John Sandford - Saturn Run

“The goddamned Chinese are asking for a rescue. They say the Celestial Odyssey has calculated a trajectory that will pair up with you in a day or so….” She called off-screen, “Is that right? A day or so? A day and a half?”

She turned back to face Fang-Castro and the others. “A day and a half. They issued the goddamnedest propaganda vid you ever saw, the Odyssey ’s first officer, cute as a button, hoping we’ll help, pictures of her kids at their school, waiting for Mom. She speaks English… the vid’s gone viral, it’s on a half-billion phones in India alone, probably a hundred million here…. We’re gonna cut it in at the end of this briefing so you can see it yourself. We got all the big brains working on a reaction, but I’m telling you, there’s no way we can say no. Not with those kids on the swing set. I suspect they’re about to produce a vid of her breast-feeding the little fuckin’ crotchfruit.

“So, you need to start thinking about how to contain the Chinese, because they’re coming for you. What’s gonna happen then, we don’t know, but we’re working on scenarios. You better start working on some of your own, you know the ship better than we do.” She looked to the side again, this time asked, “What? What? Oh, yeah.” She turned back to the camera. “Some of our guys think that they’re, well, they’re gonna try to take the Nixon . Take the alien tech. Can’t let that happen. That’s the first priority: they cannot have the tech. Let us know what you’re thinking…. Here comes the vid.”

The rest of the day was taken in video-conferencing, with the tiresome round-trip time in the discussions.

Toward the end of the day shift, Ferris Langers pinged Fang-Castro; a ping with an urgent tag. She was in the bathroom. Fang-Castro had a number of informal rules, which, though informal, were quite clear to her staff. One was that if a ping was labeled urgent, it goddamned well better be urgent. The goddamned was not articulated but was well understood.

She touched her slate, audio only. “What is it, Lieutenant?”

“Ma’am, I’ve been running the numbers of the Chinese ship. The solutions don’t make any sense for a return to Earth. I guess I’m confirming what everybody’s saying. They’re coming after us.”

“Would you care to elaborate on that?” A pro forma request. She’d known what the Chinese were doing since the moment Crow suggested it, even before the call from Santeros.

“The Odyssey just completed their inclination and course correction burns. When I figured up their new trajectory, it was still directed at the inner solar system, but it came close to ours. I ran the timeline forward, and it wasn’t just close. In a little more than a day, they’re going to be at about the same place in space that we will, with a similar velocity vector.”

She commed Crow. “Mr. Crow, the Chinese have corrected course, and there’s no longer a question. I need you in the conference room, fifteen minutes. Bring all your ideas.”

“Yes, ma’am.”

She closed the link. After issuing several other peremptory come-hithers, she poured a cup of tea, cradled it in her hands, and thought very hard about just how much trouble they might be in.

When Fang-Castro arrived at the conference room twenty-two minutes later, she was gratified to see that everyone she had summoned was already seated. Crow, looking pensive; Martinez, almost sleepy, which meant he was thinking hard; Major Barnes, freshly out of medical isolation, intent; Fiorella, engaged; Lieutenant Langers; and Greenberg, the chief engineer. All swiveled in their chairs and looked at her as she entered the room. Darlington didn’t; he was busy checking the settings on the recording equipment. Langers kept glancing down at his slate, where orbital models were running.

“Mr. Darlington, you’re ready?” Fang-Castro asked.

“Yes, ma’am. We’re on the air, straight back to the Oval Office.”

“Then let’s proceed. Lieutenant Langers has confirmed that the Chinese are coming after us.” She nodded toward the slightly nervous navigator. “Mr. Langers? You have the floor.”

The soft-spoken officer kept it short and concise. His summary, accompanied by a few plots brought up on the conference room vids, barely took longer than his original phone call to Fang-Castro.

Greenberg was incredulous. “We’re not helpless! We have power and plenty of delta-vee to spare. If we thrust at ninety degrees to our current trajectory, it would add, oh, a week, maybe, to the trip back. Then our course’d be well clear of the Chinese.”

Fang-Castro looked at the navigator, who was tapping away at his slate. He shook his head. “That won’t do the trick. We’d be a hundred thousand kilometers off to one side when the Celestial Odyssey passed us, on their current trajectory. The thing is, they’ll pick up on a course shift pretty quickly, and once they do, they can adjust their trajectory accordingly. They’ve got over a million kilometers to cover before they reach us. If they can manage a lateral burn of a kilometer or so per second, they can track us. Seems likely.”

Fang-Castro thought about that. “And, without the additional forward thrust from our engines, they’d catch us even sooner.”

Langers nodded. “By an hour or two.”

“There’s also the question of how the Chinese would react to an attempt to elude them and how Earth would react,” Crow said. “If we successfully stay away from them, they die.”

“So we’re going to have visitors,” Fang-Castro said. “We need to prepare the ship for them. I don’t mean baking cupcakes. We can’t allow them to capture the ship, take it away from us. I need ideas on how to secure the ship and the alien tech from possibly aggressive moves.”

Fiorella asked, “What if they’re on a suicide run? What if their plan is simply to take us out? If they do that, nobody gets the tech, and everything goes back to the status quo. From their point of view, that might not be an undesirable outcome.”

Martinez, now looking so sleepy that his eyes were almost closed, said, “Then we’re fucked. Excuse the language. I’ve thought about that, about what we could do about that, and my answer is, ‘Not much.’ Depending on what they’ve still got aboard, there’s lots of ways they could kill us. So I go back to a variation of John Clover’s fundamental position on the aliens…. Since there’s nothing we can do about it, if they intend to blow us up, we might as well plan on the basis that they won’t.”

Fang-Castro nodded, but said, “Mr. Crow, Major Barnes, Captain Darlington—I want you on military status, now, Sandy—and Mr. Martinez, I want you to brainstorm that whole proposition: Is it really true that we couldn’t do anything? If they don’t blow us up, what can we do to secure the ship from a takeover? We need procedures for taking the Chinese on board, without jeopardizing our own position. I want complete recommendations in four hours: that will allow the ship warfare experts on Earth to view this vid, confer, generate their own recommendations, and get them back to us. Four hours, people.”

Barnes held up a hand, and Fang-Castro nodded to him: “Major Barnes.”

“Ma’am, we need to do more than plan for ship security. We also need to plan for what we’d do if security fails and the Chinese manage to take over the ship. That might be a small possibility, but we have to consider it.”

Crow interjected: “You’re right.” And to Fang-Castro: “He’s right.”

“I’m sure he is,” Fang-Castro said. Back to Barnes: “Do you have any practical suggestions for, um, a post-takeover scenario?”

“Yes. I’d suggest that we set up some kind of kill switch that would allow us to destroy the alien tech if we needed to. Joe tells me we’re shipping everything that came over the I/O link back to Earth as quickly as we can, but it’s not fast enough. I suggest we take down all other high-speed commo links with Earth, and use them to speed up the I/O, to capture as much of that as we can before the Chinese arrive. And maybe even refuse to allow the Chinese aboard for as long as possible so we can keep sending it.”