John Sandford - Saturn Run

“You’re sort of skipping over an important point, Naomi,” Crow said. “We’re required to render assistance if it doesn’t put us in danger. But what if it does? Who decides what constitutes danger? What happens if Santeros and her intel people decide that taking Chinese troops into an unarmed vessel is automatically dangerous, and they communicate that to you?”

Fang-Castro looked up at the ceiling, thought about it, then looked back at Crow and smiled. “You know what? If they did that, and I ordered a rescue anyway, then it would all come down to what the Chinese did. If we rescued them, and that was it—we simply hauled them back to Earth on friendly terms—then Santeros wouldn’t do anything. I might not get another star, but that would be the end of it. On the other hand, if the Chinese did try to take our ship, and I survived, then I’d probably be court-martialed and convicted.”

“Yes.” Crow put his fingertips together. “It ain’t pretty. So what are we going to do?”

“Well, I think you should get word of this conversation back to Santeros, so we don’t wind up putting ourselves in a mutually untenable situation. Convince her to leave the decision to me, and I’ll take full responsibility for whatever happens. She can find reasons to do that—for example, our comm lag is now so bad that she would be unable to provide me with minute-by-minute orders, and blah-blah-blah. Her PR people can handle it.”

“I don’t know if they’ll go for that, but I can try,” Crow said. “They may try to download about a thousand different scenarios on us, everything they can think of, with specific orders for each one.”

“Tell them not to do that. If I tried to follow their scenarios, something inevitably would get screwed up, and they’d get blamed,” Fang-Castro said. “No. You tell them if something goes wrong, I’ll take the blame.”

“I’m not sure they’re so worried about who to blame—it’d be you, no matter what happens—as they are genuinely worried about what would happen if the Chinese got all this tech, and we didn’t. If they grabbed our ship, and, you know, took it and kept it.”

“I worry about that, too. Which brings me to something else I need from you. I need you to analyze the security situation should we be required to take an indeterminate number of crew members from the Celestial Odyssey on board.”

“We’re working on that.”

“David, I’ve never asked you this, but it’s time to put a few more cards on the table. How many trained military personnel do we have on board the Nixon ?” She held up a hand to stop him before he began to answer. “In total. Not just the official complement, but including the ones you had placed undercover among the regular crew members. Like Sandy Darlington. No, you don’t have to give me names. Not yet. I just want the head count.”

Crow didn’t hesitate. “We have fifteen. Including the official eight, you, and First Officer Francisco.”

“Mmm,” Fang-Castro said. “I’d hoped for a few more. What’s the latest guess on how large the Chinese crew is?”

Crow shook his head. “No change there. It can’t be fewer than twenty-five. We can’t imagine any way, technically, to run that ship with fewer people. Fifty might be a plausible guess. But it could be larger than our complement, maybe over a hundred.”

“David, that really doesn’t help at all,” Fang-Castro said. “You better start grinding out your own scenarios. And we better hope that the Chinese have their situation under control, and this doesn’t come up.”

Crow said, “We’ll get those memory things from Wurly, those quantum devices, the next time over. Supposedly, that’s everything they’ve got—science, tech, everything. We could simply say that we didn’t want to get in an untenable position here, given the lack of cooperation from the Chinese government… and then leave.”

“What would Santeros say to that?”

“Listen, what Santeros wants is every bit of information we can squeeze out of the alien station, and she doesn’t want the Chinese to get any of it,” Crow said. “She knows that’s probably not possible, but that’s the baseline of what she wants.”

“I don’t see any way that could happen.”

“There’s one way. We get everything, and decide to leave. The Chinese know that if we leave without them, they’re all dead. So they have to come with us, and we agree to take them, but we don’t give them time to download everything themselves. Then we’ve got it, and they don’t.”

“That’s a dangerous game,” Fang-Castro said. “If we’ve got it, but they don’t, then our ship is in real danger. The Chinese could decide that it’s better to destroy us than let us get back to Earth with the alien tech. Or they could decide that they’ve got to take our ship, and take the tech.”

“Yes.”

“Or they could launch a very small conventional warhead that we’d never see—if they haven’t already done it—and simply steer it into us, while we’re on the way back. The Nixon goes up in smoke, and who knows what caused it?”

“Yes.”

After a moment, she asked, “What do you think, realistically, is the best possible outcome, other than we get it all, and they don’t get any?”

“Ohhh… you know, the Odyssey started out as a colony ship, set up for a very long mission. What they could do, simply, is wait us out. When we leave, they go into the station and do just what we did. Get it all. Then the competition moves back to Earth. And that’s fine. The Chinese have some great scientists, but so do we. The competition would be pretty even. Could even become cooperative.”

“Would Santeros go for that? Or do we come back to the idea that she wants all of it, and she doesn’t want the Chinese to get any of it?”

“I don’t know. I think she’d go for it if she had no choice. I really think she’s waiting to see what’s going to happen with the Chinese ship. If it makes a good orbit tomorrow, and doesn’t need help, maybe that’s where she’ll leave it. But that woman is always looking for an advantage. This game is nowhere near over.”

The Celestial Odyssey ’s trajectory was very tight and its speed was way too fast. The Chinese ship would hit closest approach at over fifty kilometers per second. The Chinese would have to kill more than half of that velocity to get into a circular orbit. Plus, their trajectory was still inclined fifteen degrees to the ring plane, and even if they achieved orbit, they’d need yet more delta-vee to turn their orbit into one that brought them into reasonable proximity with the alien depot.

The Nixon ’s nav crew said the Celestial Odyssey ’s approach would bring them through the ring system out of view of the Nixon on the first pivotal pass. At the Chinese ship’s velocity, the most critical part of the encounter was going to be over in less than an hour. The Nixon wouldn’t be able to see the ship again until well after it passed periapsis.

Joe Martinez had a fix for that. He and Sandy modified two recon shells, fabbing lens extenders for the standard camera lenses. Martinez launched his do-it-yourself reconnaissance satellites into polar orbits, a half an orbit out of phase. That way, at any moment, one satellite had a view above the ring plane and the other below. The solution wasn’t perfect: the two cameras gave them only ninety-five percent coverage, but it would have to do.

By that “night”—ship’s time—the Chinese ship was still in free fall, closing in on Saturn faster and faster when it should have been decelerating. The nuclear thermal engines, monstrous as they were, still only provided a fraction of a gee. With dozens of kilometers per second to shed, the Chinese ship’s burn should have started hours before.