Saturn Run

48.

President Santeros: “The goddamn Chinese ought to learn how to speak proper English. I’ve got this Mandarin translator telling me what the chairman is saying, and I have no way of knowing if he’s getting the implications right, and the goddamn Chinese don’t speak in anything but implications.”

Out of sight, behind her, the chairwoman of the Joint Chiefs stuck the knuckles of her fist into her mouth, to keep from laughing. Santeros, who apparently had a monitoring screen in front of her, snapped, “I saw that, White…”

Crow, sitting in the conference room next to Fang-Castro, muttered, “Just tell us what they fuckin’ implied.”

Fang-Castro: “Shhh,” although nothing was outgoing at the moment. It was wall-to-wall Santeros, with a few advisers, from the Oval Office.

“Anyway,” Santeros said, “the Chinese are screaming at us and say that they will gather a coalition of other geopolitical entities to penalize us for this blatant violation of space law. They insist that their crew be given access to the alien primary, and say that they will begin immediate investigations into other alien vessels in the fleet around the primary. However, there’s a goddamn implication that they won’t act until they can get agreement from the other geopolitical entities, and that will take about, mmm, two days…”

Crow said, “All right. We won.”

“…But you better be prepared to get the hell out of the neighborhood. All that stuff about leaving trade points was fine, and helping with repairs, that’s good, but sooner or later, they’re going to find out about the memory modules, and the fact that we’re sneaking away like a thief in the night. Then, the shit’s gonna hit the fan. We gotta hope you can get out of range before that happens.”

Fang-Castro called Zhang. The Chinese comm said, “Our commander has been promoted. You may call him Admiral Zhang now. We will put you through.”

Crow, standing to one side, whispered, “They didn’t want him negotiating with a superior officer. They jumped him two ranks. If he’s a Chinese admiral, he technically outranks you now. He’ll have two stars.”

“I’m sure I can handle it,” Fang-Castro said. She smiled when Zhang came up on the screen. “Sir. First, congratulations on your promotion. Our intelligence people have kept me briefed on your personal background, and I have to say, I’m honored to be dealing with you.”

Zhang’s face crinkled with something that might have been embarrassment. “Thank you. It appears that my superiors will order me to make a landing under… any circumstances… when they have finished Earth-side negotiations with other nations that are as outraged by American actions as we are.”

“We understand,” Fang-Castro said, to a minute nod from Zhang.

And there it was: the deal was done. “We will be vacating the primary as soon as possible. In the meantime, is there anything we can do to help with your repairs?”

“Possibly. We understand from some of our astronauts that when the Nixon was a space station, you had on board three Mitsubishi Force 5 printers. If you still have these on board, we would wish to borrow one.”

“Stand by, Admiral, let me talk to our head of maintenance.” She lifted her slate, tapped it, got Martinez on-screen: “Joe, do we still use Mitsubishi Force 5 printers?”

“Yes, ma’am, we’ve got three of them.”

“Would it be possible to move one to the Celestial Odyssey in a timely way?”

“Uh, we’d have to figure out a way to isolate it, package it. We can’t just shove it out in space, you’d have some differential contraction among parts that wouldn’t be good. Probably put it on a bus… I’d have to make some measurements. Yeah, I could do it, given twenty-four hours. Be a lot quicker if you’d let them come over with their tug if it’s got a pressurized cargo hold. We could just push it in. We could do all that in a couple hours.”

“Stand by on that—I’ll let you know.”

“Do they need carbon fiber? We’ve got a ton of it we’ll never use. Actually several tons, we never took it out. They might be able to use it to repair their tanks, and not have to hitchhike back with us.”

“Good thought. I’ll ask.” Fang-Castro went back to the link to Zhang. “Admiral, uh, I don’t want to embarrass anyone, but how many people fit in one of your tugs?”

“Up to fifteen… why?”

“We’re still a little nervous about your military capability. My maintenance chief says that we do have that printer, as well as several tons of carbon fiber, and we could allot you some of that if you need it. The fastest and easiest way to get that to you would be for you to send a tug over. Our shuttles aren’t pressurized and the maintenance man is worried about differential contraction under temperature extremes. But if you sent a tug over with fifteen crew aboard… we would be inclined not to open the air lock.”

Zhang smiled. “You Americans are too paranoid. We will send the tug with the pilot and a copilot. Tell us when to come. And thank you. I will ask about the carbon fiber.”

When they finished talking, after more pleasantries, Crow said, “We need to get that video off to Earth right now. If this is a ploy…”

Fang-Castro said, “You must be one of those Americans who’s too paranoid.”

Crow: “The I/O’s got what, twenty-eight hours?”

“That’s what Wurly tells us… if nothing breaks. I just wish we had more bandwidth to Earth. We’re archiving most of it.”

Greenberg came up: “Ma’am, we’re ready to go. Everything looks nominal with the engines.”

The printer delivery went without incident, and the Chinese pilot seemed genuinely grateful, joking with Martinez’s men as they moved the massive piece of machinery into the Chinese tug, along with two tons of raw carbon-fiber stock.

Twenty-eight hours later, John Clover was interrogating the jukebox as the I/O stream was coming to its scheduled end. Direct vocal interrogation of the jukebox had slowed since the I/O link went up, simply because so much more critical information could be passed over the link.

The vocal material had, as a result, gone to what nine-tenths of the Nixon’s crew dismissed as “anthropological.” Clover persisted, right to the end.

“Wurly, you said you can provide us with operational logs for the station, correct?”

“Yes, for most of them. No, for a few. I cannot provide detailed security logs, only summary reports.”

“Why is that? Can I talk to the security system?”

“Security data can include the detailed activities of visitors to the depot. In the case of sanctions, where that information needs to be promulgated to the rest of the depot network, it must include species-specific information that exceeds the normal privacy protocols. Consequently, access to the detailed logs is not allowed. That information is not accessible to external systems.”

“Then the security system contains explicit details about the species visiting the depot?”

“No, even the internal-to-security database contains the bare minimum of identifying information, only enough to recognize a species if it shows up again and to allow other depots to impose mandated sanctions against that species. Still, it is against depot rules to access that data, and attempts to do so will be met with penalties.”

“What is in the summary reports, and are we allowed to see them?”

“The summary reports contain security-related status information about the station. For example, the approach of your ship. The details are completely scrubbed from the summary. No one could identify your species or its origin from the summary information. You are allowed access to any information I have. None of my data is restricted.”

Sandy had stuck a camera to a wall to record Clover’s interrogation attempt, and had then stretched out on the floor in an attempt to nap: he couldn’t do that in an upright position, nor had he trained himself to do it simply by floating in a zero-gee state. Clover spoke to him: “Well, the jukebox spins an airtight yarn. There’s no point in trying to get around its own security, because it doesn’t know anything it won’t tell us voluntarily. Plus, I’ll bet you anything that trying to circumvent its protocols breaks the rules.”

Sandy asked, “Wurly, does trying to circumvent your protocols break the rules?”

The answer-bot spoke up. “That is correct. As long as no harm is done to my systems, though, the sanctions are small because the effort cannot gain anything. There is just enough of penalty to discourage species from trying.”

Clover asked, “Have there been any sanctions applied during this depot’s operation?”

“Yes, thirteen times, all for minor breaches of protocol. Would you like the summary reports?”

“Yes. Also, are there summary reports that list arrivals and departures that don’t result in sanctions? If so, I would like those also, and time-stamped.”

Sandy keyed a private channel to Clover. “What are you up to? Are you going to get us in trouble?”

Clover shook his head. “Nope, I’ve got an idea, and I was just making sure it’s completely legal.” He turned his attention back to the answer-bot. “Wurly, I’d like to get the environmental logs for this room and any other habitable portions of the depot. Not the minute-by-minute logs, just anytime there’s a significant adjustment to the environmental conditions—lighting, temperature, atmosphere—and I’d like that time-stamped. Is there a problem with that?”

“That is a legitimate request.” The console’s colors mirrored a warm sunset. “I’ve extracted the data you requested and directed it to the uplink your technician set up. It will increase the time of the I/O flow by .013 seconds.”

Clover keyed his comm back to Sandy: “You see that?” He chortled. “We may not know exactly who visited or where they came from, but we know when, and if they behaved, and the environmental data will tell us a hell of a lot about their biology. I just scored major demographic data on the populations of alien species in our neck of the galaxy.”

“Good job,” Sandy said. He yawned. The I/O link went down and Wurly said, “Data transfer through the I/O link is now complete.”

“Thank you,” Clover said. “Wurly, I have—”

Fang-Castro crashed the party. “For all members of the contact crew, the I/O record is now complete, or so we have been told. Return to the Nixon immediately, or make arrangements to hitchhike back home with the Chinese.”

“That’s us,” Sandy said on the private link. On the public link, he said, “Yes, ma’am. It’ll take a minute to pack up my cameras.”

Clover asked, “Wurly, do you have any final message for the people of Earth?’

“Yes.”

“What is it?”

“Hello, people of Earth.”

Sandy: “I think that’s a glitch. It’s the first glitch we’ve had from him.” He patted the jukebox on its carapace. “Thanks, pal.”

A tech came out of the room where the I/O harness was attached.

He said, “Let’s haul butt.”

Thirty-seven hours after Fang-Castro first spoke to Zhang, she called back: “We are starting our main engines. We thank you for your courtesy in waiting for our departure.”

Zhang nodded. “May you have the best of luck in your return. We hope to see you there someday.”

“Someday,” Fang-Castro said.

Zhang winked out.

The Nixon left Saturn on Sunday, April 8, 2068, but it wasn’t a day of rest. As soon as Fang-Castro issued the burn order, the VASIMR engines set about pushing the Nixon out of the Saturnian system.

The exit trajectory was similar to the one that had taken them away from Earth more than eight months before—a long, slow spiral outward while the VASIMRs piled on enough thrust to finally break the ship free of Saturn’s grip. Unlike that launch, this was no tentative departure, no slow and careful ramping up of the reactors and the engines. In less than two hours, Engineering had the engines sucking down every bit of power Reactor 1 was capable of generating.

The engine ignition that signaled their departure from Earth had been a novel experience and symbolically profound for everyone on board, unimpressive as it was to the senses. Eight months later, it was another story. Firings were now routine; in truth, most of the crew had had their fill of engine starts and stops. Of space travel, really. They just wanted to get home.

As the Nixon gradually put distance between itself and the alien depot in the Maxwell Gap, it pushed out of the ring plane as it expanded and inclined its orbit. An hour of thrust had it a thousand kilometers from the depot and the Chinese. Halfway through its first orbit, as the Nixon threaded its way back through a gap in the ring plane, they were far enough from the alien constellation that it was invisible to the naked eye.

By the following morning, the Nixon had completed three outward spirals on its winding path to free flight. It was a comforting fifteen thousand kilometers farther out, in an orbit that was inclined four degrees to the ring plane. Another day’s worth of thrust doubled that. Saturn was still an overwhelmingly impressive presence in their sky, but it was dwindling. It remained paramount for the engineering and navigation teams that had to calculate and recalculate the trajectories that would let them safely thread the gaps in Saturn’s rings on each half orbit’s ring plane crossing, but even their vital job was becoming routine. By the end of Day Three, they’d be safely beyond the outer limits of the A Ring, where the ring plane was mostly empty space.

Just as when it had left Earth, the Nixon’s velocity dwindled as their orbit expanded. That peculiar logic of orbital mechanics by now felt normal to the Nixon’s crew. That trade-off would continue as they spiraled away from the ringed giant, but nine days of this would see them entirely free of Saturn’s pull.