’d love to get the full launch experience. But the heat problem . . . it nagged, and nagged, and nagged.

She’d been running herself ragged. The government had tried to make her life as easy as possible. The transfer from Minneapolis to Georgetown had been seamless. Her new condo was a slightly scary demonstration of the government’s ability to read a single individual’s habits and tastes, purely through available databases.

Because it was perfect, right down to the smart door.

The door read her implants, unlocked and opened itself, and closed itself behind her. She could mumble out a shopping list—for anything, from food to clothing—and the door would arrange for it to be delivered, and then would keep an eye on the delivery cart. It was like having a perfect invisible doorman, whom she never had to be nice to or remember on holidays.

The government apparently also got her a housekeeper, although she’d never met that person: the only reason she knew of his/her existence was that when she got home, her clothes had been washed and ironed, and the apartment was spotless. If she dropped a crumb from the always-available crumb cake, and left it on the counter, the crumb would be gone the next time she got home.

The only thing the door, and the government, couldn’t get her was the one thing she most desperately needed: time. There was plenty of money—she’d told Vintner that she needed a better workslate, and six hours later, she got the best one that she’d ever heard of. He just couldn’t
get her another three hours in the day, or an extension on the flight deadline.

Planetary alignments defined the launch window. The shortest and fastest trip meant launching in November, only eight months away, or December of the next year. Santeros wanted to go this year, but every engineer involved had told her that was impossible. Doing it in twenty-one months would be hard enough.

What was causing her sleepless nights, and obsession with integrals, was that she wasn’t convinced that twenty-one months was enough time. Pushed by presidential imperative, the DARPA engineers were proposing what at first glance seemed like a harebrained scheme: take the two habitat modules from U.S. Space Station Three, build it a new back end with a nuclear power plant and some heavy-duty electric-ion rockets called VASIMRs, strap on several thousand tons of water to provide oxygen and hydrogen for the VASIMRs, and off they went to Saturn.

Except that they wanted to get this all built in less than two years and they wanted the trip to take less than five months. And that was mildly insane.

No laws of physics were broken, it was simply an impossibly tight deadline and an unreasonably large amount of power. If they’d told her she had three years to get the ship built, and two years to get to Saturn, no sweat.

That’s what she told them.

In turn, they fed her details of the Chinese Mars mission, and just how good the Chinese were at large-scale orbital spaceship construction, and how long they thought they had before the Chinese might find out that something was up at Saturn, and how fast the Chinese might be able to get there once they did.

With an ETA of a little over two years, the DARPA brains were pretty confident they could beat the Chinese. Five years? Might as well not even try.

Rock and a hard place.

The amount of power involved
was
unreasonable. Not impossible,
just unreasonable, comparable to the amount used by the entire Twin Cities.

The reactors themselves weren’t a problem. There were designs dating back to the twentieth century that could generate enough heat in a space not much bigger than her kitchenette. She knew how to get that heat out of the reactor with a pressurized liquid sodium cycle; that was also well-understood tech. Getting the turbines and generators down to a workable size was a bit of a do, but Vintner had people working on that and they claimed they had the matter in hand.

But what came after the turbines?

There are some laws of nature that can’t be ignored: thermal electric power plants generate lots of waste heat. Gigawatts of it have to go somewhere out of the system, and Becca didn’t have the luxury of building some honking big cooling towers to dissipate it. Size and weight were at a premium, and you couldn’t carry along all that cooling water to boil off. The water alone would weigh millions of tons.

So now she was using the super-slate to run simulations for increasingly unlikely and experimental cooling systems and getting more and more frustrated with it. She heard the flight attendant talking about the flight schedule, but paid no attention. What to do with the fucking heat? How do you get it out?

The possibilities were looking thinner and thinner: she almost didn’t notice that she was being spoken to, until the flight attendant touched her arm. “Everything okay, Dr. Johansson? You all set for takeoff? You look uncomfortable. Is the seat adjusting correctly for you?”

“It’s fine. I was running some engineering stuff in my head.”

“Most people don’t do their best thinking under two-plus gees. Maybe you should just relax and enjoy the flight up. You’ll have plenty of time once we make orbit to do work.”

Not really,
Becca thought, as the flight attendant moved away.

Time!

The intercom pinged a two-minute warning. The cabin attendant took her station at the front of the cabin, looking back at them. A
backward-facing seat, pulling negative gees? That had to hurt, Becca thought. The flight attendant must be tougher than she looked.

The thirty-second warning sounded. Becca took a last look around and saw green lights blink on over every seat in the cabin: smartcams scanned each seat and verified that there were no loose objects lying about and that each passenger was safely positioned and properly strapped in. The last preflight check complete, the computer system unlocked and armed the engines. The pilot started the cradle’s engines and the cabin filled with the throaty two-tone note of turbine whine and exhaust thunder.

Takeoff was a lot like that of any commercial jet. The
Galahad
accelerated a little harder and lifted off the runway sooner, but then the shuttle reared back and started on a thirty-degree climb as the hybrid engines throttled up. They passed the ten-kilometer altitude mark at better than Mach 1, a minute and a half into the flight. The acceleration picked up, and the monitor over the flight attendant’s head said 2.2 gees of force were pushing Becca back into her chair.

A little more than a minute later, they hit Mach 3 as they slammed through thirty kilometers. The smartfoam that cradled Becca’s head and neck prevented her from turning her head, but the high-res 3-D display in front of her gave her a clearer view than the thick-paned window to her left. Becca thought she could make out the curvature of the hazy powder-blue horizon under a sky that was rapidly transitioning from deep indigo to black.

In even less time, they reached Mach 5 and sixty kilometers. The cradle’s hybrid engines had given up the increasingly futile task of trying to suck in oxygen from an almost nonexistent atmosphere, and were now running in pure rocket mode, gulping down their tanks of liquid oxygen and hydrogen.

Five minutes into the flight, the
Galahad
reached an altitude of a hundred kilometers and a velocity of 3.5 kilometers per second, running hot in essentially airless space, so the speed of sound no longer meant much. The cradle’s fuel was exhausted, save for that needed to safely return to the Mojave Spaceport, and the pilot hit the disconnect. The
cradle dropped away with a
thunk
, turning for its return to Mojave.
Galahad
proceeded under its own engine power, steadily gaining altitude and velocity. Becca gratefully noted it was a less grueling procession; she no longer felt like she was trying to bench-press her own weight.

In the next quarter-hour, the
Galahad
added another four kilometers per second to its velocity, and three hundred kilometers to its altitude. The pilot cut the shuttle’s engines; they were in stable low Earth orbit and they could stay there almost indefinitely without engine power. Eventually, the minute but unceasing drag of the thermosphere would slow them enough that they’d fall back to Earth . . . but they’d be gone before then.

Looking out the window, Becca could see the curved, pale bluish-white horizon that rimmed an immense swath of white clouds over the dusky icy-green hues of the Atlantic Ocean. She was in space, and it was glorious, and best of all, she wasn’t vomiting! No weight, nothing to hold her breakfast down, but it was staying there of its own accord: the space sickness patch really worked.

Crow had told her it would, but she’d heard it wasn’t foolproof.

Maybe it wasn’t, but it was working for her.

“Hell of a thing,” said the guy across the aisle from her. Darlington? Too good-looking, notch in chin. Big white teeth . . . like the big bad wolf.

He was right, though, and she nodded: hell of a thing.

The pilot came up and said that they were closing with the orbital tug, so they might feel a slight bump. In truth, the nudge was almost unnoticeable.

Becca couldn’t see it, but she knew the tug was similar in design to the shuttle’s launch cradle. Since the tug operated solely in space, it didn’t need wings or streamlining or air intakes or the robust framework of the launch stage, but like the launch cradle, it was unpiloted and remotely controlled.

Right now it was under the command of the shuttle crew. As they approached the space station, it would come under station control.
Galahad
’s pilot brought the tug up under the shuttle and the shuttle docked
into the tug’s rigid carbon-composite mesh hammock. Twin sets of engines and fuel tanks flanked the craft, much smaller than the ones that had lifted them from Earth.

There was no announcement from the pilot or any bright flare of exhaust from the engines firing in space, but Becca could tell when they were on their way out of low Earth orbit. Her weightless state disappeared, as the thrust of the tug’s engines pushed her back into her seat with a few tenths of a gee. It wasn’t uncomfortable, but, already, she was missing the experience of weightlessness. She was actually relieved by the feeling: she’d be spending a good part of the Saturn trip in zero-gee and the rest of it in low-gee accommodations, and secretly she’d been worried it might not suit her.

One more of the many things that she fretted about that she could scratch off her list of worries.

The pilot came on and said, “Folks, there’s not much to do now except sit back and enjoy the ride up to the station. Since we’re passing over the terminator line, I’m going to dim the cabin lights so you can get a taste of what night in space is like. Enjoy the view.”

Becca pressed her face as close to the window as she could and looked back. The broad arc of the horizon was aglow with a thin rainbow band of light, a sunset scene from orbit. The sunset faded rapidly as the spaceship passed over to the night side of the earth, and the stars popped out. Clear and untwinkling, they were set in a true-black sky that she’d never seen at night on Earth, even hiking in the Rockies. The effect was so intense it felt unreal, like a movie special effect. Below her she could see an occasional flicker of lightning in the clouds and, through the gaps in the clouds, she could see the lights of the modern metropolises of northern Africa and southern Asia.

Then dawn started to break ahead of the ship, and Becca pulled out of her reverie. She checked the time; she’d lost an hour enraptured by space. She sighed and went back to her workslate. She needed some kind of plan, even a quarter-baked one, to present when she got to the station.

“Okay, deep breath,” she murmured to herself. “What do I know that I can’t change?”

The good-looking guy asked, “Did you say something?”

“Nothing,” she said.

Becca ran through the big picture in her head. In space, there was only one way to get rid of heat, and that was by radiation. At room temperature, it would take roughly a square kilometer of radiator to get rid of a gigawatt of heat.

She needed to get rid of several. So that approach wouldn’t fly, because the radiator would simply weigh too much.
So let’s run hotter and to hell with efficiency.

She punched numbers into the slate to check her mental arithmetic. At five hundred degrees Celsius, she could dump forty times as much heat per square meter of radiator; six hundred degrees Celsius would be even better, at more than sixty times.

That should get the radiator down to areas that might be manageable.

Let’s make believe that works. How do I get the heat to the radiator?

She scanned through her tables of heat properties of materials.

If I’m running that hot, the best thing for sucking up heat is probably melting metal. It’s hundreds of times better than heating up a radiator fluid. Man, gotta love those phase changes.

Becca closed her eyes and began running design possibilities. How long she was down, she didn’t know. As she worked, unseeing, Space Station Three appeared on the monitor, three white tubes side by side. The central axis tube was longer and thinner than its flanking partners, the two living modules, which the station personnel called “habitats.” At one end of the axis was a smallish cluster of stocky modules, at the other a much larger cluster, with solar panels extending from it like petals on a daisy.

The habitats rotated about the axis tube at one revolution per minute, attached by hundred-meter-long elevator shafts at both ends. It created the illusion that the whole station was rotating lazily in space.

The
Galahad
began its delicate rendezvous maneuvers. Becca was oblivious, the excitement of space travel completely driven from her mind. This was her real element—the space between her ears. She’d taken an impossible engineering problem, run it to ground, and was
now bludgeoning it into submission. She couldn’t have been happier; in some ways, an emerging solution to an impossible problem resembled an orgasm in the pleasure it created.