"Could you, uh, pick it up?"

"We'll try."

They tried, but the artifact was immovable. A docking collar locked the fuselage to the port that went into the moonlet. The tips of several appendages were firmly embedded in complementary fixtures arrayed about the port.

"That isn't going to work," Duan called. "We need to talk here."

"Americans are almost around."

At Duan's direction, the crew tried to pry the appendages loose and rotate the docking collar, but got no movement with the degree of force the mechanics were willing to risk. The only response of the automaton was that faint internal hum increased when stress was put on the appendages.

They considered the option of cutting it free. Their cutting torches ought to be up to the task. But was it a good idea?

As an option, it was the last resort. They had no way of knowing how much damage they would do to the automaton by cutting away pieces of it, especially powered components, as the hum suggested they were. They might end up with a dead and dismembered spacecraft, pieces of alien space junk. How much could they learn about the technology from an entirely nonfunctional device?

Before going the meat-cleaver route, they opted for precision surgery. The docking mechanisms were active devices. If they could shut down the ant, they might be able to decouple it from the moonlet. The scientists and technicians now had 3-D models of the innards of the spacecraft, the fruits of the multispectral scans. A lot of what was in there was unidentifiable or incomprehensible. Just what was that thing near the bottom front that looked like a kidney?

A lot, though, was recognizable. Conduits and cables look much the same no matter who built them. They could see lumps that they could tell must function as motors or actuators, odd as they looked, just from where they were and what they were attached to.

There were a handful of larger modules. Those had to include fuel and storage tanks, computing and data-handling functions, and a power source. Assuming, of course, that alien engineering design followed anything remotely like human engineering principles. It was a large assumption, but they'd been able to recognize conduits and cables and motors, so it couldn't be all that different.

There had to be signals to the motors telling them what to do and power so that they could do it. The electrical engineers started tracing conduits back from the motors. One by one they eliminated modules from consideration, as the scientists peered anxiously over the engineers' shoulders and kept checking the time. They worked it down to two candidates. One was likely the computing unit, the other the main power supply. The one with the larger cables? Probably power.

They might be wrong, but disconnecting either ought to shut down the spacecraft. They had twenty-five minutes to do one or the other before the Americans would be looking over their shoulders. Rebooting the artifact might be tricky, or impossible, but at least they'd have an intact machine.

"Cut the power supply," Duan said. There wasn't time to consult with Zhang on the decision.

The engineers worked rapidly, calling out for tools and instruments that were delivered to them instantly by the surrounding team. Like field surgeons, they contemplated their alien patient. They were down to eighteen minutes to complete the operation. They decided where to make the first incision.

Zhang was talking with Cui, with increasing exasperation about the information feeds, and about the fact that the Americans may have tried to sneak away with the most important information dispensed by the information-bot.

He was doing that when the screens carrying the feed from the ship's telescopes flared white, at the same moment that blinding light poured through the ports on the bridge.

Cui, several kilometers away, was looking toward the ship as she spoke to Zhang, and saw the ship flicker, as though it had been lit by lightning. An instant later, though, the ship remained as it had been.

On board the Celestial Odyssey, the radiation alarm sounded for a fraction of a second and went silent. As it went silent, all the ship's screens, all the interior lighting, went dark. Zhang heard a panicked scream, he didn't know from whom; it was almost immediately stifled by the embarrassed crew member.

The windows' glare had been dazzling; anyone looking out a port had been temporarily blinded, although the flash had been several kilometers away.

After a long five seconds, lights began to come back, as well as the various vid screens.

"Shenme zai diyu?" That was the helmsman, Lieutenant Peng. His voice was high, panicked. Zhang knew who had screamed.

Zhang took a calming breath before he spoke. "Mr. Peng, that was a nuclear explosion. The ship's systems and power went down because the electromagnetic pulse tripped the safeties."

"But, sir, the shuttle!"

Zhang managed to keep his voice from shaking. "Cong, there is no shuttle. Not any longer," he said very softly.

"Admiral?" The navigator on watch, Lieutenant Sun, spoke up. "I'm confirming that. There's nothing on the scope."

"No shuttle?" asked Peng.

"Peng," replied the navigator, "there's nothing. No moonlet, no shuttle. Everything that was there . . . everyone . . . gone. Vaporized."

The helmsman began to sob. It was not professional. Zhang found it entirely understandable.

"Mr. Lei, ship's status now, if you please."

The watch officer was already hard at work. "No physical damage likely, not at twenty kilometers. The EMP might have fried some hardware. We're pretty well shielded against that-original ship's design in case it got caught by a really bad solar storm or a coronal ejection mass. But that's a whole different level from a close-by nuclear pulse. The major systems will be okay or have backups. We could lose some lesser equipment. I'll have a survey done now."

"What about the radiation flash? What effect would that have on the crew?"

"I don't know. The hull would protect us from normal background radiation, but a short, intense dose like this? I don't know. I will talk to Medical. We may want to start everyone on radiation sickness preempts, just in case."

"Do that. Mr. Sun, what is it?" The navigator was signaling urgently.

"Captain, we may have another problem. Those small autonomous spacecraft, like the one we were trying to catch? A lot of them, hundreds it looks like, are changing trajectory. They're moving in our direction."

Ta ma de, thought Zhang, we kicked the anthill.

Francisco, the executive officer, had the watch when the bridge klaxon sounded the three-note tone that signaled a radiation emergency. Startled, he lost his grip on the slate he'd been reading; the slate slowly fell to the end of its tether.

He ignored it. "Comm, kill that noise. Engineering, Science, talk to me. Frank, you first."

Lieutenant LaFarge scanned his console. "It's a real alert, sir, not a computer fault or test run. Outside sensors reported a radiation spike. Safety systems kicked in like they're supposed to and set off the alarms."

Comm spoke up. "Confirming that, sir. It's a radiation storm alert." All over the Nixon, except in the shielded engineering module, warning lights and bells were going off, while the computer system's voice instructed personnel in the unshielded sections to immediately go to their nearest hidey-hole.

"We're ten AU from the sun. It has to be one hell of a big solar event for us to notice it way out here. Why hasn't space weather sent us an alert?" The Earth-orbit monitoring stations had near-instantaneous response times. They couldn't beat the initial X-ray burst to the Nixon, but their warning should have arrived by now.

"Sir?" Albers Janssen was at the science station.

"Go ahead, Albers."

"I don't think it was the sun. The directional data says the burst came from the general direction of the alien depot. That's well off the sun line. Also, the burst was too short for a solar flare or coronal mass ejection." Janssen peered closely at the time plots. "Make that two short bursts, close together. A small one and then a much bigger one." He switched his attention to the spectral plot. "Aw fuck. The main spikes are gamma, not X-ray-511 keV. That was an antimatter detonation."

Fang-Castro hurried onto the bridge: "What happened?"

"We think the Chinese may have triggered off an antimatter explosion," Francisco said.

"Oh, no. Can we see them?"

Navigation: "No. We'd have line of sight, but the edge of the ring is in the way. We should have visual in . . . eight minutes."

- Cui turned as the air-lock door behind her closed: she didn't know why it had done that.

Suddenly feeling alone in the universe, she called the Celestial Odyssey: "Sir: What happened? Something is happening here."

Zhang came back: "Cui, evacuate your crew immediately. Duan's crew apparently set off an antimatter explosion and the ants are beginning to cluster between us and the planetoid. We need you back here, until we can reassess our status."

"Yes, sir. The crew is out of touch at the moment-immediately after the flash, the air-lock doors closed, separating me from the crew. There is no . . . Wait one . . ."

In front of her, the air-lock doors were opening again: inside the lock, she saw her entire crew.

"What happened?" she asked Wong. She kept the relay open to Zhang.

"We've been ordered out of the planetoid. Narcissus told us we have to leave. I have vid, sending now."

The vid popped up on a display screen.

Narcissus said, "There has been damage to the depot. Containment Module 7251 was disrupted. Members of your species intercepted one of the antimatter transport units while it was docking with the containment module. It appears that they tried to disable the unit, leading to a failure of its isolation vessel. The vessel contained 2.5 grams of antimatter. That explosion, in such close proximity to the containment module, caused it to fail as well, resulting in a larger explosion. Sanctions apply. Access to this depot and my database are denied, effective immediately."

Wong tried to shift blame, to keep the planetoid open: "We didn't do this. It was an action by another ship, not authorized by us."

Narcissus said, "Sanctions automatically apply to all vessels of a species. You have five Earth minutes to collect your equipment, secure your suits, and vacate this room. In five minutes the security system will discontinue life support, evacuating the atmosphere and ceasing illumination and thermal regulation. In six minutes, further countermeasures will be taken."

Wong asked, "What countermeasures?"

"I do not have that information. That information is available only to the security AI."

Wong had heard enough. To the crew, he called, "You heard it, everybody. Get it together and let's get out. Narcissus, for how long are the sanctions in effect?"

"Physical damage to a depot is a very serious security breach. Fortunately, Containment Facility 7251 was almost empty. The damage was limited to its destruction, so suspension of all depot privileges will only be in effect for one hundred and forty-four Earth years. Life-support services will end in four minutes. Further countermeasures begin in five."

Wong said, "People, into the air lock. Don't start cycling yet." And, "Narcissus, why didn't your security system prevent this kind of tampering?" The AI had indicated the depot's defensive capabilities were superior to human technology. There should have been a specific warning, he thought.

"If an unauthorized ship or one of unknown origin had attempted to access the containment facilities, the security system would have instituted protective measures. This was not a ship of unknown origin. It was one of your species' ships. Once I informed the security system that you had been given the safety protocols and basic operating instructions for using this depot, your status was changed to authorized. There was no a priori reason to believe that you would not follow the safety protocols, considering the hazards to you and the depot and the penalties that could incur. By the time the data stream indicated that a safety was being breached, there was too little time for security units to arrive before containment failed. Life-support services will end in four minutes."

Wong tried one more time. "Narcissus, the first ship did not convey the safety information to us. We did not know about the safety protocols."

"I would not know that, nor would the security system. It is in the interest of every species to make sure that none of its ships interfere with the depot's functioning, to avoid sanctions. Life-support services will end in two minutes. Further countermeasure begin in three."

There was no point arguing with the answer-bot. The team finished stowing their gear, secured their suits, and Wong entered the air lock and the interior air-lock door closed. The space-side door opened, and they found Cui hanging in space, just outside.

Cui saw herself on the vid, and killed it. "We don't know what range Narcy was talking about when he said, 'further countermeasures.' We need to get back to the ship. Everybody into the shuttle."

Another minute and they were gone.

- "Admiral Fang-Castro, Mr. Crow wishes to speak to you. Shall I put him through?"

She said, "No, not at the moment. Wait-tell him to join me in the conference room in ten minutes. And Hannegan, Clover, Martinez, Barnes, and Darlington. I want them there, too. Tell Darlington we're going to have a conference, we'll want a direct link to Earth."

Fang-Castro spent ten minutes assessing the situation from the bridge. The Celestial Odyssey was right where it had been and a tug was headed back toward it from the planetoid. There was no sign of the larger shuttle.

Francisco said, "They were messing with one of those storage units and it blew. That's why we got two pulses. I bet they tried to grab one of the bees, and something happened-could have been a self-destruct mechanism to keep that from happening-and that took out a second storage unit."

"What's our radiation status?"

"We're fine. They may not be, depending on how close they were to the explosion."

"Any other damage?"

"No."

"Comm, call Zhang."

A moment later Comm said, "Admiral, they acknowledged the call and declined it."

"Might be too busy to talk to us," Francisco said.

"Or too angry," Fang-Castro said. "Comm, reach out to them every half hour or so. If they answer, put it through to me. I'll be in the conference room. I want everything that happened since the blast, including the blast, encrypted and forwarded to Earth. I want that done immediately, with a top-priority tag on it."

"Yes, ma'am."

When Fang-Castro got to the conference room, the others were all waiting, Barnes by vid from the isolation suite. She nodded at Darlington and said, "Link this to Comm, highest encrypt, top priority, tagged for the President."

Sandy nodded and when the link was set, Fang-Castro told the group what had happened.

When she finished, Crow held up his stylus: "We must have told them that the trailing moonlets were antimatter storage?"

"Of course," Fang-Castro said. "We also told them that the bees were apparently gathering something, but we didn't know what, or why."

"Didn't we ask Wurly?" Clover asked.

"We asked Wurly for all information concerning the moonlets, the bees, and the primary, including technical drawings, manufacturing specs, and everything else we could think of," said Martinez. "He agreed to give it to us as part of the tech package. But we were so busy gathering information, and checking the validity of what we could see, and making valid copies of it, we haven't had a chance to look at much of it. We never looked at the details of what the remotes were doing, because we figured we could do that anytime."

Crow said, "I'm sure the survivors on the Odyssey are talking to Beijing. What I need to get clear here, now, is that nothing we did caused the accident-that we are not to blame."

"That is correct," Fang-Castro said. "Mr. Francisco has suggested that the Chinese may have tried to capture one of the bees. That would have been tempting-they're small and they're genuine alien tech. If they could have gotten a bee back to Earth, it would have been worthwhile. We didn't try it because we didn't have to, and we didn't actually have time, with the Chinese pushing on us as they were."

"So we're not to blame," Crow said. "Whatever happened, is the Chinese's own doing."

"Yes, that's correct, in my opinion." She turned to Hannegan. "I'd also like some reassurance that the aliens haven't been . . . fooling us. Did they actually deliver what they said they would?"

Hannegan cleared his throat. "We've been looking at the science data ever since the I/O went up. There's an awful lot of it. All the theory behind the production of antimatter, all the underlying supersymmetry stuff. That's a far cry from working technology, but it'll still give us a twenty-year jump on the underlying hard science. A lot of theoretical-physicist food fights are gonna get settled when we get back. To me, it looks like Wurly really has given us exactly what it promised at the first meetings."

Martinez held up a finger. "But understand, we got the science over the I/O link, but not the tech specs for actually building much. That's on the quantum storage units."

"Where are you on testing the actual readers?" Crow asked.

Martinez shook his head. "We're sorting out the electrical connections now. They're not hard, but we don't want to screw anything up, either. With everything else we've had to do . . . What I'm trying to say is, we could probably start testing them tomorrow, or even tonight, if you're in a rush. We haven't done it yet."

A call popped up on the corner of the conference room screen: Francisco calling. Fang-Castro tapped her slate, and Francisco's face appeared: "Admiral, we're getting a broadcast from Wurly. Or the primary. It's very short, it's in all the languages, it says we're barred from contact with the primary and all the other alien tech for one hundred and forty-four years. It's a loop, playing over and over."

"Anything else?"

"That's it, ma'am."