John Sandford - Saturn Run

“Sir…”

“Zhuo, you need to get busy. One way or another, we’re going after the Nixon . With Beijing on board, or without them.”

Zhang’s proposal made the hour-plus-long trip to Earth. Beijing considered it for four hours. The reply made its hour-plus-long trip back to the Celestial Odyssey .

When the reply came in, Zhang was alone in his private quarters; had Duan been alive, she would have been with him, but Duan was now an ever-expanding cloud of atoms. The message came in a highly encrypted block of vid from the defense minister himself, who smiled tightly as he said hello; the smile disappeared as he continued.

“Admiral Zhang, your suggestion had already been considered here in some detail. Your analysis is correct: we really cannot afford to let the Americans get all of this technology to themselves. They are pushing us into a corner and they must be aware of that and the dangers that creates. I’m quite sure they don’t want us cornered. They had hoped to get away with this banditry, of course, but we cannot let them. We understand that much of the damage to your ship was done by what, in retrospect, was the inadvisable midcourse burn and then the necessity of the aerobraking maneuver.

“We accept responsibility for those errors: they were ours, not yours. We believe that two things could be done to rescue you: you could return via the two-year transit plan, and we could build a ship to pluck you from that orbit, or you could simply wait there, in a safe orbit, and we could send a rescue ship. We could, in fact, build that ship and get it there in time to rescue you. But that would not solve the problem of the Americans getting the alien science and technology. Therefore, we are going to announce, with great loss of what the West thinks of as our face, that our ship is so damaged that no feasible rescue is possible, unless done in cooperation with the Americans. We will announce that you will attempt a rendezvous. What happens then… we shall see. Now, you have on board, as a survivor, your first officer Cui. I have seen photographs of her and she is quite attractive. She also speaks English. We will have her interviewed by a reputable Xinhua reporter, in which she expresses the desperation of your condition. That script is being written now. We have created an attractive husband for her here, and two children, and they will add to the plea. Our… experts… tell us it will go viral, worldwide.”

When they were done, Zhang had to laugh. Not a happy laugh: the cynicism of international politics had always astonished him, and he’d not been disappointed in this latest example.

He floated out to the bridge, where Cui was waiting nervously. She said, “Yes?”

“Congratulations, Cui.”

“Sir?”

“On your marriage. And the babies. You have such pretty babies.”

“Sir?” She thought he’d lost his mind.

“Did I mention that you’re about to become a movie star?”

A week and a half after the Nixon departed the Maxwell Gap and the alien depot, the Celestial Odyssey followed. It was a very different kind of departure. The Nixon ’s exit had been excruciatingly slow, tiptoeing away from the debacle of humanity’s first contact with an alien intelligence. It had only managed to fully escape Saturn’s pull a day earlier.

In contrast, the Chinese left with a massive push. Ten blue-white plasma jets poured from the reactors at full thrust. In a few hours, they generated as much boost as the Nixon managed in three days. The Chinese gamble was a race between the tortoise and the hare, turned on its head. In the long run the Nixon could outpace the Celestial Odyssey tenfold. The short run was a different matter.

Lieutenant Sun’s models had confirmed Zhang’s instincts. The Nixon was a million kilometers from Saturn, far from the Celestial Odyssey , but it was only moving away at nine kilometers per second. That velocity would steadily increase, day by day, but the Nixon would be gaining only a few kilometers per second each day.

The Celestial Odyssey was traveling twice as fast and it would pick up even more velocity with its course correction burn. It’d lose speed relative to the Nixon as it coasted in free fall, but the Chinese ship would put as much distance between itself and Saturn in a day as the Nixon had in eleven. By then the Nixon would’ve moved on, ever-accelerating, but the Celestial Odyssey still had the sprint advantage.

With some midcourse corrections, as soon as they got an exact fix on the Americans’ intended flight path, the Chinese ship could catch up with them in a little over a day and a half. They’d both be about two million kilometers from Saturn and their velocities would match. A rendezvous was achievable, a rescue possible.

The scopes on the Nixon easily picked up the Chinese exit burn. The ten plasma exhausts were impressively bright even from a million kilometers.

Fang-Castro had been eating breakfast in her quarters with Martinez, talking about the condition of the ship and the testing of the alien readers, when Francisco called from the bridge. She tried not to jog to the command station, the better to maintain her dignity.

“Not another antimatter depot?” she blurted.

“No, the flare’s continuing and we’re not seeing any gamma rays. The Chinese are leaving. It’s the only thing it can be.”

She watched for a while, then said, “Department head meeting in half an hour. Comm, let everybody know.”

“Yes, ma’am.”

Fang-Castro went back to her fake scrambled eggs and real oatmeal.

The duration of the burn was a surprise. “Admiral, they’re not heading back to Earth as fast as I would’ve expected,” said Harbinson, from Navigation, at the meeting. “Unless they’re planning a big burn later, which wouldn’t be a very efficient use of their reaction mass, it’ll take them two and a half years to get home.”

“They took a lot of external tank damage during the aerobraking,” Martinez said. “Maybe this is all they’ve got. They escaped retrograde, like we did, the fastest way to drop down to Earth’s orbit. Or maybe the depot’s security AI ordered them to go, and they’re simply hightailing before something bad happens.”

“All speculation. We’ll have a better idea after they do their course correction burn,” said Fang-Castro. “Nonetheless, I’m happy to see the last of them. We’re fortunate we beat them to the depot and that our bluff worked. The shoe could’ve been on the other foot.” She turned to the President’s liaison. “Mr. Crow, do you have anything to add?”

Crow nodded. “I hope you’re right… about seeing the last of them. We have some intelligence that has suggested that Beijing is looking into various rescue plans. We’ve also heard that Beijing has told Xinhua to reserve a block of vid time for a special presentation”—he looked at the time code in the corner of the room’s vid screen—“about forty-five minutes ago. We’ll see it in another thirty, if it’s relevant. We have to consider the possibility that they’re not headed for Earth—that they’re coming after us.”

Fang-Castro looked at him for a moment, then said, “Oh… no.”

Oh, yes.

As soon as the Chinese burn began, the information ministry released the pretaped interviews with Zhang, in Chinese only, and Cui, in Chinese and English. Her children were seen on swing sets at a Chinese elementary school, with their handsome father, waiting for Mom to get home… if only the Americans would help.

The Nixon ’s leadership was still sitting in the conference room, waiting, more than anything, when the first reaction arrived, Santeros herself, from the Oval Office: