Read Online Saturn Run by John Sandford, Ctein - Free Book Online Page A

be thought of as inconsequential. She’d worked too hard to get where she was, through a grueling Ph.D. program at MIT, and now was known as one of the best-trained and cleverest high-density power engineers ever to come down the pike.
    The young man was still there, sitting across from her, a pleasant smile fixed on his face, and she thought,
Enough! Time for a positive thought or two.
    Work was going well. The hours were way too long, but the intellectual challenges were irresistibly seductive. Designing power flows for a reactor core that had one-quarter the volume and ten times the power density of anything previously used in a commercial plant was . . . exciting.
    She was doing great and novel work; better still it was
conservative
work. Power utilities liked conservative thinking. Their job was to reliably deliver electricity twenty-four hours a day, not get Nobel prizes for innovation.
    There were no new tricks in her flow designs. The cleverness lay in how well she’d been able to optimize and integrate so many different techniques. Massive-scale heat pipes with fractal fluidic passages to pump the energy from the fissioning fuel into the boiling superheated fluids that drove the generator turbines. Thermomagnetic liquids and magnetic pumps and transformers to siphon the waste heat. Micro-evaporative heat exchangers to dump it into convective radiators and, ultimately, the air.
    That was just a fraction of what she’d thrown at the problem. No one technology, not even two or three, could manage so many gigawatts of thermal energy in a confined space. The core would’ve melted down in minutes. Put them all together, get them all tuned up, and get them all working in concert. It was the difference between an instrumental solo and a full symphony orchestra, engineering-wise.
    Her mood was lightening as the train rolled through the old airport site, now a condominium complex, made a quick stop, and then out the other side and on toward the downtown towers where Becca lived.
    The doctor—or maybe he was a nurse, or a technician—was still sitting across from her. Glancing at her from time to time.
    He would, she thought, wait until they got off the train, then he’d hit on her. But her mood had lightened, and her stop was always busy, so there’d be no threat. She’d be nice to him, she thought, and maybe—he was good-looking, although, come to think of it, his neck was a little thick—hold out some hope. A cup of coffee in the morning? But she had to be to work at six . . .
    Maybe she should find just a sliver of life outside work? Time for coffee with a good-looking surgeon?
    Twenty minutes and twenty seconds after leaving the Nuke, the train rolled into the Hennepin Avenue station under downtown Minneapolis. Becca got to her feet and headed for the door. The surgeon—yeah, right—shuffled off after her.
    On the platform, she half turned, expecting him to be there, with an approach. And he was. He smiled and held up an ID pack. He said, “I’m Robert Klipish with the FBI. We didn’t want to startle you or attract attention, but we have some people who need to talk with you.”
    She felt her mouth hanging open as she winked her implant at the ID. A green light ticked in a corner of her eye: the ID was real. “Some people?”
    He gestured across the platform, where two men and a woman were moving toward them, in a V formation, the woman at the point. She was neither chubby nor cute. She was athletic, and the three moved in a way that you might expect a school of sharks to move. As the woman came up, Becca noticed that sometime in the recent past, she’d had her nose broken.
    “What did I do?” Becca blurted. She grasped for something, anything.
    “You didn’t do anything, as far as I know,” Klipish said. “I was told to make sure that nothing happened to you, after you left work. I wastold that if you got a hangnail, I’d be reassigned to Texas.” He twinkled at her.
    “Not that,” Becca