Saturn Run by John Sandford, Ctein Page B

like the big bad wolf.
    He was right, though, and she nodded: hell of a thing.
    The pilot came up and said that they were closing with the orbital tug, so they might feel a slight bump. In truth, the nudge was almost unnoticeable.
    Becca couldn’t see it, but she knew the tug was similar in design to the shuttle’s launch cradle. Since the tug operated solely in space, it didn’t need wings or streamlining or air intakes or the robust framework of the launch stage, but like the launch cradle, it was unpiloted and remotely controlled.
    Right now it was under the command of the shuttle crew. As they approached the space station, it would come under station control.
Galahad
’s pilot brought the tug up under the shuttle and the shuttle dockedinto the tug’s rigid carbon-composite mesh hammock. Twin sets of engines and fuel tanks flanked the craft, much smaller than the ones that had lifted them from Earth.
    There was no announcement from the pilot or any bright flare of exhaust from the engines firing in space, but Becca could tell when they were on their way out of low Earth orbit. Her weightless state disappeared, as the thrust of the tug’s engines pushed her back into her seat with a few tenths of a gee. It wasn’t uncomfortable, but, already, she was missing the experience of weightlessness. She was actually relieved by the feeling: she’d be spending a good part of the Saturn trip in zero-gee and the rest of it in low-gee accommodations, and secretly she’d been worried it might not suit her.
    One more of the many things that she fretted about that she could scratch off her list of worries.
    The pilot came on and said, “Folks, there’s not much to do now except sit back and enjoy the ride up to the station. Since we’re passing over the terminator line, I’m going to dim the cabin lights so you can get a taste of what night in space is like. Enjoy the view.”
    Becca pressed her face as close to the window as she could and looked back. The broad arc of the horizon was aglow with a thin rainbow band of light, a sunset scene from orbit. The sunset faded rapidly as the spaceship passed over to the night side of the earth, and the stars popped out. Clear and untwinkling, they were set in a true-black sky that she’d never seen at night on Earth, even hiking in the Rockies. The effect was so intense it felt unreal, like a movie special effect. Below her she could see an occasional flicker of lightning in the clouds and, through the gaps in the clouds, she could see the lights of the modern metropolises of northern Africa and southern Asia.
    Then dawn started to break ahead of the ship, and Becca pulled out of her reverie. She checked the time; she’d lost an hour enraptured by space. She sighed and went back to her workslate. She needed some kind of plan, even a quarter-baked one, to present when she got to the station.
    “Okay, deep breath,” she murmured to herself. “What do I know that I can’t change?”
    The good-looking guy asked, “Did you say something?”
    “Nothing,” she said.
    Becca ran through the big picture in her head. In space, there was only one way to get rid of heat, and that was by radiation. At room temperature, it would take roughly a square kilometer of radiator to get rid of a gigawatt of heat.
    She needed to get rid of several. So that approach wouldn’t fly, because the radiator would simply weigh too much.
So let’s run hotter and to hell with efficiency.
    She punched numbers into the slate to check her mental arithmetic. At five hundred degrees Celsius, she could dump forty times as much heat per square meter of radiator; six hundred degrees Celsius would be even better, at more than sixty times.
    That should get the radiator down to areas that might be manageable.
    Let’s make believe that works. How do I get the heat to the radiator?
    She scanned through her tables of heat properties of materials.
    If I’m running that hot, the best thing for sucking up heat is probably