Saturn

“I see. You’ve made a great discovery, then.”

“I wish I had known about it before Ma

“Hey Fritz!” the radio speaker crackled. “Can you hear me?”

“Ma

“Yeah, but I don’t know for how long.”

RETURN

Alone in the cockpit of the shuttlecraft, Timoshenko had listened to the chatter between Gaeta and his technicians, then grown morose as Gaeta fell silent. So the scientists have made a great discovery, he thought. They will win prizes and drink champagne while Gaeta is forgotten.

That’s the way of the world, he thought. The big shots congratulate one another while the little guys die alone. They’ll do some video specials on Gaeta, I suppose: the daring stuntman who died in the rings of Saturn. But in a few weeks he’ll be totally forgotten.

Timoshenko had programmed the shuttlecraft to ease through the Cassini division between the A and B rings and take up a loitering orbit at the approximate position where Gaeta was programmed to come out below the ring plane. He knew that the stuntman wasn’t going to come out at that precise spot, not with what had happened to him. Probably Gaeta would not come out at all, but still Timoshenko remained where he had promised he would be.

“Hey Fritz! Can you hear me?”

Fritz blurted, “Ma

The sound of Gaeta’s voice electrified Timoshenko. He stared out the cockpit’s port at the gleaming expanse of Saturn’s rings, so bright it made him blink his eyes tearfully. Then his good sense got into gear and he checked his radar scans. There was an object about the size of a man hurtling out of the rings like a rifle shot.

“Gaeta!” Timoshenko shouted into his microphone. “I’m coming after you!”

It took Gaeta a few seconds to recover from the shock of the thruster’s sudden ignition. He had no control over it; he banged at the keyboard in desperate frustration, but the rocket simply blasted away until it ran out of fuel and abruptly died. Only then did Gaeta try his comm link. He got Fritz’s voice in his earphones; the chief tech sounded stu

“What is your condition?” Fritz asked, getting back to his normal professional cool. “The diagnostics we’re getting are still rather muddled.”

Watching ice particles fly off his faceplate, Gaeta said, “I’m okay, except I don’t know where the hell I’m going. What’s my position and vector?”

“We’re working on that. Your thruster has burned out, apparently.”

“Right. I’ve got no way to slow myself down or change course.”

“Not to worry,” came Timoshenko’s voice. “I have you on radar. I’m on a rendezvous trajectory.”

“Great,” said Gaeta. The faceplate was almost entirely clear now. He watched one little ice flake scurry around like an ant on amphetamines and finally disappear.

“So long, amigito,” Gaeta said to the particle. “No hard feelings. I hope you get back home okay, little guy.”

Pain!Holly had never known such white-hot pain. Never even dreamed it could exist. Kananga punched her again in the kidneys and fresh pain exploded inside her, searing, devastating agony that overwhelmed all her senses.

“A simple statement,” Morgenthau was saying, bending over her. “Just a single sentence. Tell us that you were helping Cardenas to develop killer nanobugs.” She jabbed the palmcomp under Holly’s nose.

Holly could barely breathe. Through lips that were puffed and bleeding she managed to grunt, “No.”

Kananga put a knee into the small of her back and twisted her left arm mercilessly. Holly screamed.

“It only gets worse,” Kananga hissed into her ear. “It keeps on getting worse until you do what we want you to.”

Holly heard Eberly’s voice, miserable, pleading, “You’re going to kill her. For God’s sake, leave her alone.”

“You call on God?” Morgenthau said. “Blasphemer.”

“You’ll kill her!”

“She’s going to die anyway,” Kananga said.

“Work on the other one,” Eberly pleaded. “Give her a rest.”

“He’s unconscious again. Holly is a lot tougher, aren’t you, Holly?” Kananga grabbed a handful of hair and yanked Holly’s head back so sharply she thought her neck would snap.

“If we had the neural controllers,” Vyborg said, “we could make her say anything we wanted.”

“But we don’t have the proper equipment,” Morgenthau said. She sighed heavily. “Break her fingers. One at a time.”

Timoshenko swung the little shuttlecraft into a trajectory that swiftly caught up with the hurtling figure of Gaeta.

“I’m approaching you from four o’clock, in your perspective,” he called. “Will you able to climb into the cargo bay hatch once I come within a few meters of you?”

Gaeta answered doubtfully, “I du

“Not so good.” Timoshenko looked through the cockpit port. He could see the tiny figure of a man outlined against the broad, brilliant glow of Saturn’s rings.

“Ow!” Gaeta yipped.

“What’s the matter?” Fritz’s voice.

“I pulled a muscle when I got my legs outta the suit legs,” Gaeta answered. “Now I’m putting ’em back in and it hurts like hell.”

“If that’s your worst problem,” said Fritz, “you have nothing to complain about.”

Timoshenko couldn’t help laughing at the technician’s coolness. Like a painless dentist, he thought. The dentist feels no pain.

Gaeta said, “I’m not go

“Not to worry,” Timoshenko said. “I’ll bring this bucket to you. I’ll bring you in like a man on the high trapeze catching his partner in midair. Like a ballet dancer catching his ballerina in her leap. Just like that.” He wished he truly felt as confident as he sounded.

Holly lay crumpled on the steel flooring of the airlock chamber, unconscious again.

“She’s faking,” Morgenthau said.

“For God’s sake, let her be,” Eberly begged. “Push her out the airlock if you want to, but stop this torture. It’s inhuman!”

Vyborg said, “We have enough recordings of her voice to synthesize a statement against Cardenas.”

“I want to make certain,” Morgenthau insisted. “I want to hear it from her own lips.”

Kananga nudged Tavalera’s inert body with a toe. “I’m afraid some of his ribs are broken. He’s probably bleeding pretty heavily internally. Perhaps a lung’s been punctured.”

Morgenthau planted her fists on her wide hips, a picture of implacable determination in a ludicrous rainbow-striped caftan.

“Wake her up,” Morgenthau commanded. “I want to hear her say the words. Then you can get rid of her.”

“One hundred meters and closing.” Timoshenko’s voice in Gaeta’s helmet earphones sounded calm, completely professional.

He couldn’t see the approaching shuttlecraft in his faceplate, so Gaeta spent a squirt of minithruster fuel to turn slightly. There it was, coming on fast, its ungainly form looking as beautiful as a racing yacht to Gaeta’s eyes. The cargo hatch was wide open, inviting.

“You look awful damn good, amigo,” Gaeta said.

“I’m adjusting my velocity vector to match yours,” Timoshenko replied.

Fritz’s voice added, “Your fuel supply is reaching critical. Instead of trying to return to the main airlock, it will save fuel if you come in to the central ’lock at the endcap.”

“Is it big enough to let me squeeze through in the suit?” Gaeta asked.

“Yes,” said Fritz. “Aim for the endcap’s central airlock.”