Saturn Run

52.

A week and a half after the Nixon departed the Maxwell Gap and the alien depot, the Celestial Odyssey followed. It was a very different kind of departure. The Nixon’s exit had been excruciatingly slow, tiptoeing away from the debacle of humanity’s first contact with an alien intelligence. It had only managed to fully escape Saturn’s pull a day earlier.

In contrast, the Chinese left with a massive push. Ten blue-white plasma jets poured from the reactors at full thrust. In a few hours, they generated as much boost as the Nixon managed in three days. The Chinese gamble was a race between the tortoise and the hare, turned on its head. In the long run the Nixon could outpace the Celestial Odyssey tenfold. The short run was a different matter.

Lieutenant Sun’s models had confirmed Zhang’s instincts. The Nixon was a million kilometers from Saturn, far from the Celestial Odyssey, but it was only moving away at nine kilometers per second. That velocity would steadily increase, day by day, but the Nixon would be gaining only a few kilometers per second each day.

The Celestial Odyssey was traveling twice as fast and it would pick up even more velocity with its course correction burn. It’d lose speed relative to the Nixon as it coasted in free fall, but the Chinese ship would put as much distance between itself and Saturn in a day as the Nixon had in eleven. By then the Nixon would’ve moved on, ever-accelerating, but the Celestial Odyssey still had the sprint advantage.

With some midcourse corrections, as soon as they got an exact fix on the Americans’ intended flight path, the Chinese ship could catch up with them in a little over a day and a half. They’d both be about two million kilometers from Saturn and their velocities would match. A rendezvous was achievable, a rescue possible.

The scopes on the Nixon easily picked up the Chinese exit burn. The ten plasma exhausts were impressively bright even from a million kilometers.

Fang-Castro had been eating breakfast in her quarters with Martinez, talking about the condition of the ship and the testing of the alien readers, when Francisco called from the bridge. She tried not to jog to the command station, the better to maintain her dignity.

“Not another antimatter depot?” she blurted.

“No, the flare’s continuing and we’re not seeing any gamma rays. The Chinese are leaving. It’s the only thing it can be.”

She watched for a while, then said, “Department head meeting in half an hour. Comm, let everybody know.”

“Yes, ma’am.”

Fang-Castro went back to her fake scrambled eggs and real oatmeal.

The duration of the burn was a surprise. “Admiral, they’re not heading back to Earth as fast as I would’ve expected,” said Harbinson, from Navigation, at the meeting. “Unless they’re planning a big burn later, which wouldn’t be a very efficient use of their reaction mass, it’ll take them two and a half years to get home.”

“They took a lot of external tank damage during the aerobraking,” Martinez said. “Maybe this is all they’ve got. They escaped retrograde, like we did, the fastest way to drop down to Earth’s orbit. Or maybe the depot’s security AI ordered them to go, and they’re simply hightailing before something bad happens.”

“All speculation. We’ll have a better idea after they do their course correction burn,” said Fang-Castro. “Nonetheless, I’m happy to see the last of them. We’re fortunate we beat them to the depot and that our bluff worked. The shoe could’ve been on the other foot.” She turned to the President’s liaison. “Mr. Crow, do you have anything to add?”

Crow nodded. “I hope you’re right… about seeing the last of them. We have some intelligence that has suggested that Beijing is looking into various rescue plans. We’ve also heard that Beijing has told Xinhua to reserve a block of vid time for a special presentation”—he looked at the time code in the corner of the room’s vid screen—“about forty-five minutes ago. We’ll see it in another thirty, if it’s relevant. We have to consider the possibility that they’re not headed for Earth—that they’re coming after us.”

Fang-Castro looked at him for a moment, then said, “Oh… no.”

Oh, yes.

As soon as the Chinese burn began, the information ministry released the pretaped interviews with Zhang, in Chinese only, and Cui, in Chinese and English. Her children were seen on swing sets at a Chinese elementary school, with their handsome father, waiting for Mom to get home… if only the Americans would help.

The Nixon’s leadership was still sitting in the conference room, waiting, more than anything, when the first reaction arrived, Santeros herself, from the Oval Office:

“The goddamned Chinese are asking for a rescue. They say the Celestial Odyssey has calculated a trajectory that will pair up with you in a day or so….” She called off-screen, “Is that right? A day or so? A day and a half?”

She turned back to face Fang-Castro and the others. “A day and a half. They issued the goddamnedest propaganda vid you ever saw, the Odyssey’s first officer, cute as a button, hoping we’ll help, pictures of her kids at their school, waiting for Mom. She speaks English… the vid’s gone viral, it’s on a half-billion phones in India alone, probably a hundred million here…. We’re gonna cut it in at the end of this briefing so you can see it yourself. We got all the big brains working on a reaction, but I’m telling you, there’s no way we can say no. Not with those kids on the swing set. I suspect they’re about to produce a vid of her breast-feeding the little fuckin’ crotchfruit.

“So, you need to start thinking about how to contain the Chinese, because they’re coming for you. What’s gonna happen then, we don’t know, but we’re working on scenarios. You better start working on some of your own, you know the ship better than we do.” She looked to the side again, this time asked, “What? What? Oh, yeah.” She turned back to the camera. “Some of our guys think that they’re, well, they’re gonna try to take the Nixon. Take the alien tech. Can’t let that happen. That’s the first priority: they cannot have the tech. Let us know what you’re thinking…. Here comes the vid.”

The rest of the day was taken in video-conferencing, with the tiresome round-trip time in the discussions.

Toward the end of the day shift, Ferris Langers pinged Fang-Castro; a ping with an urgent tag. She was in the bathroom. Fang-Castro had a number of informal rules, which, though informal, were quite clear to her staff. One was that if a ping was labeled urgent, it goddamned well better be urgent. The goddamned was not articulated but was well understood.

She touched her slate, audio only. “What is it, Lieutenant?”

“Ma’am, I’ve been running the numbers of the Chinese ship. The solutions don’t make any sense for a return to Earth. I guess I’m confirming what everybody’s saying. They’re coming after us.”

“Would you care to elaborate on that?” A pro forma request. She’d known what the Chinese were doing since the moment Crow suggested it, even before the call from Santeros.

“The Odyssey just completed their inclination and course correction burns. When I figured up their new trajectory, it was still directed at the inner solar system, but it came close to ours. I ran the timeline forward, and it wasn’t just close. In a little more than a day, they’re going to be at about the same place in space that we will, with a similar velocity vector.”

She commed Crow. “Mr. Crow, the Chinese have corrected course, and there’s no longer a question. I need you in the conference room, fifteen minutes. Bring all your ideas.”

“Yes, ma’am.”

She closed the link. After issuing several other peremptory come-hithers, she poured a cup of tea, cradled it in her hands, and thought very hard about just how much trouble they might be in.

When Fang-Castro arrived at the conference room twenty-two minutes later, she was gratified to see that everyone she had summoned was already seated. Crow, looking pensive; Martinez, almost sleepy, which meant he was thinking hard; Major Barnes, freshly out of medical isolation, intent; Fiorella, engaged; Lieutenant Langers; and Greenberg, the chief engineer. All swiveled in their chairs and looked at her as she entered the room. Darlington didn’t; he was busy checking the settings on the recording equipment. Langers kept glancing down at his slate, where orbital models were running.

“Mr. Darlington, you’re ready?” Fang-Castro asked.

“Yes, ma’am. We’re on the air, straight back to the Oval Office.”

“Then let’s proceed. Lieutenant Langers has confirmed that the Chinese are coming after us.” She nodded toward the slightly nervous navigator. “Mr. Langers? You have the floor.”

The soft-spoken officer kept it short and concise. His summary, accompanied by a few plots brought up on the conference room vids, barely took longer than his original phone call to Fang-Castro.

Greenberg was incredulous. “We’re not helpless! We have power and plenty of delta-vee to spare. If we thrust at ninety degrees to our current trajectory, it would add, oh, a week, maybe, to the trip back. Then our course’d be well clear of the Chinese.”

Fang-Castro looked at the navigator, who was tapping away at his slate. He shook his head. “That won’t do the trick. We’d be a hundred thousand kilometers off to one side when the Celestial Odyssey passed us, on their current trajectory. The thing is, they’ll pick up on a course shift pretty quickly, and once they do, they can adjust their trajectory accordingly. They’ve got over a million kilometers to cover before they reach us. If they can manage a lateral burn of a kilometer or so per second, they can track us. Seems likely.”

Fang-Castro thought about that. “And, without the additional forward thrust from our engines, they’d catch us even sooner.”

Langers nodded. “By an hour or two.”

“There’s also the question of how the Chinese would react to an attempt to elude them and how Earth would react,” Crow said. “If we successfully stay away from them, they die.”

“So we’re going to have visitors,” Fang-Castro said. “We need to prepare the ship for them. I don’t mean baking cupcakes. We can’t allow them to capture the ship, take it away from us. I need ideas on how to secure the ship and the alien tech from possibly aggressive moves.”

Fiorella asked, “What if they’re on a suicide run? What if their plan is simply to take us out? If they do that, nobody gets the tech, and everything goes back to the status quo. From their point of view, that might not be an undesirable outcome.”

Martinez, now looking so sleepy that his eyes were almost closed, said, “Then we’re fucked. Excuse the language. I’ve thought about that, about what we could do about that, and my answer is, ‘Not much.’ Depending on what they’ve still got aboard, there’s lots of ways they could kill us. So I go back to a variation of John Clover’s fundamental position on the aliens…. Since there’s nothing we can do about it, if they intend to blow us up, we might as well plan on the basis that they won’t.”

Fang-Castro nodded, but said, “Mr. Crow, Major Barnes, Captain Darlington—I want you on military status, now, Sandy—and Mr. Martinez, I want you to brainstorm that whole proposition: Is it really true that we couldn’t do anything? If they don’t blow us up, what can we do to secure the ship from a takeover? We need procedures for taking the Chinese on board, without jeopardizing our own position. I want complete recommendations in four hours: that will allow the ship warfare experts on Earth to view this vid, confer, generate their own recommendations, and get them back to us. Four hours, people.”

Barnes held up a hand, and Fang-Castro nodded to him: “Major Barnes.”

“Ma’am, we need to do more than plan for ship security. We also need to plan for what we’d do if security fails and the Chinese manage to take over the ship. That might be a small possibility, but we have to consider it.”

Crow interjected: “You’re right.” And to Fang-Castro: “He’s right.”

“I’m sure he is,” Fang-Castro said. Back to Barnes: “Do you have any practical suggestions for, um, a post-takeover scenario?”

“Yes. I’d suggest that we set up some kind of kill switch that would allow us to destroy the alien tech if we needed to. Joe tells me we’re shipping everything that came over the I/O link back to Earth as quickly as we can, but it’s not fast enough. I suggest we take down all other high-speed commo links with Earth, and use them to speed up the I/O, to capture as much of that as we can before the Chinese arrive. And maybe even refuse to allow the Chinese aboard for as long as possible so we can keep sending it.”

LaFarge, the comm officer, said, “That would double our I/O rate, but we still wouldn’t manage to get a significant fraction of it back. We might get ten percent of it, instead of eight.”

“Yeah, but who knows what might be in the additional two percent?” Martinez said. “Be worth doing, in my estimation.”

“Then we’ll do it,” Fang-Castro said. “Major Barnes—expand on the kill switch. I don’t quite grasp where you’re going with that.”

Barnes nodded. “If the Chinese managed to take the ship, they could probably figure out a way to get a package or several packages, containing a reader and a memory module, back to Earth, no matter what happened to our ships. Put them on a simple rocket, launch it in the proper orbit. Maybe it doesn’t arrive for ten years, but so what? They’d still get it a hundred and thirty years before we did.”

“Maybe we ought to consider that,” Crow said. “We’ve got eight copies—”

Martinez said, “We don’t have time. We’d have to fab a rocket, work out the orbits… they’re going to be here in less than a day. If I had a couple of weeks, maybe. But this wouldn’t be a simple project.”

Barnes said, “To finish my thought… if we can’t launch our own rocket—and even if we did, I suspect the Chinese would see it, and could probably intercept it, either here or at the earth, and either capture or destroy it—then we should protect the memory capsules and the readers from a takeover. We should fab a box, a safe, out of materials on hand, load it with magnesium from our Mayday flares, and build in a coded trigger. Then, we give triggers to Admiral Fang-Castro and a couple other people. If the Chinese take the ship, we tell them what we’ve done, and tell them if they interfere with the box, we’ll blow it. We’ll already have a tech edge on them, from the I/O material. If we do this, it’ll at least give the top people on Earth a chance to work out a compromise.”

Fang-Castro scratched her nose, then said, “Mr. Crow.”

Crow smiled. “Major Barnes has nailed it. This would give us an ultimate fallback.”

Barnes: “Keep in mind, we wouldn’t even have to use the box if we decide ten hours from now that we don’t need it. But if we decide a day from now that we desperately need one, but didn’t have it, it might be too late to fab one. We could fab it now and decide later if we need it.”

Fang-Castro looked at Martinez and said, “Build it.”

“Yes, ma’am. Though…”

“What?”

“Ah, I just hate the thought of blowing all that tech. We’ve got that science stuff on the I/O, but building the tech from first principles is gonna be a nightmare. It’s like this: suppose I went back to the 1700s and cornered Ben Franklin and handed him the plans for a laser, and asked him how quickly he could whip one up for me. Even if he fully understood the concepts, he simply wouldn’t have the tools. He wouldn’t even have the tools to make the tools. Hell, he’d probably electrocute himself trying—he just got lucky with that kite and lightning stunt. That’s where we’re at. We blow that tech… well, we might get some of it in less than a hundred and fifty years, but we won’t get all of it. I bet we wouldn’t even get most of it.”

Crow said, “Joe, it’s not really about what mankind would lose: it’s about the competition between us and the Chinese.”

Martinez nodded. “I know that. But I don’t want mankind to lose it. I don’t want to lose it. I won’t be alive in a hundred and fifty years. I want to see what’s in the alien package. Like, now. Before I die.”

Fiorella and Sandy put together a quick vid of Fang-Castro graciously agreeing that the Americans would do everything possible to rescue the Chinese. Fiorella’s carefully crafted commentary left no doubt that American science, technology, and humanitarianism—the Americans were risking their lives—were key to rescuing the cruder Chinese mission, to allow Cui to get back with her handsome husband and pretty children. She didn’t say that, but everybody watching the vid understood it.

“I think you just made Ultra,” Sandy told her, when the vid had been dispatched to Earth. “Santeros will owe you big-time, and as big a bitch as she can be, nobody ever claimed that she didn’t take care of her own.”

“I’m not one of her own,” Fiorella protested.

“Not exactly, but she’ll feel the debt. Not a bad place to be,” Sandy said.

Fiorella thought about that, then changed the subject. “You’re done with your meds now, right?”

“Yup.”

“How are you feeling?”

“Still hurts, but I’m functional. What happens is… Do you want to hear this?”

“Yes.”

“What happens is, your brain gets stuck in a feedback loop. Why did this happen? Is there something wrong with me that it keeps happening—first in the Tri-Border, and now here? What could I have done? What could I have said to her that I didn’t? You get these flashbacks and every time you flash back, the loop intensifies. The meds break the loop and smooth out the thought processes, and eventually time starts to erode the power of the flashbacks. Somewhat, anyway. Still get them, but less frequently, and with less force. So. That’s where I’m at.”

“I asked because… Fang-Castro says you’re back on military status. Which means, if there were a conflict with the Chinese…”

“You’re worried that I’m fragile.”

“I worry about you.”

“I’m good. And sad. Both at once. But: functional. My brain’s working again.”

“We’re sure that’s a good thing?”

Sandy gave her his toothy smile: “You gotta work with what you got, sweetheart. I just try to keep up….”