John Sandford - Saturn Run

“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.