Saturn Run

29.

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.