John Sandford: Saturn Run

Her chief of staff stuck his head in: “Ma’am, you’ve got a highest priority incoming from the Nixon . You’re gonna want to look at it.”

“How bad?”

The chief of staff scratched his head. “Honestly… I don’t know. It’s… I’m just going to spool it over to you.”

“Give it to me in one word. Are we going to war?”

“Uh… no, but I’m not sure how much happier you’re gonna be. Let me spool it over.”

Hong’s call came just past midnight in Washington, early afternoon in a sunny, flower-scented Beijing. In Washington, Gladys’s soft, synthesized voice spoke in the Oval Office. “Madam President, General Secretary Hong is on the line. May I put him through?” Santeros waved assent.

She said, “Mr. Secretary, we’re going to need something that’ll make both our populaces… and our governmental oppositions… happy. I’m getting a lot of push here just to have the Chinese rescuees shot outright, as pirates. No international tribunals, no repatriation. Just a bullet for each one.”

Hong: “And I’m dealing with folks who think they’re the Heroes of the Revolution. You shoot them and my administration won’t stand. The MSS will have me replaced with someone even more intractable within hours.”

Santeros chuckled. “Things don’t move quite so fast here, but if your ‘heroes’ get their way and my opponents can pin that on me, the next sound you hear will be the House drawing up articles of impeachment.”

Representative Cline shook her head vigorously no.

“Oh, face facts, Francie,” Santeros said. “If it looks like I caved in to the Chinese pirates, and you don’t support a motion to impeach, you’ll find yourself ex-Speaker before you could blink twice.”

Hong continued, “So, here’s our proposed joint statement: our two crews had some communications difficulties to begin with. Language barriers, misunderstood orders, which created some confusion and concern, but it was all over nothing. I can toss in something about radical dissidents trying to foment trouble, not in concert with our policies. I’m sure you can come up with something about minor difficulties in the power plant delaying the restart of the engines. The important thing being that everyone is working together now in the spirit of international cooperation to see that both our peoples come home safely.”

“That could fly, if your guys will go along. We’ll have to shut everybody up when they get back, but I can do that on my end.”

“And I can assure you that I can do it on mine. But I have to give the MSS a bone. They don’t believe that all the memory is gone. They point out that you have three major computers, not one.”

“You should know, you sabotaged one of them.”

“I’m trying to be… cooperative here, and find a way to save both our asses.”

“But primarily your own.”

“Of course, and I’m sure that you have the same relative priority.”

“Yes. I do.”

“So. Since you say the memory store and the QSUs are all gone… here is our proposal.”

Santeros had to struggle with the various interest groups involved—and talk to the top scientific experts—but in the end, acceded to the Chinese proposal.

One last task: put the screws to Fiorella. Santeros needed just the right news to be broadcast….

Greenberg was sucking down a bulb of coffee when she took the call from the bridge. The Nixon floated in space, fourteen million kilometers from Saturn and 1.3 billion kilometers from Earth.

“Dr. Greenberg, this is Commander Fang-Castro. You have permission to bring the engines back online, full power at your convenience. Helm has sent the navigation coordinates to your station. Let’s go home.”

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.”