“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.”
65.
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.”
Clover rubbed his hands together. “I was hoping you’d talk me out of my spasm of righteousness. The Hump Pool was wrong. I’m defending the reputation of women everywhere by taking the cash.”
“Absolutely,” Fiorella said.
An hour later, she was live from the bridge:
“While the crew, including myself, and the former crewmen of the Celestial Odyssey, will have to spend some time in a Level Four biocontainment facility, now being fabbed in the new Chinese Divine Wanderer, there’s not much doubt the viral visitor can be eradicated from our bodies. There remains the question of what will happen to the Nixon. Eradicating every last organic particle from this ship would be a vast task, not made easier by the fact that we’d have to do it in space. Preliminary tests have shown that this particle may not be killed by exposure to a vacuum….”