Fang-Castro scratched her nose, then said, “Mr. Crow.”
Crow smiled. “Major Barnes has nailed it. This would give us an ultimate fallback.”
Barnes: “Keep in mind, we wouldn’t even have to use the box if we decide ten hours from now that we don’t need it. But if we decide a day from now that we desperately need one, but didn’t have it, it might be too late to fab one. We could fab it now and decide later if we need it.”
Fang-Castro looked at Martinez and said, “Build it.”
“Yes, ma’am. Though . . .”
“What?”
“Ah, I just hate the thought of blowing all that tech. We’ve got that science stuff on the I/O, but building the tech from first principles is gonna be a nightmare. It’s like this: suppose I went back to the 1700s and cornered Ben Franklin and handed him the plans for a laser, and asked him how quickly he could whip one up for me. Even if he fully understood the concepts, he simply wouldn’t have the tools. He wouldn’t even have the tools to make the tools. Hell, he’d probably electrocute himself trying—he just got lucky with that kite and lightning stunt. That’s where we’re at. We blow that tech . . . well, we might get some of it in less than a hundred and fifty years, but we won’t get all of it. I bet we wouldn’t even get most of it.”
Crow said, “Joe, it’s not really about what mankind would lose: it’s about the competition between us and the Chinese.”
Martinez nodded. “I know that. But I don’t want mankind to lose it. I don’t want to lose it. I won’t be alive in a hundred and fifty years. I want to see what’s in the alien package. Like, now. Before I die.”
—
Fiorella and Sandy put together a quick vid of Fang-Castro graciously agreeing that the Americans would do everything possible to rescue the Chinese. Fiorella’s carefully crafted commentary left no doubt that American science, technology, and humanitarianism—the Americans were risking their lives—were key to rescuing the cruder Chinese mission, to allow Cui to get back with her handsome husband and pretty
children. She didn’t say that, but everybody watching the vid understood it.
“I think you just made Ultra,” Sandy told her, when the vid had been dispatched to Earth. “Santeros will owe you big-time, and as big a bitch as she can be, nobody ever claimed that she didn’t take care of her own.”
“I’m not one of her own,” Fiorella protested.
“Not exactly, but she’ll feel the debt. Not a bad place to be,” Sandy said.
Fiorella thought about that, then changed the subject. “You’re done with your meds now, right?”
“Yup.”
“How are you feeling?”
“Still hurts, but I’m functional. What happens is . . . Do you want to hear this?”
“Yes.”
“What happens is, your brain gets stuck in a feedback loop. Why did this happen? Is there something wrong with me that it keeps happening—first in the Tri-Border, and now here? What could I have done? What could I have said to her that I didn’t? You get these flashbacks and every time you flash back, the loop intensifies. The meds break the loop and smooth out the thought processes, and eventually time starts to erode the power of the flashbacks. Somewhat, anyway. Still get them, but less frequently, and with less force. So. That’s where I’m at.”
“I asked because . . . Fang-Castro says you’re back on military status. Which means, if there were a conflict with the Chinese . . .”
“You’re worried that I’m fragile.”
“I worry about
you.
”
“I’m good. And sad. Both at once. But: functional. My brain’s working again.”
“We’re sure that’s a good thing?”
Sandy gave her his toothy smile: “You gotta work with what you got, sweetheart. I just try to keep up. . . .”
The alien tech was kept in one of the rooms that earlier had been used as a temporary jail. Because it had been specifically designed for that purpose, it had been lined with thin sheet steel on all six sides, which effectively made it a Faraday cage, shielding the room from most electromagnetic radiation.
With a heavy, nearly unbreakable lock, it would also resist physical interference, for at least some period of time. All by itself, it might serve.
“The only problem,” Martinez said, as he, Sandy, and Crow stood in the room, looking at the carefully packaged alien tech where it sat on newly fabbed plastic shelves, “is that it’s too big. Any amount of explosive big enough to guarantee that the tech would be destroyed might also knock a hole in the ship.”
“Not good,” Crow said.
“We need a small, tough isolation box, inside the hard room, connected to a little tiny receiver buried in the wall outside the steel, where the Chinese can’t see it. If we keep the fire in the box, and put the box on a heat-resistant stand of some kind, that’ll restrict the fire until we can get inside the room and kill it. And we probably ought to have a camera inside the room, in case they figure another way in.”
“Box won’t be that small,” Crow said. They all looked at the readers, which were the size of a standard office printer.
“Why not just fab a box for the memory modules?” Sandy asked. “Kill those, and the readers are useless, anyway. I mean, maybe we could take four readers, and give four to the Chinese, and we could all race to see how they worked. We could even call it a sign of goodwill.”
Crow said, “You’ve been thinking about this.”
“My history in the Tri-Border: trust no one, everything breaks, nothing works as advertised, and if anything can go wrong, it will.”
“And you’re so young.”
“But getting older by the minute,” Sandy said. “I can fab the steel box, if Joe can work out the kill trigger switches, which is going to be the hard part. I’ll need to measure the modules. Actually, I can scale them with one of my Reds.”
“How long will that take?” Crow asked.
“I can fab the box in a couple of hours,” Sandy said. “Compared to building a guitar, it’s nothing. If we get Elroy to work with Joe on the kill trigger switches . . . I don’t know, we should be done before midnight?”
Martinez nodded: “But we’ll have to hustle.”
The dinner briefing was quiet. Not much had changed. Santeros had confirmed the ship’s preparations for the Chinese, “although I’ll be pretty goddamned unhappy if you blow that tech.”
Sandy had finished the box and gave a brief description of the work: “Made out of steel, with a steel lock. It’ll have a bed of raw magnesium taken from Mayday flares. I didn’t want the magnesium to actually touch the memory modules, in case there might be some chemical reaction, so I fabbed a tray that sits inside the box, near the top, with individual grooves for each module. The tray’s made of non-reactive plastic, so the modules should be fine. That’s ready to go. Joe can tell you about his switches.”
Martinez said, “We created two electronic ignition circuits inside the magnesium bed—this is a very thin layer of the stuff, because it burns really hot, and we want it to burn out in a hurry. The circuit is battery-powered—two batteries sit inside the box, and either one can provide juice to the firing circuits. It’s got a radio link to a coded transceiver embedded in the wall of the room that would be almost impossible to find—it’s about the size of your little fingernail. Only two people know where it is, and the Chinese, even if they knew, would virtually have to tear the middle of the ship apart to get at it. Anyway, it’s a deadman circuit. If it doesn’t get a picosecond ping from at least one of the kill triggers each second, it’ll go off. Just in case the Chinese do manage to find the transceiver or otherwise isolate the box from a possible kill signal. We built three triggers for Admiral Fang-Castro to distribute as she wishes. We assume the actual holders of the triggers will be secret, trusted people known only to the admiral.”
“This all makes me very nervous,” Fang-Castro said. “Though it’s exactly what I asked for. How do we fire the switches, if we need to?”
He reached down into a briefcase and pulled out three gold slate styluses. “These actually work, of course. If you drop them, throw them, whatever, nothing happens. But if you look carefully at the middle of them, you’ll see a very faint line. That’s a cut point. You turn the two halves against each other, rotating them, it doesn’t matter which way, then just snap it in your hand. Like you were breaking a wooden pencil. It takes some effort, more than breaking a pencil, but nothing that would be a problem for any active person. No way that could be done accidentally, both the turn and the snap. Do it, and BOOM. The box blows.”
“Are they armed?” Barnes asked.
“Yeah, they’re functional, but the box isn’t. Not yet. I’ll arm that just before the Chinese come aboard. Once that’s done, it’s done.” He pushed the styluses across the table to Fang-Castro, who pulled them in, looked at them, and said, “God help us.”
Barnes asked, “What about the stuff in memory? The stuff we got through the I/O?”
“That’s a little easier,” Martinez said. “We suggest that the I/O material be sequestered in the main memory banks, at a location known only to Admiral Fang-Castro and her most-trusted people, and accessible only with a code. We should make it accessible through any terminal. If we hit a crisis point . . . somebody accesses the memory and hits delete.”
“I don’t see why that’s necessary,” Greenberg said. “The Chinese can’t make use of our data. We’ve been scrupulous about following the security protocols. Every bit of alien data that came in over the I/O is quantum-encrypted and the intermediate stores are scrubbed as soon as the backup’s been verified. We can’t even read our own records. The only copy of the decryption key is in Santeros’s hands. We’ve never seen it, it’s never been out of secure storage. Without it, the encryption’s unbreakable. The Chinese can’t get in. If there’s even the least chance of keeping or regaining control of the data, we can’t consider throwing away knowledge we won’t get for another hundred and fifty years.”
Crow shook his head. “That’s just it. As far as we know, the
encryption’s NP-complete, secure even under quantum attack for aeons. But we might be wrong. The encryption could’ve been compromised from the beginning. Look what happened with the American atomic secrets during World War Two. The country built an entire top secret town out in New Mexico, and guarded it with the most paranoid military men you could imagine, and every bit of tech was stolen and delivered to the Russians. There are back doors into a lot of supposedly secure systems. The sabotage of the
Nixon
’s power systems demonstrates that we can’t blindly rely on a belief that we’re impregnable.”
He looked around the room, then continued. “Even if we are . . . today . . . well, if I were the Chinese and I got my hands on that datastore, I would fund the mother of all Manhattan Project hacks. It might take me a century to figure a way in, but if there was any way in, I’d find it. That’s a long-term view. The Chinese are good at thinking long-term.”
Barnes said, “I kind of don’t like the whole ‘accessible from any terminal’ business. If I were the Chinese, and I took over the ship, I’d make sure that no terminals were accessible that they weren’t watching. Even if I had to shoot them out. I’d be a lot happier if we had the same kind of kill switch we’re using with the QSUs. Something that would send a signal directly to a receiver hidden someplace, that would invoke the memory-wipe. Primary memory
and
system backups. We should be able to do that, shouldn’t we?”
Fang-Castro nodded at Martinez, who sighed and said, “Yeah, we can do that. But this stuff really does scare me. The thought of losing all that information . . . I can’t sleep thinking about it.”
And more to worry about.
Fang-Castro nodded at Barnes. “Major Barnes: your assessment of our overall physical security.”
Barnes picked up a coffee cup and said, “It’s pretty simple, ma’am. If they attack us, we’re screwed. We have no major weaponry. The
Nixon
has very little maneuvering capability and it is very slow to respond.”
He turned the cup in his hands, as though warming them. “Even if the
Celestial Odyssey
has no traditional weaponry whatsoever, which I would hardly assume, they can cripple us. All they have to do is
maneuver alongside us, turn tail on and rake their exhaust across one of our radiator masts or booms. The nine-thousand-degree plasma’ll take it out in an instant. That’s it for us. We’ve got no propulsion without the radiators. The auxiliary power plant system can provide us with ship-support power forever, but without the big generators online we’ve got insignificant thrust.”
Fang-Castro: “So with hardly any effort on their part, they can leave us adrift in space with no damage to the rest of the
Nixon
, no immediate loss of life, zip. A perfect surgical strike. There is absolutely nothing we can do to prevent it. If we try to outmaneuver them or counter with our own engines, they are ten times more nimble than we are at our best. If they want to disable us, they will.”
Barnes nodded: “Yes. Then, if we assume they don’t do that, and we take them on board, and they managed to hide some weaponry . . . well, we have a dozen sidearms and four Taser rifles. The Tasers will disable any EVA suits I’ve ever heard of, and at lower power stages will take down a human. But frankly, that’s not much equipment, if we’re facing a takeover by trained military personnel with more sophisticated equipment.”
“We can’t allow any weaponry on board,” Crow said to Barnes. “I assume your marines will take any baggage apart, molecule by molecule.”
Barnes said, “Yes. Frankly the biggest danger is that they’d take a weapon away from one of us, get a group of us together as hostages, and threaten to start executing people. So we need really good weapon control. Weapons only to people who really know how to control them.”
Crow nodded.
And finally, Fang-Castro asked, “The
Odyssey
hasn’t even asked for help, yet. Not ship-to-ship. I don’t want to call Zhang, I’d rather have him do it. But suppose we manage to take the Chinese on board and all they really want is help. Where are we at on consumables? Do we need to transfer some from the
Odyssey
? How would we do that?”
The meeting went on for two hours.
Then Comm pinged them: “Admiral, the
Celestial Odyssey
is calling us.”