"The alien information has been destroyed," Fang-Castro said. "Your own people can confirm this."

"I do not believe this," Sun shouted at her. "Even if so, you still have the I/O input. We demand that you return to your quarters, and return the ship to our control, so that we may access the datastore, or I will execute another crew member in"-she winked at her implants-"three minutes."

Fang-Castro said, "Killing people won't bring back the QSUs-"

"We can't take the chance!" Sun shouted. "If you don't believe me . . ."

She raised her gun, pointing it at Francisco.

Sandy shouted, "Wait, wait, wait . . . Colonel. I can fix this. . . . I promise you, I can fix this."

Sun was wild-eyed: "And how would you fix this, Captain Darlington?"

"Let me . . ." He picked up his slate and unclipped his stylus. "A datastore switch."

From the screen above him, Fang-Castro said, "Captain Darlington! Captain Darlington! Don't do that. Don't do that! That's an order."

Sandy looked up at the screen. "She's crazy, ma'am. She's going to kill Commander Francisco."

Sun said, "Give me that switch."

Sandy said, "No. Here. I'm going to fix everything." He snapped the stylus in his hands, and said, "The datastore is gone."

Sun shouted, "You are lying. You lie!" Spittle was flying from her lips as she looked around the room at the wide-eyed Americans. She pointed the gun at Sandy's head and shouted, "Admiral, you have ten seconds to surrender the bridge-"

Cui shot her in the back.

Sun went down and rolled over, her eyes open, catching Cui just before she died. Cui felt nothing for her at all. She looked up at the screen and said, "Admiral Fang-Castro, if you will put me on ship-wide comm, I will order my crew to lay down their arms."

Propulsion and Engineering's systems ran entirely independently of the rest of the Nixon. The shift on duty had no appreciation of how much the balance of power had shifted in a few handfuls of minutes.

"Hey, Wendy, the comm channels are all open again," one of her techs called out. Dr. Greenberg shook her head. Why did it seem like the interesting stuff always happened on her shift? So far, on this mission, "interesting" meant "bad."

Okay, maybe not bad this time, she thought. She opened a channel to the bridge, thought about asking, "Hey what's going on up there?" but decided on a more prudent formality, just in case she was speaking for history.

"Wendy Greenberg, here, chief engineer on duty. Can we have a status update? Over."

"Wendy? You guys okay? Langers. The Chinese have surrendered. Summerhill, Hannegan, and Sun are dead. Over."

There was a mutter all through Engineering: Summerhill was dead? But they had the ship back? Greenberg asked a tech, "Do I laugh or cry?"

When Fang-Castro and Crow got to the Commons, they found Sandy sitting in a chair next to a couple of Chinese soldiers. Sandy looked at Fang-Castro and said, "It's all over?"

"It's all over." She shook her head: "We lost both the QSUs and the datastore. Mr. Francisco?"

"Yes, ma'am?"

"Take Captain Darlington to the remaining lockup and secure him there. I'm placing him under arrest for ignoring a direct order under combat conditions."

Crow was dumbfounded. "Really?"

"I believe we could have negotiated-"

Clover jumped in. "You're wrong. You're flat wrong. Sun was nuts. She was going to kill all of us."

Fang-Castro snapped: "I didn't ask your opinion, Mr. Clover. This will all be subject to an inquiry. In the meantime, Mr. Darlington goes to jail. We've lost access to centuries' worth of knowledge that would have revolutionized the world as we know it. Mr. Francisco, remove him."

Sandy gave Crow the toothy grin: "Some days you ride the board, and some days the board rides you. That's just life, big guy."

Santeros was all too aware of the light-speed delay. It was not improving her temperament. It would be difficult for anything to put her in a worse mood than the past week. Starting with goddamn Fang-Castro's taking the Chinese survivors on board the Nixon, and hadn't that worked out well?

Then came the takeover and the runaround she'd gotten from Beijing. This was an act of piracy, clear and simple. Or maybe an act of war. Nobody disputed that. How had Beijing responded? With the diplomatic equivalent of a shrugged shoulder and a mock-sympathetic "Life is hard, isn't it?"

And in the meantime, the Chinese had started a worldwide scare campaign: they were just trying to keep the Americans from keeping the tech that belonged to all humans. The scare campaign was gaining ground.

And that goddamn general secretary, Hong, was doing his best to piss her off even more. On the phone, just now: he didn't say it in so many words, but the condensed version was that she-the fuckin' President of the whole United fuckin' States-was being blown off!

She said her polite good-byes, wished the general secretary's family well, added under her breath that she hoped they'd all get tertiary syphilis, and slammed the handset down so hard that it cracked.

The bang made Paula White and Richard Emery, the chairwoman and vice chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, wince. They glanced at each other. Santeros had a famous temper, but this was off the scale.

Carefully and quietly, White asked, "No improvement, Madam President?"

"Oh no, it's just great. Can't you tell from the expression on my face?" She caught herself and took a deep breath, swallowed. "I'm sorry, Paula, I'm taking it out on you and I should be taking it out on that asshole, Hong. He's got that grandpa face, and he's a bigger hard-liner than me. Publicly, he's all wringing of hands and bemoaning the 'rogue activities' of the Chinese pirates. In private he's throwing a party. Hell, it's not even that private."

"Madam President," said Emery, "we need to up the ante. Put pressure on Beijing as well as prepare for the worst. Paula and I"-he glanced over at his boss, who nodded-"we think you need to start mobilizing. Take our forces up to Tier Three. And if this doesn't resolve soon, Tier Two."

Her chief of staff stuck his head in: "Ma'am, you've got a highest priority incoming from the Nixon. You're gonna want to look at it."

"How bad?"

The chief of staff scratched his head. "Honestly . . . I don't know. It's . . . I'm just going to spool it over to you."

"Give it to me in one word. Are we going to war?"

"Uh . . . no, but I'm not sure how much happier you're gonna be. Let me spool it over."

Hong's call came just past midnight in Washington, early afternoon in a sunny, flower-scented Beijing. In Washington, Gladys's soft, synthesized voice spoke in the Oval Office. "Madam President, General Secretary Hong is on the line. May I put him through?" Santeros waved assent.

She said, "Mr. Secretary, we're going to need something that'll make both our populaces . . . and our governmental oppositions . . . happy. I'm getting a lot of push here just to have the Chinese rescuees shot outright, as pirates. No international tribunals, no repatriation. Just a bullet for each one."

Hong: "And I'm dealing with folks who think they're the Heroes of the Revolution. You shoot them and my administration won't stand. The MSS will have me replaced with someone even more intractable within hours."

Santeros chuckled. "Things don't move quite so fast here, but if your 'heroes' get their way and my opponents can pin that on me, the next sound you hear will be the House drawing up articles of impeachment."

Representative Cline shook her head vigorously no.

"Oh, face facts, Francie," Santeros said. "If it looks like I caved in to the Chinese pirates, and you don't support a motion to impeach, you'll find yourself ex-Speaker before you could blink twice."

Hong continued, "So, here's our proposed joint statement: our two crews had some communications difficulties to begin with. Language barriers, misunderstood orders, which created some confusion and concern, but it was all over nothing. I can toss in something about radical dissidents trying to foment trouble, not in concert with our policies. I'm sure you can come up with something about minor difficulties in the power plant delaying the restart of the engines. The important thing being that everyone is working together now in the spirit of international cooperation to see that both our peoples come home safely."

"That could fly, if your guys will go along. We'll have to shut everybody up when they get back, but I can do that on my end."

"And I can assure you that I can do it on mine. But I have to give the MSS a bone. They don't believe that all the memory is gone. They point out that you have three major computers, not one."

"You should know, you sabotaged one of them."

"I'm trying to be . . . cooperative here, and find a way to save both our asses."

"But primarily your own."

"Of course, and I'm sure that you have the same relative priority."

"Yes. I do."

"So. Since you say the memory store and the QSUs are all gone . . . here is our proposal."

Santeros had to struggle with the various interest groups involved-and talk to the top scientific experts-but in the end, acceded to the Chinese proposal.

One last task: put the screws to Fiorella. Santeros needed just the right news to be broadcast. . . .

- Greenberg was sucking down a bulb of coffee when she took the call from the bridge. The Nixon floated in space, fourteen million kilometers from Saturn and 1.3 billion kilometers from Earth.

"Dr. Greenberg, this is Commander Fang-Castro. You have permission to bring the engines back online, full power at your convenience. Helm has sent the navigation coordinates to your station. Let's go home."

Saturday, November 24, 2068-a hundred and fifty thousand kilometers from Earth. The Nixon was home.

That's how it felt to the crew, anyway. They were in Earth orbit. It was a large, elliptical orbit, never coming closer than fifty thousand kilometers to the earth and extending out beyond the moon. But it was an orbit; they were captured in Earth's gravitational field.

The Nixon would spiral in, reversing the course they had taken when they departed nearly a year and a half ago. Thanksgiving, two days earlier, had been a sober affair. Although Earth was tantalizingly close, less than a million kilometers away and rushing toward them, they still had too much velocity for orbital capture.

But nothing went wrong.

The least thankful person had been Fang-Castro. She had not taken the decisions of the two governments very well.

"I cannot believe you're asking this of me," she said. "You seriously expect me to scuttle my own ship?" She'd received outrageous demands in her time, but this was beyond all imagining.

Santeros was the model of calm. "Admiral, I am not asking anything of you. I'm telling you. This is what is going to happen. The Nixon will be abandoned, disposed of. The new Chinese Martian transport will retrieve you and your crew. They will bring you back to low Earth orbit. This has been decided. Debate is not being reopened."

"Then I'd ask you to relieve me of command. You can have somebody else take over for the rest of the mission."

The faintest of smiles played across Santeros's lips. "That wouldn't discomfit me in the least, but that's not how this is going to play out. There are issues of international politics that are far more important than you, and as far as that goes, all of your crew members put together. I want neither the distraction nor the questions that might be raised by a last-minute change of command. I need a good face on this. You're going to serve."

"Why should I?"

Santeros shrugged. "Because you're an officer in the navy. You guys always do what you're told first and resign later. If you want to resign later, be my guest."

Fang-Castro's shoulders slumped. Her hands gripped the arms of her chair. The knuckles were pale. She spoke softly. "You give me no choice. I've noticed that tendency in your administration. Anything else?" She didn't say, "ma'am."

"Thank you, Admiral. Look at it this way, Naomi: you have a certain . . . mmm . . . grip on my balls. That's a good thing, from your side. From my side, I'm used to it. There are more hands in my pants than you can believe. But, you know, play your part, and good things will happen for you. Play your part, and Crow will take care of the details."

- The Chinese were unwilling to risk even the slightest chance that the Nixon could somehow unload the information on the alien technology. Since they didn't know how much memory the alien downloads would use, they were unwilling to let even the smallest objects leave the Nixon: a memory file could be made to look like almost anything, so they would not allow anything to leave the Nixon.

How to do that? The Nixon was diseased.

That was the report, a day after they achieved high orbit, when they'd already had visitors. Now the visitors were stuck, too.

Major Barnes came down with something that looked like a virus . . . but not quite like a virus. He'd been cleared through the quarantine months earlier, after breathing the atmosphere in the alien primary, and even now, didn't seem especially ill. Sore throat, pink blotchy spots over his back, legs, and arms.

Then Cui came down with it.

Fang-Castro made the announcement.

"The CDC has a man on the way up. The blood samples taken by Doctors Manfred and Mo suggest a virus, but it doesn't look like anything they've seen before. We're afraid it could have come from the alien environment, so the CDC's guy will be visiting us in a full environmental suit. Dr. Mo suggests that we really don't have much to be worried about, the bug seems easy enough to kill in vitro."

Ship-wide groans.

Sandy had been confined for a week after his performance on the bridge, but the confinement was obviously pointless-where was he going to run to?-and he hadn't yet been convicted of anything, though he surely would be. And he wasn't dangerous . . . and nine-tenths of the people on the ship thought he'd probably saved their lives.

So they let him out.

Fang-Castro told him, "Too many people in Washington know about this to let it go. You're going to spend time in jail."

"Not too much," he said, with his grin.

"If I were you, I'd brace myself," Fang-Castro said. "Among other things, Santeros is looking for a scapegoat."

Now, in Earth orbit, Sandy set up for an interview with Fiorella, announcing the onset of the plague.

"I probably wouldn't refer to it as the plague," Fiorella said.

"They want you to," Sandy said.

"Maybe. But I'm a journalist, not a lapdog," she said. "Really." She sounded slightly guilty. She'd had an extremely pragmatic talk with Santeros.

"I just take the pictures," Sandy said. "Really."

Clover cruised by. "One-point-two million in the Hump Pool. Not a single person has bet on tonight. Or last night or tomorrow night. So, I was thinking we ought to pull the trigger, but . . . you know, even though the whole concept of the Hump Pool is despicable, taking the money smacks of fraud. I'm getting mildly cold feet."

Sandy said, "If we pull the trigger, you could fund your own archaeological expedition. To anywhere."

Clover said, "My feet got warmer. Keep talking."

"I don't really need the money, but I want it," Fiorella said. "It's me that the Hump Pool is about. The assumption that I could never resist Mr. Money and Big White Teeth. I will not mind sticking it to them and turning a profit on twisting the knife."

Sandy brought out the teeth: "Dinner and a movie? Tonight at my place?"

"I'll be there at seven o'clock," Fiorella said. She threw her head back, released a well-simulated sexual groan, then straightened and said, "And I'm just warming up."