“Can you perform simple operations, like locating a particular crew member or locking or unlocking a particular door?”
He looked at the panel. “Yes, I can do that.”
“Please be sure, Mr. Langers. I would be very unhappy if you were to accidentally unlock all the doors or the communications system. The consequences could be tragic.”
Langers looked at her face and then at her sidearm. “I will be careful.”
“Are Commander Fang-Castro and Mr. Crow in their quarters? Can you open communications channels just to them and unlock only their quarters’ doors when Commander Cui requests it? And do you have vid surveillance of their quarters?”
Langers tapped the panel and pulled up a few data lines. “They are both in quarters—or somebody is. I can unlock the doors, but I can’t give you the vid. That’s locked for reasons of privacy and only the admiral can override the locks. I can give you audio to both quarters, although they both have the option to kill the audio, if they wish.”
Cui asked, “Lieutenant Sun, how is our complement?”
“Up to full strength, Commander.”
“Lieutenant Langers, please open links to Admiral Fang-Castro and Mr. Crow.”
Langers tapped the screen he was looking at, and then pointed a finger at Cui.
“Admiral Fang-Castro, Mr. Crow? This is Cui Zhuo. I would like to meet with both of you in the conference room. I’ll be sending escorts to accompany you. They will be armed. Please don’t attempt anything foolish.”
She didn’t wait for an answer, but gestured and Langers closed the channel. “Now, Mr. Summerhill, bring up the ship’s logs for the past three weeks. My lieutenant and I have some reading to do.”
Summerhill was sweating. “Some of the logs are encrypted, ma’am. I don’t have the passwords or keys for those. Honestly, ma’am.”
“Bring up what you can, Lieutenant.”
60.
The first round of discussions between the Chinese and Americans went as expected: not well.
Sun had confirmed from the ship’s logs what the AI told Cui at the alien station, that the Nixon had received eight data storage units of some kind from the alien station, and eight readers for the QSUs. The details were in the encrypted files they couldn’t access.
She also divined, from the considerable amount of high-bandwidth data that had been beamed to the Nixon from the station, that a substantial store of information on the aliens or their technology must exist in the Nixon’s own databanks. The details were also not evident in the unsecured files in the datastore.
Cui and Sun were waiting in the conference room when Fang-Castro and Crow arrived, escorted by two crew members who were also members of the Chinese special forces, the Zhōngguó tèzhong bùduì.
Cui gestured at the chairs, but Fang-Castro shook her head. “Naomi Fang-Castro, rear admiral, U.S. Navy, 756-487-8765.”
Cui shook her head: “Please. We need to talk this out. You are not a prisoner of war.”
“Naomi Fang-Castro, rear admiral, U.S. Navy, 756-487-8765.”
Crow said, “Admiral Fang-Castro would disagree about her status. She’s a prisoner of war, because your acts are certainly acts of war. That’s why she provides her name, rank, and serial number… in this case, her Social Security number. If you were not declaring war with your acts—”
“We were not,” Sun blurted.
“—then you’re pirates, for which the punishment in a critical situation like this, would certainly be death, for all the pirates.” He paused, to look at the two Chinese officers, then continued. “Admiral Fang-Castro’s reticence does not apply to me, of course, since I’m a civilian. I am willing to talk, and willing to report what you say to the President, although I warn you, it would be advisable for you to give this up right now. The admiral is a humane person and I doubt that she would order any executions. Once I speak to the President, then this is all on the record. You will have declared war on the United States. I don’t know if the chairman granted you the power to do that, but that’s where we are.”
Cui glanced involuntarily at Sun, then said, “Lieutenant Sun is our… new political officer. She would know more about the legalities than I do.”
Sun said, “We anticipate returning the ship to your control amicably and quickly. Before we can do that, however, we need to work out a way to share the alien data that you took from the planetoid, and which the aliens intended for all mankind, not for the exclusive use of the U.S.A. I am quite sure that all the regional blocs would agree with us.”
Crow smiled at her, shrugged.
“What?”
“We will give you what the President says we can. But I’m not going to do that on my own. If we’re in a state of war, then giving you that information would be treason, and I could be shot. I would not enjoy being shot by my own people. And you won’t get it from the admiral.”
Sun: “We will get it from somebody.”
“Good luck with that.”
“I would point out that we could simply take the memory modules, and ship them separately back to Earth.”
Crow shook his head. “No. You can’t.”
He told them about the burn box, and the secret switches.
The discussion went downhill from there. Cui made another appeal to Fang-Castro, who was still standing.
Fang-Castro: “Naomi Fang-Castro, rear admiral, U.S. Navy, 756-487-8765.”
Sun turned to Crow: “It’s time to talk to your president. You can establish a connection with that slate?”
“Yes, but not from here. There is a separately secured network in my quarters. It’s tempest-hardened. That’s the only way I can set up a line to the President. It wouldn’t be good if anyone on the ship could listen in to our communications.”
“Let me guess, you’re the only one who can operate that slate.”
Again, a smile: “It’s standard issue for high-level diplomacy. Biometrically linked to me. Nobody else can start it up, and it’ll shut down after three minutes if it doesn’t sense my thumb. Oh, and it requires a live thumb. It can tell.”
Cui looked at Fang-Castro, then at Crow, and sighed. She told the two special forces officers to escort the Americans back to their quarters. “Mr. Crow, Lieutenant Sun and I will confer, and then we will visit you, and perhaps speak to your president.”
“I would hurry,” Crow said. “You’ve cut the data stream to Earth and that will be noticed. We will have questions on the way back, by now. If they don’t get answers, we might get a war even if you give the ship back to us—because one way or another, our president and military people will understand what has happened.”
Cui nodded.
When they were alone, Cui asked Sun: “So, are we at war, or not?”
“Right now, we are Schrödinger’s cat,” she said. “We need to work on our talking points.”
Fifteen minutes later, with Fang-Castro still confined to her quarters, Cui and Sun visited Crow in his. Cui instructed the bridge to reactivate the network in Crow’s room and the adjacent corridor.
Crow could’ve done both, by himself, but wasn’t about to reveal that.
Cui instructed Crow to initiate a link to the White House. Once he’d started the process running, she took the slate from him and walked out of the room. She got barely a meter away from the door when an orange alert came up on the screen: “Authorized network no longer available—suspending link initialization.”
She stepped back into the room. The alert message was replaced by one stating that initialization had resumed. She stepped just outside the doorway and closed the door. The orange alert reappeared. The network was shielded and the slate locked to it, just as Crow had said. She stepped back into the room and returned the slate to him before the biometric authorization timed out.