Saturn Run

56.

Just past midnight, Nixon time, transports left the Chinese and American ships. Fang-Castro had decided that requiring Zhang to come on board first was perhaps insulting. And she didn’t see much risk in a simultaneous exchange.

Sandy said to Crow, who was driving the bus, “I hope she’s right. I got this funny feeling between my shoulder blades.”

“Could be shingles,” Crow said.

“Or possibly a sniper.”

“You take your stims?” Crow asked.

“Does a chicken have lips?”

Crow considered, then said, “I don’t know what that means. It could go either way.”

“Yeah, I took the stims. But fear alone would keep me awake.”

As the Nixon’s bus passed the Chinese runabout, Sandy waved at the space-suited figures strapped to the framework of their craft. It was similar in concept to the Nixon’s eggs, but meant to carry more than one person outside the Celestial Odyssey. Rather than working from inside, as with an egg, the Chinese craft would ferry several space-suited workers to any point on the ship, and then release them to work as individuals. One of the space-suited figures waved back. The larger one, he thought.

Crow nudged him. “When we get there, don’t say anything unless spoken to, and keep your replies as short as possible. I want you to be the silent guy with the camera. Don’t volunteer anything. Don’t ask any questions. That’s my job.”

“Got it. Sir. General. Field Marshal.”

The Nixon, with its near-kilometer-long radiators and three-hundred-meter main axle, was larger than the Odyssey, but it was like a box kite made of balsa wood and string, long thin columns and beams tied together with graphene guy wire. The Chinese ship was only two-thirds the size of the Nixon, but it looked like a tank.

As they approached the massive deep space transport, Sandy panned his cameras over the surface of the Chinese ship, and Crow muttered, “Holy cow. Look at that. Get that.”

“I’m getting it.”

They were stunned by the damage. There were fused and torn moorings where, presumably, there had been external hydrogen tanks. There were none of those now. The hull was scarred and gouged where pieces of the disintegrating tanks must have slammed into the ship. It was obvious that the Chinese crew had patched things together rapidly and, so far, functionally, but there was no attempt to clean it up. Rough welds, overlapping plates, mismatched joints.

Crow said, “You can have it fast or you can have it right.” The Chinese had been under time pressures that precluded “right.”

“Can’t believe they didn’t breach,” Sandy muttered.

Crow: “The Chinese know how to build a hull. If that had happened to us…”

They’d all be dead.

Sandy went to an open channel back to the Nixon: “Comm, are you seeing all this? Just checking.”

“We see it. Astonishing. Keep it coming, Sandy.”

They lingered for a few moments outside the Chinese ship, doing a complete vid scan of the exterior. When Sandy finished, Crow maneuvered the bus into the one operational shuttle bay on the Celestial Odyssey. It was a huge space, clearly designed to accommodate a surface-to-orbit vehicle. Now it contained nothing but a couple of runabouts and service pods. A second shuttle, they’d been told, was currently useless, trapped behind nonfunctioning doors on the other shuttle bay. The external vids might confirm that, once Martinez went over them. Sandy couldn’t tell, from one look: there was simply too much patchwork on the exterior of the ship.

As Crow maneuvered into the shuttle bay, Sandy stuck the small hand camera on a side-support, with the camera aimed toward the air lock. If a bunch of Chinese troopers came boiling out to seize the bus while he and Crow were inside, the Nixon would see it.

While they waited for the bay to pressurize, Crow and Sandy disconnected themselves from the bus and pushed off toward the floor. The shuttle bay was zero-gee environment, as was the entire ship.

“They gotta have some kind of serious exercise regimen, or they’re gonna drop dead when they get back to Earth,” Sandy said.

“They do,” Crow said, as though he actually knew. “And they got lots of meds.”

“That shit can kill you all by itself,” Sandy said.

The environmental all-clear had come through on their internal readers. As they stripped off their suits, the inner bay door opened and two people came in, led, Sandy noticed, by a young woman, about his age. A really, really cute young woman, small, slim, buff, who looked like she was made to ride a surfboard.

The two Chinese stopped a few meters from the two Americans. “Welcome to the Celestial Odyssey. I am Second Officer and Acting Commander Sun Yu Jie, and this”—she gestured to her left—“is our medical officer, Dr. Mo Mu.”

Her English was excellent, with only the faintest hint of an accent. “Please do not be offended, but Dr. Mo is going to perform a body scan on both of you, to ensure that you are not bringing any weapons or explosives on board. I am entirely comfortable with the arrangements Captain Zhang has made, but some of my crew is nervous.” She looked regretful. “They feel that we are at the disadvantage in this situation. This will relieve some of their anxiety and distrust, unjustified as it is.”

Sandy gave her his toothy grin. “No problem! I’m Sanders Darlington. Everyone calls me Sandy—”

Crow’s voice crackled in his earbud. “Zip it, Sandy.”

Sandy said to the woman, “…and this is Mr. Crow, my assistant.”

The woman smiled back and extended a hand to Crow: “Yes, Mr. David Crowell, the political officer. Ours, unfortunately, as you heard, was killed. She was loved by everyone. As, I’m sure, is Mr. Crow.”

“Absolutely,” Sandy said. “And by no one more than myself.”

Crow said, “Mr. Darlington is our videographer and will be sending a vid stream of what we observe back to the Nixon for the experts there to evaluate. We understand that time is short, and I put myself and Mr. Darlington at your disposal. I’m sure you best know what we need to see to appreciate your situation and confirm Captain Zhang’s statements. Not, I assure you, that we’ve been given any reason to doubt them.”

Sun reached out to Sandy, and as they shook hands, she said, “Captain Darlington. I’ve been watching your vids since you left Earth. You are very talented. Welcome aboard.”

Crow conjured up a look of regret, and said, apparently embarrassed, “The President is insisting on confirmation in a matter which has such profound international repercussions. If it were left up to me, we could dispense with all of this.”

“The scan, then?” Sun asked. “You accept the scan?”

“Yes, of course.”

“Do you wish to continue in English?” Sun asked. “Or go to Mandarin? I understand yours is excellent.”

Crow didn’t flinch. “English is fine.”

With the formalities completed, and the body scans done, the four of them left the hangar bay for their tour of the ship. Mo also spoke English, and Crow engaged him in polite chitchat, inquiring of his family, wondering what it was like to practice space medicine on a trip like this, and admiring the spaciousness of the ship they were wandering through.

Sandy marveled at it: Crow was completely in character as a political functionary, a meet-and-greeter whose primary skill was to be disarmingly pleasant and a good listener.

Though it didn’t demand any dissimulation to marvel at the scale of the Chinese ship. The Nixon was large in dimension, but very little of that was interior space. The Celestial Odyssey was all about carrying cargo, people, and equipment. Three-quarters of the interior was taken up with the propulsion system, mostly the huge internal liquid hydrogen tanks that provided reaction mass for the thermal nuclear engines, but the remaining quarter was still a lot of volume, especially in a zero-gee vessel that was carrying a fraction of the number of people it’d been designed for.

Crow consulted his slate and said, “We’d like to see the propulsion system and talk to a few of your engineers, if we could.”

Sandy did vid of the conversation: most of the engineers spoke passable English, and Crow relayed questions from Martinez and Greenberg. At the end, he asked that their engine operation and refueling logs, from the time they arrived at Saturn, be transmitted to the Nixon. The engineers looked at Sun, who nodded.

Sandy didn’t know what Crow was seeing, but nothing he saw suggested that Zhang had told anything but the truth. Sandy didn’t understand, and wasn’t interested in, most of the details of ship operations. But after documenting the activities of the Nixon’s crew for nine months, he had developed a feel for what were normal working situations in space.

This surely wasn’t. There were many fewer workstations than the Nixon had, and two-thirds of them were unstaffed. Some of that might be differences in the way the Americans and the Chinese did things, but overall, the ship looked bare bones to him. The unused stations were powered down and there was a very, very thin layer of dust on the screens, about what you’d expect to see from a few days of non-use on Earth. But in a spaceship, in zero-gee? They must be having scrubber problems. Sandy made a note for his report.

The remainder of their tour didn’t turn up anything to contradict the impression that the Celestial Odyssey was operating with a skeleton crew. Sun asked if there was anything else they needed to see.

Crow carefully consulted his slate one last time and, apparently chagrined, asked if it would be possible to see some of the crew quarters. He told Sun that he felt this was an invasion of privacy and that if she declined he wouldn’t hold it against her or their evaluation. It would make his job easier, though, if she could accommodate this awkward, and in his view inappropriate, request.

She agreed to the request—the whole thing had been gamed by both sides, Sandy realized, and there were no unexpected moves—and took them to what amounted to a space-side barracks. Most of the Chinese quarters were laid out for three or four occupants, and a large fraction of them seemed to be entirely unoccupied. Unless the Chinese had very carefully staged all the living quarters, Crow’s random sampling ought to yield a fair statistical estimate of the number of Chinese remaining in the crew.

Sandy dutifully vidded everything and then they headed back to the shuttle bay for the return trip to the Nixon. Crow amiably chatted the whole way, asking about opportunities for touring, even living in China. He thought there might be some prospect for posting to the diplomatic corps if he did well on this assignment.

Once they had jetted well away from the Celestial Odyssey, Sandy aimed his remote at the hand-camera, which unstuck itself, and as he stowed it, he said, “Jesus, what an enormous load of bullshit. The diplomatic stuff. You think they bought it? They know you’re the political officer.”

“What part did you think was bullshit?”

“The ‘hail fellow well met’ routine. Free-and-easy social banter isn’t really your style.”

“You really don’t know my style, Sandy.”

Sandy hesitated, then asked, “Do you?”

Crow shrugged, and they slid back to the Nixon. A minute before they arrived, he said, “I’ll tell you what, Sandy. When John Clover interrogated the alien AI, he was more interested in finding out why the aliens were doing things than what they were doing. That’s what I wanted to know. I didn’t so much care what the Chinese told me. What I cared about was how they told it to me. What I learned is that they are scared. You, they paid no attention to, because they understood your function. But they were frightened of me, because they were afraid I might say no, and they understand me as the political officer. They are deeply suspicious of us, but they badly wanted my approval.

“That, more than anything I saw or you vidded, makes me think they’re telling the truth. His crew has been traumatized and is operating under terrific stress. They’re keeping a lid on it as best they can, but they’re terrified. Unless their typical engineer is better at this game than I am, this isn’t some crafty ruse to get on board the Nixon. They need us. If we don’t help, they’re dead.”

After a minute, Sandy said, “All right.” After another minute, “I’m sorta impressed, man.”

Zhang and Cui inhaled the delicate vapors drifting up from the cups of tea that Fang-Castro had offered them. “Superb,” Zhang said. “Better than anything I can get. When we are back on the ground, you will have to give me the name of your provider. I’m stunned that you, outside of China, can obtain better leaf than I can.”

Fang-Castro smiled. “It’s a side effect of our international trade. When you find out what I paid for this, you’ll be amazed. The tea growers in China can make much more money selling their goods on the international market, than they can selling it locally. There’s not a lot of opportunity on a space station to spend my pay. So most of it goes into retirement funds for me and my ex-wife, and our children’s education. Tea is one of my few indulgences.”

Zhang sighed. “I hope we will get to enjoy retirements. On that point… I am feeling pressed for time. May we discuss transfer arrangements, assuming your investigations confirm my claims and encourage you to a favorable decision?”

“I read the summary of your situation. You only have nine space suits and your pressurized shuttle was destroyed in the antimatter explosion? Other than a handful of service eggs, similar to your pods, we don’t have any pressurized transfer vehicles, and our space suits are customized to the user. How did you plan to make the transfer?”

“Our suits are not so customized. We could either shuttle the suits back and forth or go to body bags. I’d prefer not to go to body bags.”

“I understand.”

“We would also wish to bring aboard personal items. We understand that they would be thoroughly inspected by your security people.”

“Are you talking about weapons?”

“No, of course not. Just small sentimental items, and clothing and so on.”

“We can take a limited amount of that. But it will all be closely inspected.”

“Of course.”

Fang-Castro’s slate pinged. “Admiral? Summerhill, here. The bus with Darlington and Crow is back.”

“Send them to the conference room, along with Mr. Martinez,” she said. She turned to Zhang. “All right, sir, let’s see what my people have learned.”