John Sandford - Saturn Run

Sandy went to an open channel back to the Nixon : “Comm, are you seeing all this? Just checking.”

“We see it. Astonishing. Keep it coming, Sandy.”

They lingered for a few moments outside the Chinese ship, doing a complete vid scan of the exterior. When Sandy finished, Crow maneuvered the bus into the one operational shuttle bay on the Celestial Odyssey . It was a huge space, clearly designed to accommodate a surface-to-orbit vehicle. Now it contained nothing but a couple of runabouts and service pods. A second shuttle, they’d been told, was currently useless, trapped behind nonfunctioning doors on the other shuttle bay. The external vids might confirm that, once Martinez went over them. Sandy couldn’t tell, from one look: there was simply too much patchwork on the exterior of the ship.

As Crow maneuvered into the shuttle bay, Sandy stuck the small hand camera on a side-support, with the camera aimed toward the air lock. If a bunch of Chinese troopers came boiling out to seize the bus while he and Crow were inside, the Nixon would see it.

While they waited for the bay to pressurize, Crow and Sandy disconnected themselves from the bus and pushed off toward the floor. The shuttle bay was zero-gee environment, as was the entire ship.

“They gotta have some kind of serious exercise regimen, or they’re gonna drop dead when they get back to Earth,” Sandy said.

“They do,” Crow said, as though he actually knew. “And they got lots of meds.”

“That shit can kill you all by itself,” Sandy said.

The environmental all-clear had come through on their internal readers. As they stripped off their suits, the inner bay door opened and two people came in, led, Sandy noticed, by a young woman, about his age. A really, really cute young woman, small, slim, buff, who looked like she was made to ride a surfboard.

The two Chinese stopped a few meters from the two Americans. “Welcome to the Celestial Odyssey . I am Second Officer and Acting Commander Sun Yu Jie, and this”—she gestured to her left—“is our medical officer, Dr. Mo Mu.”

Her English was excellent, with only the faintest hint of an accent. “Please do not be offended, but Dr. Mo is going to perform a body scan on both of you, to ensure that you are not bringing any weapons or explosives on board. I am entirely comfortable with the arrangements Captain Zhang has made, but some of my crew is nervous.” She looked regretful. “They feel that we are at the disadvantage in this situation. This will relieve some of their anxiety and distrust, unjustified as it is.”

Sandy gave her his toothy grin. “No problem! I’m Sanders Darlington. Everyone calls me Sandy—”

Crow’s voice crackled in his earbud. “Zip it, Sandy.”

Sandy said to the woman, “…and this is Mr. Crow, my assistant.”

The woman smiled back and extended a hand to Crow: “Yes, Mr. David Crowell, the political officer. Ours, unfortunately, as you heard, was killed. She was loved by everyone. As, I’m sure, is Mr. Crow.”

“Absolutely,” Sandy said. “And by no one more than myself.”

Crow said, “Mr. Darlington is our videographer and will be sending a vid stream of what we observe back to the Nixon for the experts there to evaluate. We understand that time is short, and I put myself and Mr. Darlington at your disposal. I’m sure you best know what we need to see to appreciate your situation and confirm Captain Zhang’s statements. Not, I assure you, that we’ve been given any reason to doubt them.”

Sun reached out to Sandy, and as they shook hands, she said, “Captain Darlington. I’ve been watching your vids since you left Earth. You are very talented. Welcome aboard.”

Crow conjured up a look of regret, and said, apparently embarrassed, “The President is insisting on confirmation in a matter which has such profound international repercussions. If it were left up to me, we could dispense with all of this.”

“The scan, then?” Sun asked. “You accept the scan?”

“Yes, of course.”

“Do you wish to continue in English?” Sun asked. “Or go to Mandarin? I understand yours is excellent.”

Crow didn’t flinch. “English is fine.”

With the formalities completed, and the body scans done, the four of them left the hangar bay for their tour of the ship. Mo also spoke English, and Crow engaged him in polite chitchat, inquiring of his family, wondering what it was like to practice space medicine on a trip like this, and admiring the spaciousness of the ship they were wandering through.

Sandy marveled at it: Crow was completely in character as a political functionary, a meet-and-greeter whose primary skill was to be disarmingly pleasant and a good listener.

Though it didn’t demand any dissimulation to marvel at the scale of the Chinese ship. The Nixon was large in dimension, but very little of that was interior space. The Celestial Odyssey was all about carrying cargo, people, and equipment. Three-quarters of the interior was taken up with the propulsion system, mostly the huge internal liquid hydrogen tanks that provided reaction mass for the thermal nuclear engines, but the remaining quarter was still a lot of volume, especially in a zero-gee vessel that was carrying a fraction of the number of people it’d been designed for.

Crow consulted his slate and said, “We’d like to see the propulsion system and talk to a few of your engineers, if we could.”

Sandy did vid of the conversation: most of the engineers spoke passable English, and Crow relayed questions from Martinez and Greenberg. At the end, he asked that their engine operation and refueling logs, from the time they arrived at Saturn, be transmitted to the Nixon . The engineers looked at Sun, who nodded.

Sandy didn’t know what Crow was seeing, but nothing he saw suggested that Zhang had told anything but the truth. Sandy didn’t understand, and wasn’t interested in, most of the details of ship operations. But after documenting the activities of the Nixon ’s crew for nine months, he had developed a feel for what were normal working situations in space.

This surely wasn’t. There were many fewer workstations than the Nixon had, and two-thirds of them were unstaffed. Some of that might be differences in the way the Americans and the Chinese did things, but overall, the ship looked bare bones to him. The unused stations were powered down and there was a very, very thin layer of dust on the screens, about what you’d expect to see from a few days of non-use on Earth. But in a spaceship, in zero-gee? They must be having scrubber problems. Sandy made a note for his report.

The remainder of their tour didn’t turn up anything to contradict the impression that the Celestial Odyssey was operating with a skeleton crew. Sun asked if there was anything else they needed to see.

Crow carefully consulted his slate one last time and, apparently chagrined, asked if it would be possible to see some of the crew quarters. He told Sun that he felt this was an invasion of privacy and that if she declined he wouldn’t hold it against her or their evaluation. It would make his job easier, though, if she could accommodate this awkward, and in his view inappropriate, request.

She agreed to the request—the whole thing had been gamed by both sides, Sandy realized, and there were no unexpected moves—and took them to what amounted to a space-side barracks. Most of the Chinese quarters were laid out for three or four occupants, and a large fraction of them seemed to be entirely unoccupied. Unless the Chinese had very carefully staged all the living quarters, Crow’s random sampling ought to yield a fair statistical estimate of the number of Chinese remaining in the crew.