Saturn Run

Chapter One
 
February 9, 2066
 
            From ten kilometers out, the Sky Survey Observatory looked like an over-sized beer can. Yellow-white sunlight glittered from the can s outward side, while the other half was a shifting funhouse reflection of the pale blues and pearly cloud-streaks of the Earth, a thousand kilometers below.
The can was not quite alone: an egg-shaped service module, human-sized, encrusted with insectile appendages, ports, windows and cameras, was closing in on it. Storage lockers and canisters surrounded the base of the egg. Had there been any air around it, and anything with ears, the faint twang of country music might have been heard vibrating through its ice-white walls: Oh, my ATV is a hustlin on down the line, and them tofu critters are looking mighty fine
The handyman was making a house call.
The Sky Survey Observatory carried four telescopes: the Big Eye, the Medium Eye, the Small Eye, and Chuck s Eye, the latter unofficially named after a congressman who slipped the funding into a veto-proof Social Security bill. The scopes stared outward, assisted by particle and radiation detectors, looking for interesting stuff.
All of the SSO s remotely operable telescopes, radio dishes, and particle sensors, all the digital cameras and computers, all the storage systems and fuel tanks and solar cells, lived at the command of astronomers sitting comfortably in climate-controlled offices back on the ground.
Until the observatory broke. Then somebody had to go there with the metaphorical equivalent of a screwdriver.
One of the groundhuggers called, Can you see it?
Joe Martinez said into his chin mike, Yeah, I can. Holy cow. Something really whacked that motherfucker.
What! What? Joe, what
Just messin with you, Bob.
Hey, Joe? I m pushing the button that cuts off your air.
Didn t know you had one of those.
You don t mess with astronomers, Joe.

John Sandford is the author of twenty-five Prey novels, most recently Gathering Prey, eight Virgil Flowers novels, and eight other books, including the young adult novels Uncaged and Outraged, written with Michelle Cook. He lives in Santa Fe, New Mexico.
 
Ctein is an internationally known photographer and expert on photographic printing. He holds a double degree from Caltech in English and physics, and is the author of more than five hundred articles, columns, books, and manuals. A celebrated member of the science fiction community, he lives in San Francisco.

A terrific story of alien first contact. It s a book Michael Crichton would have enjoyed, but never could have written...With the able partnership of Ctein, it s fast, scientifically believable, and peopled by characters who become good friends. Fans of Lucas Davenport and Virgil Flowers will eat this up. Stephen King
 
Three things to now: First, I m the world s biggest John Sandford fan. Second: I saw this book and thought... What? Third: I needn t have worried. It s vintage Sandford all the way, with all his trademark strengths and insights, except set in the future, not the present. You won t be disappointed. Lee Child
 
Utterly captivating!...the heart of a breakneck thriller and the mind of the best science fiction (Bradbury and Heinlein come to mind).... Sandford and Ctein have brilliantly pulled off the difficult task of making a very different world familiar, proving that a born storyteller is a storyteller, whether he sets his books on mean streets or in deep space. I, for one, want more. Jeffrey Deaver