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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.

Sandy dutifully vidded everything and then they headed back to the shuttle bay for the return trip to the Nixon. Crow amiably chatted the whole way, asking about opportunities for touring, even living in China. He thought there might be some prospect for posting to the diplomatic corps if he did well on this assignment.

Once they had jetted well away from the Celestial Odyssey, Sandy aimed his remote at the hand-camera, which unstuck itself, and as he stowed it, he said, “Jesus, what an enormous load of bullshit. The diplomatic stuff. You think they bought it? They know you’re the political officer.”

“What part did you think was bullshit?”

“The ‘hail fellow well met’ routine. Free-and-easy social banter isn’t really your style.”

“You really don’t know my style, Sandy.”

Sandy hesitated, then asked, “Do you?”

Crow shrugged, and they slid back to the Nixon. A minute before they arrived, he said, “I’ll tell you what, Sandy. When John Clover interrogated the alien AI, he was more interested in finding out why the aliens were doing things than what they were doing. That’s what I wanted to know. I didn’t so much care what the Chinese told me. What I cared about was how they told it to me. What I learned is that they are scared. You, they paid no attention to, because they understood your function. But they were frightened of me, because they were afraid I might say no, and they understand me as the political officer. They are deeply suspicious of us, but they badly wanted my approval.

“That, more than anything I saw or you vidded, makes me think they’re telling the truth. His crew has been traumatized and is operating under terrific stress. They’re keeping a lid on it as best they can, but they’re terrified. Unless their typical engineer is better at this game than I am, this isn’t some crafty ruse to get on board the Nixon. They need us. If we don’t help, they’re dead.”

After a minute, Sandy said, “All right.” After another minute, “I’m sorta impressed, man.”

____

Zhang and Cui inhaled the delicate vapors drifting up from the cups of tea that Fang-Castro had offered them. “Superb,” Zhang said. “Better than anything I can get. When we are back on the ground, you will have to give me the name of your provider. I’m stunned that you, outside of China, can obtain better leaf than I can.”

Fang-Castro smiled. “It’s a side effect of our international trade. When you find out what I paid for this, you’ll be amazed. The tea growers in China can make much more money selling their goods on the international market, than they can selling it locally. There’s not a lot of opportunity on a space station to spend my pay. So most of it goes into retirement funds for me and my ex-wife, and our children’s education. Tea is one of my few indulgences.”

Zhang sighed. “I hope we will get to enjoy retirements. On that point… I am feeling pressed for time. May we discuss transfer arrangements, assuming your investigations confirm my claims and encourage you to a favorable decision?”

“I read the summary of your situation. You only have nine space suits and your pressurized shuttle was destroyed in the antimatter explosion? Other than a handful of service eggs, similar to your pods, we don’t have any pressurized transfer vehicles, and our space suits are customized to the user. How did you plan to make the transfer?”