Saturn Run

39.

Launch plus a hundred and ninety-five days, eighty million kilometers from Saturn. It was February 7, 2068, back on Earth, but that didn’t mean as much to the crew as it used to. The Nixon had become their world. It was on its way back in to Saturn, had been for a week. Their velocity was up to a piddling twenty kilometers per second and would only get a bit higher; reaction mass was in short supply. They still had eighty million kilometers and six weeks to go before they’d get to Saturn.

Crow sat with his feet on his desk and tapped at his slate, looking at the numbers even though he already knew them all, and they wouldn’t change. Six weeks: and it wouldn’t be long after that when the competition showed up. Fang-Castro wanted to have some idea where they stood with the Chinese before that happened.

Crow had been working all of his contacts, both those with access to human intelligence and the techies who pulled things down out of the sky and up out of the buried fiber-optic cables that connected Chinese military installations.

He was met with very little resistance—one middle-level CIA bureaucrat had objected to what he called the “over-allocation of resources to this single project,” and a half hour later had taken a call from the director, in person, in which he learned that the director had taken a call from the President, in person, and the President had mentioned the bureaucrat’s name, and not in a kindly fashion. Did the bureaucrat have Arctic-quality survival gear? If not, he might start looking into some.

Resistance melted like ice cream on a hot sidewalk.

Even with good cooperation, Crow didn’t know much more now than he’d known when he started.

But he did know a few things.

One thing he knew for sure: there was one person on board who was as unhappy as he was: Admiral Naomi Fang-Castro. She had all his reasons and then some. He was responsible for ship security? Fang-Castro was responsible for the ship, period. He looked at the time, sighed, and walked down to her private office, tapped the comm button by her door. A moment later her voice said, “Come.”

He nodded and said, “Admiral,” and took his chair; Fang-Castro poured a cup of tea and pushed it toward him. It had become a ritual they both enjoyed, when enjoyment was on the table.

“Anything?”

Crow shook his head. “No. It’s driving me crazier than it is you. I truly believe we have a spy on board, who has some method of communicating with the Chinese. Probably the Chinese.”

“All those analysts at the NSA, there are supposedly tens of thousands of them, they can’t find anything?” Fang-Castro asked.

“That’s not the problem,” Crow said. “There are no countermeasures that can keep me from collecting information, but there are countermeasures. Ninety-nine percent of the information we’re taking in is actually noise, or active disinformation. The opposition knows they can’t prevent us from tapping in, not entirely and not for very long, so they try to bury us. I can see the forest for the trees, but almost all of the trees are fakes. They are there to lead us down the wrong path. Admiral, everyone lies. All the time.”

Fang-Castro: “You’re saying there’s no way to ferret the truth out of the noise?”

“I’m not quite saying that. We have tools. Contextual analyses, time-stamp discontinuities, tail-thread stubs, meta-patterns, and a lot more that the supercomputers can throw at the problem. Most of the time they’ll tell me what’s a bogus plant and point me toward the one true oak. But this time we’re playing for the highest stakes in at least half a century, maybe ever, and everyone’s pulling out their A Game. The disinformation is fierce and sophisticated.

“My best thread says the Chinese are behind the sabotage. That might be true. It might also be a plant by one of the other geopolitical unions, who wouldn’t mind seeing the relationship between the two superpowers get chillier, especially if one of them, or both, is about to acquire starship tech. It could even be disinformation by a faction within the Chinese government. Santeros doesn’t have a monopoly on hawks.”

“What about sabotage on the Chinese ship?”

“Don’t know. Anyone with a decent-sized infrared telescope could figure out that we had a problem when our heat signature and trajectory changed. Post-launch-boost phase, the Celestial Odyssey has mostly been in free fall. If they’re having propulsion system problems, they wouldn’t be anywhere as obvious. Maybe that midcourse burn of theirs was a glitch, not a plan. We just don’t know.”

“So that’s it?”

Crow hesitated, and hesitated some more, and his eyes went down then cut toward her, and finally he said, “On New Year’s, just for that night, you told me I could call you Naomi. I need to call you Naomi again. Just for a few minutes—this is way off base, but…”

“You’re not going to make a pass at me?” She was amused.

So was he. “If your preferences were different… you’re probably my type. But no. I’m not gonna make a pass.”

“So call me Naomi. For a few minutes.”

“Thank you, Naomi. I’ve been involved with discussions between the President and her advisers. They believe it’s not necessary to bother you with them. So I’m putting my ass in your hands, so to speak.”

The intelligence nets on Earth, along with the agencies’ science people, Crow told Fang-Castro, had determined that the Chinese ship’s midcourse burn had not only advanced their arrival time by weeks, it had seriously hampered their plans for establishing orbit around Saturn. They would go into the Saturnian system five kilometers per second hotter than they’d planned. The intelligence coming in suggested that the burn had been devised under direct pressure from the general secretary.

“The problem is, Naomi, that the Celestial Odyssey may not have the reaction mass to kill enough velocity to achieve a close orbit around Saturn. It’s possible that they’ve been able to lighten their ship enough to make some kind of orbit, but that is not likely,” Crow said.

“Why wouldn’t our people tell me that?” Fang-Castro asked.

“Because it’s equally unlikely that the Chinese decided to go ahead and commit suicide. They’re up to something and the intelligence guys think that smells like trouble for us. The reason they’re not talking to you is, they want to decide how we react. They don’t want you getting out the law books and deciding on what to do about a distress call, they want to decide. They’ve worked up a bunch of different scenarios, including saying, ‘Fuck it, let ’em die.’ Depending on what we find at the alien site, of course.”

“I wouldn’t do that—let them die,” Fang-Castro said.

“But what do you do if Santeros, backed by the secretary of the navy, calls Francisco and tells him that you’ve been relieved of command, and he’s the new commander—and ‘fuck it, let ’em die’?”

“Francisco wouldn’t do it,” she said. “That’s why he’s my Number Two.”

“But what about your Number Three, Naomi? And so on.”

They sat and stared at each other for a moment.

Then she asked, “What if the Chinese planned for the midcourse option in advance, and they’ve got a leaner, meaner ship that can make it to Saturn, establish orbit, and make it back?”

“That’s the best case. That’s what we’re hoping for. But honestly? Nobody thinks it’s likely. Burning through the extra reaction mass when they left Earth orbit would have bought them a lot more time than the midcourse burn. Everybody now agrees that was a Plan B. Another possibility is that they’re going to orbit much farther out, well beyond Saturn’s rings. That’ll reduce the delta-vee requirements for establishing orbit, but it would leave them with a several-day trip time between their ship and the alien whatsit. That’s more than inconvenient, it’s unpredictably dangerous. They don’t have any more ideas than we do what or who is there, or what the environment is like around the alien station.”

“Somebody suggested to me that they might have some kind of small return ship attached to the Celestial Odyssey.”

“We’ve discarded that idea: more intelligence,” Crow said. “They’ve got a couple of buses, like ours, to get them back and forth from the alien site, but that’s it. No way the buses could get the Chinese crew back to Earth. They’re also talking about other possibilities—that they’ll loop around Saturn, use what delta-vee they’ve got to get into a closed orbit around the sun, that might pull them close enough to Earth for a rescue mission.”

“I was twiddling with my slate, with John Harbinson, and… mmm… that would take them years,” Fang-Castro said. Harbinson was the onboard nav guru. “Would they have enough consumables to do that?”

“Unlikely. The thing is, we can’t discard the possibility that they are really down to Plan C. In other words, acts of desperation. In that case, there’s a fair possibility that whatever they’ve got planned won’t work. Best-case scenario from Santeros’s point of view is that their ship gets destroyed. Worst case is that it survives, with the crew alive, but it can’t establish close Saturn orbit. In that case, they start screaming for help.”

“And we could help them, once we take on water for reaction mass.”

“Let me say this in Chairwoman White’s voice: ‘We know the crew on board the Celestial Odyssey is mostly military, and real military, guys who’ve been fighting Islamorads in the Western Provinces for years. We’re gonna give those guys access to the most advanced ship the U.S. has ever built? Plus, whatever we find in Saturn’s rings? Is that even under consideration?’”

Fang-Castro smiled at Crow’s mimicry, and asked, “Crow, is Crow really your name?”

“No.”

“You might as well tell me what it is—I can always look for your smiling face in the academy yearbooks.”

“It’s Crowell. David Crowell,” Crow said. “Nobody’s called me either name for years. Even my wife called me Crow.”

“I guess it goes with the job,” Fang-Castro said.

“Yeah. Anyway, White is furious at the very thought of allowing Chinese troops on the Nixon. That’s what she calls them—Chinese troops.”

“International law says I would have to help if the Chinese ask, and I can do it. If I don’t, I could be charged with murder. Rightfully so, in my opinion.”

“And that, Naomi, is why they’re not talking to you. They want to decide.”

“I’ll tell you what, David. It appears to me that we’re looking at the first real interplanetary bureaucratic clusterfuck.”

“Yes. And I’ll tell you what, Naomi: if push comes to shove, and I do mean shove—I’ll back you up. All the way. I will.”