John Sandford - Saturn Run

Cui pinged the Chinese guard outside the strong room. “What is your status?”

“There are two Americans here, with guns, but they have not drawn them. My gun remains holstered.”

“We have been told that a kill trigger switch has been fired. Do you have any indication—”

“Yes. I heard a… boom… one minute ago, and I believe it came from the strong room. One moment, another American is running here.”

They waited and a few seconds later, the guard called again: “He has a fire extinguisher, which he says he needs to shoot on the outside of the burn box before the fire burns through. He says it will cool the box. Shall I allow him to open the door?”

Sun said, “Yes. Tell me what you see.”

The guard called again a moment later: “It is very hot in here. There is a steel box sitting on what looks like ceramic bricks. The box is glowing red at the top and white at the bottom. The American is spraying it with a freezing foam which does not stay on, but the box is cooling somewhat.”

Sun said, “I can’t believe it.”

She turned to Bob Hannegan and shot him in the head. Hannegan’s body simply dropped straight down; he might have had a surprised look on his face.

Sun looked up at the view screen, where Fang-Castro had reappeared. She shouted, “Admiral Fang-Castro. We demand that you return to your quarters. We have executed the first of your crew members, and will continue each five minutes until we are given access to the alien information.”

“The alien information has been destroyed,” Fang-Castro said. “Your own people can confirm this.”

“I do not believe this,” Sun shouted at her. “Even if so, you still have the I/O input. We demand that you return to your quarters, and return the ship to our control, so that we may access the datastore, or I will execute another crew member in”—she winked at her implants—“three minutes.”

Fang-Castro said, “Killing people won’t bring back the QSUs—”

“We can’t take the chance!” Sun shouted. “If you don’t believe me…”

She raised her gun, pointing it at Francisco.

Sandy shouted, “Wait, wait, wait… Colonel. I can fix this…. I promise you, I can fix this.”

Sun was wild-eyed: “And how would you fix this, Captain Darlington?”

“Let me…” He picked up his slate and unclipped his stylus. “A datastore switch.”

From the screen above him, Fang-Castro said, “Captain Darlington! Captain Darlington! Don’t do that. Don’t do that! That’s an order.”

Sandy looked up at the screen. “She’s crazy, ma’am. She’s going to kill Commander Francisco.”

Sun said, “Give me that switch.”

Sandy said, “No. Here. I’m going to fix everything.” He snapped the stylus in his hands, and said, “The datastore is gone.”

Sun shouted, “You are lying. You lie!” Spittle was flying from her lips as she looked around the room at the wide-eyed Americans. She pointed the gun at Sandy’s head and shouted, “Admiral, you have ten seconds to surrender the bridge—”

Cui shot her in the back.

Sun went down and rolled over, her eyes open, catching Cui just before she died. Cui felt nothing for her at all. She looked up at the screen and said, “Admiral Fang-Castro, if you will put me on ship-wide comm, I will order my crew to lay down their arms.”

Propulsion and Engineering’s systems ran entirely independently of the rest of the Nixon . The shift on duty had no appreciation of how much the balance of power had shifted in a few handfuls of minutes.

“Hey, Wendy, the comm channels are all open again,” one of her techs called out. Dr. Greenberg shook her head. Why did it seem like the interesting stuff always happened on her shift? So far, on this mission, “interesting” meant “bad.”

Okay, maybe not bad this time, she thought. She opened a channel to the bridge, thought about asking, “Hey what’s going on up there?” but decided on a more prudent formality, just in case she was speaking for history.

“Wendy Greenberg, here, chief engineer on duty. Can we have a status update? Over.”

“Wendy? You guys okay? Langers. The Chinese have surrendered. Summerhill, Hannegan, and Sun are dead. Over.”

There was a mutter all through Engineering: Summerhill was dead? But they had the ship back? Greenberg asked a tech, “Do I laugh or cry?”

When Fang-Castro and Crow got to the Commons, they found Sandy sitting in a chair next to a couple of Chinese soldiers. Sandy looked at Fang-Castro and said, “It’s all over?”

“It’s all over.” She shook her head: “We lost both the QSUs and the datastore. Mr. Francisco?”

“Yes, ma’am?”

“Take Captain Darlington to the remaining lockup and secure him there. I’m placing him under arrest for ignoring a direct order under combat conditions.”

Crow was dumbfounded. “Really?”

“I believe we could have negotiated—”

Clover jumped in. “You’re wrong. You’re flat wrong. Sun was nuts. She was going to kill all of us.”

Fang-Castro snapped: “I didn’t ask your opinion, Mr. Clover. This will all be subject to an inquiry. In the meantime, Mr. Darlington goes to jail. We’ve lost access to centuries’ worth of knowledge that would have revolutionized the world as we know it. Mr. Francisco, remove him.”

Sandy gave Crow the toothy grin: “Some days you ride the board, and some days the board rides you. That’s just life, big guy.”

Santeros was all too aware of the light-speed delay. It was not improving her temperament. It would be difficult for anything to put her in a worse mood than the past week. Starting with goddamn Fang-Castro’s taking the Chinese survivors on board the Nixon , and hadn’t that worked out well?

Then came the takeover and the runaround she’d gotten from Beijing. This was an act of piracy, clear and simple. Or maybe an act of war. Nobody disputed that. How had Beijing responded? With the diplomatic equivalent of a shrugged shoulder and a mock-sympathetic “Life is hard, isn’t it?”

And in the meantime, the Chinese had started a worldwide scare campaign: they were just trying to keep the Americans from keeping the tech that belonged to all humans. The scare campaign was gaining ground.

And that goddamn general secretary, Hong, was doing his best to piss her off even more. On the phone, just now: he didn’t say it in so many words, but the condensed version was that she—the fuckin’ President of the whole United fuckin’ States—was being blown off!

She said her polite good-byes, wished the general secretary’s family well, added under her breath that she hoped they’d all get tertiary syphilis, and slammed the handset down so hard that it cracked.

The bang made Paula White and Richard Emery, the chairwoman and vice chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, wince. They glanced at each other. Santeros had a famous temper, but this was off the scale.

Carefully and quietly, White asked, “No improvement, Madam President?”

“Oh no, it’s just great. Can’t you tell from the expression on my face?” She caught herself and took a deep breath, swallowed. “I’m sorry, Paula, I’m taking it out on you and I should be taking it out on that asshole, Hong. He’s got that grandpa face, and he’s a bigger hard-liner than me. Publicly, he’s all wringing of hands and bemoaning the ‘rogue activities’ of the Chinese pirates. In private he’s throwing a party. Hell, it’s not even that private.”

“Madam President,” said Emery, “we need to up the ante. Put pressure on Beijing as well as prepare for the worst. Paula and I”—he glanced over at his boss, who nodded—“we think you need to start mobilizing. Take our forces up to Tier Three. And if this doesn’t resolve soon, Tier Two.”