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

between a long, slow trip to Mars and a long, fast one to Saturn. And your little prevarication wouldn’t look like much, next to my big one.”
    “That seems pretty technical, I mean, on an emotional level.”
    “Screw a bunch of emotions. If your relationship can’t survive a little white lie, then it probably can’t survive, anyway,” Santeros said. “Might as well get it over with.”
    Fang-Castro had a snappy comeback to that, but suppressed it. Santeros’s husband was known as Happy Frank, as was his penis, which had reportedly traveled to places it shouldn’t have. Instead, Fang-Castro said, “Listen . . . I, uh . . .” She put a finger to her lips, thought for a few seconds, realized that she desperately wanted to go. She said, “I’ll take it. I’ll go.”
    The President smiled and said, “Excellent. We want you pretty badly.” And she was gone again.
    Vintner said, “I apologize if I seemed a little . . . pushy, but we’ve been under a lot of pressure with very little sleep for the past couple days.”
    “Apology accepted,” Fang-Castro said. “Let’s get down to it. What kinds of mods are we talking about? What’s our propulsion system going to be? Who is handling recruiting of the ship’s complement and scientists? I have some current personnel I’d like to have vetted for this, particularly my Number Two . . .”
    Ninety minutes later—it seemed like ten—Fang-Castro closed the screen, raised the security firewall, and took a deep breath. Ruineddinners were a point of discord in their relationship and there was some making-nice to be done: Tomaselli took her cooking seriously, and this wouldn’t be their first ruined dinner.
    Back in the common room, Tomaselli was immersed in a book. She didn’t look up. The window shade was drawn. Not good signs.
    Fang-Castro said, “I need to tell you something that falls under your top secret clearance. It comes with a warning from the President: you’ll be prosecuted if you say a word about this to anyone but me, before tomorrow at one o’clock.”
    Tomaselli was pissed, but she wasn’t stupid: some things were more important than dinner. “What?”
    “The President says we’re going to Mars,” Fang-Castro said. “I made them agree that I could tell you, before the announcement. They want me to take the job, and I accepted. I’d never dictate to you, Llorena, and I know this will be a long separation . . . but it wouldn’t start for a couple of years. I would be desperately sad to . . . leave you behind.”
    “Mars? You made who agree?”
    “Santeros . . . and a couple of high-level bureaucrats,” Fang-Castro said. “That’s who I was talking to.” And, “Listen, I’m really sorry about your dinner.”
    “Oh, fuck the beans, Naomi,” Tomaselli said. “What in God’s name just happened?”
    Fang-Castro said, “I don’t have the details, because nobody does. All I got was a lot of engineering questions. Maybe we’ll get some details tomorrow, when Santeros makes her big speech.”
    Little white lies.

5 .
    Sandy let the van’s nav take him home; it was quicker that way, locking into fast-lane traffic across town to Pasadena. Zuma Beach had been a bust, with too many people, too few decent waves. And he’d been distracted: couldn’t be thinking about alien starships when your board was trying to kick your ass into the deep.
    He’d left Argentina in a medevac chopper, spent the next six months at the San Francisco Army Hospital. When he got out, physically rehabbed and mentally stable, give or take a med or two, he’d started looking for a job that might engage him. He hadn’t found it. He was addicted to the rush of combat, but that was hard to find in civilian life. You could find jobs that were simply dangerous, but as dangerous as they might be, they were usually boring as well, until everything went sideways and you got killed.
    He’d gotten a taste of the rush, running around L.A. with a news