Saturn Run

by John Sandford

  Sandy dutifully vidded everything and then they headed back to the shuttle bay for the return trip to the Nixon. Crow amiably chatted the whole way, asking about opportunities for touring, even living in China. He thought there might be some prospect for posting to the diplomatic corps if he did well on this assignment.

  Once they had jetted well away from the Celestial Odyssey, Sandy aimed his remote at the hand-camera, which unstuck itself, and as he stowed it, he said, “Jesus, what an enormous load of bullshit. The diplomatic stuff. You think they bought it? They know you’re the political officer.”

  “What part did you think was bullshit?”

  “The ‘hail fellow well met’ routine. Free-and-easy social banter isn’t really your style.”

  “You really don’t know my style, Sandy.”

  Sandy hesitated, then asked, “Do you?”

  Crow shrugged, and they slid back to the Nixon. A minute before they arrived, he said, “I’ll tell you what, Sandy. When John Clover interrogated the alien AI, he was more interested in finding out why the aliens were doing things than what they were doing. That’s what I wanted to know. I didn’t so much care what the Chinese told me. What I cared about was how they told it to me. What I learned is that they are scared. You, they paid no attention to, because they understood your function. But they were frightened of me, because they were afraid I might say no, and they understand me as the political officer. They are deeply suspicious of us, but they badly wanted my approval.

  “That, more than anything I saw or you vidded, makes me think they’re telling the truth. His crew has been traumatized and is operating under terrific stress. They’re keeping a lid on it as best they can, but they’re terrified. Unless their typical engineer is better at this game than I am, this isn’t some crafty ruse to get on board the Nixon. They need us. If we don’t help, they’re dead.”

  After a minute, Sandy said, “All right.” After another minute, “I’m sorta impressed, man.”

  —

  Zhang and Cui inhaled the delicate vapors drifting up from the cups of tea that Fang-Castro had offered them. “Superb,” Zhang said. “Better than anything I can get. When we are back on the ground, you will have to give me the name of your provider. I’m stunned that you, outside of China, can obtain better leaf than I can.”

  Fang-Castro smiled. “It’s a side effect of our international trade. When you find out what I paid for this, you’ll be amazed. The tea growers in China can make much more money selling their goods on the international market, than they can selling it locally. There’s not a lot of opportunity on a space station to spend my pay. So most of it goes into retirement funds for me and my ex-wife, and our children’s education. Tea is one of my few indulgences.”

  Zhang sighed. “I hope we will get to enjoy retirements. On that point . . . I am feeling pressed for time. May we discuss transfer arrangements, assuming your investigations confirm my claims and encourage you to a favorable decision?”

  “I read the summary of your situation. You only have nine space suits and your pressurized shuttle was destroyed in the antimatter explosion? Other than a handful of service eggs, similar to your pods, we don’t have any pressurized transfer vehicles, and our space suits are customized to the user. How did you plan to make the transfer?”

  “Our suits are not so customized. We could either shuttle the suits back and forth or go to body bags. I’d prefer not to go to body bags.”

  “I understand.”

  “We would also wish to bring aboard personal items. We understand that they would be thoroughly inspected by your security people.”

  “Are you talking about weapons?”

  “No, of course not. Just small sentimental items, and clothing and so on.”

  “We can take a limited amount of that. But it will all be closely inspected.”

  “Of course.”

  Fang-Castro’s slate pinged. “Admiral? Summerhill, here. The bus with Darlington and Crow is back.”

  “Send them to the conference room, along with Mr. Martinez,” she said. She turned to Zhang. “All right, sir, let’s see what my people have learned.”

  57.

  The transfer of the Celestial Odyssey’s crew took six hours in two shifts. Crew members collected personal belongings, packed them into standard Chinese military duffels, and carried them to the shuttle bay, where the bus from the Nixon was moored. Those chosen to go first got into space suits and shuffled onto the bus, for the short ride across. Cui would go with the first group, to command the Chinese on the Nixon. Zhang would go last.

  On arrival at the Nixon, each Chinese crewman was put through a security scanner, and their duffel bags were both scanned and examined by hand. All personal items that might be considered volatile—a few bottles of perfume, soaps, and so on—were sequestered for chemical analysis, with the crewman’s name written on the outside of a clear plastic bag containing the questionable items.

  At the end, only Zhang, Second Officer Sun, and four other Chinese crew members were left aboard the Odyssey. As they suited up and prepared to board the waiting bus, Zhang looked around the shuttle bay for the last time. They were abandoning ship. He’d never had to do that before. He’d never lost a vessel . . . or the majority of his crew.

  The level of failure that he felt, the deep melancholy, that was something he could barely endure. Every morning he woke from fitful sleep into a worse nightmare. He’d done his best to be a good commander, to make the right decisions, but all he could say of himself was that his very best had only been enough to keep a near-total disaster from being total.

  He barely felt the bus accelerate away from his ship. He shook himself. He wasn’t sure how much time had passed since he climbed onto the bus, probably less than a minute. All he had to do was wait. The fittings on their space suits weren’t compatible with the ports on the bus, but for such a short operation it didn’t matter. They could rely on their suits for life support during the transfer procedures.

  Ahead of them was the Nixon; behind was his past. He watched as the shuttle bay grew smaller with distance. The lights were on, but there was no one left there to operate the doors.

  The Celestial Odyssey would continue its voyage, the lights on but nobody home, as the Americans might say. For how long? Who knew? At their lowest power generation settings the reactors might run for many decades. Probably before then something would break and the lights would go out, leaving the ship a dark and powerless hulk.

  For a while, though, the Odyssey would continue to function. Maybe, Zhang thought, long enough for Beijing to send out a recovery mission. More likely, given its condition, Beijing would abandon it. Perhaps centuries from this moment, space explorers would discover a mysterious, dimly lit ship, abandoned by its crew for reasons long forgotten, a Flying Dutchman of the Early Space Era.

  A silly and romantic notion. Zhang’s mind was wandering. So much fatigue. With his responsibilities over, for all practical purposes, he could barely keep his eyes open.

  The receding shuttle bay looked dimmer, blurrier. He wished he could rub his eyes to clear them. That was something he’d always hated about space suits; if you got an itch, you couldn’t scratch. Maybe he should just close his eyes for a minute, to see if that would clear his vision. He was just a package on the Americans’ transporter.

  They didn’t need him.

  —

  Half an hour after leaving the crippled Chinese ship, the bus arrived at the Nixon. A white American egg hovered outside the bus bay, and Sun could see the young cameraman—Captain Darlington?—inside the egg, recording the transfer.

  The bus edged into the Nixon’s air lock, settled onto the deck, where clamps engaged its legs. The bay doors closed and the hangar began to pressurize. Sun looked to Zhang. “Sir, we’ve arrived. Your orders?” She got no reply. She leaned over and poked at his arm. He didn’t move. She tried aga
in. No response. Tried again . . .

  She hit her open channel button. “Nixon, we have a problem. Admiral Zhang is unresponsive. We need medical attention!”

  The Nixon’s chief medical officer, Derek Manfred, rushed forward, along with marines there to process the new arrivals. Manfred and Barnes unclipped the inert captain’s suit from the bus harness. There wasn’t time to wait for the hangar to finish pressurizing. They ran with him to the air lock. Barnes radioed over his shoulder. “You can come if you wish, Lieutenant Sun, but we’re not holding the air lock for you. Your call.”

  Sun followed her commander.

  Fang-Castro, Cui, Crow, and a few others were waiting on the other side of the air lock. Barnes held Zhang’s unmoving body while Cui pulled off his helmet and started in on the rest of the suit. Dr. Manfred moved in and shoved her to one side, gently but firmly.

  He said, “Not breathing. No pulse. Shocking, now. . . . Nothing. Okay, last resort.” The doctor injected Zhang with something and shocked him again. “Nothing.”

  Another shock, and another. Finally, to Cui: “I’m sorry, I can’t bring him back.”

  Cui was stunned: “How could this happen?”

  Manfred was doctor-cool: “I’d have to perform an autopsy to be absolutely certain, but the blood chem telltales are consistent with asphyxiation. Way too little oxygen, way too much CO2. Something went badly wrong with the air mix in his suit.”

  Fang-Castro reached out and touched Cui’s arm. “I am so very, very sorry, Lieutenant Cui. Admiral Zhang was unquestionably an intelligent and perceptive man and an officer of integrity. I was greatly looking forward to spending time with him in the coming months.”

  She straightened up. “Lieutenant Cui, I believe that you are the ranking officer and now in command of your crew. I welcome you aboard the USSS Richard M. Nixon. With your permission, we can transport Admiral Zhang’s body to Medical. I’ll have our very best technician, Joe Martinez, go over his space suit. Dr. Manfred can perform an autopsy, if you wish. We should attend to the task of moving the rest of your crew into the Nixon.”

  Sun said, “The suits were tested before we left. Tested. He should have been fine.” She hesitated, looked to Cui. “Sir, your orders?”

  Cui was still trying to get her bearings. “Uh, yes.” She turned to Fang-Castro: “Thank you, Admiral, please go ahead with the personnel transfer. I want to be sure the rest of our . . . my . . . people are all right.”

  Cui Zhuo stared for a moment at Zhang’s body, then turned to the shuttle bay air lock. The door opened—the bay was now fully pressurized—and the American marines were helping the final crew members peel off their suits. As the Chinese crewmen clambered out, the Americans helped them get their footing.

  When they were all out, Cui barked an order, gave them a moment to focus on her, and took that moment to do a quick evaluation of the ranks. They all looked alert and in good health. Excellent. Manfred could check them over later.

  “Your attention,” she said. “We have some very sad news. . . .”

  Lieutenant Peng looked like he might burst into tears. Dr. Gao’s eyes were huge; eventually she would think to close her mouth. Sun appeared thoughtful. She wasn’t surprised by any of that; she knew her crew. Cui would make a good commander, even if she lacked the seasoning of Zhang.

  “Sun is your new first officer. Retrieve your duffels from the bus and carry them to the American marines for inspection. You will get individual receipts for your property.”

  Fang-Castro asked Crow, “What do you think, Mr. Crow? Anything catch your attention?”

  “What happened to Zhang—that’s not right. I don’t understand that, and I need to,” Crow said, flicking through the pages on his slate. “As for physical security . . . Most of their duffels were purely personal effects, plus some electronics, mostly standard brand-name slates, although we’re checking them closely, of course. We found nothing hidden, nothing resembling contraband or an effort to circumvent our security. There were an unusually large number of drugs, along with the usual vitamins, headache remedies, and such. Their Dr. Mo said that they were primarily to offset the effects of long-term zero-gee travel and to counter any possible damage from radiation exposure at Saturn. It’s plausible. Manfred and his medical people are doing analysis of all the various drugs as well as all the volatile chemicals carried aboard . . . mostly soaps, perfumes, deodorant, that sort of thing.”

  “Are we in danger?”

  “No way to know. Zhang . . . Is there some kind of coup under way? There doesn’t appear to be. As for them taking over the Nixon . . . If I were them, I’d be thinking about it. But a ship this size? With only eighteen unarmed people? Not if they don’t hold Command and Control, for certain. Obviously we do not allow any of them into C & C. Not for any reason.

  “We’re going to lock down their quarters on a rotating schedule, give them limited access to the Commons and other areas, such as the gym, a limited number at a time. Restrict them to the living modules and elevators—no access aft to Engineering or to the storage and shuttle bay. I’d like to keep them out of the elevators, keep them confined to one section of one living module, but the shared facilities of the ship—galley, gym, medical bay, and so on, are distributed across the habitat sections, so we obviously can’t completely restrict them.”

  Fang-Castro noticed a wrinkle in Crow’s forehead. Probably the closest he ever came to a furrowed brow. “Unfortunately for us right now, the designers didn’t plan this as a prison ship,” Crow continued. “I would recommend that you set up a monitoring screen on the bridge, with continuous coverage of all internal cameras, and detail some of our marines to watch the cameras at all times. . . . This situation makes me more uncomfortable than I expected it to be. Especially the loss of Zhang. We knew quite a bit about him. About Cui . . . we know almost nothing.”

  “I’ll take your recommendations for surveillance,” Fang-Castro said. “We have them quartered in different areas of the ship, we’ve split up their sleep/wake schedule and require them to be in their beds during the sleep cycle, we split up exercise cycles and require them to attend,” Fang-Castro said. “We’ve arranged it so that it would be hard for even half of them to congregate at once. We’ve taken their communication gear . . . I don’t know what more we can do.”

  “I’ll think of something,” Crow said.

  “Do we have some kind of anti-paranoia pill?” Fang-Castro asked. “If we do, maybe you should take one, David.”

  Crow was paging through his slate at a pace little short of frenetic. Fang-Castro said, “David. Relax. Have a cup of tea.”

  —

  Lieutenant Sun followed Cui out of the shuttle bay toward a cart that was waiting to take them to the living module elevator. When they were alone, she opened a file of printed paper—hard copies of personnel lists with medical histories to be given to the Nixon’s doctors—and pulled two sheets of paper, checked the page numbers, and then pressed them together, face-to-face.

  Cui: “What are you doing?”

  Sun: “Creating a chemical reaction. There is a plastic coating on page fourteen that will be dissolved by the chemical treatment on page nineteen.”

  “What?”

  Sun peeled the two sheets of paper apart and said, “Lick the corner of this page.”

  “What?”

  “If you don’t lick the page, in about”—Sun checked her implants—“three hours, you’re going to spend several hours on a very pleasant trip.”

  “Yu Jie, what are you talking about?”

  “You can thank me later, Zhuo, but we’re about to take control of the USSS Richard M. Nixon. You will have your own ship, Captain Cui.”

  58.

  “What?” Cui said it again, feeling stupid.

  Sun said, “Short version, there’s a drug in the Nixon’s air supply. It’ll become active in less than three hours. T
he antagonist on this paper will block it. I can give you the long version, but first, lick the paper.”

  Cui refused to give ground. “You’re my second. You may speak frankly, but you do not give me orders. I am your superior.”

  Sun shook her head. “You are not my superior officer. I operate under a mandate from the Party and the Ministry of State Security. Duan Me, the Celestial Odyssey’s political officer, reported to me. I report directly to the MSS. I am not obligated to follow your orders. Strictly speaking, you are obligated to follow mine. Lick. The. Goddamn. Paper . . . ma’am.”

  She offered the paper again. The expression on her face was fierce and imploring, both. Cui licked the paper, her eyes never leaving Sun’s.

  “Now. Tell me. All of it.”

  Sun told her.

  —

  Sun was yuhanguan. Yes, she had done everything and been on every assignment that was in her official dossier. Primarily, though, she functioned as a covert operative for the Ministry of State Security. She was thirty-six years old, not twenty-eight. Since Sun had turned twenty, she had been officially aging, on paper, one year for every two real years.

  “I’ve had a longer career than most. That’s just good fortune,” Sun said. “Agents age out of the program when it becomes too difficult to reconcile their physical age with their paper one. I was lucky with good genes: I look unusually youthful, and I haven’t started to shift into a middle-age appearance, yet.”

  Her apparent youth was used to place her in the lower levels of any command group, where she’d be less conspicuous, she said.

  Her personal medication and toiletries were completely innocent. Her papers were not, and had been primed with several chemical agents. One of the agents was designed to incapacitate a large number of people in a large enclosed space in a short period of time, useful, on Earth, in terrorist hostage situations. Hardly ever likely to be needed in space, but how handy it was, if it were needed.