Saturn Run by John Sandford, Ctein

asked, “Why?”
    “Well, oddly enough, you precisely fit a slot on the ship. You’re a decent videographer, bordering on good, and you’ll be better than good by the time we leave. We need to document every millimeter of this thing. We’ll want it in the highest resolution. And we want it done by somebody who has demonstrated some guts—somebody who won’t cut and run because he’s about to be flamed by a bug—and somebody who has shown that he can keep his mouth shut. That’s one thing.”
    “One thing? There’s another?”
    “Yeah. There’ll be a few guns on board,” Crow said. “I’ll have one. You’ll have access to another one, if need be. Some weird shit could happen on this trip. There’ll be a lot of stress, probably a lot of argument, given the kind of people who’ll be aboard. Could have some psych problems. We think it’d be a good idea to have a hard-nosed security guy to back me up, if I need it.”
    “I’m really not interested in killing anybody,” Sandy said. He took a hit of Dos Equis. “Not anymore.”
    “If you got to the point where you had to kill someone, you’d most likely be saving the whole crew, as well as your own ass,” Crow said.
    Sandy said, “Okay. That, I could do.”
    “So. You wanna go?”
    “Absolutely. The only thing is . . .”
    Crow: “What?”
    “I’m afraid that you’re setting me up,” Sandy said. “Fletcher’s told you that I’m entirely unreliable, that I couldn’t change a fuckin’ tire, and all that. That I smoke too much dope, that I screw my way through the Group . . .”
    Crow waved it off: “We know what Fletcher’s going to say, and I know what Larry McGovern told me yesterday. Larry said that if I ever needed a backup, and I didn’t choose you when I had the chance, I was a fool. I’m not a fool. You couldn’t take any dope aboard the ship, for obvious reasons, but—”
    “I don’t need it,” Sandy said. “I’m still worried that you’ll just lead me along, and then, at the last minute, after word about the mission has leaked . . . you’ll kick me off the mission. Like totally fuck me.”
    “We considered that,” Crow said. “But, given the fact that you rather neatly fit a slot we need, and all your money, and the potential for fucking us back . . . we decided it’d be easier to play it straight.”
    Sandy grinned at him: “I would have liked to have seen that decision get made. ‘Playing it straight’? That’s gotta be a first for Santeros.”
    “We’re not that bad,” Crow said.
    “Of course you are,” Sandy said.
    Crow asked, “Why’d you drop the HK when you saw who it was? What if I’d come here to take care of our potential publicity problem?”
    “You really do that?” Sandy asked.
    “I’ll ignore that question,” Crow said. Then, a half second later, “Wait—I won’t ignore it. Of course I don’t do that. We don’t go around killing innocent people.”
    Sandy nodded and said, “I keep the gun in case there’s still somebody who might try to collect the blood money. When it turned out tobe you, I knew that the gun wouldn’t help. If you were here to kill me, it was a done deal. Though, when I think some more about it, you wouldn’t be here if I was going to be killed. There’d be an unfortunate surfing accident, or a semi-trailer’s nav would go crazy and cross the centerline . . .”
    “Paranoid fantasy . . . science fiction.” Crow took a final pull on his beer, put down the bottle, and asked, “Would you be willing to go back under military discipline?”
    “You mean reenlist?”
    “You’d be reactivated. You’re still technically—very technically—in the reserve.”
    “Could I be a major?”
    “No, but you could be a captain,” Crow said.
    “Would I have to wear a uniform?”
    “Actually, we don’t want you to,” Crow said. “The only reason we want you under discipline is so that if . . . mmm . . . there were some difficult orders, the