"I'm fine. I just got myself fired, that's all," Becca snapped.

"Over the accident? That's . . . I didn't think-"

"No, I'm gonna be fired because I just told the President to go fuck herself."

Sandy stared at her, agape, for a second, then started laughing. "You told Santeros to go fuck herself? Oh, I like that."

Becca could feel her face getting even hotter.

Sandy put up his hands. "Whoa. I'm not laughing at you. It's what you did. Man, I wish I could've seen her face. Hey, you wanna grab a mug and tell me about it?" And he laughed again, an infectious laugh.

Becca found herself smiling at him. Oh, what the hell. The day after she left, it would be all over the station, anyway. Screw discretion, there ain't any to be had. "All right. I can do that."

Sandy retrieved his coffee cup from the other side of the room and they eased into a table and belted down. She let her mug warm her hands and inhaled the steam. Her shoulders were starting to unknot, a little bit. She managed a smile. "So. That vid from yesterday wasn't terrible. The technical stuff, I mean, not the news stuff. The news stuff-"

"What do you mean not terrible? I'll tell you what, Johansson, that was about as close to perfect as-"

"Why don't you call me Becca? It's Sandy, right? Sanders? Sandy?"

"It's Sandy," he said. "About that vid . . ."

Fang-Castro sat back in her easy chair, drank her morning tea, gazed at the curved horizon of the earth displayed on her giant wallscreen, and sighed. She'd moved to new, single-room quarters and no longer had the pleasure of her living room window.

As part of the weight-saving measures for the Nixon, the design teams had reworked the living modules for more efficient use of space, paring them from their original hundred-meter length down to seventy. Compared to what was being done in the power modules, this was unglamorous reengineering, but eliminating the excess living space would cut the dry mass of the ship by twelve percent. It wasn't a lot by itself, but it cut the requirements for power, heat disposal, and water for reaction mass, reducing the final size of the ship by a thousand tons.

For all that, it wasn't asking a lot to give up a window, and her new quarters did have a wall-sized high-resolution 3-D screen, totally state of the art. But it wasn't real, she thought sadly. It was like the sound system in her new quarters; recorded music sounded wonderful and was a delight to listen to, but nothing like a live performance. Unfortunately rank, along with its privileges, had to set a good example.

Fang-Castro had sent most of the crew ground-side, starting two weeks earlier at the end of January. After the non-essentials had departed the station, construction crews installed temporary bulkheads thirty meters inward of the front ends of the modules. They'd stripped the furnishings from the forward thirty meters and bled the air back into the station's reserves.

Then they'd fabricated and attached support pillars between the axle and the modules just rearward of the cutting line. In the final preparation for the trimming, each module's forward elevator shaft had been cut free and moved off to a safe distance. That final bit of prep had finished up yesterday, two days ahead of schedule, Fang-Castro noted. Everybody was working hard: no slackers allowed.

Her slate chimed: John Clover. "You called? I was in the bathroom."

"Are you close by my quarters?"

"Yeah, I'm in mine. Just got back."

"Stop in if you have a minute."

And a minute later, her door chimed, and she said, "Come in," which released the door.

Clover stepped in, with his cat sitting on his shoulder. He put the cat on the floor, and Fang-Castro got up, went to a drawer, took out a pack of salmon jerky, and gave a strip to the cat, who was expecting it.

Virtually everybody in the station was a technician of some kind: Clover wasn't, and didn't much care about tech. He was a thinker, and a conversationalist. Ever since their clandestine late-night dinner, they'd been meeting a couple of times a week, to chat. As might have been expected of a leading anthropologist, he was both intelligent and observant.

"Sit down," she said.

He took his usual chair and said, "So-do we have an agenda, or are we ruminating?"

"Ruminating-I'm waiting to give them the go-ahead to start cutting up the place," she said. "Let's assume there are aliens at the station-a resident crew. Do we need to take weapons with us? If we do, what kind?"

"I'm not a shrink," Clover said. "But we'll need a few weapons on board, not for the aliens, but for the humans. As we get further out, there'll be a lot of stress, and there'll be some personal conflict. There may even be some good old-fashioned mating-ritual violence . . . too few women, too many alpha males. We'll need some electrical stunners . . ."

Fang-Castro waved him down. "Let's stick with the aliens. We've got the crew problems covered, I think."

Clover nodded. "Okay. First-"

He was interrupted by a computer voice: "Incoming priority for Fang-Castro from Joe Martinez."

Fang-Castro held up a finger, and took the call: "Joe?"

"We're ready to go out here. We need you to give the order."

"Recording with time-note: I'm ordering you to commence the quarters trim."

"Thank you, ma'am. We're starting now."

Back to Clover: "So, do we need a weapons system to deal with the aliens?"

Clover said, "Basically, no. I've talked to Crow about this, and there are only a few ways to fight in space. Some of them are suicidal, so we rule those out. I haven't been able to think of a situation in which we'd destroy our own ship as a method of attacking the aliens. There are some movie scenarios out there-the aliens are an evil life-form that preys on humans. Or they take over our minds and turn us into zombies with some kind of infectious virus and the only way we can save Earth is to blow up our own ship. But if the aliens really want to do that, why haven't they done it? That's the critical question. Why haven't they done it? The fact is, we know they could have destroyed all life on Earth if they'd wanted to, long before this. Or even with this arrival-we only saw them by mistake. If they'd simply accelerated an asteroid into Earth, and we know they can do that, given the size of their ship, we probably wouldn't even see it coming until too late. From all of that, I'd deduce that they don't want to destroy us. Simply because they could have, anytime, and didn't. So, we ignore the movie scenarios."

"What if they don't actively want to destroy us, but want to keep us away from their station?"

"That's what I've been talking to Crow about. They're a century ahead of us, maybe more. I can't begin to guess what they'd have to stop us, but they'd sure have something! They might warn us off . . . or we might not even see it coming."

"Bottom line, we can't defend ourselves against them, if they get aggressive."

"No. We can't. That's my feeling. We anthros are very good at war-maybe even better than they are. The overriding fact, though, is there really isn't a very good way to fight in deep space. Fights would lead to annihilation, first of the fighters, and then later, of the warring ships or bases, or even the warring planets."

"Not desirable."

"For either side," Clover said. "Suppose we get out there and find a station. The existence of the station as a stopping point suggests that they really need the place. So what happens if we go out there, and they do something to piss us off? What happens when the next starship shows up, and the gas station has been burned down? They may represent a danger to us, but we also represent a danger to them. It seems to me, it behooves both sides to act with some . . . courtesy. Some rational approach to contact."

"You're suggesting we do nothing."

"Nah. That's not safe, either. They might be territorial and want to see how far they can push us. So, they give us a little whack. We give them a little whack back-but only once."

"The problem with that is, the little whack could be the end of us."

"I don't think so. Look, once a planetary civilization reaches a certain point-the generation of radio waves, say-a lot of other things just naturally fall into place. Radio waves suggest a command of electricity, of course, and everything that comes out of that-internal combustion engines, airplanes, and advanced understanding of practical physics. They know we're here. Even if they didn't before, they know now. They could have been watching our TV programs all the way in. So if they give us a little warning shot, it'll be small: I think. It's not likely to happen at all. I think. I don't really think they'd even take the chance. We could have detected these ships coming in fifty or a hundred years ago, but we didn't. Why not? Probably because their visits are extremely rare. If they destroyed us, or our ships, then the next time they show up, we could have a nuke waiting for them. A nuke they wouldn't even see until it would be too late to do anything about it. So there are reasons for them not to annoy us, just as there are reasons for us not to annoy them."

Fang-Castro nodded. "I buy most of that: the aliens probably don't want to kill us. You understand what our biggest problem could be . . ."

"The Chinese."

"Yes. It seems to me that we're getting in a bind here. They would have a problem with our getting exclusive use of an alien tech. That's something we've got to work through."

"Are you going to weaponize the Nixon to fight the Chinese?"

"I doubt it. We have to see what the big brains on Earth think. But if we did-and if the Chinese already have-I think what you'd have is mutual assured destruction. If we don't arm ourselves and the Chinese attacked us, I'm pretty sure Santeros would destroy their ship in retaliation. And vice versa. There wouldn't be a huge war, or anything, but nobody would be able to put anything out in space-or more to the point, get it back. At the same time, exclusive use is pretty tempting."

"Lot of ugly possibilities growing out of those fears," Clover said.

"Yes, there are." Fang-Castro glanced at her view screen and said, "They're cutting up the hulls. I've got to go check on things. Listen, John-we've got to talk more. Read some twentieth-century stuff on the way the Americans and Russians managed the Cold War. Tell me what you think about that-their management techniques."

"I will do that," Clover said. "I've got to tell you, though, you've got me a little puckered up here."

"I've been puckered up ever since I found out the Chinese were going to Saturn."

Trimming the living modules wasn't technically difficult; it just had to be done carefully and in a coordinated fashion so it wouldn't throw the station out of balance. Industrial lasers could cut through the frothy walls in minutes. After the cutters sliced off the excess thirty meters from each module, crews would build new proper front ends, reattach the front elevators, and remove the temporary supports.

Clover had just gone, with his cat, when the station computer pinged Fang-Castro to move to the command module. She relieved the officer on watch and checked the external monitors and status displays; the four industrial cutters were in position.

"Mr. Martinez, how's everything out there?"

"We're good. We're about through the first one, the tugs are positioned to get it out of the way."

In carefully coordinated action, the four laser operators had fired up their beams and begun simultaneously cutting through the inner and outer walls of the two living modules, just forward of the temporary bulkheads. Grooves had appeared in the four walls and deepened into narrow cuts; otherwise there was little to see besides a faint purplish glow.

The excimer laser cutters projected intense shortwave ultraviolet light, invisible to human eyes. The high-energy photons didn't burn their way through materials; they directly broke apart molecular bonds. Foam and fabric simply disintegrated into vapor where the beam hit, cold-cutting that the laser crews controlled with surgical precision.

It took most of an hour to cut through the first two pairs of walls. The job could have been done in half the time, but Martinez was being careful. He periodically called for work stoppages while status readings were checked. Were the station's stabilizing computers keeping everything in balance? Were the brackets doing their job of keeping the forward sections from breaking loose prematurely? Any stray debris flying around, something blown off by the lasers?

After January's failed radiator test, Fang-Castro was being super-careful about creating space junk. That hadn't just been embarrassing, it'd been expensive. Nobody had been prepared for such a spectacular failure, and the station personnel were only able to recover about three-quarters of the chaff created by the uncontrolled radiator ribbons.

Interops, the International Orbital Operating Commission, had levied a fine whose size was described as "astronomical" by almost every punster on the Internet. Space junk had made low Earth orbit space almost unusable by the mid-thirties, and it had taken a decade of concerted and costly international effort to clear out the big stuff. A lot of the small stuff was still circling the earth, and now the space nations were talking about who'd pay to clear that.

The cutting proceeded, carefully, until the forward thirty meters of modules were severed from the rear seventy. The cutters shut down the lasers, a final systems check came up green, and Martinez spoke an authorization into his workslate. The operations computer simultaneously released the locking clamps on the module sections and a millisecond later fired the engines on the pair of robotic tugs.

From the command module, Captain Fang-Castro watched as the now-superfluous forward sections were moved to a safe distance away from the station. Some of their materials would be recycled into the Nixon, but most of it was scrap, possibly recyclable to a new station. She checked the status reports: the station was stable and the temporary forward bulkheads on the truncated living modules were working perfectly. The whole operation had gone off with exemplary smoothness.

She realized she'd been tensely hunched over the console and consciously relaxed her shoulder blades. The rest of the reconstruction wouldn't take more than the remainder of the day. Crews had pre-fabbed new front ends for the modules with all the fittings, docking collars, and brackets they needed to smoothly hook them up to the living modules and reattach the free-floating front elevator shafts to them and the new axle hubs.

"Mr. Martinez?"

"Yes, ma'am."

"Outstanding work. Pass that along to everyone who had a hand in this. I just spoke to the President, and she is extremely impressed, and she is not an easily impressed woman," Fang-Castro said.

"I will pass that along, ma'am. Thank you."

She hadn't spoken to Santeros in a week, at which time they'd agreed on two possible statements: congratulations for a job well done, and a second, "The responsibility for this problem is mine, not the men and women who did the work."

"Mine," as in Fang-Castro's, not Santeros's.

Fortunately, she thought, as she headed back to her room, the second statement wouldn't be needed.

As yet, anyway.

Sandy and Fiorella had stayed up, when most of the crew had gone down, because they were documenting the reconstruction. Sandy had been outside, and had just gotten back, when Fiorella pinged him.

"We need to talk to you. Privately."

"Uh, where are you?"

"My cabin."

"I just got in, I'm in Engineering. I could stop by . . ."

"Please do. Soon."

Was she now using the royal "we"? Sandy wondered, as he dropped down the shaft to the habitat. Or was there more than one person waiting for him? Whatever, Fiorella definitely sounded conspiratorial. Of course, she was of Italian heritage; the Medicis, and all that.

He got to her cabin, tapped the call bell, and the door popped open. "Come on in," Fiorella said. John Clover was sitting in the single chair, and nodded. Fiorella sat at one end of her bunk and patted the other end for Sandy.

"So what's up?" Clover asked.

Fiorella looked at Sandy. "Despite our personal differences, the people on this ship believe that you and I are destined to sleep together."

"Fools," Sandy said.

"I would agree," Fiorella said.

"Although you are not totally unattractive," Sandy allowed.

"I would have to say the same about you," Fiorella said.

Clover said, "Excuse me. I don't think I want to hear this conversation."

Fiorella said, "Yes, you do. Wait until I finish."

Clover subsided, and Sandy, curious, asked, "What happened?"

"I was sitting in an egg, not going anywhere, checking out a possible internal shot. That feature we were talking about, showing the groundhuggers how you control an egg. Anyway, your friend the handyman walked into the garage, with a tech, and they were talking about us. They were being sneaky about it. Joe kept glancing over at me, making sure I couldn't hear."

"You turned up the gain on the external mike," Sandy said. All the eggs had external microphones and speakers. They were useless in space, but convenient when two people were working on an egg repair, one inside and one out.

"Yes, I did," Fiorella said. "Anyway, it seems that the crew has a pool, on the day we fall into bed together. The pool is still open. The buy-in is one thousand dollars."

That didn't seem like much to Sandy, but Clover grunted. "There are what, ninety-plus people going on this trip? More or less? That's ninety grand, if everybody buys in. Nice. That's three months' salary for a poor man like me."

"Much nicer than that," Fiorella said. "Because these guys are a bunch of scientists, they all think they're statistical savants. They weren't happy with a simple, pick-your-day pool. They set up a market."

Sandy: "A market? You mean like a political market?"

"Exactly. You buy a date that you think it'll happen. If you start to feel your pick was weak or if your date goes by without any action, you can buy back in, any date you want-but you have to pay the market price, which is set by consensus. Everybody who already has that date won't want you to buy in at all-they'll want to keep all the money to themselves. But if you have the right to buy in, they'll want to jack up your reentry price as high as possible.

"On the other hand," she continued, "people who don't have that date, and don't believe it will happen, will want other people to buy in-because the money stays in the pot if it doesn't happen. So they want the buy-in price to be low enough to encourage people to buy in, but also high enough that the pot gets fatter downstream."