Saturn Run

59.

Wendy Greenberg was the first crew member on the Nixon to notice something wrong. She was wrapping up her night in Engineering. She liked to be on-site for engine restarts. The confidence she expressed to the admiral about the state of the power plant wasn’t false—but they’d had enough trouble with the power plants over the course of this mission that even when everything was running smoothly, and she had every expectation it would continue to, she wanted to be there during the run-up to ignition. Just in case.

Now she checked the time: 6:05 A.M. Her shift replacement was late.

That was not okay. Yesterday had been a little bit crazy, but her people had had plenty of time to learn that she was a little bit anal about punctuality. She would have words with somebody.

No point sitting around twiddling her thumbs, she thought. She went back to the endless task of filing operations reports. Definitely not the best part of the job.

When she looked up again, it was 6:20 A.M. That was more than not okay. Mildly steamed, she turned to one of the techs. “Julie, did Javier say anything to you about a shift change for today?”

“No, why?”

“Because he’s twenty minutes late and I’m beat. I’m pinging his comm.” Should have done that at 6:01, she groused to herself.

Julie Park: “He’s not usually late for anything. He’s as anal as you are, Chief.”

“Or you.”

“Let’s face it, if you’re in Engineering…”

Greenberg tapped the comm button. Nothing. Huh. “Hey, Julie, I’m not getting an answer, not even in pingback from his comm. Can you ping Javier from your slate?”

“Yup.” A few seconds later, “Uh, problem, boss. I can’t get a connection, either. Something’s screwed up with communications.”

By then, Greenberg was opening a line to the bridge. Except, it wouldn’t open. She tried the communications station, then security, and finally the admiral’s personal comm. They were locked out of the system.

“This ain’t good. I’m going to find out what’s wrong. Julie, you’re in charge of the room until the next shift shows up or I get back. Whichever’s first.”

She launched herself out of the control room and down the corridor to the air locks. Park switched to the command workstation and had just started reviewing the status plots, when Greenberg returned. Barely a minute had passed. She was flushed and wide-eyed, out of breath.

“Wendy, what…?”

“We’re locked in. I cycled through the first air lock, no problem. When I got to the second, the door wouldn’t open. The far-side door was wedged open, so the lock couldn’t cycle. There was a woman on the far side, so I banged on the door. She turned around. I didn’t recognize her. She was one of the Chinese we picked up, I think. She had a gun. She gestured with it for me to go back.”

Park said, “Then we’re in really bad trouble.”

For the next three hours, everyone in Engineering who didn’t absolutely, positively have to be monitoring the power plant and the engines tried to find a way to communicate with the rest of the ship. Nothing. They couldn’t raise any of the stations in Command and Control. Not just security or communications, but the helm and Navigation were out of touch, as well. They couldn’t even get through to the galley to order coffee, or send themselves a message to their own quarters. The whole intraship network was down. At least, it wasn’t accessible to them.

Okay, hard decision time, Greenberg thought. No helm, no navigation. We’re flying blind. We should be on course, but we can’t actually tell if our heading’s drifted or what. Not good.

She made the call. “Guys, let’s shut everything down. We won’t fire the VASIMRs up until the admiral says so. We’re going back to standby status until we know what’s going on.”

Commander Fang-Castro rolled over and stretched. She’d slept exceptionally well. Remarkable dreams, surreal even for a dreamscape—more intense, more vivid than any she could recall having before, but exceptionally enjoyable. Her wake-up alarm should be going off any moment; she had an unusually reliable internal body clock. She clicked her implants.

After nine o’clock?

She’d badly overslept, and either the alarm hadn’t gone off or had failed to wake her. Someone should have called down from the bridge when she hadn’t relieved Francisco over an hour ago. She grabbed her comm and hit the fast-connect for his. Nothing. No response.

His quarters, the same. Bridge and Engineering, the same. No one was picking up her comm; she couldn’t even tell if they were getting through. She jumped out of bed, threw on her uniform, and headed for the door.

It wouldn’t open for her.

She was locked in her room, with no way of communicating with the rest of the crew. She didn’t have to be a genius to figure out what had happened, even if she didn’t know the details.

All right, then.

She put on her NWUs and clipped the kill trigger stylus to the side of her slate. Then she retrieved her personal sidearm from a locker, pulled her chair around to face the door from the far side of the room, and cradled the firearm in her lap. It was turned on, unlocked and loaded. Eventually, someone would be coming for her. She could wait.

Crow woke up a few minutes after Fang-Castro. No wake-up call, no comm, and no exit. The good news was that nobody had come for him, yet. They would, sooner rather than later.

Okay, priority one: making sure that he wasn’t transferred to the lockup. He had useful tools in his quarters, ones the Chinese wouldn’t know about. They wouldn’t find out from the rest of the crew, because they didn’t know about them, either. He needed an excuse for staying where he was.

He pulled out the data-hardened slate he used for communicating with the White House. It was set up so he could establish a secure connection to Santeros from anywhere in the ship. Useful previously, but now that worked against him. He drilled down into the slate’s network protocols, as deep as he could go quickly. If he was lucky, the Chinese wouldn’t have anyone who could dig that far down into an unfamiliar operating system. He hard-linked the slate to his quarters’ intranet.

Next, work the same trick the other way around. He hacked into his room’s net and changed its low-level protocols so that it would not establish secure outbound connections with anything except his presidential slate.

The slate? That was designed to work only for him, at least in the most-secure mode that was needed to connect to the White House. The log-in was biometrically linked to him. Nothing suspicious or unusual about that; every high-level diplomat’s slate worked the same way.

If he was lucky, the Chinese would buy it. It shouldn’t take a lot of luck; it was entirely reasonable that the man who had the direct ear of the President of the United States would be provided well-controlled and restricted ways of grabbing that ear.

He had to hope that whoever had masterminded this little coup was security-minded enough to appreciate how sensible this all was. Then all he’d have to do would be to continue to play relatively dumb, and they’d likely leave him where he was. Probably even let him link to the White House as much as he wanted, because they’d be wanting the ear of the President and they’d be wanting her to know just how bad, for the Americans, the situation was.

There was a lot more he could do from his quarters. Without checking, because his checks might be detected, he was pretty confident they’d be controlling the Nixon at the most superficial level. Unless the Chinese happened to have a serious cyber-expert among their survivors, it would be easy to circumvent blocks on the network and door lockdowns. Easy, at least, when you had the equipment he had to work with, plus some carefully placed back doors.

But there was nothing more he was going to do. Not at this time. He wasn’t a superspy from a badly written vid. He couldn’t single-handedly wrest control of the ship from eighteen Chinese hijackers, at least not without them noticing and eventually figuring out who was doing it and where he was, and then he’d either be dead or find himself working from the naked-in-the-bare-cell scenario.

His tech prep done, it was time to clean up, to look the part he was playing. He shaved, trimmed a few errant hairs from his head, and took his best suit from the closet. Appropriately matching socks and a quick buff to the shoes. He contemplated ties, found one that complemented the suit and his eyes and gave himself a critical once-over in the mirror. He would do: he looked the part of a president’s representative about to meet with the very highest level dignitaries of a foreign government. He hoped the Chinese would appreciate the gesture.

Just one last item. The kill switch. He’d picked up the stylus and slipped it into his breast pocket. It went nicely with the suit and tie. Didn’t write too badly, either.

He sat down at his desk, pulled up some innocuous presidential briefings on his slate, and let his brain run overtime on the situation, while he waited for his captors to show up.

All over the Nixon, crew members were waking up, or coming down. On the bridge, Cui took stock: there were three unarmed Americans against three armed Chinese; five, including herself and Lieutenant Sun. The three Americans were coming to their senses. She could tell from their expressions that they’d rather be in dreamland. Sorry, she thought, but this is reality and this is the new order.

And, for the time being, the Nixon was her ship.

She didn’t expect that status to hold indefinitely. Once an accommodation was reached over the disposition of the alien information, she’d be happy to share the command with Fang-Castro. She would even consider handing it back to her entirely, as long as the Chinese retained control of the weapons.

It could work. It would be like one of those countries back on Earth whose civilian government was supported by a strong and independent military. As long as principles and goals were agreed upon, everything was fine, and if there was a disagreement, well… The real power did not lie with the government.

She turned to the American at the communications station who was by now sufficiently un-addled to be both alert and fearful. “Lieutenant, what is your name?”

She consciously copied Zhang’s command voice—low and soothing, but authoritative. “Don’t worry. Despite appearances, you are in no danger as long as you cooperate, and I will not ask you to do anything that puts your compatriots or your ship at risk.”

“Summerhill, ma’am, Albi Summerhill.”

Ma’am, that was good. He appreciated the situation he was in. “Thank you. Mr. Summerhill, I’m going to need you to operate the communications console according to my instructions. My people understand your systems well enough to engage simple operations, such as temporarily shutting down internal communications, but not how to operate it fully. You understand what I’m asking of you?”

He nodded.

“Very good. Open a ship-wide channel, so that I can make an announcement to your entire crew. Signal me when you’ve done that.”

Summerhill looked over the status board, pressed a few keys, and nodded to Cui. She nodded back in acknowledgment, and took a deep breath. The deepest one of her career; it felt like standing on the edge of a precipice, more exhilarating than terrifying, but some of both. Well, no turning back.

She leaped.

“Your attention, please. And good morning. I am Commander Cui Zhuo, of the People’s Republic of China, and former first officer of the Deep Space Vessel Celestial Odyssey. I and my fellow yuhanguan… astronauts… are in command of the Richard M. Nixon. We expect to return command to you as soon as some concerns are resolved. At present we have locked your quarters and blocked internal communications for security reasons.

“We expect to restore normal functioning shortly. Please be patient, and I personally apologize for any inconveniences we are causing you.”

She made a slicing motion with her hand, and then Summerhill killed the microphone. She nodded at him: “Thank you, Lieutenant.”

Sun turned to the American sitting near the security station. “And you, what is your name? I’d like you to bring up some security information for me.”

“Uh, Langers, ma’am, Ferris Langers. I’m usually at Navigation. I’m a navigation officer. I don’t know a lot about this station.”

“Can you perform simple operations, like locating a particular crew member or locking or unlocking a particular door?”

He looked at the panel. “Yes, I can do that.”

“Please be sure, Mr. Langers. I would be very unhappy if you were to accidentally unlock all the doors or the communications system. The consequences could be tragic.”

Langers looked at her face and then at her sidearm. “I will be careful.”

“Are Commander Fang-Castro and Mr. Crow in their quarters? Can you open communications channels just to them and unlock only their quarters’ doors when Commander Cui requests it? And do you have vid surveillance of their quarters?”

Langers tapped the panel and pulled up a few data lines. “They are both in quarters—or somebody is. I can unlock the doors, but I can’t give you the vid. That’s locked for reasons of privacy and only the admiral can override the locks. I can give you audio to both quarters, although they both have the option to kill the audio, if they wish.”

Cui asked, “Lieutenant Sun, how is our complement?”

“Up to full strength, Commander.”

“Lieutenant Langers, please open links to Admiral Fang-Castro and Mr. Crow.”

Langers tapped the screen he was looking at, and then pointed a finger at Cui.

“Admiral Fang-Castro, Mr. Crow? This is Cui Zhuo. I would like to meet with both of you in the conference room. I’ll be sending escorts to accompany you. They will be armed. Please don’t attempt anything foolish.”

She didn’t wait for an answer, but gestured and Langers closed the channel. “Now, Mr. Summerhill, bring up the ship’s logs for the past three weeks. My lieutenant and I have some reading to do.”

Summerhill was sweating. “Some of the logs are encrypted, ma’am. I don’t have the passwords or keys for those. Honestly, ma’am.”

“Bring up what you can, Lieutenant.”