Read Online Saturn Run by John Sandford, Ctein - Free Book Online
Authors: John Sandford, Ctein
Tags: thriller, Science-Fiction
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We’re not out to steal China’s glory nor beat them to Mars. We fully intend to give them the honor of placing the first footsteps on Martian soil. They have earned it. Then we can proceed together, as humanity expands into the solar system.
I expect, not too many months from now, to be congratulating our Chinese and American pioneers as they stand side by side under the rust-colored skies of Mars. Godspeed to them all.
Chen shook his head, said, “What is this? What can it be?”
The elevator door opened in the communications unit, where twoarmed guards were waiting with submachine guns, which they promptly pointed elsewhere.
Jiang paused, and said quietly, “I can tell you what it is. It’s bullshit, Chen. The Americans are fucking with us. I don’t know why, but I want you to find out.”
“They must know that we’re sending a colony ship,” Chen said. “They’re afraid that we’re going to use that to lay claim to Mars. They’re making sure to let us know that that is not an acceptable outcome, and they’re taking steps to prevent it.”
Jiang asked, “Are we doing that?”
“Boss, that would be a complete violation of the International Space Treaty that has served both sides very well for the past thirty years. No, we are not doing that. Even if we did, everybody would just laugh us off. It’d be like . . . claiming the moon.”
“You’re sure?”
“I’m sure, boss. There are probably a few idiots in Beijing who’ve tried to bring it up, but it’d never fly.”
“So we let the big brains figure this out,” Jiang said. “I’d give a lot of money to see the chairman’s face when this pops up on his screen.”
“A lot of money,” Chen said, “but preferably from a safe distance.”
7 .
Dr. Rebecca Johansson hurried past her workstation, grabbed her coat, let her implants turn her computer off—
do not look at the waiting e-mails.
The implants were already talking to the door and clicked the rems app. The radiation monitor flashed green, which meant she wasn’t noticeably radioactive this evening, and that was a good thing.
She indicated the “out” app and the door popped open after registering her ID. In the hall she clicked on the elevator app, waited impatiently for the car, said, “Station,” when it arrived, and dropped six floors to the Northfield nuke’s underground shuttle station.
The ten o’clock train arrived three minutes after she walked onto the platform. She scampered aboard, sank into a seat, and sighed. She was twenty minutes from downtown Minneapolis, not much to see on the way but endless tracts of suburban houses. Way too late for sanity’s sake, and Senior Star power engineers didn’t get overtime.
If only,
she thought. With double and triple time on her usual hours, she’d be retired in five years.
But then what? She actually liked the work. Liked the action.
Two minutes out from the Nuke, too tired to read, Becca stared into the window at her own ghostly reflection. A door opened between her car and the second car and a young man moved up and took a seat across from her. A doctor, she thought, a surgeon, heading north to the Cities from the Mayo Clinic in Rochester, where the shuttle tracks ended. He glanced up briefly and she quickly flicked her eyes away, hoping he hadn’t seen her seeing him.
People were always trying to chat her up. It wasn’t always a half-baked mating ritual. People simply found her approachable: Partly it was that pure Minnesota-Scandinavian look, and a plump, finely featured face with a fresh-scrubbed pale pink complexion. She was, she sometimes thought in despair, “cute,” like a doll you won at the state fair. Combine that with being both short and . . . plumpish . . . and the wholeensemble screamed, “I am sweet and I am inoffensive, and I am no threat, and so I don’t have to be taken seriously because no one this cute and plump ever is.”
Becca did not like being dismissed. She did not like to
I expect, not too many months from now, to be congratulating our Chinese and American pioneers as they stand side by side under the rust-colored skies of Mars. Godspeed to them all.
Chen shook his head, said, “What is this? What can it be?”
The elevator door opened in the communications unit, where twoarmed guards were waiting with submachine guns, which they promptly pointed elsewhere.
Jiang paused, and said quietly, “I can tell you what it is. It’s bullshit, Chen. The Americans are fucking with us. I don’t know why, but I want you to find out.”
“They must know that we’re sending a colony ship,” Chen said. “They’re afraid that we’re going to use that to lay claim to Mars. They’re making sure to let us know that that is not an acceptable outcome, and they’re taking steps to prevent it.”
Jiang asked, “Are we doing that?”
“Boss, that would be a complete violation of the International Space Treaty that has served both sides very well for the past thirty years. No, we are not doing that. Even if we did, everybody would just laugh us off. It’d be like . . . claiming the moon.”
“You’re sure?”
“I’m sure, boss. There are probably a few idiots in Beijing who’ve tried to bring it up, but it’d never fly.”
“So we let the big brains figure this out,” Jiang said. “I’d give a lot of money to see the chairman’s face when this pops up on his screen.”
“A lot of money,” Chen said, “but preferably from a safe distance.”
7 .
Dr. Rebecca Johansson hurried past her workstation, grabbed her coat, let her implants turn her computer off—
do not look at the waiting e-mails.
The implants were already talking to the door and clicked the rems app. The radiation monitor flashed green, which meant she wasn’t noticeably radioactive this evening, and that was a good thing.
She indicated the “out” app and the door popped open after registering her ID. In the hall she clicked on the elevator app, waited impatiently for the car, said, “Station,” when it arrived, and dropped six floors to the Northfield nuke’s underground shuttle station.
The ten o’clock train arrived three minutes after she walked onto the platform. She scampered aboard, sank into a seat, and sighed. She was twenty minutes from downtown Minneapolis, not much to see on the way but endless tracts of suburban houses. Way too late for sanity’s sake, and Senior Star power engineers didn’t get overtime.
If only,
she thought. With double and triple time on her usual hours, she’d be retired in five years.
But then what? She actually liked the work. Liked the action.
Two minutes out from the Nuke, too tired to read, Becca stared into the window at her own ghostly reflection. A door opened between her car and the second car and a young man moved up and took a seat across from her. A doctor, she thought, a surgeon, heading north to the Cities from the Mayo Clinic in Rochester, where the shuttle tracks ended. He glanced up briefly and she quickly flicked her eyes away, hoping he hadn’t seen her seeing him.
People were always trying to chat her up. It wasn’t always a half-baked mating ritual. People simply found her approachable: Partly it was that pure Minnesota-Scandinavian look, and a plump, finely featured face with a fresh-scrubbed pale pink complexion. She was, she sometimes thought in despair, “cute,” like a doll you won at the state fair. Combine that with being both short and . . . plumpish . . . and the wholeensemble screamed, “I am sweet and I am inoffensive, and I am no threat, and so I don’t have to be taken seriously because no one this cute and plump ever is.”
Becca did not like being dismissed. She did not like to
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