Saturn Run

by John Sandford

  “Then I’d ask you to relieve me of command. You can have somebody else take over for the rest of the mission.”

  The faintest of smiles played across Santeros’s lips. “That wouldn’t discomfit me in the least, but that’s not how this is going to play out. There are issues of international politics that are far more important than you, and as far as that goes, all of your crew members put together. I want neither the distraction nor the questions that might be raised by a last-minute change of command. I need a good face on this. You’re going to serve.”

  “Why should I?”

  Santeros shrugged. “Because you’re an officer in the navy. You guys always do what you’re told first and resign later. If you want to resign later, be my guest.”

  Fang-Castro’s shoulders slumped. Her hands gripped the arms of her chair. The knuckles were pale. She spoke softly. “You give me no choice. I’ve noticed that tendency in your administration. Anything else?” She didn’t say, “ma’am.”

  “Thank you, Admiral. Look at it this way, Naomi: you have a certain . . . mmm . . . grip on my balls. That’s a good thing, from your side. From my side, I’m used to it. There are more hands in my pants than you can believe. But, you know, play your part, and good things will happen for you. Play your part, and Crow will take care of the details.”

  —

  The Chinese were unwilling to risk even the slightest chance that the Nixon could somehow unload the information on the alien technology. Since they didn’t know how much memory the alien downloads would use, they were unwilling to let even the smallest objects leave the Nixon: a memory file could be made to look like almost anything, so they would not allow anything to leave the Nixon.

  How to do that? The Nixon was diseased.

  That was the report, a day after they achieved high orbit, when they’d already had visitors. Now the visitors were stuck, too.

  Major Barnes came down with something that looked like a virus . . . but not quite like a virus. He’d been cleared through the quarantine months earlier, after breathing the atmosphere in the alien primary, and even now, didn’t seem especially ill. Sore throat, pink blotchy spots over his back, legs, and arms.

  Then Cui came down with it.

  Fang-Castro made the announcement.

  “The CDC has a man on the way up. The blood samples taken by Doctors Manfred and Mo suggest a virus, but it doesn’t look like anything they’ve seen before. We’re afraid it could have come from the alien environment, so the CDC’s guy will be visiting us in a full environmental suit. Dr. Mo suggests that we really don’t have much to be worried about, the bug seems easy enough to kill in vitro.”

  Ship-wide groans.

  Sandy had been confined for a week after his performance on the bridge, but the confinement was obviously pointless—where was he going to run to?—and he hadn’t yet been convicted of anything, though he surely would be. And he wasn’t dangerous . . . and nine-tenths of the people on the ship thought he’d probably saved their lives.

  So they let him out.

  Fang-Castro told him, “Too many people in Washington know about this to let it go. You’re going to spend time in jail.”

  “Not too much,” he said, with his grin.

  “If I were you, I’d brace myself,” Fang-Castro said. “Among other things, Santeros is looking for a scapegoat.”

  Now, in Earth orbit, Sandy set up for an interview with Fiorella, announcing the onset of the plague.

  “I probably wouldn’t refer to it as the plague,” Fiorella said.

  “They want you to,” Sandy said.

  “Maybe. But I’m a journalist, not a lapdog,” she said. “Really.” She sounded slightly guilty. She’d had an extremely pragmatic talk with Santeros.

  “I just take the pictures,” Sandy said. “Really.”

  Clover cruised by. “One-point-two million in the Hump Pool. Not a single person has bet on tonight. Or last night or tomorrow night. So, I was thinking we ought to pull the trigger, but . . . you know, even though the whole concept of the Hump Pool is despicable, taking the money smacks of fraud. I’m getting mildly cold feet.”

  Sandy said, “If we pull the trigger, you could fund your own archaeological expedition. To anywhere.”

  Clover said, “My feet got warmer. Keep talking.”

  “I don’t really need the money, but I want it,” Fiorella said. “It’s me that the Hump Pool is about. The assumption that I could never resist Mr. Money and Big White Teeth. I will not mind sticking it to them and turning a profit on twisting the knife.”

  Sandy brought out the teeth: “Dinner and a movie? Tonight at my place?”

  “I’ll be there at seven o’clock,” Fiorella said. She threw her head back, released a well-simulated sexual groan, then straightened and said, “And I’m just warming up.”

  Clover rubbed his hands together. “I was hoping you’d talk me out of my spasm of righteousness. The Hump Pool was wrong. I’m defending the reputation of women everywhere by taking the cash.”

  “Absolutely,” Fiorella said.

  An hour later, she was live from the bridge:

  “While the crew, including myself, and the former crewmen of the Celestial Odyssey, will have to spend some time in a Level Four biocontainment facility, now being fabbed in the new Chinese Divine Wanderer, there’s not much doubt the viral visitor can be eradicated from our bodies. There remains the question of what will happen to the Nixon. Eradicating every last organic particle from this ship would be a vast task, not made easier by the fact that we’d have to do it in space. Preliminary tests have shown that this particle may not be killed by exposure to a vacuum. . . .”

  She went on for a while, but the thrust was clear: a solution would have to be found for eliminating the contamination of the Nixon. The world could not risk the introduction of a new alien organism . . . or any other organisms that hadn’t yet been found.

  Later that evening, after another performance, she said hoarsely, “Damn, my voice is shot.”

  “Yeah, well, I’m pretty sore from bouncing that cot up and down. I’m thinking the real thing is a lot less work.”

  “Probably, and neither of us will likely get an Oscar for our performance . . .”

  “Your moans were pretty convincing . . .”

  “. . . but you can’t fault the pay scale.”

  “Amen, sister.”

  Clover was taking high fives in the Commons. He had a spaghetti pot under his arm, stuffed with currency.

  —

  Fang-Castro glanced around her bare quarters.

  Saturday, December 1, 2068. She’d remember this date, the day she gave up the command of the Nixon.

  The Chinese had been prompt and efficient. They could, in fact, have launched and arrived a day earlier than projected. It was the personnel on the Nixon who’d held to the original schedule, transmitting every last bit of their work to Earth . . . in native English and math . . . through a Chinese relay.

  Not a lot of trust there. Not a lot of trust, anywhere.

  Three Americans and two Chinese had died in her ship, though Admiral Zhang was probably dead by the time he arrived. There were four bodies in cold storage, and one was still sailing, in a broken egg, toward the outer planets. The thought of Becca Johansson, on her lonely voyage, still made Fang-Castro tight in the throat.

  They’d also lost one cat on the trip: Mr. Snuffles had died of a heart attack three weeks out. John Clover had been devastated, but had said, “He never would have made it back on Earth, anyway. The gravity would kill him the first day. Better this way.”

  The living Americans—and the former crew members of the Celestial Odyssey, as well—would be going through meticulous body scans before they’d even be allowed in the Chinese facility, and then they’d be confined to the Level 4 biocontainment area until the docs were absolutely, one
hundred percent sure that they’d eliminated the last of the . . .

  Measles.

  A mild, attenuated, fast-developing form of measles genetically designed to produce the raw material for a measles vaccine, should that ever be needed; and though it was attenuated, it nevertheless produced the blotching pink rash of regular measles. The only place where the regular disease occasionally popped up was the wilds of Marin County, California. If a few hundred parents hadn’t resisted, it would have been eradicated there decades earlier. This outbreak had been brought up by the first visitor to the Nixon, a cheerful, politically reliable doc from the CDC.

  With both the Chinese and American propaganda machines denying that there was any real danger from the “alien” virus, at the same time they used various ignorance-bathed celebrities to spread fear and misinformation through the Internet, most of the world had become convinced that the Nixon was a death machine.

  A long-forgotten film from a century earlier, The Andromeda Strain, resurfaced on the Internet. Medical personnel—so they claimed to be—called and texted late-night talk shows, citing research that had shown how microorganisms could survive under the most extraordinary conditions. They reminded listeners how diseases on Earth had jumped between species, given the right set of chance mutations. Organisms that might normally infect an alien host might, and they emphasized the word “might,” be able to make the jump to human beings.

  Probably not. But maybe.

  Santeros said it most plainly, in a talk on public television:

  “Humans have encountered aliens. No one knows, for certain, what the Nixon might have brought back with it in the way of pathogens—germs. We are confident that we can eliminate any pathogens in the human body itself, but with the Nixon, that’s a much different situation.

  “We have consulted with the Chinese, European, Brazilian, African Union, and Indian governments. As much as it breaks my heart, the decision has been taken to destroy the Nixon in a way that will remove any doubt that rogue pathogens have been destroyed with it. . . .

  “The only things to be brought back from the ship are eight alien machines, which will also be thoroughly decontaminated, and from which we hope and expect to derive much information about their computer technologies. As an act of goodwill between the U.S. and its many foreign allies, the machines will be distributed among the major states represented on the UN’s Security Council. We hope, however, to develop a mutual research program.”

  But what to do with the Nixon?

  De-orbiting the ship was unthinkable. It was far too large to entirely burn up; something might survive and contaminate the world. Crash it into the moon? It’d have to be monitored as a hazardous waste site indefinitely.

  The only smart place to send the ship was to the ultimate incinerator. The sun. The Divine Wanderer, the Celestial Odyssey’s successor, could do the job; a ship that was designed to carry over a thousand tonnes of cargo wouldn’t have any problem pushing around the four-hundred-and-fifty-tonne Nixon. A little extra water reaction mass from some strap-on tanks, some newly fabricated attachment mounts, and the Martian transport became the world’s biggest and fastest tugboat.

  The operation took a week.

  On its second, and final, trip to the Nixon, the Divine Wanderer brought along service eggs, graphene cable, and sensor-laden tie-downs, and a full complement of riggers and jockeys. They’d only be pushing the poor Nixon at a few percent of a gee, but that was still several times more acceleration than the ship had been subject to before. A little extra rigging, just to make sure nothing broke loose. It was cheap insurance.

  At six o’clock in the morning, Beijing time, President Santeros and General Secretary Hong jointly issued the orders to proceed.

  The Divine Wanderer, grappled to the Nixon’s cold, dead VASIMR engines, began to push. Its nuclear thermal rockets thrummed at a comfortable one-third power for the next day, as the Divine Wanderer pushed the Nixon away from the earth and against its orbital motion about the sun. When it was done, twenty-seven kilometers per second of fresh delta-vee canceled out all but a few kilometers per second of residual orbital velocity about the sun.

  The Nixon’s new course was confirmed. The Divine Wanderer released its grapples, turned tail, and headed back to Earth. The Nixon continued on, in a tight elliptical track with a perihelion of less than half a million kilometers. It would never complete a full orbit; the sun’s radius was seven hundred thousand kilometers.

  In just over two months, the Nixon would hit the sun at over six hundred kilometers per second, at least those few refractory bits that hadn’t vaporized millions of kilometers out.

  —

  After six weeks of decontamination, the crew of the Nixon, and their Chinese guests, were released from biocontainment. The Americans were picked up, a few at a time, by Virgin-SpaceX shuttles, and returned to Earth.

  John Clover was among the first to hit dirt: and feel the oppressive pull of Earth’s gravity. He’d lost weight in his time in space and had worked out religiously. Still, gravity was a trial. On the other hand, he’d get used to it in a couple of months, and he’d have better than a half-million dollars, his share of the Hump Pool. Made him laugh to think about it.

  In New Orleans, he stepped from the government autolimo and checked out his house. It was different. The steps were freshly painted. For that matter, so was the whole fuckin’ house.

  Crow had told him that the government would maintain it, but this . . .

  “Aw, crap.” He palmed the front-door lock and the door opened. The hinges didn’t squeak. Crap-crap, he thought, if they’ve messed with my stuff . . .

  Someone had straightened up the living room. Straightened up? They’d done a thorough cleaning, practically a remake. All his carefully tabbed and dog-eared papers and magazines, half-read books, the stacks of old journals by his chairs, all the stuff that had taken up eighty percent of the floor, it was all gone.

  Assholes. It’ll take years to undo what some brain-dead “organizer” had done to his filing system, he thought. Hell, it’d probably take him years just to find where they’d put all his stuff, assuming they hadn’t thrown it out in some misguided fit of do-goodedness.

  He needed a joint, he decided, hoping they hadn’t thrown out his stash. He stepped on the loose floorboard to the left of the entryway to the living room. The floorboard flipped up and he reached for the rusty tackle box below it. He grunted as he pulled it up. Heavy. Inside there were fresh, wrapped kilo bricks. He peered at the label. They were from the government research farm in Kentucky.

  An envelope was taped to one of the bricks, with a letter and a card inside. The letter said he was an authorized owner of the dope under federal law; the card identified him as a federal research subject, exempting him from Louisiana’s antiquated prohibitions.

  Both were signed by the surgeon general.

  The card said:

  See what the nanny state can do for you? Welcome home, John. I’ll call you. I need some jambalaya.—C.

  Well, I will be blown, Clover thought, as he rolled a joint. He stepped outside to light it up: a calico cat sat on the neighbor’s fence, a thin, feral feline. The cat narrowed his eyes and meowed, just once. Food?

  “Back in a minute,” Clover said to the cat. He’d always had a weakness for calicoes. He meowed once, and went back inside to look for the cat crunchies.

  Good dope, even the possibility of a new cat.

  Wonder if everybody gets this kind of welcome?

  —

  No. They didn’t.

  Fiorella said good-bye to Sandy at the back of the shuttle. “This whole criminal thing is bullshit,” she said. “I’ll do everything I can. I think I can probably do a lot. Santeros owes me. We’ve already got a petition going, almost everybody in the crew signed it.”

  “Thank you. For everything,” Sandy said. “You gonna give
me a kiss good-bye?”

  “If I do, are you gonna try to squeeze my ass?”

  “Maybe. Okay, maybe not.”

  She gave him a peck on the cheek and said, “Everything will work out.”

  “I know it will. I’ll be seeing you around.”

  The FBI was waiting at the bottom of the stairs.

  Whatever else had been said and done, Santeros still needed a scapegoat.

  Sandy was arrested, placed in solitary confinement in Los Angeles, and the next day was flown to Washington, where he’d stand trial in federal court. Santeros had nixed a court-martial for the simple reason that nobody had actually taken the time to reactivate Sandy’s commission in the army.

  He had excellent attorneys. His father visited him every day and made it very clear that Santeros was going to get a half billion (or so) of adverse political advertising shoved down her throat at the next election cycle.

  The trial itself was quite short, since the charges were designed to be undeniable. Sandy didn’t bother to deny them, and pled nolo contendere. Most of the trial involved the pre-sentencing hearing, in which two dozen Nixon crew members defended Sandy’s actions as necessary, sane, and probably the salvation of the ship; and former military colleagues represented him as an unsung hero.

  Fiorella wasn’t allowed to cover the case, because of the obvious conflict of interest, but she’d been interviewed on the top-rated CBSNN show Sweet Emotion and, in her Ultra-Star way, had dampened half the hankies in America.

  The prosecutor, a civil servant but determined opponent of everything Santeros stood for, asked that Sandy be given forty years, as a way to embarrass her. The judge, a Santeros appointee, had been listening to the witnesses, too, and had a friendly conversation with an old college buddy currently working at the Justice Department; he cut the sentence as short as he possibly could.