John Sandford - Saturn Run

Cui: “What are you doing?”

Sun: “Creating a chemical reaction. There is a plastic coating on page fourteen that will be dissolved by the chemical treatment on page nineteen.”

“What?”

Sun peeled the two sheets of paper apart and said, “Lick the corner of this page.”

“What?”

“If you don’t lick the page, in about”—Sun checked her implants—“three hours, you’re going to spend several hours on a very pleasant trip.”

“Yu Jie, what are you talking about?”

“You can thank me later, Zhuo, but we’re about to take control of the USSS Richard M. Nixon . You will have your own ship, Captain Cui.”

“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.