Saturn Run

65.

Saturday, November 24, 2068—a hundred and fifty thousand kilometers from Earth. The Nixon was home.

That’s how it felt to the crew, anyway. They were in Earth orbit. It was a large, elliptical orbit, never coming closer than fifty thousand kilometers to the earth and extending out beyond the moon. But it was an orbit; they were captured in Earth’s gravitational field.

The Nixon would spiral in, reversing the course they had taken when they departed nearly a year and a half ago. Thanksgiving, two days earlier, had been a sober affair. Although Earth was tantalizingly close, less than a million kilometers away and rushing toward them, they still had too much velocity for orbital capture.

But nothing went wrong.

The least thankful person had been Fang-Castro. She had not taken the decisions of the two governments very well.

“I cannot believe you’re asking this of me,” she said. “You seriously expect me to scuttle my own ship?” She’d received outrageous demands in her time, but this was beyond all imagining.

Santeros was the model of calm. “Admiral, I am not asking anything of you. I’m telling you. This is what is going to happen. The Nixon will be abandoned, disposed of. The new Chinese Martian transport will retrieve you and your crew. They will bring you back to low Earth orbit. This has been decided. Debate is not being reopened.”

“Then I’d ask you to relieve me of command. You can have somebody else take over for the rest of the mission.”

The faintest of smiles played across Santeros’s lips. “That wouldn’t discomfit me in the least, but that’s not how this is going to play out. There are issues of international politics that are far more important than you, and as far as that goes, all of your crew members put together. I want neither the distraction nor the questions that might be raised by a last-minute change of command. I need a good face on this. You’re going to serve.”

“Why should I?”

Santeros shrugged. “Because you’re an officer in the navy. You guys always do what you’re told first and resign later. If you want to resign later, be my guest.”

Fang-Castro’s shoulders slumped. Her hands gripped the arms of her chair. The knuckles were pale. She spoke softly. “You give me no choice. I’ve noticed that tendency in your administration. Anything else?” She didn’t say, “ma’am.”

“Thank you, Admiral. Look at it this way, Naomi: you have a certain… mmm… grip on my balls. That’s a good thing, from your side. From my side, I’m used to it. There are more hands in my pants than you can believe. But, you know, play your part, and good things will happen for you. Play your part, and Crow will take care of the details.”

The Chinese were unwilling to risk even the slightest chance that the Nixon could somehow unload the information on the alien technology. Since they didn’t know how much memory the alien downloads would use, they were unwilling to let even the smallest objects leave the Nixon: a memory file could be made to look like almost anything, so they would not allow anything to leave the Nixon.

How to do that? The Nixon was diseased.

That was the report, a day after they achieved high orbit, when they’d already had visitors. Now the visitors were stuck, too.

Major Barnes came down with something that looked like a virus… but not quite like a virus. He’d been cleared through the quarantine months earlier, after breathing the atmosphere in the alien primary, and even now, didn’t seem especially ill. Sore throat, pink blotchy spots over his back, legs, and arms.

Then Cui came down with it.

Fang-Castro made the announcement.

“The CDC has a man on the way up. The blood samples taken by Doctors Manfred and Mo suggest a virus, but it doesn’t look like anything they’ve seen before. We’re afraid it could have come from the alien environment, so the CDC’s guy will be visiting us in a full environmental suit. Dr. Mo suggests that we really don’t have much to be worried about, the bug seems easy enough to kill in vitro.”

Ship-wide groans.

Sandy had been confined for a week after his performance on the bridge, but the confinement was obviously pointless—where was he going to run to?—and he hadn’t yet been convicted of anything, though he surely would be. And he wasn’t dangerous… and nine-tenths of the people on the ship thought he’d probably saved their lives.

So they let him out.

Fang-Castro told him, “Too many people in Washington know about this to let it go. You’re going to spend time in jail.”

“Not too much,” he said, with his grin.

“If I were you, I’d brace myself,” Fang-Castro said. “Among other things, Santeros is looking for a scapegoat.”

Now, in Earth orbit, Sandy set up for an interview with Fiorella, announcing the onset of the plague.

“I probably wouldn’t refer to it as the plague,” Fiorella said.

“They want you to,” Sandy said.

“Maybe. But I’m a journalist, not a lapdog,” she said. “Really.” She sounded slightly guilty. She’d had an extremely pragmatic talk with Santeros.

“I just take the pictures,” Sandy said. “Really.”

Clover cruised by. “One-point-two million in the Hump Pool. Not a single person has bet on tonight. Or last night or tomorrow night. So, I was thinking we ought to pull the trigger, but… you know, even though the whole concept of the Hump Pool is despicable, taking the money smacks of fraud. I’m getting mildly cold feet.”

Sandy said, “If we pull the trigger, you could fund your own archaeological expedition. To anywhere.”

Clover said, “My feet got warmer. Keep talking.”

“I don’t really need the money, but I want it,” Fiorella said. “It’s me that the Hump Pool is about. The assumption that I could never resist Mr. Money and Big White Teeth. I will not mind sticking it to them and turning a profit on twisting the knife.”

Sandy brought out the teeth: “Dinner and a movie? Tonight at my place?”

“I’ll be there at seven o’clock,” Fiorella said. She threw her head back, released a well-simulated sexual groan, then straightened and said, “And I’m just warming up.”

Clover rubbed his hands together. “I was hoping you’d talk me out of my spasm of righteousness. The Hump Pool was wrong. I’m defending the reputation of women everywhere by taking the cash.”

“Absolutely,” Fiorella said.

An hour later, she was live from the bridge:

“While the crew, including myself, and the former crewmen of the Celestial Odyssey, will have to spend some time in a Level Four biocontainment facility, now being fabbed in the new Chinese Divine Wanderer, there’s not much doubt the viral visitor can be eradicated from our bodies. There remains the question of what will happen to the Nixon. Eradicating every last organic particle from this ship would be a vast task, not made easier by the fact that we’d have to do it in space. Preliminary tests have shown that this particle may not be killed by exposure to a vacuum….”

She went on for a while, but the thrust was clear: a solution would have to be found for eliminating the contamination of the Nixon. The world could not risk the introduction of a new alien organism… or any other organisms that hadn’t yet been found.

Later that evening, after another performance, she said hoarsely, “Damn, my voice is shot.”

“Yeah, well, I’m pretty sore from bouncing that cot up and down. I’m thinking the real thing is a lot less work.”

“Probably, and neither of us will likely get an Oscar for our performance…”

“Your moans were pretty convincing…”

“…but you can’t fault the pay scale.”

“Amen, sister.”

Clover was taking high fives in the Commons. He had a spaghetti pot under his arm, stuffed with currency.

Fang-Castro glanced around her bare quarters.

Saturday, December 1, 2068. She’d remember this date, the day she gave up the command of the Nixon.

The Chinese had been prompt and efficient. They could, in fact, have launched and arrived a day earlier than projected. It was the personnel on the Nixon who’d held to the original schedule, transmitting every last bit of their work to Earth… in native English and math… through a Chinese relay.

Not a lot of trust there. Not a lot of trust, anywhere.

Three Americans and two Chinese had died in her ship, though Admiral Zhang was probably dead by the time he arrived. There were four bodies in cold storage, and one was still sailing, in a broken egg, toward the outer planets. The thought of Becca Johansson, on her lonely voyage, still made Fang-Castro tight in the throat.

They’d also lost one cat on the trip: Mr. Snuffles had died of a heart attack three weeks out. John Clover had been devastated, but had said, “He never would have made it back on Earth, anyway. The gravity would kill him the first day. Better this way.”

The living Americans—and the former crew members of the Celestial Odyssey, as well—would be going through meticulous body scans before they’d even be allowed in the Chinese facility, and then they’d be confined to the Level 4 biocontainment area until the docs were absolutely, one hundred percent sure that they’d eliminated the last of the…

Measles.

A mild, attenuated, fast-developing form of measles genetically designed to produce the raw material for a measles vaccine, should that ever be needed; and though it was attenuated, it nevertheless produced the blotching pink rash of regular measles. The only place where the regular disease occasionally popped up was the wilds of Marin County, California. If a few hundred parents hadn’t resisted, it would have been eradicated there decades earlier. This outbreak had been brought up by the first visitor to the Nixon, a cheerful, politically reliable doc from the CDC.

With both the Chinese and American propaganda machines denying that there was any real danger from the “alien” virus, at the same time they used various ignorance-bathed celebrities to spread fear and misinformation through the Internet, most of the world had become convinced that the Nixon was a death machine.

A long-forgotten film from a century earlier, The Andromeda Strain, resurfaced on the Internet. Medical personnel—so they claimed to be—called and texted late-night talk shows, citing research that had shown how microorganisms could survive under the most extraordinary conditions. They reminded listeners how diseases on Earth had jumped between species, given the right set of chance mutations. Organisms that might normally infect an alien host might, and they emphasized the word “might,” be able to make the jump to human beings.

Probably not. But maybe.

Santeros said it most plainly, in a talk on public television:

“Humans have encountered aliens. No one knows, for certain, what the Nixon might have brought back with it in the way of pathogens—germs. We are confident that we can eliminate any pathogens in the human body itself, but with the Nixon, that’s a much different situation.

“We have consulted with the Chinese, European, Brazilian, African Union, and Indian governments. As much as it breaks my heart, the decision has been taken to destroy the Nixon in a way that will remove any doubt that rogue pathogens have been destroyed with it….

“The only things to be brought back from the ship are eight alien machines, which will also be thoroughly decontaminated, and from which we hope and expect to derive much information about their computer technologies. As an act of goodwill between the U.S. and its many foreign allies, the machines will be distributed among the major states represented on the UN’s Security Council. We hope, however, to develop a mutual research program.”

But what to do with the Nixon?

De-orbiting the ship was unthinkable. It was far too large to entirely burn up; something might survive and contaminate the world. Crash it into the moon? It’d have to be monitored as a hazardous waste site indefinitely.

The only smart place to send the ship was to the ultimate incinerator. The sun. The Divine Wanderer, the Celestial Odyssey’s successor, could do the job; a ship that was designed to carry over a thousand tonnes of cargo wouldn’t have any problem pushing around the four-hundred-and-fifty-tonne Nixon. A little extra water reaction mass from some strap-on tanks, some newly fabricated attachment mounts, and the Martian transport became the world’s biggest and fastest tugboat.

The operation took a week.

On its second, and final, trip to the Nixon, the Divine Wanderer brought along service eggs, graphene cable, and sensor-laden tie-downs, and a full complement of riggers and jockeys. They’d only be pushing the poor Nixon at a few percent of a gee, but that was still several times more acceleration than the ship had been subject to before. A little extra rigging, just to make sure nothing broke loose. It was cheap insurance.

At six o’clock in the morning, Beijing time, President Santeros and General Secretary Hong jointly issued the orders to proceed.

The Divine Wanderer, grappled to the Nixon’s cold, dead VASIMR engines, began to push. Its nuclear thermal rockets thrummed at a comfortable one-third power for the next day, as the Divine Wanderer pushed the Nixon away from the earth and against its orbital motion about the sun. When it was done, twenty-seven kilometers per second of fresh delta-vee canceled out all but a few kilometers per second of residual orbital velocity about the sun.

The Nixon’s new course was confirmed. The Divine Wanderer released its grapples, turned tail, and headed back to Earth. The Nixon continued on, in a tight elliptical track with a perihelion of less than half a million kilometers. It would never complete a full orbit; the sun’s radius was seven hundred thousand kilometers.

In just over two months, the Nixon would hit the sun at over six hundred kilometers per second, at least those few refractory bits that hadn’t vaporized millions of kilometers out.

After six weeks of decontamination, the crew of the Nixon, and their Chinese guests, were released from biocontainment. The Americans were picked up, a few at a time, by Virgin-SpaceX shuttles, and returned to Earth.

John Clover was among the first to hit dirt: and feel the oppressive pull of Earth’s gravity. He’d lost weight in his time in space and had worked out religiously. Still, gravity was a trial. On the other hand, he’d get used to it in a couple of months, and he’d have better than a half-million dollars, his share of the Hump Pool. Made him laugh to think about it.

In New Orleans, he stepped from the government autolimo and checked out his house. It was different. The steps were freshly painted. For that matter, so was the whole fuckin’ house.

Crow had told him that the government would maintain it, but this…

“Aw, crap.” He palmed the front-door lock and the door opened. The hinges didn’t squeak. Crap-crap, he thought, if they’ve messed with my stuff…

Someone had straightened up the living room. Straightened up? They’d done a thorough cleaning, practically a remake. All his carefully tabbed and dog-eared papers and magazines, half-read books, the stacks of old journals by his chairs, all the stuff that had taken up eighty percent of the floor, it was all gone.

Assholes. It’ll take years to undo what some brain-dead “organizer” had done to his filing system, he thought. Hell, it’d probably take him years just to find where they’d put all his stuff, assuming they hadn’t thrown it out in some misguided fit of do-goodedness.

He needed a joint, he decided, hoping they hadn’t thrown out his stash. He stepped on the loose floorboard to the left of the entryway to the living room. The floorboard flipped up and he reached for the rusty tackle box below it. He grunted as he pulled it up. Heavy. Inside there were fresh, wrapped kilo bricks. He peered at the label. They were from the government research farm in Kentucky.

An envelope was taped to one of the bricks, with a letter and a card inside. The letter said he was an authorized owner of the dope under federal law; the card identified him as a federal research subject, exempting him from Louisiana’s antiquated prohibitions.

Both were signed by the surgeon general.

The card said:

Well, I will be blown, Clover thought, as he rolled a joint. He stepped outside to light it up: a calico cat sat on the neighbor’s fence, a thin, feral feline. The cat narrowed his eyes and meowed, just once. Food?

“Back in a minute,” Clover said to the cat. He’d always had a weakness for calicoes. He meowed once, and went back inside to look for the cat crunchies.

Good dope, even the possibility of a new cat.

Wonder if everybody gets this kind of welcome?

No. They didn’t.

Fiorella said good-bye to Sandy at the back of the shuttle. “This whole criminal thing is bullshit,” she said. “I’ll do everything I can. I think I can probably do a lot. Santeros owes me. We’ve already got a petition going, almost everybody in the crew signed it.”

“Thank you. For everything,” Sandy said. “You gonna give me a kiss good-bye?”

“If I do, are you gonna try to squeeze my ass?”

“Maybe. Okay, maybe not.”

She gave him a peck on the cheek and said, “Everything will work out.”

“I know it will. I’ll be seeing you around.”

The FBI was waiting at the bottom of the stairs.

Whatever else had been said and done, Santeros still needed a scapegoat.

Sandy was arrested, placed in solitary confinement in Los Angeles, and the next day was flown to Washington, where he’d stand trial in federal court. Santeros had nixed a court-martial for the simple reason that nobody had actually taken the time to reactivate Sandy’s commission in the army.

He had excellent attorneys. His father visited him every day and made it very clear that Santeros was going to get a half billion (or so) of adverse political advertising shoved down her throat at the next election cycle.

The trial itself was quite short, since the charges were designed to be undeniable. Sandy didn’t bother to deny them, and pled nolo contendere. Most of the trial involved the pre-sentencing hearing, in which two dozen Nixon crew members defended Sandy’s actions as necessary, sane, and probably the salvation of the ship; and former military colleagues represented him as an unsung hero.

Fiorella wasn’t allowed to cover the case, because of the obvious conflict of interest, but she’d been interviewed on the top-rated CBSNN show Sweet Emotion and, in her Ultra-Star way, had dampened half the hankies in America.

The prosecutor, a civil servant but determined opponent of everything Santeros stood for, asked that Sandy be given forty years, as a way to embarrass her. The judge, a Santeros appointee, had been listening to the witnesses, too, and had a friendly conversation with an old college buddy currently working at the Justice Department; he cut the sentence as short as he possibly could.

Sandy got five years, in Leavenworth.

On the first day of winter, he was taken out of the Washington federal courthouse in handcuffs and leg chains. Onlookers and former cell mates thought he looked unreasonably cheerful for a man facing hard time at Leavenworth.

He was to be transported to National Airport, and from there, flown to Kansas City, for further transfer on to Leavenworth.

The first vehicle was an eight-person van, divided into four cells, cages within a cage. Seating was minimal, but not brutal: a city-bus-style plastic seat, with minor alterations to allow the leg chain to be passed through a steel loop welded into the floor. There was enough room that he could stand and stretch.

He was allowed a slate with one book on it for entertainment, no Internet connection. On this day, he was the only passenger. The trip to National would take a half hour, since the federal marshals driving the van were not allowed to exceed the speed limit.

They were moving at precisely eight o’clock in the morning, the time chosen to avoid reporters. The first stop took place four minutes later, outside the old Smithsonian building. The van pulled to the side of the street, and one of the marshals in the front got out, came around to the back, and popped the door. Crow was standing on the curb, and climbed into the cell next to Sandy’s.

“I was wondering when you’d show up. I thought it’d be at National,” Sandy said. Gave him the toothy grin.

“Man, with that smirk, you gotta be even dumber than you look,” Crow said. “You’re on your way to Leavenworth. You know what that means? You’re gonna miss the best part of your life.”

“I’m thinking not,” Sandy said.

“Daddy can’t buy you outa this one, pal. Not gonna happen. And all your shipmates who think you saved their lives? Santeros dropped their petition in the wastebasket. She didn’t even bother to read it.”

Sandy looked down at his slate and flipped a page. Crow couldn’t quite see what he was reading. “Yeah, well. There’s always France. I think they’ll be willing to help out.” Sandy held up the slate: French for Americans.

“You gotta be kidding me.”

“Not at all. I need the refresher—it wasn’t my best subject at Harvard. I’ve always been an admirer of French civilization,” Sandy said. “The philosophy, the painting, the women, the food. The cheese, the mushrooms, the snails. You know. So I thought they’d really be the logical ones to lead the world into the next Renaissance.”

After a moment, Crow said, “You backed up the database, didn’t you? How’d you get it off the ship?”

“I’m gonna give it to the French. They’d ask me nicer.”

“The French? You motherfucker,” Crow said.

Sandy said, “You want to get out now? This is going to be a tiresome ride and I’ve got some serious reading to do.”

A long silence. Crow didn’t move. Then, “What do you want?”

“A pardon from the President,” Sandy said. “I’ll let her cover her ass. You know, ‘We let the trial go on, because we wanted to make a point about discipline. But there are extenuating circumstances, he’s very young and a little dumb, had a good service record’… blah blah blah.”

“We can talk about that,” Crow said.

“And I want an apology. I thought about requiring her resignation, because, you know, she’s quite the serious asshole. But… I guess anyone else would be just as bad.”

“No way she would quit,” Crow said. “Or apologize.”

“You could be wrong about that. If word got out about the stakes involved—the whole future of American technological leadership—I believe the House and Senate might be willing to listen. They don’t like her much, anyway. I think she might resign rather than face impeachment.”

“Word wouldn’t get out,” Crow said. “You’ll be amazed at how secure our prison system can be, when it wants to be. When was the last time you heard a political statement from Ramon Roarty?” Roarty had conceived and planned the Houston Flash; he was now serving a life sentence at Leavenworth.

“I believe the French ambassador might be asking for permission to visit me in Leavenworth,” Sandy said. “To check on rumors of inhumane treatment of prisoners.”

“A request that would be denied.”

“Amidst vast embarrassment. To say nothing of rather pointed inquiries from the Chinese.” Sandy looked thoughtfully through the bars of his cage at the low ceiling of the van. “Maybe I should spread the wealth around. Let the French have the science stuff… they’re no good with tech anyway… and give the alien technology stuff… to who? The Brazilians? They’re really good with machinery.”

For the first time in their entire acquaintance, Sandy saw a hint of surprise in Crow’s eyes. “Now you are fucking with me. It’s not the database? You’ve got a QSU?”

Sandy picked up the slate. “Hmmm, I need to work on my French for ‘fuck.’ That’ll be important,” he muttered. He read something on the slate. “And it’s a little complicated. It’d be embarrassing to use the wrong version of the word. The French are so… intricate… in their sexual ways, don’t you think?”

Another long silence, then, “I can get you the pardon.”

“And the apology…”

“We’ll work out something,” Crow said.

“I have to insist on the apology,” Sandy said. “A really abject one. Handwritten by herself. Signed. I’ll promise to hold it privately until she’s out of office. When she’s out, though, I’m gonna use my grandpa’s money to buy a mansion at Zuma Beach and I’ll put the apology on the wall of the entrance hall. Gonna be so cool. But the pardon has to be public. Like right now.”

“We’ll work it out,” Crow said again. “So. What did you do?”

“I won’t give you the precise details until I’m walking around free,” Sandy said.

“Just tell me. Or I’m getting out and the van can go on to Leavenworth. It’s not the day camp you seem to imagine it is.”

Sandy said, “You remember when I was fabbing the burn box and I had to do those measurements of the QSUs? Well, while Joe was busy building the circuits, I printed up a couple copies of the QSUs. I had my Red photos with perfect color-matching, and the precise scales, and when I finished… I mean, they were perfect. Then, when I was fitting the QSUs into the burn box, I switched a couple of them.”

“Why’d you do that?”

“Because everybody was so worried about what would happen if the Chinese took the ship. It was an obvious possibility, so… why not? If everything worked out, I’d just retrieve them and turn them over to you.”

“How’d you get them off the ship?”

“In my hand-camera case. Took the camera out, put the QSUs inside, sealed it up… and when we evacuated the Chinese from the Odyssey, took a minute to stick it on the far side of the ship with its Post-it pads. I was worried about the battery—that the lack of warmth would kill it. But then I remembered about the radiators. They put enough heat on parts of the hull that the hull actually was warmish, and that’s all I needed. With just a little warmth seeping into the camera case, the battery would last for five years. When we got back…”

“You used your remote to unstick it. The camera case is in orbit.”

“Yup. Saw it pop off the hull myself. It’ll take you about a hundred years to find it, with all the other shit that’s still floating around up there. What I’ll keep to myself, until I get the apology, is exactly what time I let that puppy go. Got it right down to the tenth of a second. With that information, you could find it in an hour.”

“Why’d you wait so long to tell me? Why this whole charade?”

“I think we needed it,” Sandy said. “I think we needed the whole trial, all the theatrics, all the bullshit about doing research on the readers, all the sincerity, to convince the Chinese that we really didn’t have anything, other than the raw science from the I/O. And that’s mostly theory—that’s gonna get out no matter what we do. Probably printed in Nature & Science. In fact, when I thought about it, publishing the science, even the little bit that we have, would set off a lot of research commotion, which would cover up the fact that we have all of it. For a while, anyway.”

Crow nodded and said, “You’re right. About all of it.” He stood up, climbed out of the van, and said to the marshals, who were waiting on the sidewalk, “Let him out.”

As the marshals came around, Sandy said, “You knew I’d been up to something. Why?”

“’Cause you once told me that you’d not only do what we want, you’d do what we need,” Crow said. “I believed you. Plus, of course, that shit-eating grin that would pop onto your face, from time to time, during the trial. Santeros actually spotted it.”

“Huh. Gotta work on that,” Sandy said. “Uh, why are the marshals just… letting me go?”

“They’re not exactly marshal-type marshals, if you take my meaning.”

“Did you ever catch your spy?”

“Can’t talk about that.”

“Did you ever figure out how he was communicating with the Chinese?”

“No, never did.”

“I read that Elroy Gorey died when the GPS went crazy on a twenty-wheeler, swerved across the road and killed him.”

“A tragedy,” Crow said. “We all felt terrible.” Neither his voice nor his face showed the slightest inflection.

The marshals freed him and Sandy climbed out of the van. Crow handed him an envelope. On the outside it said simply: “The White House.”

“What’s this?”

“The pardon,” Crow said. “I’ll work on the apology. Listen, my car’s right around the corner. You need a lift?”