Saturn Run Read Online Free Page B

Washington from Pasadena an hour earlier on a private hopjet, accompanied by the thin, dark-eyed man.
    The man was named Crow. He didn’t sit next to Fletcher. He didn’t sit next to anybody. The President looked at her science adviser and said, “Jacob: an alien starship? I mean, really?”
    Vintner, a fat man with a shiny bald head and small blue eyes, was more than a little nervous. He’d known Santeros since she was in college, had mentored her since graduate school, had been her official science adviser and unofficial confidante throughout her political ascent. It had all been interesting and some of it had been crucially important. None of it had been like this: he felt like a bit player in a bad sci-fi movie.
    “We can’t think of what else it could be,” he said. “Once we had a trajectory for it, we looked at the Large Synoptic Survey database and tracked it back a few weeks. It’s gotta be from interstellar space. Our oldest photographs showed it already decelerating, with a residual velocity above one percent of c.”
    “A little bit more in English?” That was White, the chairwoman. Good military mind, not so strong in physics.
    “One percent of the speed of light. It was already slowing down two weeks ago,” Vintner said, “but was still traveling in excess of three thousand kilometers a second.”
    White nodded: “So, basically, moving a hundred times faster than anything we’ve ever built. That doesn’t make it alien. I mean, we could build something that fast, right? Somebody could.” She meant China.
    Lossness, the DARPA director, chimed in. “Yeah, but we couldn’t make anything very big. Takes a lot of energy to go that fast. This thing is kilometers in size. It’s like, ahh, a million times more massive than the biggest rocket we’ve ever built. It’s hundreds of times the size of an aircraft carrier.”
    The President: “Nobody on Earth built that. We’d know about an industrial base that large.”
    Lossness said, “That’s correct.”
    Santeros turned to Fletcher: “You’re the guy who found this thing, right? What else do we know about it?”
    Fletcher, both exhausted and ebullient, fidgeted a moment, rubbed his bald spot for good luck, and said, “My group of researchers discovered it. Actually, one of the grad students brought it to my attention. He was the one who found it first in some test photos from the Sky Survey Observatory.”
    “Why isn’t he here?” Santeros asked. “Too busy for me?”
    Fletcher shook his head. “No, ma’am. To be frank, he’s a kid who looks at a monitor and matches photos. He doesn’t know much about anything. He’s scientifically incompetent, personally irresponsible, and only got the job because his family is enormously rich—his father’s given Caltech a couple of buildings, and we’d like to get a couple more. The kid’s got a degree in art or something, and spends most of his time surfing and playing guitars. He wouldn’t have anything to contribute.”
    Crow stirred, as if about to say something, but then he didn’t.
    “But not so incompetent that he couldn’t recognize a starship whenhe saw it,” Santeros said. “And not so irresponsible that he didn’t know enough to bring it to you, am I right?”
    “The computer did most of that,” Fletcher said. “What he did was, he walked down the hall with a piece of paper in his hand.”
    Santeros: “Okay, so what is it doing right now? This starship?”
    “We don’t know. Not in detail. The best we can determine, it’s settled into orbit within Saturn’s rings. We think it may have rendezvoused with something. There’s a moonlet about there, embedded in one of the rings. Whatever that is, it’s too small for us to make out any details. We see a few flickers in the images, just pixels in size, which make us think that maybe there’s some activity going on there.”
    “What about the moon it rendezvoused with?”
    “We don’t know much about that, either,”