Saturn Run Read Online Free

brought up his computer, put his feet on the desk, pulled open a drawer, unfolded a practice-guitar neck, and began running scales; it was a mindless activity that allowed him to maintain his left-hand calluses while he formulated his next move on McGill. He’d been doing that for twelve seconds when the computer pinged and produced a line of type:
    CRITICAL ANOMALY.
    That hadn’t happened before. Dating rituals forgotten for the moment, Sandy put the guitar-neck aside and frowned. “Hi-ho, Watson, the game’s afoot.” He touched a menu that had popped up on the side of the screen, selecting the word “Describe.”
    The computer said:
    OBJECT DECELERATING.
    Sandy dropped his bare feet to the floor and said to the computer, “It’s not just afoot, Holmes, it’s a whole fucking leg.”
    “What’s that?” Chandrakar asked over a cubicle wall.
    “Talking to myself. It’s the pachuca weed.”
    “Told ja.”
    —
    Celestial objects do not decelerate, not even for Harvard graduates.
    Sandy touched another menu item—Report—and the computer prepared a short report. The computer said:
    THE OBJECT IS REAL ~ 99%.
    THE OBJECT IS BETWEEN ONE AND 10 KM IN LENGTH.
    THE OBJECT IS BETWEEN ONE AND FOUR KM IN WIDTH.
    THE OBJECT IS EMITTING MOST STRONGLY IN THE DEEP ULTRAVIOLET.
    THE OBJECT IS EMITTING HYDROGEN GAS AT UNKNOWN VOLUME.
    THE OBJECT IS DECELERATING.
    What the holy hell? When had the test series been photographed? He checked: okay, mid-morning, about three hours earlier. About the time he should have gotten to work. Sandy tapped a few more keys, and the computer ran its virtual clock forward to the present time, extrapolating where the object would be if its behavior remained unchanged.
    He checked the status board for all the SSO’s scopes and saw that none of them were in use at the moment. The various researchers had held off on scheduling observations in case the servicing of the SSO took longer than expected. Good. He walked down the hall and looked in Fletcher’s office, which was empty, along with most of the others.
    Ah, he thought. The group meeting, to which he wasn’t invited. Okay, no witnesses.
    Sandy punched in Fletcher’s authorization—he paid more attention to computer use than his coworkers suspected—and told Chuck’s Eye to grab another set of comparison frames. The anomaly was probably a camera failure in that new module, he thought. Really couldn’t be anything else.
    He thought about it for another moment, checked down the hall again, and then retargeted the Medium Eye, which had never given them any trouble, to the extrapolated coordinates. He instructed the MediumEye to send down three short-exposure images separated by five-minute intervals. That should confirm that nothing was at the target site: both cameras wouldn’t be wrong, at least not the same way.
    But what was that thing the computer said, about “the object is real ~ 99%”?
    Real? And decelerating?
    Ten minutes to kill. He went and made fresh coffee, one of his assigned tasks. Anything that kept him from watching the clock. There must be a glitch. A major glitch. Because if it wasn’t, he’d found an impossibility. “The object is decelerating?”
    Time’s up.
    Sandy downloaded the files and ran them through the comparator. The new Chuck’s Eye image showed the same anomaly, same weird-ass spectra, not quite where the computer had projected it would be, but close enough for the Medium Eye to catch it. He pulled up those frames, superimposed them, centered on the anomaly at maximum magnification, and,
    There. It. Fucking. Was.
    Three little dots in a row. If this was an instrumentation glitch, then both telescopes were hallucinating exactly the same way.
    Sandy punched in a new group of commands: calculate the current deceleration rate and position, combine it with those from three hours earlier, extrapolate an orbit.
    EXTRAPOLATION: THE OBJECT WILL ACHIEVE SATURN ORBIT IN 13 HOURS.
    The supervisory working group