Chapter 13: Bob – August 17, 2133 – En Route
Epsilon Eridani is 10.52 light-years away from Sol. The specs indicated that the ship could run at 2g indefinitely with no ill effects, which would get me to my target star in a little over eleven years. However, I wanted to make a little side trip first. Saturn wasn’t directly in line with my flight plan, but I wasn’t going to miss the opportunity to do a flyby.
Saturn had always been my favorite planet. I had watched every second of Voyager and Cassini video from the Saturn missions, over and over, until I wore the electrons out. Now I was able to go there myself and see it first-hand.
The side trip would take a bit over six days at a constant two-g acceleration, which would give me time to track down any booby traps. I unstowed the roamers and ordered a half-dozen of the smaller ones to trace the circuitry from the radio antennae on in. The most likely scenario would be a tap on the antenna cable that wouldn’t show up on the blueprints.
Sure enough, within a couple of hours, the roamers found some circuitry that didn’t show up on any diagrams. I sent in some of the gnat-sized roamers and tracked down a small explosives package, positioned where it would take out the primary computer system. Me, in other words.
The package had obviously been a rush job, and an improvisation at that. The explodey stuff—I assumed it was C4 or some future equivalent—had been stuck to the bulkhead with duct tape. Yeah, they still make duct tape. And it still holds the universe together.
As I stared through the roamer’s camera at this jury-rigged mess, I kept thinking, Don’t cut the red wire. Don’t cut the red wire. I may not have mentioned it before, but I really hate explosives at the best of times. And this wasn’t the best of times.
Rather than try anything fancy, I had a larger roamer disconnect the whole package as a unit and chuck it out an airlock. The small chance I might find a use for it wasn’t worth the stress of having it on board.
Once the booby-trap was removed, I set up some receiving equipment to record any incoming transmissions and isolated the whole assemblage from the rest of the system. I didn’t want to find out the hard way if there was some kind of trigger in my circuitry as well, but I also didn’t want to miss any transmissions. This way, I could save everything to play back later, once I’d cleaned house.
I was travelling at over 5000 km/s by the time I reached the second-largest planet in the solar system. Saturn was immense, and the rings were at close to maximum inclination. The horizontal bands of cloud circling Saturn’s visible surface weren’t as distinctive as those of Jupiter, but each band was wider than the Earth. From this distance I could see lightning flashes from storms that must have been tens of thousands of miles across. Swirls and eddies at the boundaries were literally big enough to drop the moon into. The shadow of the rings fell across the planet, and I could see that it wasn’t just a flat surface—the shadow dipped and bent as it lay across different levels and layers of cloud. I remembered all the science fiction books I’d read that had whole ecosystems floating around in the different layers, and I wondered if I’d find anything like that in my travels.