Saturn Run (43 page)

“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.”

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 again. 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.”

“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. The 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.

As soon as she had realized what dire straits the
Celestial Odyssey
was in, Sun had begun re-analyzing her options. After Zhang confided his plans to his officers, she reached out to several carefully selected crew members, the ones she was sure would be most patriotic.

Each was provided with an innocent-looking packet of paper—permanent hard records. All they needed to do once they were safely aboard the
Nixon
was to shuffle the papers while they were sorting their personal effects for the marines’ inspection. After that, it wouldn’t matter if the marines confiscated them.

The volatile contents from the papers started evaporating as soon as they were exposed to air. There was no odor. Within an hour, they’d have entirely evaporated and the ship’s air circulation system would distribute the microencapsulated, aerosolized LSD derivative throughout the forward sections of the ship. The only air that wouldn’t be contaminated was in the separately ventilated engineering and power plant modules.

On release, the encapsulation on the particles began to degrade. Three hours after release, the psychoactive component would be exposed, plenty of time for everyone on board the
Nixon
to have inhaled a dose. Shortly thereafter, anyone who had not taken the antagonist would undergo the very best psychedelic experience of their lives. None of that street shit; the chemists in Beijing knew how to make the really good stuff.

After that, the most time-consuming task for the Chinese would be shepherding happily incapacitated and distracted Americans back to
their quarters. The best opportunity for clandestine release was during the Chinese’s earliest time on the
Nixon
, when things were most chaotic and their activities least well supervised and restricted.

It was purely an accident of timing that it was late night, ship’s time, when the unprotected crew would start tripping; Sun couldn’t have planned that well, but she was fully prepared to take advantage of it.

Cui was amazed at the lieutenant’s sureness. “You seem to have thought this through very thoroughly.”

“I didn’t come up with this entirely on my own,” Sun said. “We started analyzing takeover scenarios for the
Nixon
and collecting intelligence in that direction the moment we realized what the Americans were up to. Truth, we didn’t expect to exploit any of those scenarios, not without a direct attack on the
Nixon
that would lead to war. But, y’know, you do the analyses anyway, just in case, and for the intellectual exercise.”

A surprisingly small number of Chinese, just seven or eight, could control the
Nixon
. With two shifts, the Chinese could maintain control for a considerable length of time. They couldn’t run the ship; more Americans than that were required in Engineering alone. What those half dozen could do was dominate and command the Americans, as long as they were armed and the Americans were not. The part the MSS hadn’t been able to figure out was how to gain control in the first place, other than by force.

“Admiral Zhang handed us that opportunity,” Sun said, with a hint of gloating.

Cui was aghast. “Admiral Zhang was in on this? It’s hard for me to believe he would’ve approved.”

“No, he wouldn’t have. That is why he is not part of the situation,” Sun said.

The import of that sank in. “You killed him!”

Sun said, “The Party and the MSS came to the opinion that Zhang’s myriad failings were putting the entire mission in jeopardy. He was becoming increasingly independent of the thought in Beijing, by our best planners. His reputation was useful: the Americans knew all about him. But he would have used his command weight to interfere with a
takeover, even if he knew it was possible. He had a romantic conception of his job, as though he were an old-fashioned sailing captain. The fate of the
Celestial Odyssey
, and its crew, is as nothing, compared to the long-term interests of China. If we don’t get the alien technology, we could be left behind for centuries, just as we were in the eighteenth through twentieth centuries, when we were forced inward. Zhang had become an obstacle to our interests.”

Cui was still trying to grasp just what was happening. “Still, initiating an operation like this, without the approval of the admiral? What makes you think the crew will accept this?”

“Half of the crew are overtly with me. Nobody in the crew is anything less than wholeheartedly supportive of the State’s mandates. The MSS wouldn’t have let anyone on this mission who wasn’t. Everyone has the same goals. The only differences are over what measures need to be taken to achieve them. Once a course of action has been settled upon, they will all fall in behind it.”

Sun was right, and Cui knew it. The captain had hoped the matter could be resolved without confrontation. It was a laudable ideal. Not one, though, the real world would support. Without a show of strength by the Chinese, they had no chance of extracting any concessions from the Americans.

—

Salvatore Francisco had the graveyard watch on the bridge. Goddamn, what a long day it had been! He sucked at his bulb of coffee. He could’ve used a mug, but years of duty in zero-gee had made the bulb a comfortable and familiar item in his routine. The transfer of the Chinese had come off without a hitch, but there was so much planning involved, so many different issues and concerns, that it was exhausting monitoring it all. That wasn’t even considering the political complications they were facing. Thank God he didn’t have to worry about that.

Fang-Castro was getting some well-deserved sleep, and Francisco was scanning routine maintenance reports. Everything was nominal. The Chinese were settled into their quarters.

The new Chinese commander, Cui, had been given the schedule of who would be bunking with whom, and the dining and exercise schedules for the coming days. Each of the Chinese refugees had been assigned two American “supervisors,” in most cases one of them military, to watch over them until they were properly settled in their quarters, made familiar with the operation of all the facilities, and locked down for the night.

The Chinese were being very cooperative. He was back to reviewing the engineering reports, post-start-up, when he noticed a scattered sparkling of lights in his vision, like the cosmic ray hits on the retina that happened every so often. Except there were a lot more of them, and they were increasing in intensity as well as frequency. A major solar storm? Radiation monitors were silent.

He blinked, shook his head, trying to clear his vision. Colors were starting to shift, the pale gray background of the text on his slate was taking on tints of green, purple, pink; they started to move and swirl across the screen. Something was wrong. He tapped the comm to Dr. Manfred’s quarters. “Doc? Something’s wrong with me. I need to see youuuu . . . riiiiight . . . aaaaawwwwaaaaaaaayyyyyyyyy . . .”

He was having trouble speaking, or, at least, he felt like he was having trouble speaking. Maybe he was speaking just fine, maybe his words were stretching out like taffy taffy taffytoffeecoffeecarefree . . . What was he going to say? He couldn’t remember. Words. They were just sooo interesting . . . taffytoffeecoffeecarefreetaffy . . .

He giggled. Low-gee was fun! He tossed his slate and gave it a little spin, watching it arc slowly toward the middle of the bridge, its shiny edges picking up the beautiful liquid light that was pouring from the control lamps and the glowing, wonderfully expanding data displays, flinging that light back at him, split into lightning shards of glorious, constantly changing colors and lovely sounds.
So this is what a rainbow sounds like.
The thought drifted through his head.
I never noticed before. The notes, and the colors, they’re so solid. I could climb them. I wonder where they lead?

It was very quiet throughout the
Nixon
. Most of the Americans were
asleep; a few of them mumbled into their pillows. All of them were having the most wonderful dreams, the kind you hoped you’d never wake up from. They would wake up from them, in about ten hours. They’d be surprised at how much the waking world had changed.

The people who were still awake, the Chinese, their “supervisors,” and the rest of the crew on duty, didn’t make much noise, either. The Chinese who’d been offered the antagonist, the most trusted ones, were quietly going about their tasks. The rest of the Chinese, like the Americans, were too engrossed in the extraordinarily entertaining synesthesia surrounding them to say or do much.

Engineering was quiet, too, but it was operating normally. It was on its own air system. Nobody there, including Dr. Greenberg, who’d taken the late shift to supervise the next day’s engine restart, noticed anything out of the ordinary. They went about their business, uploaded the routine status reports to the bridge, and supervised the smoothly running power plant.

In the living modules, those Chinese who weren’t tripping gently removed the weapons and any ammunition they could find from their military escorts. They pulled the escorts into empty quarters and left them sitting or lying on the beds, enjoying their fantastic new world.

Two went off to the bus deck, opened the outer lock, and took the bus back to the
Odyssey
, where a nineteenth crewman, a volunteer who’d offered to risk his life to stay with the ship for a few more hours, had been hidden.

He was waiting, with the
Odyssey
’s armory, mostly handguns fitted with high-storage capacitor slugs, which would disable any living creature they hit, and perhaps kill a few.

And there were a few guns that were simply that: large-caliber weapons loaded with slugs that would kill without fragmentation ricochet or the power to do much secondary damage to things like a hull. . . .

The round-trip took barely an hour.

The nine functional Chinese crew members rendezvoused with Cui and Sun in the ship’s conference room. From there, they moved to the bridge, where they removed the personnel on duty, save for the crew
members staffing the communications, safety, and security workstations. Three stayed to watch over the controls and the tripping crew members. They’d need them later. The Chinese could control the rudimentary functions of the
Nixon
; those were sufficiently self-explanatory. The intricacies of real day-to-day operation? For that they’d need the Americans.

Three more positioned themselves respectively in life support, the galley, and at the dual air lock that led into Engineering.

The remaining two roamed the corridors of the
Nixon
, looking for any more incapacitated military personnel whose weapons they could confiscate and anyone who might still be wandering free. There were very few; at this late hour the only crew members who were up were the ones who were supposed to be on duty.

By the time everyone was in position, most of the night had passed. The eleven sober
yuhanguan
settled themselves down and waited for their compatriots and the Americans to sober up.