The Nixon's leadership was still sitting in the conference room, waiting, more than anything, when the first reaction arrived, Santeros herself, from the Oval Office: "The goddamned Chinese are asking for a rescue. They say the Celestial Odyssey has calculated a trajectory that will pair up with you in a day or so. . . ." She called off-screen, "Is that right? A day or so? A day and a half?"

She turned back to face Fang-Castro and the others. "A day and a half. They issued the goddamnedest propaganda vid you ever saw, the Odyssey's first officer, cute as a button, hoping we'll help, pictures of her kids at their school, waiting for Mom. She speaks English . . . the vid's gone viral, it's on a half-billion phones in India alone, probably a hundred million here. . . . We're gonna cut it in at the end of this briefing so you can see it yourself. We got all the big brains working on a reaction, but I'm telling you, there's no way we can say no. Not with those kids on the swing set. I suspect they're about to produce a vid of her breast-feeding the little fuckin' crotchfruit.

"So, you need to start thinking about how to contain the Chinese, because they're coming for you. What's gonna happen then, we don't know, but we're working on scenarios. You better start working on some of your own, you know the ship better than we do." She looked to the side again, this time asked, "What? What? Oh, yeah." She turned back to the camera. "Some of our guys think that they're, well, they're gonna try to take the Nixon. Take the alien tech. Can't let that happen. That's the first priority: they cannot have the tech. Let us know what you're thinking. . . . Here comes the vid."

The rest of the day was taken in video-conferencing, with the tiresome round-trip time in the discussions.

Toward the end of the day shift, Ferris Langers pinged Fang-Castro; a ping with an urgent tag. She was in the bathroom. Fang-Castro had a number of informal rules, which, though informal, were quite clear to her staff. One was that if a ping was labeled urgent, it goddamned well better be urgent. The goddamned was not articulated but was well understood.

She touched her slate, audio only. "What is it, Lieutenant?"

"Ma'am, I've been running the numbers of the Chinese ship. The solutions don't make any sense for a return to Earth. I guess I'm confirming what everybody's saying. They're coming after us."

"Would you care to elaborate on that?" A pro forma request. She'd known what the Chinese were doing since the moment Crow suggested it, even before the call from Santeros.

"The Odyssey just completed their inclination and course correction burns. When I figured up their new trajectory, it was still directed at the inner solar system, but it came close to ours. I ran the timeline forward, and it wasn't just close. In a little more than a day, they're going to be at about the same place in space that we will, with a similar velocity vector."

She commed Crow. "Mr. Crow, the Chinese have corrected course, and there's no longer a question. I need you in the conference room, fifteen minutes. Bring all your ideas."

"Yes, ma'am."

She closed the link. After issuing several other peremptory come-hithers, she poured a cup of tea, cradled it in her hands, and thought very hard about just how much trouble they might be in.

When Fang-Castro arrived at the conference room twenty-two minutes later, she was gratified to see that everyone she had summoned was already seated. Crow, looking pensive; Martinez, almost sleepy, which meant he was thinking hard; Major Barnes, freshly out of medical isolation, intent; Fiorella, engaged; Lieutenant Langers; and Greenberg, the chief engineer. All swiveled in their chairs and looked at her as she entered the room. Darlington didn't; he was busy checking the settings on the recording equipment. Langers kept glancing down at his slate, where orbital models were running.

"Mr. Darlington, you're ready?" Fang-Castro asked.

"Yes, ma'am. We're on the air, straight back to the Oval Office."

"Then let's proceed. Lieutenant Langers has confirmed that the Chinese are coming after us." She nodded toward the slightly nervous navigator. "Mr. Langers? You have the floor."

The soft-spoken officer kept it short and concise. His summary, accompanied by a few plots brought up on the conference room vids, barely took longer than his original phone call to Fang-Castro.

Greenberg was incredulous. "We're not helpless! We have power and plenty of delta-vee to spare. If we thrust at ninety degrees to our current trajectory, it would add, oh, a week, maybe, to the trip back. Then our course'd be well clear of the Chinese."

Fang-Castro looked at the navigator, who was tapping away at his slate. He shook his head. "That won't do the trick. We'd be a hundred thousand kilometers off to one side when the Celestial Odyssey passed us, on their current trajectory. The thing is, they'll pick up on a course shift pretty quickly, and once they do, they can adjust their trajectory accordingly. They've got over a million kilometers to cover before they reach us. If they can manage a lateral burn of a kilometer or so per second, they can track us. Seems likely."

Fang-Castro thought about that. "And, without the additional forward thrust from our engines, they'd catch us even sooner."

Langers nodded. "By an hour or two."

"There's also the question of how the Chinese would react to an attempt to elude them and how Earth would react," Crow said. "If we successfully stay away from them, they die."

"So we're going to have visitors," Fang-Castro said. "We need to prepare the ship for them. I don't mean baking cupcakes. We can't allow them to capture the ship, take it away from us. I need ideas on how to secure the ship and the alien tech from possibly aggressive moves."

Fiorella asked, "What if they're on a suicide run? What if their plan is simply to take us out? If they do that, nobody gets the tech, and everything goes back to the status quo. From their point of view, that might not be an undesirable outcome."

Martinez, now looking so sleepy that his eyes were almost closed, said, "Then we're fucked. Excuse the language. I've thought about that, about what we could do about that, and my answer is, 'Not much.' Depending on what they've still got aboard, there's lots of ways they could kill us. So I go back to a variation of John Clover's fundamental position on the aliens. . . . Since there's nothing we can do about it, if they intend to blow us up, we might as well plan on the basis that they won't."

Fang-Castro nodded, but said, "Mr. Crow, Major Barnes, Captain Darlington-I want you on military status, now, Sandy-and Mr. Martinez, I want you to brainstorm that whole proposition: Is it really true that we couldn't do anything? If they don't blow us up, what can we do to secure the ship from a takeover? We need procedures for taking the Chinese on board, without jeopardizing our own position. I want complete recommendations in four hours: that will allow the ship warfare experts on Earth to view this vid, confer, generate their own recommendations, and get them back to us. Four hours, people."

Barnes held up a hand, and Fang-Castro nodded to him: "Major Barnes."

"Ma'am, we need to do more than plan for ship security. We also need to plan for what we'd do if security fails and the Chinese manage to take over the ship. That might be a small possibility, but we have to consider it."

Crow interjected: "You're right." And to Fang-Castro: "He's right."

"I'm sure he is," Fang-Castro said. Back to Barnes: "Do you have any practical suggestions for, um, a post-takeover scenario?"

"Yes. I'd suggest that we set up some kind of kill switch that would allow us to destroy the alien tech if we needed to. Joe tells me we're shipping everything that came over the I/O link back to Earth as quickly as we can, but it's not fast enough. I suggest we take down all other high-speed commo links with Earth, and use them to speed up the I/O, to capture as much of that as we can before the Chinese arrive. And maybe even refuse to allow the Chinese aboard for as long as possible so we can keep sending it."

LaFarge, the comm officer, said, "That would double our I/O rate, but we still wouldn't manage to get a significant fraction of it back. We might get ten percent of it, instead of eight."

"Yeah, but who knows what might be in the additional two percent?" Martinez said. "Be worth doing, in my estimation."

"Then we'll do it," Fang-Castro said. "Major Barnes-expand on the kill switch. I don't quite grasp where you're going with that."

Barnes nodded. "If the Chinese managed to take the ship, they could probably figure out a way to get a package or several packages, containing a reader and a memory module, back to Earth, no matter what happened to our ships. Put them on a simple rocket, launch it in the proper orbit. Maybe it doesn't arrive for ten years, but so what? They'd still get it a hundred and thirty years before we did."

"Maybe we ought to consider that," Crow said. "We've got eight copies-"

Martinez said, "We don't have time. We'd have to fab a rocket, work out the orbits . . . they're going to be here in less than a day. If I had a couple of weeks, maybe. But this wouldn't be a simple project."

Barnes said, "To finish my thought . . . if we can't launch our own rocket-and even if we did, I suspect the Chinese would see it, and could probably intercept it, either here or at the earth, and either capture or destroy it-then we should protect the memory capsules and the readers from a takeover. We should fab a box, a safe, out of materials on hand, load it with magnesium from our Mayday flares, and build in a coded trigger. Then, we give triggers to Admiral Fang-Castro and a couple other people. If the Chinese take the ship, we tell them what we've done, and tell them if they interfere with the box, we'll blow it. We'll already have a tech edge on them, from the I/O material. If we do this, it'll at least give the top people on Earth a chance to work out a compromise."

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.