Nevertheless, they were on their way back to the moon. After all the launch pressure they floated around a small but luxurious cabin. Now Ta Shu and Fred could float into a corner and strap themselves in, and suck on some bulbs of tea, and finally catch up. Fred had had a busy time of it, to the point where he couldn’t seem to talk about it very well. Ta Shu had to excavate the story out of him question by question, but eventually he understood how Fred and Qi had stayed hidden for so long; they had gone to ground and stayed there, simple as that. Only after they ventured out had they been recaptured, Fred wasn’t sure how. In fact Ta Shu knew more about what had happened to them after their capture in Hong Kong than they did themselves. He could explain a bit of that, and also explain how returning to the moon might be helpful to Fred.
“You’ll be under the protection of a very powerful faction in the Chinese government, that’s the main thing. They’ll push the investigation of what happened to you last time. On Earth there were too many factions after you, some of them quite dangerous. So I think this makes sense.”
“I hope so. Do you know if my family got word that I was okay?”
“I don’t know, but I can ask people to find out.”
“I want them to know.”
“I understand, but it will be important to be discreet about that. If there are people trying to harm you, you don’t want to remind anyone of your family’s existence.”
He looked even more unhappy.
Ta Shu patted him on the arm, said to him, “This should keep you out of the hands of the factions down there who are Qi’s enemies, also her father’s enemies. That could have gotten bad.”
“It was bad.”
“I mean worse.”
Fred nodded to show he understood. Ta Shu was not sure he did, but then again, he looked much warier than he had when they had met during their first moon landing. He had gone through a lot since then. He was pale; he had gotten sick in Hong Kong, he said, and had not yet fully recovered.
Qi, on the other hand, looked full of energy. Sophisticated; powerful. Ta Shu was reminded of Peng Ling, and not just Ling the student of twenty years before, but the current chairperson of the standing committee. Qi had that same kind of tiger gaze. Well, she was the daughter of a tiger, and princelings often enjoyed the shade of trees planted by the ancestors. So it was not so surprising.
Now as they waited out their transit, moving from sleep to meals to gazing out the window, she had questions for him. First, of course, concerning who exactly it was he was referring to, when he spoke of their benefactor.
She was very interested when he told her it was Peng Ling. “Peng!” she said. “She used to be an ally of my father’s, but now that may be changing. They are both possible candidates for the next presidency. I don’t know if I trust her.”
“That’s something only you can decide,” Ta Shu said.
She was also very interested in the communication device Ta Shu now pulled from the luggage compartment and handed to her. As he gave it to her he said, “All I know about this is that someone who knew where you were going, and knew I was going to join you, wanted you to have it. They said it was from someone who wanted to help you. I can’t vouch for it beyond that.”
The little box had a glossy operations screen on its top. Qi took it from him with a suspicious look and then handed it over immediately to Fred, who inspected it closely.
“Is it made by your company?” Ta Shu asked him.
“No,” Fred said. “It’s Chinese. The qubits in it are probably yttrium molecules in a matrix of platinum. Either that or diamonds with nitrogen trapped in their flaws.”
“Can it be used to track us?” Qi asked.
“No,” Fred said. “It’s basically a radio phone. What people call a unicaster, in that it only broadcasts to its twin. The quantum array in it is entangled with the complementary array in the phone it’s paired with, so communication between the two is encrypted in a way that can’t be cracked.”
“And the other one could be anywhere?” Ta Shu said. “Non-locality?”
Fred tilted his head to the side; Ta Shu saw that this was a move he made when he was thinking about something he liked to think about. “The other one could be anywhere and it would stay entangled with this one. Anywhere in the universe, in theory. But it has to be within radio range to actually communicate with the other one. It doesn’t take much power to transmit from the Earth to the moon. But this one is small enough that it’s probably what people in the business call a telegraph. It sends a small bit rate at low power in a narrow bandwidth. So it probably just sends texts.”
“But it can’t give away where we are,” Qi repeated.
“No. Essentially it’s just a secure private text line.”
Qi looked at it dubiously.
“It can never hurt to talk to people,” Ta Shu suggested.
“As long as they can’t find you,” she said.
The hours of their transit passed. Their chamber had a single small round window; in it from time to time they saw Earth, each time smaller, the gorgeous blue ball glowing in a way that belied all its troubles. It was hard to believe they were as far away from it as they were. It was also hard to believe that it was what it was. Thinking of Zhou Bao, Ta Shu tapped onto his pad:
They came down on retro-rockets, which meant the speed of their landing was very slight compared to that of their previous arrival. Ta Shu looked at Fred and saw Fred glance at him; no doubt he also was remembering their meteoric stoop onto the piste at the south pole. That had been quite a moment. Ta Shu smiled, and Fred dipped his head.
This time they were landing on the far side of the moon, they had been told, on a pad just inside the rugged mountain rim of Tsiolkovsky Crater, a big crater in the generally rocky landscape of the far side. When their spaceship was down, the pad they had landed on rose a little under them, then wheeled their craft into a tall gap in the arcing inside wall of Tsiolkovsky Crater. This gap proved to be an entryway to an enormous rock-walled vestibule, which contained on its inside wall a door as tall as the rocket. The door opened; the rocket and its platform rolled inside it, the giant doors slid shut and closed behind them. They were inside the moon, rocket and all.
This place was Fang Fei’s hidden refuge, a crew member told them. A secret world, and even bigger than it first appeared, because the tall tunnel they had been wheeled into proved to be just an antechamber. From there they were wheeled through two more sets of giant doors, and after the last ones had closed behind them, their rocket’s outer doors simply opened, and their crew led them out of the craft and down a set of stairs, in a slight wind of warm dry air. They were invited to sit on the rear seats of a big electric cart, and when they did that they were driven through another tunnel, then out an open doorway into a bigger space.