Saturn Run Read online

  Saturn

  Run

  Also by Stanley Salmons

  ALEXEI’S TREE AND OTHER STORIES

  A BIT OF IRISH MIST

  THE TOMB

  THE CANTERPURRY TALES

  FOOTPRINTS IN THE ASH

  NH3

  THE MAN IN TWO BODIES

  THE DOMINO MAN

  COUNTERFEIT

  THE REICH LEGACY

  SATURN

  RUN

  Stanley Salmons

  Copyright © 2017 Stanley Salmons

  All rights reserved.

  The right of Stanley Salmons to be identified as author of this work has been asserted by him in accordance with the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act 1988

  ISBN: 1979438072

  ISBN-13: 978-1979438070

  Cover attributions: NASA/JPL/Space Science Institute and European Southern Observatory (ESO)

  This novel is a work of fiction. Any resemblance between the characters and actual persons, living or dead, is entirely coincident

  Stanley Salmons was born in Clapton, East London. He is internationally known for his work in the fields of biomedical engineering and muscle physiology, published in over two hundred scientific articles and twelve scientific books. Although still contributing to the real world of research, he maintains a parallel existence as a fiction writer, in which he can draw from his broad scientific experience. He has published over forty short stories in various magazines and anthologies. This is his eighth novel.

  For Paula, Graham, Daniel, and Debby

  PART ONE:

  EARTH

  1

  “STs, stand by for release of clamps… clamps off. Repeat, all clamps off. You are go to undock.”

  “Copy that. Commencing undocking.”

  Two hundred miles above the Earth, Dan Larssen listened to the communications between the Flight Controller and the space-tugs that would gently nudge him away from the orbital dock. He had no part in this; the ship was entirely in their hands. It left him with a slightly helpless feeling, especially as he couldn’t see what was going on – here on the Flight Deck the view was restricted in everything but the forward direction. The Observation Deck would be better.

  He propelled himself to the vertical ladder at the back of the Flight Deck and with practised skill pulled just hard enough on the handrails to loft himself up through the vertical shaft. A brief tightening of his grip on the rails arrested his progress and he floated into the Observation Deck. He flicked a switch to retract the clamshell doors, there to protect the transparent dome from micrometeorite strikes, flicked another switch to extinguish the low-level red illumination, and peered out. Now he was on top of the living pod, with a complete hemisphere of vision – everywhere except down.

  The triple-hull spacefreighter dwarfed Orbital Dock 3. Looking back along the length of the craft he could see the lighted windows of the Dock’s living quarters over half a mile away, echoed in a diffuse reflection from the black metallic shell of the starboard cargo pod. Four space-tugs were manoeuvring on the craft’s starboard side, the dazzling white beams from their forward spotlights illuminating the cargo pod and patterning the central living pod with the moving shadows of the access tubes that bridged between the hulls. One by one the tugs reached their allotted positions. Four more tugs moved around the back of the freighter to take up stations on the port side. As their lights passed, the brief gleam of a distant reflection in apparently empty space hinted at the presence there of the twin nacelles housing the two big plasma engines, which rose high above and beyond the rear of the central living pod.

  He watched the familiar routine but his mind was elsewhere.

  “Come back, Danny.”

  That’s all she’d said. Come back, Danny. The words lodged in his chest and lingered there in a dull ache. More than two years before he could see her again, two whole years to get there and back – if he made it. For him the time would pass quickly enough – he’d be spending the bulk of it in cryosleep. Not for her, though. She’d be working, meeting people, other men…

  He tore himself away from the thought and instead directed his gaze across the cargo pod to the unlit hemisphere of the Earth. Initially his vision swam unfocused, but he shielded his eyes from the lights of the Orbital Dock and the manoeuvring tugs, and the blackness began to differentiate. Faint splashes of light grew in intensity and formed into a familiar pattern. These were the major cities of the Eastern seaboard of the United States: New York, Philadelphia, Baltimore, Washington, DC. He reached further into the darkness and made out faint lines, like spiders’ webs catching the moonlight, the tracery of roads and illuminated flight avenues connecting the cities. Then the reflection of a roving spotlight from the nearest space-tug travelled along the cargo pod and into his field of vision, and the cities of his home planet vanished from view.

  Not many minutes from now he’d be embarking on a journey of a thousand million miles across the solar system in a mile-long spacefreighter, with more than two hundred holds packed with a secret and highly sensitive cargo.

  On his own.

  No pilot in their right mind would have taken on such an impossible mission. Unless they were desperate.

  He closed his eyes and took a deep breath. He’d fallen a long way to end up like this. A very long way…

  2

  Wesley Larssen would say they were a farming family. Truth was, Wesley was the farmer; none of the rest of the family showed any enthusiasm for it – not his wife, Mary Louise (although she never would have said so out loud) and certainly not the children. There were fifteen years between the youngest, Daniel, and his older brother Tom, and Daniel could barely remember his brother because Tom got the hell out of West Virginia just as soon as he could. He took a job with a minerals exploration company and the last time anyone heard he was in Australia. After Tom, the Larssens had three girls. They married young and moved away, and none of their husbands had any interest in farming. It’s a fair bet the girls would have passed them by if they had.

  Daniel was closest to his youngest sister, Sal. On one of her increasingly rare visits she caught his eye and the two of them got up to go for a walk.

  As soon as they’d stepped down off the creaky verandah she started to brush her trousers briskly with her hands. She grimaced. The dust here rose off the land and settled everywhere. It got on your clothes and in your hair; it crunched underfoot on the wooden floors of the house, roughened the bedsheets, and textured everything you ate with grit. Yet it was more than dust she was unconsciously brushing away.

  They turned down the side of a field. The air, bonfire-scented by the sun-parched grass, shimmered with heat. She barely noticed it; she was glad to have some respite from the even more stifling atmosphere of the Larssen household.

  “Gee, it’s so good to get out for a bit,” she sighed. She stopped, looked down at her kid brother and gave his short hair an affectionate rub. “I miss you, Danny, but you’re the only thing around here I do miss.”

  “Sal, ya sound kinda different these days. Some of the things ya say I can scarce unnerstan’.”

  She laughed, then bent closer to his ear, as if there might be someone around to overhear them, and her lowered voice suddenly had a more familiar ring to it.

  “Lemme tell ya somethin’, honey. When you get away from this place, which God willin’ you goin’ do as soon as ever you can, people goin’ to know where you’re from by yer voice. And when they know where you’re from they goin’ to look down on you, ’cos that’s the way people are. It ain’t nice when people do that to ya. I learned that real fast, and so will you. You’re a bright kid. Y’always were.”

  She straightened up and looked around, fixing in her mind the raw landscape, which cowered under the relentl
ess sun. At the far end of the field dust-devils raced each other, then collapsed, coating their father’s struggling crops and filling the hardened tyre tracks left behind by his tractor.

  “A-Lord,” she breathed, “how I do hate this ol’ place. I don’ know why I came back but I ain’t nivver comin’ back agin.”

  *

  With Tom gone and his daughters all married off, Wesley Larssen’s hopes and dreams for carrying on the farm, and the knife-edge existence it gave to him and his family, focused on Daniel. Wesley would take him out on the tractor and, waving his hand over the grim piece of land in front of them, he’d say “One day all this is gonna be yours, son”. Daniel liked driving the tractor but the rest didn’t mean much to him. He’d say “Yes, father”, because he’d been brought up to respect his parents. This was the only world he knew and despite what his sister Sal had said to him he couldn’t imagine there might be other ways to go, other things to do.

  As soon as he was old enough Daniel started at the local high school, the same school that his brother and sisters had attended briefly and without much distinction. Wesley Larssen held with schooling, at least he held with enough of it for you to be able to read and write and add up a column of figures. He was a God-fearing man – it was hard not to be when you worked as close to the soil as he did – so he’d consent to a little religion as well, but not too much. Anything more in the way of schooling he saw as a dangerous distraction. As he never tired of saying, “What a man needs is education in the School of Life.” So Daniel had to help him on the farm and eventually, of course, he’d take it over from him. Otherwise what was the point of having kids?

  Mary Louise had no opinions on the matter. Life was hard enough without making things harder. She’d borne Wesley five children and managed somehow to put food on the table each day of their lives with whatever Wesley could raise himself or buy, and surely to goodness that was enough for anybody. Decisions she left to Wesley. Getting involved would mean arguments about who was right and who was wrong and Mary Louise didn’t like arguments. She liked things nice and peaceable in her home.

  *

  The main thing, Mr Alexander decided, that singled Daniel out from the other kids in his class was his propensity for asking questions. They were seldom pointless – sometimes they were challenging – but he could rely on getting several in each lesson. The other kids would groan when Daniel raised his hand, and the lad would open his palms and say, “Just tryin’ to get my head straightened out.” The other teachers were satisfied with Daniel’s steady, if unremarkable, progress, but Mr Alexander was older and more experienced. He sensed there was something wrong.

  “Daniel, I’ve been looking at your marks,” he said, after the other students had filed out of the classroom. “You know, I think you’re holding out on us.”

  “Howdja mean, sir?”

  “Your classwork’s good. You perform well, you participate a lot. But your homework’s scrappy. You just don’t seem to put enough time and effort into it.”

  “Mmm.”

  “Can you tell me why that is?”

  “Well sir, I guess it’s because I do most of it in the computer room at lunchtimes. There ain’t a whole lot of time and there’s other kids around. I find it kinda hard to concentrate.”

  “Why don’t you do it at home?”

  “It’s supposed to be done on a computer, and we ain’ got one.”

  “You don’t have a computer?”

  “No, sir.”

  “Would it help if I could get one for you? We replace them from time to time. You could have an older model.”

  “Well that’s real nice of you, sir, but I don’ think it would work. See, Jimmy Lane’s father sells ’em, and he got Jimmy a new one, and Jimmy was all set to give me his old one for near to nothin’, but my father wouldn’t have it in the house.”

  “Why on earth not?”

  “He says they use up too much electric. You know, he works real hard, and he says it all goes on feed and fertilizer and gas and everythin’. Any case, we ain’ got a satellite connection, so we wouldn’t be networked like we are in here. Wasn’t worth arguin’ about.”

  Mr Alexander was thoughtful. It wasn’t the first time he’d come across this sort of parental resistance. He doubted it was simply a question of money. Some of the more traditional farmers found technology threatening, especially as their children understood it better than they did. The electricity argument was new to him, though; the usual complaint was the filth their children would be exposed to, surfing WorldNet. You told them they could bar access to adult sites, but they didn’t want to hear about it.

  “What about using the school machines in the morning before classes start? The other students aren’t around then.”

  “Well I’m up pretty early as it is, sir, havin’ to do the chores before I walk here.”

  Mr Alexander grimaced. He knew Wesley Larssen’s farm. It was a good three miles from the school – maybe a bit less if you cut across the fields, but still a fair distance for a youngster to walk every morning and evening.

  “Okay, Daniel,” he said. “I’ll tell you what we can do. I have a machine here for my own use. You can use it for an hour or two at the end of each day while I’m looking through the assignments. How does that sound?”

  Daniel said that sounded just great.

  *

  The name came up in the Staff Common Room over coffee.

  “Daniel Larssen?” Miss Bethan was a peripatetic art teacher. She laughed. “He’s lovely! He hardly has any artistic talent to speak of but he tries so hard!”

  Mr Alexander remained serious. “Well he has plenty of talent when it comes to math and sciences. He’s been working on my computer in the evenings. He doesn’t just do his homework problems – he’s been setting them out with tables and graphs. I asked him who showed him how to use the spreadsheet and the graphics software and the printer. He worked it out for himself! Said they were just there, and he didn’t think I’d mind.” A smile tugged at the corners of the teacher’s mouth. “I’ve been setting him harder problems, and showing him some short-cuts. He laps it up. You never have to show him the same thing twice.”

  The Principal, Mr Buddle, looked up from the papers he was reading.

  “Remember Anne Moore, Richard? She was a bright kid too.”

  “Daniel’s way ahead of her, Philip. He’s coping now with stuff I’m setting for the seniors, and they’re three years older than he is. You know, what’s so interesting is his approach to problems. Most students, even senior ones, start computing right away and hope it’ll fall out. He sits there and thinks where he’s going first.”

  Mr Buddle nodded. “That’s remarkably mature.”

  “I mentioned it to him. You know what he said? ‘Well sir, I don’ see how you can start walkin’ if you don’ know which direction you’re headed’.”

  And they all laughed.

  *

  “I’ve been talking to Mr Buddle about you.”

  Daniel looked up at Mr Alexander in consternation.

  “We’d like to see you develop your talents. You understand? Take things to a higher level than you could here.”

  Daniel was opening his mouth to say something but his teacher anticipated him.

  “We know money’s a problem, so we’ve been looking to see if there are any scholarships we could enter you for. There is a scheme that’s suitable. They’re called Fynnon Scholarships. If you win one you get automatic entry to Space Fleet Academy.”

  “Space Fleet Academy? Wow! But isn’t that for folk who are goin’ to be pilots in spacecraft and stuff?”

  “Yes, but you don’t have to go that far. What you’d get there is a first-class technical education. They give you a diploma as you finish each section of the course. So actually you could step out at any stage, and with diploma qualifications like that you’d get a good job. Something interesting and challenging.”

  “My father thinks I’m goin’ to take over his
farm.”

  “Is that what you want to do?”

  “Not really.”

  Mr Alexander smiled. “Well, we’ll consider that hurdle if and when it arises. I don’t want you to get your hopes up, son. This is a big country, and kids from all over compete for these scholarships. We’ve never had one at this school. The chances are slim but we think you should at least give it a try. Do you want to talk it over with your Mum and Dad?”

  *

  When Daniel walked home that evening he was deep in thought. Mr Alexander had never called him “son” before. He liked that, because Mr Alexander was someone he’d liked to have had as a father. But a Fynnon Scholarship?

  In the end he just dropped it casually into the conversation when they were clearing up after dinner.

  “School is puttin’ me in for a scholarship thingy. Reckon it will help to pay for my education. Chances are pretty thin, but it’s worth a shot.”

  His mother said, “That’s nice, dear.”

  He saw that his father had the pre-eruption look, just like when he’d been asked if he could have the computer, so Daniel put in quickly, “I know how hard you work for every dollar, father, so this way I’d be less of a burden to you. But, like I say, it’s a pretty long shot.”

  It was a bit crafty but it seemed to work. Wesley Larssen gave a grunt and went back to his newspaper.

  3

  Mr Alexander put in a lot of time with Daniel. He obtained sample question papers and they worked through the problems. They covered syllabus Mr Alexander admitted he himself hadn’t looked at in years. Finally he conducted mock interviews.

  “What are the qualities of a good engineer?”

  “Why did you apply to Space Fleet Academy?”

  “Why do you want to be a pilot?”