Saturn Run

by John Sandford

  There was a lot more he could do from his quarters. Without checking, because his checks might be detected, he was pretty confident they’d be controlling the Nixon at the most superficial level. Unless the Chinese happened to have a serious cyber-expert among their survivors, it would be easy to circumvent blocks on the network and door lockdowns. Easy, at least, when you had the equipment he had to work with, plus some carefully placed back doors.

  But there was nothing more he was going to do. Not at this time. He wasn’t a superspy from a badly written vid. He couldn’t single-handedly wrest control of the ship from eighteen Chinese hijackers, at least not without them noticing and eventually figuring out who was doing it and where he was, and then he’d either be dead or find himself working from the naked-in-the-bare-cell scenario.

  His tech prep done, it was time to clean up, to look the part he was playing. He shaved, trimmed a few errant hairs from his head, and took his best suit from the closet. Appropriately matching socks and a quick buff to the shoes. He contemplated ties, found one that complemented the suit and his eyes and gave himself a critical once-over in the mirror. He would do: he looked the part of a president’s representative about to meet with the very highest level dignitaries of a foreign government. He hoped the Chinese would appreciate the gesture.

  Just one last item. The kill switch. He’d picked up the stylus and slipped it into his breast pocket. It went nicely with the suit and tie. Didn’t write too badly, either.

  He sat down at his desk, pulled up some innocuous presidential briefings on his slate, and let his brain run overtime on the situation, while he waited for his captors to show up.

  —

  All over the Nixon, crew members were waking up, or coming down. On the bridge, Cui took stock: there were three unarmed Americans against three armed Chinese; five, including herself and Lieutenant Sun. The three Americans were coming to their senses. She could tell from their expressions that they’d rather be in dreamland. Sorry, she thought, but this is reality and this is the new order.

  And, for the time being, the Nixon was her ship.

  She didn’t expect that status to hold indefinitely. Once an accommodation was reached over the disposition of the alien information, she’d be happy to share the command with Fang-Castro. She would even consider handing it back to her entirely, as long as the Chinese retained control of the weapons.

  It could work. It would be like one of those countries back on Earth whose civilian government was supported by a strong and independent military. As long as principles and goals were agreed upon, everything was fine, and if there was a disagreement, well . . . The real power did not lie with the government.

  She turned to the American at the communications station who was by now sufficiently un-addled to be both alert and fearful. “Lieutenant, what is your name?”

  She consciously copied Zhang’s command voice—low and soothing, but authoritative. “Don’t worry. Despite appearances, you are in no danger as long as you cooperate, and I will not ask you to do anything that puts your compatriots or your ship at risk.”

  “Summerhill, ma’am, Albi Summerhill.”

  Ma’am, that was good. He appreciated the situation he was in. “Thank you. Mr. Summerhill, I’m going to need you to operate the communications console according to my instructions. My people understand your systems well enough to engage simple operations, such as temporarily shutting down internal communications, but not how to operate it fully. You understand what I’m asking of you?”

  He nodded.

  “Very good. Open a ship-wide channel, so that I can make an announcement to your entire crew. Signal me when you’ve done that.”

  Summerhill looked over the status board, pressed a few keys, and nodded to Cui. She nodded back in acknowledgment, and took a deep breath. The deepest one of her career; it felt like standing on the edge of a precipice, more exhilarating than terrifying, but some of both. Well, no turning back.

  She leaped.

  “Your attention, please. And good morning. I am Commander Cui Zhuo, of the People’s Republic of China, and former first officer of the Deep Space Vessel Celestial Odyssey. I and my fellow yuhanguan . . . astronauts . . . are in command of the Richard M. Nixon. We expect to return command to you as soon as some concerns are resolved. At present we have locked your quarters and blocked internal communications for security reasons.

  “We expect to restore normal functioning shortly. Please be patient, and I personally apologize for any inconveniences we are causing you.”

  She made a slicing motion with her hand, and then Summerhill killed the microphone. She nodded at him: “Thank you, Lieutenant.”

  Sun turned to the American sitting near the security station. “And you, what is your name? I’d like you to bring up some security information for me.”

  “Uh, Langers, ma’am, Ferris Langers. I’m usually at Navigation. I’m a navigation officer. I don’t know a lot about this station.”

  “Can you perform simple operations, like locating a particular crew member or locking or unlocking a particular door?”

  He looked at the panel. “Yes, I can do that.”

  “Please be sure, Mr. Langers. I would be very unhappy if you were to accidentally unlock all the doors or the communications system. The consequences could be tragic.”

  Langers looked at her face and then at her sidearm. “I will be careful.”

  “Are Commander Fang-Castro and Mr. Crow in their quarters? Can you open communications channels just to them and unlock only their quarters’ doors when Commander Cui requests it? And do you have vid surveillance of their quarters?”

  Langers tapped the panel and pulled up a few data lines. “They are both in quarters—or somebody is. I can unlock the doors, but I can’t give you the vid. That’s locked for reasons of privacy and only the admiral can override the locks. I can give you audio to both quarters, although they both have the option to kill the audio, if they wish.”

  Cui asked, “Lieutenant Sun, how is our complement?”

  “Up to full strength, Commander.”

  “Lieutenant Langers, please open links to Admiral Fang-Castro and Mr. Crow.”

  Langers tapped the screen he was looking at, and then pointed a finger at Cui.

  “Admiral Fang-Castro, Mr. Crow? This is Cui Zhuo. I would like to meet with both of you in the conference room. I’ll be sending escorts to accompany you. They will be armed. Please don’t attempt anything foolish.”

  She didn’t wait for an answer, but gestured and Langers closed the channel. “Now, Mr. Summerhill, bring up the ship’s logs for the past three weeks. My lieutenant and I have some reading to do.”

  Summerhill was sweating. “Some of the logs are encrypted, ma’am. I don’t have the passwords or keys for those. Honestly, ma’am.”

  “Bring up what you can, Lieutenant.”

  60.

  The first round of discussions between the Chinese and Americans went as expected: not well.

  Sun had confirmed from the ship’s logs what the AI told Cui at the alien station, that the Nixon had received eight data storage units of some kind from the alien station, and eight readers for the QSUs. The details were in the encrypted files they couldn’t access.

  She also divined, from the considerable amount of high-bandwidth data that had been beamed to the Nixon from the station, that a substantial store of information on the aliens or their technology must exist in the Nixon’s own databanks. The details were also not evident in the unsecured files in the datastore.

  Cui and Sun were waiting in the conference room when Fang-Castro and Crow arrived, escorted by two crew members who were also members of the Chinese special forces, the Zhōngguó tèzhong bùduì.

  Cui gestured at the chairs, but Fang-Castro shook her head. “Naomi Fang-Castro, rear admiral, U.S. Navy, 756-487-8765.”

  Cui sho
ok her head: “Please. We need to talk this out. You are not a prisoner of war.”

  “Naomi Fang-Castro, rear admiral, U.S. Navy, 756-487-8765.”

  Crow said, “Admiral Fang-Castro would disagree about her status. She’s a prisoner of war, because your acts are certainly acts of war. That’s why she provides her name, rank, and serial number . . . in this case, her Social Security number. If you were not declaring war with your acts—”

  “We were not,” Sun blurted.

  “—then you’re pirates, for which the punishment in a critical situation like this, would certainly be death, for all the pirates.” He paused, to look at the two Chinese officers, then continued. “Admiral Fang-Castro’s reticence does not apply to me, of course, since I’m a civilian. I am willing to talk, and willing to report what you say to the President, although I warn you, it would be advisable for you to give this up right now. The admiral is a humane person and I doubt that she would order any executions. Once I speak to the President, then this is all on the record. You will have declared war on the United States. I don’t know if the chairman granted you the power to do that, but that’s where we are.”

  Cui glanced involuntarily at Sun, then said, “Lieutenant Sun is our . . . new political officer. She would know more about the legalities than I do.”

  Sun said, “We anticipate returning the ship to your control amicably and quickly. Before we can do that, however, we need to work out a way to share the alien data that you took from the planetoid, and which the aliens intended for all mankind, not for the exclusive use of the U.S.A. I am quite sure that all the regional blocs would agree with us.”

  Crow smiled at her, shrugged.

  “What?”

  “We will give you what the President says we can. But I’m not going to do that on my own. If we’re in a state of war, then giving you that information would be treason, and I could be shot. I would not enjoy being shot by my own people. And you won’t get it from the admiral.”

  Sun: “We will get it from somebody.”

  “Good luck with that.”

  “I would point out that we could simply take the memory modules, and ship them separately back to Earth.”

  Crow shook his head. “No. You can’t.”

  He told them about the burn box, and the secret switches.

  The discussion went downhill from there. Cui made another appeal to Fang-Castro, who was still standing.

  Fang-Castro: “Naomi Fang-Castro, rear admiral, U.S. Navy, 756-487-8765.”

  Sun turned to Crow: “It’s time to talk to your president. You can establish a connection with that slate?”

  “Yes, but not from here. There is a separately secured network in my quarters. It’s tempest-hardened. That’s the only way I can set up a line to the President. It wouldn’t be good if anyone on the ship could listen in to our communications.”

  “Let me guess, you’re the only one who can operate that slate.”

  Again, a smile: “It’s standard issue for high-level diplomacy. Biometrically linked to me. Nobody else can start it up, and it’ll shut down after three minutes if it doesn’t sense my thumb. Oh, and it requires a live thumb. It can tell.”

  Cui looked at Fang-Castro, then at Crow, and sighed. She told the two special forces officers to escort the Americans back to their quarters. “Mr. Crow, Lieutenant Sun and I will confer, and then we will visit you, and perhaps speak to your president.”

  “I would hurry,” Crow said. “You’ve cut the data stream to Earth and that will be noticed. We will have questions on the way back, by now. If they don’t get answers, we might get a war even if you give the ship back to us—because one way or another, our president and military people will understand what has happened.”

  Cui nodded.

  When they were alone, Cui asked Sun: “So, are we at war, or not?”

  “Right now, we are Schrödinger’s cat,” she said. “We need to work on our talking points.”

  Fifteen minutes later, with Fang-Castro still confined to her quarters, Cui and Sun visited Crow in his. Cui instructed the bridge to reactivate the network in Crow’s room and the adjacent corridor.

  Crow could’ve done both, by himself, but wasn’t about to reveal that.

  Cui instructed Crow to initiate a link to the White House. Once he’d started the process running, she took the slate from him and walked out of the room. She got barely a meter away from the door when an orange alert came up on the screen: “Authorized network no longer available—suspending link initialization.”

  She stepped back into the room. The alert message was replaced by one stating that initialization had resumed. She stepped just outside the doorway and closed the door. The orange alert reappeared. The network was shielded and the slate locked to it, just as Crow had said. She stepped back into the room and returned the slate to him before the biometric authorization timed out.

  Crow tipped his head: “You see?”

  “I see.”

  In another minute, the slate finished initializing the downlink. Had they been close to Earth, Crow would have waited for a response from the White House server confirming the link. With more than an hour of light-speed delay, that was infeasible.

  Crow looked at Cui, who nodded, and Crow looked at the vid screen, with a still image of Santeros smiling from the Oval Office.

  “President Santeros. I am calling to inform you of some extraordinary events this morning. The Nixon has been seized by military members of the Chinese ship Celestial Odyssey. Admiral Fang-Castro has refused any cooperation with the Chinese and has indicated by her actions that she considers herself a prisoner of war. Her legal status, of course, would be up to you and to Congress, since she can’t unilaterally declare war. At the moment, however, she is refusing the Chinese any cooperation.”

  He told Santeros that the burn box had been activated. He told her that the Chinese wanted to examine the alien datastore in the Nixon’s computer memory, and that he’d informed them that he didn’t know the location, and that in any case, the files were fully encrypted and the only key to the encryption was on Earth, as the President knew.

  When he finished, he nodded at Cui, who said, “Madam President, this is neither an act of war, nor of piracy. However, what the Nixon has done poses an existential threat to the Chinese people, more serious than any atomic bomb. You have, essentially, declared war on us by seizing all the memory modules from the alien planetoid, when they were clearly intended for all humans. There are eight QSUs. We want two of them. You may have two of them. The other four would go to the other major geopolitical blocs. If this is agreed, we will promptly turn control of the ship back to Admiral Fang-Castro.”

  She nodded at Crow and said, “You may close the link.”

  Crow said, “It’ll be at least a couple of hours before we hear back—probably more than that, especially if they have to fight a war first. What would you like me to do in the meantime?”

  Cui looked at him soberly. “You might wish to think about ways to persuade her.”

  Sun: “When I was going to graduate school at UCLA . . .”

  Crow: “I would have guessed Berkeley . . .”

  Sun: “. . . there was a saying. ‘Better to ask forgiveness than permission.’ If you deliver the QSU units to us—only two of the eight, along with two readers—you will present her with a fait accompli, and she will have to make the best of it. We return control of the ship to you, with certain safeguards, and there will be no war, no controversy, no piracy, no problem.”

  “Only the admiral has the power to do that, and she won’t,” Crow said. “Perhaps I should give you a few more details on the switches.”

  “Please . . .”

  “You can’t disable the burn box. Try to force your way into it, you’ll trigger the devices. Remove the box from the strong room, they go off. Try to power them down without the r
elease code, they’ll go off. I don’t know who has the switches: only Admiral Fang-Castro knows how they were distributed. If Fang-Castro is sequestered and you attempt to torture her for the information, the first trigger-holder to find out will burn the box. Really, over some long period of time, and with more of that gas you used on us—another, separate act of war, by the way—you might get some of the switches, but I doubt that you’ll get all of them.”

  Sun looked at him, then said, “Shit.”

  Two hours later, one of the Chinese special forces officers escorted Fang-Castro to Crow’s quarters.

  “How’s it going?” Crow asked. Cui and Sun were not yet there.

  “I’m frantically bored,” she said. “They’ve turned off everything inside my quarters. I can’t even watch Feeling Up Frankie.”

  “So maybe there is an upside to this mess,” Crow said.

  “How did they get away with that gas, or whatever it was?” Fang-Castro asked.

  “I don’t want to think about that, because I might have to find a pistol and stick it in my ear,” Crow said. “My fault: I should have thought of it. It was some form of encapsulated LSD, I’m sure. It’s powerful stuff.”

  “Do we have any?”

  “I wish.”

  There was a ping at the door, and then Cui and Sun stepped in. Fang-Castro stood up, turned her back on them.

  Cui shook her head and asked Crow, “Anything?”

  “No, but it won’t be long.”

  Fang-Castro broke her silence after fifteen minutes. Addressing Cui, she asked, “Do I have permission to return to my quarters?”

  Cui shook her head: “No. You must hear what the President has to say.”

  Fang-Castro turned away again.

  Santeros showed up five minutes later. She was seated at her desk, the pale greens of Washingtonian spring visible through the windows of the Oval Office. It had been a long time since any of them had seen trees.