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

team and a camera, but after a while, it all seemed pointless: with nine billion people on Earth, anything that you could conceive of people doing to each other was being done. All the time. Taking pictures of it didn’t change anything.
    His father, though a rich and conservative plutocrat, was a nice-enough guy. He worried that Sandy was drifting, and, when he inherited his grandfather’s money, would become another too-rich dilettante, wasting his life with sex, drugs, AR, and RhythmTech. He’d call every morning with suggestions, and finally had suggested a job that might engage Sandy’s intellect: “I think I found you something different over at Caltech.”
    That hadn’t worked out, and Sandy started drifting again. He stayed away from the Alternate Reality games, as too stupid and too addictive. His VA medical monitor suggested more drugs, something that might chemically re-create the spark.
    The Benz parked itself, and the phone component of Sandy’swrist-wrap told the front door that he’d arrived. The door unlocked itself and disarmed the alarm. One step inside, he stripped off his damp T-shirt and dropped it on the floor, as the door closed itself. Another three steps and he stopped, then backed up to the door, passed his wrist-wrap over a faux-but-good Impressionist painting. The painting swung silently away from the wall, revealing a niche.
    Sandy took the HK double-stack automatic out of the niche, turned it on, and selected the hard stuff without thinking, and asked, aloud, “Who’s here?”
    “Crow.”
    Crow. Sandy could smell him. Nothing offensive—mostly peanut butter—but not right for an empty apartment. Sandy followed the muzzle of the pistol into the kitchen, where Crow was sitting at the breakfast bar, handling the partly disassembled RED XV vid camera that Sandy had been refurbishing. A half-eaten peanut-butter sandwich sat an arm’s length away.
    “Careful with the camera,” Sandy said. He dropped the gun on the kitchen counter with a metallic clank and pulled open the refrigerator. “I’ve been realigning the sensor and it’s not tightened down yet.”
    “I can see that—I’ve worked with one of these before,” Crow said. “Looks like a full hardware alignment.”
    “Yeah, it is. The actuators were screwed. And for Christ’s sakes, don’t get peanut butter on anything.”
    “Sorry. I haven’t had much time to eat.”
    Sandy nodded. “You want a Dos Equis? And, uh, I got a couple splits of champagne if you’re feeling girlie.”
    “Dos Equis is good. So: I talked to Larry McGovern last night.”
    “Yeah? I heard he got his birds.” Sandy handed Crow a bottle of beer, picked up the HK and turned it off, and leaned against the refrigerator door.
    “Yes, he did. He’ll get a star in a couple of years, if he doesn’t send the wrong memo to the wrong guy.”
    “He’s not really a memo guy,” Sandy said. “At least, he didn’t used to be, when he was a light colonel.”
    “Still not. He says ‘hello.’ He doesn’t call you ‘Sandy,’ or ‘Lieutenant Darlington,’ by the way. He calls you ‘The X.’ Not ‘X,’ but ‘The X.’”
    “Army bullshit,” Sandy said. “Anyway, what’s up with you? I assume this isn’t a practice burglary. Especially with the security they’ve got in this place.”
    “No. We need to talk to you, about keeping your mouth shut. About not trying to blackmail us into letting you go on the mission.”
    “What mission?”
    “To Saturn. Leaves in a year or two.”
    Sandy took his beer around to the couch that faced the breakfast bar, dropped into it, and said, “You’re really going?”
    “Yeah.”
    “Man, I gotta tell you—I want to go, and bad,” Sandy said. “What do I have to do to talk you into it? Or bribe you? How about a huge fuckin’ campaign contribution to Santeros? I could . . .”
    Crow shook his head: “Nothing. You want to sign up, we’ll take you.”
    Sandy thought about it for a minute, then