The people who were still awake, the Chinese, their “supervisors,” and the rest of the crew on duty, didn’t make much noise, either. The Chinese who’d been offered the antagonist, the most trusted ones, were quietly going about their tasks. The rest of the Chinese, like the Americans, were too engrossed in the extraordinarily entertaining synesthesia surrounding them to say or do much.
Engineering was quiet, too, but it was operating normally. It was on its own air system. Nobody there, including Dr. Greenberg, who’d taken the late shift to supervise the next day’s engine restart, noticed anything out of the ordinary. They went about their business, uploaded the routine status reports to the bridge, and supervised the smoothly running power plant.
In the living modules, those Chinese who weren’t tripping gently removed the weapons and any ammunition they could find from their military escorts. They pulled the escorts into empty quarters and left them sitting or lying on the beds, enjoying their fantastic new world.
Two went off to the bus deck, opened the outer lock, and took the bus back to the Odyssey, where a nineteenth crewman, a volunteer who’d offered to risk his life to stay with the ship for a few more hours, had been hidden.
He was waiting, with the Odyssey’s armory, mostly handguns fitted with high-storage capacitor slugs, which would disable any living creature they hit, and perhaps kill a few.
And there were a few guns that were simply that: large-caliber weapons loaded with slugs that would kill without fragmentation ricochet or the power to do much secondary damage to things like a hull….
The round-trip took barely an hour.
The nine functional Chinese crew members rendezvoused with Cui and Sun in the ship’s conference room. From there, they moved to the bridge, where they removed the personnel on duty, save for the crew members staffing the communications, safety, and security workstations. Three stayed to watch over the controls and the tripping crew members. They’d need them later. The Chinese could control the rudimentary functions of the Nixon; those were sufficiently self-explanatory. The intricacies of real day-to-day operation? For that they’d need the Americans.
Three more positioned themselves respectively in life support, the galley, and at the dual air lock that led into Engineering.
The remaining two roamed the corridors of the Nixon, looking for any more incapacitated military personnel whose weapons they could confiscate and anyone who might still be wandering free. There were very few; at this late hour the only crew members who were up were the ones who were supposed to be on duty.
By the time everyone was in position, most of the night had passed. The eleven sober yuhanguan settled themselves down and waited for their compatriots and the Americans to sober up.
59.
Wendy Greenberg was the first crew member on the Nixon to notice something wrong. She was wrapping up her night in Engineering. She liked to be on-site for engine restarts. The confidence she expressed to the admiral about the state of the power plant wasn’t false—but they’d had enough trouble with the power plants over the course of this mission that even when everything was running smoothly, and she had every expectation it would continue to, she wanted to be there during the run-up to ignition. Just in case.
Now she checked the time: 6:05 A.M. Her shift replacement was late.
That was not okay. Yesterday had been a little bit crazy, but her people had had plenty of time to learn that she was a little bit anal about punctuality. She would have words with somebody.
No point sitting around twiddling her thumbs, she thought. She went back to the endless task of filing operations reports. Definitely not the best part of the job.
When she looked up again, it was 6:20 A.M. That was more than not okay. Mildly steamed, she turned to one of the techs. “Julie, did Javier say anything to you about a shift change for today?”
“No, why?”
“Because he’s twenty minutes late and I’m beat. I’m pinging his comm.” Should have done that at 6:01, she groused to herself.
Julie Park: “He’s not usually late for anything. He’s as anal as you are, Chief.”
“Or you.”
“Let’s face it, if you’re in Engineering…”
Greenberg tapped the comm button. Nothing. Huh. “Hey, Julie, I’m not getting an answer, not even in pingback from his comm. Can you ping Javier from your slate?”
“Yup.” A few seconds later, “Uh, problem, boss. I can’t get a connection, either. Something’s screwed up with communications.”
By then, Greenberg was opening a line to the bridge. Except, it wouldn’t open. She tried the communications station, then security, and finally the admiral’s personal comm. They were locked out of the system.
“This ain’t good. I’m going to find out what’s wrong. Julie, you’re in charge of the room until the next shift shows up or I get back. Whichever’s first.”
She launched herself out of the control room and down the corridor to the air locks. Park switched to the command workstation and had just started reviewing the status plots, when Greenberg returned. Barely a minute had passed. She was flushed and wide-eyed, out of breath.
“Wendy, what…?”
“We’re locked in. I cycled through the first air lock, no problem. When I got to the second, the door wouldn’t open. The far-side door was wedged open, so the lock couldn’t cycle. There was a woman on the far side, so I banged on the door. She turned around. I didn’t recognize her. She was one of the Chinese we picked up, I think. She had a gun. She gestured with it for me to go back.”
Park said, “Then we’re in really bad trouble.”
For the next three hours, everyone in Engineering who didn’t absolutely, positively have to be monitoring the power plant and the engines tried to find a way to communicate with the rest of the ship. Nothing. They couldn’t raise any of the stations in Command and Control. Not just security or communications, but the helm and Navigation were out of touch, as well. They couldn’t even get through to the galley to order coffee, or send themselves a message to their own quarters. The whole intraship network was down. At least, it wasn’t accessible to them.
Okay, hard decision time, Greenberg thought. No helm, no navigation. We’re flying blind. We should be on course, but we can’t actually tell if our heading’s drifted or what. Not good.
She made the call. “Guys, let’s shut everything down. We won’t fire the VASIMRs up until the admiral says so. We’re going back to standby status until we know what’s going on.”
Commander Fang-Castro rolled over and stretched. She’d slept exceptionally well. Remarkable dreams, surreal even for a dreamscape—more intense, more vivid than any she could recall having before, but exceptionally enjoyable. Her wake-up alarm should be going off any moment; she had an unusually reliable internal body clock. She clicked her implants.
After nine o’clock?
She’d badly overslept, and either the alarm hadn’t gone off or had failed to wake her. Someone should have called down from the bridge when she hadn’t relieved Francisco over an hour ago. She grabbed her comm and hit the fast-connect for his. Nothing. No response.
His quarters, the same. Bridge and Engineering, the same. No one was picking up her comm; she couldn’t even tell if they were getting through. She jumped out of bed, threw on her uniform, and headed for the door.