Saturn Run (23 page)

Six days after parasol deployment and thirty-two days into their mission, the
Nixon
passed perihelion. This was the most uncertain part of the mission plan, next to visiting the alien whatsit.

There were a number of ways the ship could get into trouble. Parasol failure was only the most obvious and predictable one. That wouldn’t kill the crew.

“Well, probably not,” Fang-Castro told Clover. They were drinking tea in Fang-Castro’s apartment. “The ship could take the heat, at least for a couple of weeks. We don’t know if the heat pumps could shunt the thermal load from the living modules to the radiator system, but we think they could. Probably.”

“I wasn’t really thinking about the heat,” Clover said. “We got the heat handled. But I was talking to Alfie, and he said we’re near the solar maximum . . .”

“True . . .”

“. . . and so we get these flares and coronal ejections and whatnot, and there’s no really good way to model them. They can’t really see forward for more than a few days or a week. After that, it’s guesswork.”

“Guesswork and statistics. Statistics say we’d have to be really unlucky to get hit.”

“But if we did, it’d be all bad,” Clover said.

“Yes, it would be.” She smiled at him. “Since there’s not much we can do about it, except have fire drills, it’s best not to think about it.”

A major flare would unleash a burst of X-rays, and at the
Nixon
’s distance, the hard radiation would hit them in a few minutes—most of the crew wouldn’t get enough warning to reach the safety of aft Engineering, where they would be shielded by the huge water tanks that provided reaction mass for the VASIMR engines.

There were hidey-holes in each module of the ship, which, in a pinch, could accommodate the crew in a radiation-safe environment for the hour or so they might need protection—but it would be crowded and uncomfortable. Crowded and uncomfortable was better than dead.

Fang-Castro had insisted on drill after drill until every crew member showed they could make it to safety in less than ninety seconds, three times in a row. In the month leading up to perihelion, every crew member had come to hate the sound of the flare alarm.

After the X-rays, there’d be a proton storm. The flood of charged particles was immensely damaging, biologically, but it would also wreak havoc with electronics, inducing massive eddy currents in anything metallic.

The hidey-holes and the water tanks were enough to protect the crew but there was no way to electrically shield the entire ship. Shunts and circuit breakers would provide some protection, and the ship builders believed the craft would make it through without fatal damage. Nobody was quite sure, and there was no way to test for it.

The worst possibility was that they’d be hit by a coronal mass ejection. If that happened, they were toast. The massive plasma stream would overwhelm any imaginable safeguards on the ship’s critical systems.

There really wasn’t much to be done except prepare for what they reasonably could. Space weather could give them some advance warning, but the
Nixon
was not a maneuverable ship. The math was simple and irrefutable: the ship was barreling along at one hundred and fifteen kilometers per second deep in the sun’s gravitational well. At best, its engines could alter its velocity by two kilometers per second in a day’s time. Major course changes were out of the question. If the
Nixon
found itself on a collision course with a coronal mass ejection, then a collision was what was going to happen.

The anxiety was compounded by the boredom. There just wasn’t much to do on the ship: eat, work, sleep, exercise, watch vids beaming in
from Earth. Ten days on, it looked like they were going to luck out, as far as solar storms were concerned. No news was the best news. Still, it was no news.

Boring.

Well, not all the time.

Francois Peneski, a biochemist known for research into the possibilities of non-carbon-based life-forms, finished dinner in the cafeteria/commons. He took his tray and empty dishes to the dirty-dishes corral, dumped the dishes, then carried the tray back to where Don Larson, a mathematician, was chatting with friends, and used the hard-plastic tray to smash Larson in the face, breaking several blood vessels in Larson’s nose and knocking him off his chair.

Larson knew precisely why this had occurred, and though the nose pain was nearly blinding, and blood was running down his chin, he got up off the floor and swung wildly at Peneski, connecting, more by luck than anything else, with the other man’s left eye.

Then it was on: flailing fists and feet, several bites, screaming crew members. A woman named Rosalind Aster, a mechanical engineer, ripped at Peneski’s face with her fingernails. Peneski elbowed her in the mouth, and she fell backwards, hard, taking a table full of dishes down with her.

(After the fight, several of the numbers people and one of the physicists tried to work out the optimum tactics for a low-gravity fistfight. The problem proved to be surprisingly difficult, given the number of variables involved; the actual fight, however, was carried out with some efficiency.)

Francisco, the ship’s executive officer, was in the cafeteria at the time, as was Ang, the wrestling, violin-playing shrink, and between the two of them, they managed to pry the fighters apart. There were three empty reinforced cabins designed to be used either as hospital rooms or as cells, as need be. The exec ordered the three fighters confined to the cells, and to be attended by a ship’s doctor, while he talked with Fang-Castro about the next step.

The next step was to interview the fighters.

Fang-Castro appeared at Peneski’s cell, with Francisco, Crow, and Ang in tow. Peneski was sitting on the floor—the room had no furniture—and when the door opened, he stood as Fang-Castro walked in.

Fang-Castro said, “Mr. Peneski: What in God’s name was that about? My executive officer tells me that you launched an unprovoked attack on Mr. Larson. Mr. Larson has a bloody nose, and Ms. Aster has several loosened teeth, which will require braces. Your face looks like a raw steak. Can you give me a good reason why you shouldn’t remain locked up?”

“I’m sorry,” Peneski said. “It won’t happen again. And it wasn’t unprovoked.”

“Then give me an explanation to consider.”

“Roz and I had developed a . . . relationship,” Peneski said.

“A sexual relationship,” Fang-Castro said.

“Yes. She was . . . she was really a good thing for me. I have difficulty with relationships. But then, she joined Larson’s orgy club and she didn’t want to be with me anymore. I couldn’t—”

Fang-Castro: “The
what
club?”

“The orgy club. Larson started an orgy club. There are six members, four men and two women. Roz invited me to get in, but I didn’t want to, I wanted to be exclusive. She started avoiding me and finally I said I’d do it, but then she said it was too late, they’d recruited a fifth guy, and I couldn’t get in until they got another woman, unless I was bi, and maybe not even then, because I was a stick-in-the-mud, and they didn’t want any stick-in-the-muds.”

The exec said, “Ah, Jesus.”

By the time Peneski spoke with Fang-Castro, the well-lubricated rumor mill was already in overdrive. Not only was the reason for the fight well known, but the details of the Larson orgies were also revealed. Not only revealed, but extensively embroidered upon.

Larson was quoted as having said, “Women are basically recreational areas, with several separate facilities available at any given time.”

The quotation was completely fabricated, but people were entirely unamused. And, of course,
then
the jokes started, often based on
Peneski’s occupation: “Is that a silicon-based life-form in your pocket, or are you just happy to see me?”

“What would you recommend?” Fang-Castro asked Francisco, Crow, and Ang, in the hallway outside the cell where Peneski remained confined.

Crow said, “There was a violent attack. It’s not something you can ignore, even if there’s no danger of another one. There has to be some kind of punishment. Since you’re the captain, you have to decide on what it should be.”

Ang said, “Peneski doesn’t seem irrational—he managed to work himself into a momentary rage, watching them sit at their table, laughing. He says it won’t happen again and I tend to believe him. Whatever the punishment is, I don’t think we should shame him. He’s already shamed enough. And Larson was provoked, beyond question. I’d suggest a monetary fine, a couple of weeks’ pay, for both of them. I would also find out who the other members of the orgy club are, and I would peel the skin off them. It’s not so much the group sex that worries me, it’s the exclusionary attitude—Peneski couldn’t qualify for membership.”

The exec said, “Ah, Jesus.”

Crow: “Ma’am, I would also recommend that you address the situation directly. Call a crew meeting and broadcast it. Be very clear about the limits of what you’ll tolerate.”

“I should say it’s okay to have orgies, but you have to invite everybody? I don’t think so,” Fang-Castro said. “The President would be the teensiest bit annoyed.”

Crow actually smiled at the thought. “That’s not quite what I meant. You outline the damaging effects that this kind of thing has on ship morale, tell them that you won’t put up with it. Tell them to behave like adults on a deadly serious mission, and that while sex is their own affair, morale is your affair. That if they do anything that will impair morale—and indiscreet sexual liaisons might well qualify—you will lock the offenders in the restraint cells with nothing but a TV set and three meals a day, for the duration of the mission. That you will not allow any
behavior, even if legal on Earth, that will impair the mission: this ship is
not
a democracy, and you are the Queen.”

“I can do that,” Fang-Castro said. “I will also make it clear that assaults, for any reason, are not tolerable and no provocation will be considered an acceptable excuse. Don’t look at me like that, Dr. Ang—regardless of the bizarre circumstances, shipboard discipline requires this.”

Ang waved a finger. “If I may make a suggestion? Remind them that shipboard, libido is a privilege. A privilege that can be revoked. I have the necessary drugs. Would you support that?”

Crow interjected, “I can tell you the President would. Hell, she’d likely have them spaced.”

“Which is why she doesn’t get to command a spaceship,” said Fang-Castro. To Ang, she said, “I’ll mention the drugs.”

The exec said, “Ah, Jesus.”

Crow was completely and intensely aware of the crew’s opinion of him—the knot-headed security man, unfriendly, possibly psychopathic, certainly sociopathic, and perhaps even a semi-comic figure, in the Godot sense, unless he happened to be strangling you or pushing you out the air lock. Given the makeup of the rest of the crew, he was considered hardly anyone’s intellectual equal, and was therefore treated with a thinly disguised disdain.

Crow hadn’t graduated first in his class at the Naval Academy because he hadn’t wanted to: something in his makeup insisted that he remain obscure, a man behind a curtain. Adjustments made to his academic record lowered him to the eleventh spot, high enough to be taken seriously, low enough that he wasn’t a threat to anyone.

He’d gone directly from the academy into intelligence work as a Marine Corps officer. Given the nature of intelligence work in the last half of the twenty-first century, he had made himself expert in computer and communications technology, and in statistics. He could speak Mandarin as well as most Western academic China specialists—well enough to understand it and make himself understood—and was fluent in Russian and Portuguese.

His work in the intelligence world gave him a sixth sense about intelligence operations: he was certain the
Nixon
had been sabotaged. He’d remained publicly ambivalent, even with Fang-Castro, but in his heart, he knew, one hundred percent.

His cabin was heavily shielded. The best electronics security people he’d ever known had come up to the
Nixon
to make sure of that. After they vouched for its cleanliness, he brought up another group, to check the first. Then he checked it himself. From his cabin, he could talk to his ground support, completely outside normal communications channels.

If the
Nixon
had been sabotaged, as he believed, there could have
been two ways to do that: with a timed action, or with a specific local signal to a prepared bomb of some kind, either virtual or physical, and probably not the latter—though he didn’t entirely discount the possibility.

The timed action would be the most secure way to attack the ship. Once the sabotage was set, it would happen no matter what. There’d be no foul-ups caused by unreliable personnel, no last-minute changes of mind.

The specific local signal would require an agent on board, who could act either by his controller’s demand, or, if he were trusted enough, act of his own volition.

When Reactor 2 went down, it appeared to be a time bomb, set to detonate the Easter egg at a certain point in the trip—after departure but not too far into it, probably triggered by a random, but practically certain, event in the data stream going into the reactor logs.

Crow believed that the Easter egg had probably been created on Earth, and that he could do nothing about it without pushing the ship’s risk profile to an unacceptable level. The fact that there’d been an Easter egg, however, told him something else: that someone—probably China—was willing to take substantial risk to design and carry out sabotage right in the face of extraordinarily heavy security.

That suggested to him that the ship had been the target of a major and extremely intelligent espionage effort, and the effort probably would not have been one-dimensional, entirely dependent on the Easter egg in the software.

A heavy espionage operation would want an ear on the ship, and a way to talk.

A spy.

Crow worked the vid link, though the delay between transmission and reply was beginning to drive him crazy. Phaedra Mellis was on the link this morning, talking in long blocks for the simple efficiency of it:

“Hey, Crow, got an eye-opener for you. We got a call from Will Jackson. They won’t tell us how they got the data, though it has to be human intelligence rather than something they pulled out of the ground.
Anyway, the key
Celestial Odyssey
strategists have been told that Becca Johansson says you might be able to kick up thrust on the remaining engine by no more than three percent and still remain within the 99.5 percent reliability status on the radiators, or, four percent thrust at ninety-seven percent reliability. Those numbers were precise and so was the attribution to Johansson. Jackson ran all the data traffic from you guys through Grendel, and he said that in no case, not even in the encrypted data downloads, were those specific numbers mentioned,” Mellis said.

Will Jackson was the three-star general who ran the NSA, and Grendel was their fastest sorting computer.

Mellis continued: “Jackson checked with the orbit guys here. They hadn’t heard those numbers, and were under the impression that Johansson and her people had to do more studies to come up with a precise number, and those studies might take a while—a week or two. Our question here is, did Johansson ever mention those precise numbers? The Grendel results show quite a bit of conversation with various people down here, including the President’s circle, where an increase in velocity has been discussed, but only in terms of projected arrival dates. I’m told it’s possible that the Chinese intercepted some of that data and extrapolated the power boost, but that’s pretty unlikely. If they did get it here and extrapolate it, it’d mean that they’ve got a source pretty close to the President, which would also be . . . discomfiting. So that’s where we’re at, man. Over.”

Crow said, “Johansson mentioned something like those numbers—I think those exact numbers, I’ll check—in a meeting here a week or so ago. She was pulling the numbers out of her butt, more or less, nothing she’d want to go on the record with. I think we’ve got a Chinese asset on board. The meeting room has been heavily scanned for bugs, but just inner-ship chatter could have picked up the numbers. What’s happening with the re-scan on the crew?”

He waited, and waited, and then Mellis was back:

“We are shredding the crew, but we’re not seeing anything that we didn’t already know. I’m telling you, we did a first-rate job the first time
through. The only thing new is that you’ve got a guy there, Cary Roth, microbiologist, cross-trained as a medic and welder, degrees in biology from Iowa State and Texas. Twenty-two years ago, somebody cracked a safe in the controller’s office at Iowa State and stole forty-eight thousand dollars. Police thought it might have been Roth, more for proximity reasons than anything. He had a part-time job there—I’ll ship you all the details—but he was never arrested, charged, or even spoken to harshly. If he did it, he got away with it. That’s about it, it’s nothing that the Chinese could use as a lever or even know about. I really think that if you’ve got somebody up there, it’s a paid asset, not an ideological one. Not something we’re going to find out by pushing their background.

“On the other hand, we’re seeing nothing on the financial side. This is one of the cleanest bunch of people I’ve ever seen. Maybe a little fooling around with income taxes, but nothing that would push a guy into Beijing’s lap. Almost all of them are salaried, and they get good salaries, and the IRS knows what they get down to the penny, and they are living within their means. We’ve traced them all the way back to their birth dates, we’ve looked at their school yearbooks and their grade records, we’ve talked to people who remember them from kindergarten, photos from unrelated people, vids of Little League games. The original work we did still looks good. So, uh . . . that’s what we got, long files to follow on the data links. We need ideas. Over.”

Crow: “I’m burning out my brain here, Fay. If there’s a spy on board, they’ll want him to have some access to communications. I kinda don’t think we’ll find it, but if you guys develop any reasonable ideas, let me know. Maybe they had to do something in a hurry, and they built a link into our outgoing data streams. I doubt that they’d have any kind of a regular schedule—if there’s a schedule at all, it’s randomized and linked to a one-time pad that we won’t find.

“Most likely there is no schedule: they’ve set up a link that can be used anytime, but that they’ll only use for something urgent. We’ve got three big data links coming out of here, but I’d look particularly at the low-bandwidth omni-directional antenna carrying the black-box data from the ship. Nobody’s going to look at the black-box signal unless we
blow up, so if they’re going out through one of the antennas, I suspect that’s the one they’d choose. We need to do an analysis of the black-box signal all the way from Earth orbit to here. If there’s an encrypted message buried in the black-box signal, I suspect it’ll be disguised as noise, so you need to tell the guys to look specifically at the noise. The optical link is a lot cleaner, so it’d be harder to hide a signal there, but there’s also so much data that a full analysis might not be feasible. If it is feasible, then do it. But to tell the truth, I don’t think we’ll find anything. Over.”

He waited a while for the reply, then Mellis came back:

“We can run the data screens, but we’re gonna need more money. That’s a lot of data to look at, and we’re gonna need access to Grendel again, and you know how those guys get about that. Over.”

“You’ll get it. Jackson is aware of Santeros’s interest. Over. And out, unless you’ve got something else.”

Mellis had nothing more. Crow called Johansson, asked her to switch to encryption, and put the question to her. Had she mentioned those numbers anywhere outside the meeting room?

“Well, sure, here in Engineering,” Becca said. “We’ve been trying to figure out what we might do, and if it makes any sense to do it. But we’re sort of backing up on the numbers. I don’t think four percent is at all feasible anymore. . . . But to go to your question, I mentioned those specific numbers only in that meeting. Here in Engineering, we’re pretty aware that it’s a range, not a specific number.”

“Huh. Becca: thank you. You’ve been a help.”

And she was gone.