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.
59.
Wendy Greenberg was the first crew member on the Nixon to notice something wrong. She was wrapping up her night in Engineering. She liked to be on-site for engine restarts. The confidence she expressed to the admiral about the state of the power plant wasn’t false—but they’d had enough trouble with the power plants over the course of this mission that even when everything was running smoothly, and she had every expectation it would continue to, she wanted to be there during the run-up to ignition. Just in case.
Now she checked the time: 6:05 A.M. Her shift replacement was late.
That was not okay. Yesterday had been a little bit crazy, but her people had had plenty of time to learn that she was a little bit anal about punctuality. She would have words with somebody.
No point sitting around twiddling her thumbs, she thought. She went back to the endless task of filing operations reports. Definitely not the best part of the job.
When she looked up again, it was 6:20 A.M. That was more than not okay. Mildly steamed, she turned to one of the techs. “Julie, did Javier say anything to you about a shift change for today?”
“No, why?”
“Because he’s twenty minutes late and I’m beat. I’m pinging his comm.” Should have done that at 6:01, she groused to herself.
Julie Park: “He’s not usually late for anything. He’s as anal as you are, Chief.”
“Or you.”
“Let’s face it, if you’re in Engineering . . .”
Greenberg tapped the comm button. Nothing. Huh. “Hey, Julie, I’m not getting an answer, not even in pingback from his comm. Can you ping Javier from your slate?”
“Yup.” A few seconds later, “Uh, problem, boss. I can’t get a connection, either. Something’s screwed up with communications.”
By then, Greenberg was opening a line to the bridge. Except, it wouldn’t open. She tried the communications station, then security, and finally the admiral’s personal comm. They were locked out of the system.
“This ain’t good. I’m going to find out what’s wrong. Julie, you’re in charge of the room until the next shift shows up or I get back. Whichever’s first.”
She launched herself out of the control room and down the corridor to the air locks. Park switched to the command workstation and had just started reviewing the status plots, when Greenberg returned. Barely a minute had passed. She was flushed and wide-eyed, out of breath.
“Wendy, what . . . ?”
“We’re locked in. I cycled through the first air lock, no problem. When I got to the second, the door wouldn’t open. The far-side door was wedged open, so the lock couldn’t cycle. There was a woman on the far side, so I banged on the door. She turned around. I didn’t recognize her. She was one of the Chinese we picked up, I think. She had a gun. She gestured with it for me to go back.”
Park said, “Then we’re in really bad trouble.”
For the next three hours, everyone in Engineering who didn’t absolutely, positively have to be monitoring the power plant and the engines tried to find a way to communicate with the rest of the ship. Nothing. They couldn’t raise any of the stations in Command and Control. Not just security or communications, but the helm and Navigation were out of touch, as well. They couldn’t even get through to the galley to order coffee, or send themselves a message to their own quarters. The whole intraship network was down. At least, it wasn’t accessible to them.
Okay, hard decision time, Greenberg thought. No helm, no navigation. We’re flying blind. We should be on course, but we can’t actually tell if our heading’s drifted or what. Not good.
She made the call. “Guys, let’s shut everything down. We won’t fire the VASIMRs up until the admiral says so. We’re going back to standby status until we know what’s going on.”
—
Commander Fang-Castro rolled over and stretched. She’d slept exceptionally well. Remarkable dreams, surreal even for a dreamscape—more intense, more vivid than any she could recall having before, but exceptionally enjoyable. Her wake-up alarm should be going off any moment; she had an unusually reliable internal body clock. She clicked her implants.
After nine o’clock?
She’d badly overslept, and either the alarm hadn’t gone off or had failed to wake her. Someone should have called down from the bridge when she hadn’t relieved Francisco over an hour ago. She grabbed her comm and hit the fast-connect for his. Nothing. No response.
His quarters, the same. Bridge and Engineering, the same. No one was picking up her comm; she couldn’t even tell if they were getting through. She jumped out of bed, threw on her uniform, and headed for the door.
It wouldn’t open for her.
She was locked in her room, with no way of communicating with the rest of the crew. She didn’t have to be a genius to figure out what had happened, even if she didn’t know the details.
All right, then.
She put on her NWUs and clipped the kill trigger stylus to the side of her slate. Then she retrieved her personal sidearm from a locker, pulled her chair around to face the door from the far side of the room, and cradled the firearm in her lap. It was turned on, unlocked and loaded. Eventually, someone would be coming for her. She could wait.
—
Crow woke up
a few minutes after Fang-Castro. No wake-up call, no comm, and no exit. The good news was that nobody had come for him, yet. They would, sooner rather than later.
Okay, priority one: making sure that he wasn’t transferred to the lockup. He had useful tools in his quarters, ones the Chinese wouldn’t know about. They wouldn’t find out from the rest of the crew, because they didn’t know about them, either. He needed an excuse for staying where he was.
He pulled out the data-hardened slate he used for communicating with the White House. It was set up so he could establish a secure connection to Santeros from anywhere in the ship. Useful previously, but now that worked against him. He drilled down into the slate’s network protocols, as deep as he could go quickly. If he was lucky, the Chinese wouldn’t have anyone who could dig that far down into an unfamiliar operating system. He hard-linked the slate to his quarters’ intranet.
Next, work the same trick the other way around. He hacked into his room’s net and changed its low-level protocols so that it would not establish secure outbound connections with anything except his presidential slate.
The slate? That was designed to work only for him, at least in the most-secure mode that was needed to connect to the White House. The log-in was biometrically linked to him. Nothing suspicious or unusual about that; every high-level diplomat’s slate worked the same way.
If he was lucky, the Chinese would buy it. It shouldn’t take a lot of luck; it was entirely reasonable that the man who had the direct ear of the President of the United States would be provided well-controlled and restricted ways of grabbing that ear.
He had to hope that whoever had masterminded this little coup was security-minded enough to appreciate how sensible this all was. Then all he’d have to do would be to continue to play relatively dumb, and they’d likely leave him where he was. Probably even let him link to the White House as much as he wanted, because they’d be wanting the ear of the President and they’d be wanting her to know just how bad, for the Americans, the situation was.
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