When they were all out, Cui barked an order, gave them a moment to focus on her, and took that moment to do a quick evaluation of the ranks. They all looked alert and in good health. Excellent. Manfred could check them over later.
“Your attention,” she said. “We have some very sad news….”
Lieutenant Peng looked like he might burst into tears. Dr. Gao’s eyes were huge; eventually she would think to close her mouth. Sun appeared thoughtful. She wasn’t surprised by any of that; she knew her crew. Cui would make a good commander, even if she lacked the seasoning of Zhang.
“Sun is your new first officer. Retrieve your duffels from the bus and carry them to the American marines for inspection. You will get individual receipts for your property.”
Fang-Castro asked Crow, “What do you think, Mr. Crow? Anything catch your attention?”
“What happened to Zhang—that’s not right. I don’t understand that, and I need to,” Crow said, flicking through the pages on his slate. “As for physical security… Most of their duffels were purely personal effects, plus some electronics, mostly standard brand-name slates, although we’re checking them closely, of course. We found nothing hidden, nothing resembling contraband or an effort to circumvent our security. There were an unusually large number of drugs, along with the usual vitamins, headache remedies, and such. Their Dr. Mo said that they were primarily to offset the effects of long-term zero-gee travel and to counter any possible damage from radiation exposure at Saturn. It’s plausible. Manfred and his medical people are doing analysis of all the various drugs as well as all the volatile chemicals carried aboard… mostly soaps, perfumes, deodorant, that sort of thing.”
“Are we in danger?”
“No way to know. Zhang… Is there some kind of coup under way? There doesn’t appear to be. As for them taking over the Nixon… If I were them, I’d be thinking about it. But a ship this size? With only eighteen unarmed people? Not if they don’t hold Command and Control, for certain. Obviously we do not allow any of them into C & C. Not for any reason.
“We’re going to lock down their quarters on a rotating schedule, give them limited access to the Commons and other areas, such as the gym, a limited number at a time. Restrict them to the living modules and elevators—no access aft to Engineering or to the storage and shuttle bay. I’d like to keep them out of the elevators, keep them confined to one section of one living module, but the shared facilities of the ship—galley, gym, medical bay, and so on, are distributed across the habitat sections, so we obviously can’t completely restrict them.”
Fang-Castro noticed a wrinkle in Crow’s forehead. Probably the closest he ever came to a furrowed brow. “Unfortunately for us right now, the designers didn’t plan this as a prison ship,” Crow continued. “I would recommend that you set up a monitoring screen on the bridge, with continuous coverage of all internal cameras, and detail some of our marines to watch the cameras at all times…. This situation makes me more uncomfortable than I expected it to be. Especially the loss of Zhang. We knew quite a bit about him. About Cui… we know almost nothing.”
“I’ll take your recommendations for surveillance,” Fang-Castro said. “We have them quartered in different areas of the ship, we’ve split up their sleep/wake schedule and require them to be in their beds during the sleep cycle, we split up exercise cycles and require them to attend,” Fang-Castro said. “We’ve arranged it so that it would be hard for even half of them to congregate at once. We’ve taken their communication gear… I don’t know what more we can do.”
“I’ll think of something,” Crow said.
“Do we have some kind of anti-paranoia pill?” Fang-Castro asked. “If we do, maybe you should take one, David.”
Crow was paging through his slate at a pace little short of frenetic. Fang-Castro said, “David. Relax. Have a cup of tea.”
Lieutenant Sun followed Cui out of the shuttle bay toward a cart that was waiting to take them to the living module elevator. When they were alone, she opened a file of printed paper—hard copies of personnel lists with medical histories to be given to the Nixon’s doctors—and pulled two sheets of paper, checked the page numbers, and then pressed them together, face-to-face.
Cui: “What are you doing?”
Sun: “Creating a chemical reaction. There is a plastic coating on page fourteen that will be dissolved by the chemical treatment on page nineteen.”
“What?”
Sun peeled the two sheets of paper apart and said, “Lick the corner of this page.”
“What?”
“If you don’t lick the page, in about”—Sun checked her implants—“three hours, you’re going to spend several hours on a very pleasant trip.”
“Yu Jie, what are you talking about?”
“You can thank me later, Zhuo, but we’re about to take control of the USSS Richard M. Nixon. You will have your own ship, Captain Cui.”
58.
“What?” Cui said it again, feeling stupid.
Sun said, “Short version, there’s a drug in the Nixon’s air supply. It’ll become active in less than three hours. The antagonist on this paper will block it. I can give you the long version, but first, lick the paper.”
Cui refused to give ground. “You’re my second. You may speak frankly, but you do not give me orders. I am your superior.”
Sun shook her head. “You are not my superior officer. I operate under a mandate from the Party and the Ministry of State Security. Duan Me, the Celestial Odyssey’s political officer, reported to me. I report directly to the MSS. I am not obligated to follow your orders. Strictly speaking, you are obligated to follow mine. Lick. The. Goddamn. Paper… ma’am.”
She offered the paper again. The expression on her face was fierce and imploring, both. Cui licked the paper, her eyes never leaving Sun’s.
“Now. Tell me. All of it.”
Sun told her.
Sun was yuhanguan. Yes, she had done everything and been on every assignment that was in her official dossier. Primarily, though, she functioned as a covert operative for the Ministry of State Security. She was thirty-six years old, not twenty-eight. Since Sun had turned twenty, she had been officially aging, on paper, one year for every two real years.
“I’ve had a longer career than most. That’s just good fortune,” Sun said. “Agents age out of the program when it becomes too difficult to reconcile their physical age with their paper one. I was lucky with good genes: I look unusually youthful, and I haven’t started to shift into a middle-age appearance, yet.”
Her apparent youth was used to place her in the lower levels of any command group, where she’d be less conspicuous, she said.
Her personal medication and toiletries were completely innocent. Her papers were not, and had been primed with several chemical agents. One of the agents was designed to incapacitate a large number of people in a large enclosed space in a short period of time, useful, on Earth, in terrorist hostage situations. Hardly ever likely to be needed in space, but how handy it was, if it were needed.
As soon as she had realized what dire straits the Celestial Odyssey was in, Sun had begun re-analyzing her options. After Zhang confided his plans to his officers, she reached out to several carefully selected crew members, the ones she was sure would be most patriotic.