Saturn Run

58.

“What?” Cui said it again, feeling stupid.

Sun said, “Short version, there’s a drug in the Nixon’s air supply. It’ll become active in less than three hours. The antagonist on this paper will block it. I can give you the long version, but first, lick the paper.”

Cui refused to give ground. “You’re my second. You may speak frankly, but you do not give me orders. I am your superior.”

Sun shook her head. “You are not my superior officer. I operate under a mandate from the Party and the Ministry of State Security. Duan Me, the Celestial Odyssey’s political officer, reported to me. I report directly to the MSS. I am not obligated to follow your orders. Strictly speaking, you are obligated to follow mine. Lick. The. Goddamn. Paper… ma’am.”

She offered the paper again. The expression on her face was fierce and imploring, both. Cui licked the paper, her eyes never leaving Sun’s.

“Now. Tell me. All of it.”

Sun told her.

Sun was yuhanguan. Yes, she had done everything and been on every assignment that was in her official dossier. Primarily, though, she functioned as a covert operative for the Ministry of State Security. She was thirty-six years old, not twenty-eight. Since Sun had turned twenty, she had been officially aging, on paper, one year for every two real years.

“I’ve had a longer career than most. That’s just good fortune,” Sun said. “Agents age out of the program when it becomes too difficult to reconcile their physical age with their paper one. I was lucky with good genes: I look unusually youthful, and I haven’t started to shift into a middle-age appearance, yet.”

Her apparent youth was used to place her in the lower levels of any command group, where she’d be less conspicuous, she said.

Her personal medication and toiletries were completely innocent. Her papers were not, and had been primed with several chemical agents. One of the agents was designed to incapacitate a large number of people in a large enclosed space in a short period of time, useful, on Earth, in terrorist hostage situations. Hardly ever likely to be needed in space, but how handy it was, if it were needed.

As soon as she had realized what dire straits the Celestial Odyssey was in, Sun had begun re-analyzing her options. After Zhang confided his plans to his officers, she reached out to several carefully selected crew members, the ones she was sure would be most patriotic.

Each was provided with an innocent-looking packet of paper—permanent hard records. All they needed to do once they were safely aboard the Nixon was to shuffle the papers while they were sorting their personal effects for the marines’ inspection. After that, it wouldn’t matter if the marines confiscated them.

The volatile contents from the papers started evaporating as soon as they were exposed to air. There was no odor. Within an hour, they’d have entirely evaporated and the ship’s air circulation system would distribute the microencapsulated, aerosolized LSD derivative throughout the forward sections of the ship. The only air that wouldn’t be contaminated was in the separately ventilated engineering and power plant modules.

On release, the encapsulation on the particles began to degrade. Three hours after release, the psychoactive component would be exposed, plenty of time for everyone on board the Nixon to have inhaled a dose. Shortly thereafter, anyone who had not taken the antagonist would undergo the very best psychedelic experience of their lives. None of that street shit; the chemists in Beijing knew how to make the really good stuff.

After that, the most time-consuming task for the Chinese would be shepherding happily incapacitated and distracted Americans back to their quarters. The best opportunity for clandestine release was during the Chinese’s earliest time on the Nixon, when things were most chaotic and their activities least well supervised and restricted.

It was purely an accident of timing that it was late night, ship’s time, when the unprotected crew would start tripping; Sun couldn’t have planned that well, but she was fully prepared to take advantage of it.

Cui was amazed at the lieutenant’s sureness. “You seem to have thought this through very thoroughly.”

“I didn’t come up with this entirely on my own,” Sun said. “We started analyzing takeover scenarios for the Nixon and collecting intelligence in that direction the moment we realized what the Americans were up to. Truth, we didn’t expect to exploit any of those scenarios, not without a direct attack on the Nixon that would lead to war. But, y’know, you do the analyses anyway, just in case, and for the intellectual exercise.”

A surprisingly small number of Chinese, just seven or eight, could control the Nixon. With two shifts, the Chinese could maintain control for a considerable length of time. They couldn’t run the ship; more Americans than that were required in Engineering alone. What those half dozen could do was dominate and command the Americans, as long as they were armed and the Americans were not. The part the MSS hadn’t been able to figure out was how to gain control in the first place, other than by force.

“Admiral Zhang handed us that opportunity,” Sun said, with a hint of gloating.

Cui was aghast. “Admiral Zhang was in on this? It’s hard for me to believe he would’ve approved.”

“No, he wouldn’t have. That is why he is not part of the situation,” Sun said.

The import of that sank in. “You killed him!”

Sun said, “The Party and the MSS came to the opinion that Zhang’s myriad failings were putting the entire mission in jeopardy. He was becoming increasingly independent of the thought in Beijing, by our best planners. His reputation was useful: the Americans knew all about him. But he would have used his command weight to interfere with a takeover, even if he knew it was possible. He had a romantic conception of his job, as though he were an old-fashioned sailing captain. The fate of the Celestial Odyssey, and its crew, is as nothing, compared to the long-term interests of China. If we don’t get the alien technology, we could be left behind for centuries, just as we were in the eighteenth through twentieth centuries, when we were forced inward. Zhang had become an obstacle to our interests.”

Cui was still trying to grasp just what was happening. “Still, initiating an operation like this, without the approval of the admiral? What makes you think the crew will accept this?”

“Half of the crew are overtly with me. Nobody in the crew is anything less than wholeheartedly supportive of the State’s mandates. The MSS wouldn’t have let anyone on this mission who wasn’t. Everyone has the same goals. The only differences are over what measures need to be taken to achieve them. Once a course of action has been settled upon, they will all fall in behind it.”

Sun was right, and Cui knew it. The captain had hoped the matter could be resolved without confrontation. It was a laudable ideal. Not one, though, the real world would support. Without a show of strength by the Chinese, they had no chance of extracting any concessions from the Americans.

Salvatore Francisco had the graveyard watch on the bridge. Goddamn, what a long day it had been! He sucked at his bulb of coffee. He could’ve used a mug, but years of duty in zero-gee had made the bulb a comfortable and familiar item in his routine. The transfer of the Chinese had come off without a hitch, but there was so much planning involved, so many different issues and concerns, that it was exhausting monitoring it all. That wasn’t even considering the political complications they were facing. Thank God he didn’t have to worry about that.

Fang-Castro was getting some well-deserved sleep, and Francisco was scanning routine maintenance reports. Everything was nominal. The Chinese were settled into their quarters.

The new Chinese commander, Cui, had been given the schedule of who would be bunking with whom, and the dining and exercise schedules for the coming days. Each of the Chinese refugees had been assigned two American “supervisors,” in most cases one of them military, to watch over them until they were properly settled in their quarters, made familiar with the operation of all the facilities, and locked down for the night.

The Chinese were being very cooperative. He was back to reviewing the engineering reports, post-start-up, when he noticed a scattered sparkling of lights in his vision, like the cosmic ray hits on the retina that happened every so often. Except there were a lot more of them, and they were increasing in intensity as well as frequency. A major solar storm? Radiation monitors were silent.

He blinked, shook his head, trying to clear his vision. Colors were starting to shift, the pale gray background of the text on his slate was taking on tints of green, purple, pink; they started to move and swirl across the screen. Something was wrong. He tapped the comm to Dr. Manfred’s quarters. “Doc? Something’s wrong with me. I need to see youuuu… riiiiight… aaaaawwwwaaaaaaaayyyyyyyyy…”

He was having trouble speaking, or, at least, he felt like he was having trouble speaking. Maybe he was speaking just fine, maybe his words were stretching out like taffy taffy taffytoffeecoffeecarefree… What was he going to say? He couldn’t remember. Words. They were just sooo interesting… taffytoffeecoffeecarefreetaffy…

He giggled. Low-gee was fun! He tossed his slate and gave it a little spin, watching it arc slowly toward the middle of the bridge, its shiny edges picking up the beautiful liquid light that was pouring from the control lamps and the glowing, wonderfully expanding data displays, flinging that light back at him, split into lightning shards of glorious, constantly changing colors and lovely sounds. So this is what a rainbow sounds like. The thought drifted through his head. I never noticed before. The notes, and the colors, they’re so solid. I could climb them. I wonder where they lead?

It was very quiet throughout the Nixon. Most of the Americans were asleep; a few of them mumbled into their pillows. All of them were having the most wonderful dreams, the kind you hoped you’d never wake up from. They would wake up from them, in about ten hours. They’d be surprised at how much the waking world had changed.

The people who were still awake, the Chinese, their “supervisors,” and the rest of the crew on duty, didn’t make much noise, either. The Chinese who’d been offered the antagonist, the most trusted ones, were quietly going about their tasks. The rest of the Chinese, like the Americans, were too engrossed in the extraordinarily entertaining synesthesia surrounding them to say or do much.

Engineering was quiet, too, but it was operating normally. It was on its own air system. Nobody there, including Dr. Greenberg, who’d taken the late shift to supervise the next day’s engine restart, noticed anything out of the ordinary. They went about their business, uploaded the routine status reports to the bridge, and supervised the smoothly running power plant.

In the living modules, those Chinese who weren’t tripping gently removed the weapons and any ammunition they could find from their military escorts. They pulled the escorts into empty quarters and left them sitting or lying on the beds, enjoying their fantastic new world.

Two went off to the bus deck, opened the outer lock, and took the bus back to the Odyssey, where a nineteenth crewman, a volunteer who’d offered to risk his life to stay with the ship for a few more hours, had been hidden.

He was waiting, with the Odyssey’s armory, mostly handguns fitted with high-storage capacitor slugs, which would disable any living creature they hit, and perhaps kill a few.

And there were a few guns that were simply that: large-caliber weapons loaded with slugs that would kill without fragmentation ricochet or the power to do much secondary damage to things like a hull….

The round-trip took barely an hour.

The nine functional Chinese crew members rendezvoused with Cui and Sun in the ship’s conference room. From there, they moved to the bridge, where they removed the personnel on duty, save for the crew members staffing the communications, safety, and security workstations. Three stayed to watch over the controls and the tripping crew members. They’d need them later. The Chinese could control the rudimentary functions of the Nixon; those were sufficiently self-explanatory. The intricacies of real day-to-day operation? For that they’d need the Americans.

Three more positioned themselves respectively in life support, the galley, and at the dual air lock that led into Engineering.

The remaining two roamed the corridors of the Nixon, looking for any more incapacitated military personnel whose weapons they could confiscate and anyone who might still be wandering free. There were very few; at this late hour the only crew members who were up were the ones who were supposed to be on duty.

By the time everyone was in position, most of the night had passed. The eleven sober yuhanguan settled themselves down and waited for their compatriots and the Americans to sober up.