Duan signaled back to Zhang: “It’s some kind of drone, we think. No visible defensive or offensive capability.”
“How big?”
“A meter and a half long. Appears to be inactive. We’ve probed it with every nondestructive tool we’ve got—millimeter waves, soft X-ray, active sonar and passive sound detecting equipment. There’s a little hum, but not much.”
“Could you, uh, pick it up?”
“We’ll try.”
They tried, but the artifact was immovable. A docking collar locked the fuselage to the port that went into the moonlet. The tips of several appendages were firmly embedded in complementary fixtures arrayed about the port.
“That isn’t going to work,” Duan called. “We need to talk here.”
“Americans are almost around.”
At Duan’s direction, the crew tried to pry the appendages loose and rotate the docking collar, but got no movement with the degree of force the mechanics were willing to risk. The only response of the automaton was that faint internal hum increased when stress was put on the appendages.
They considered the option of cutting it free. Their cutting torches ought to be up to the task. But was it a good idea?
As an option, it was the last resort. They had no way of knowing how much damage they would do to the automaton by cutting away pieces of it, especially powered components, as the hum suggested they were. They might end up with a dead and dismembered spacecraft, pieces of alien space junk. How much could they learn about the technology from an entirely nonfunctional device?
Before going the meat-cleaver route, they opted for precision surgery. The docking mechanisms were active devices. If they could shut down the ant, they might be able to decouple it from the moonlet. The scientists and technicians now had 3-D models of the innards of the spacecraft, the fruits of the multispectral scans. A lot of what was in there was unidentifiable or incomprehensible. Just what was that thing near the bottom front that looked like a kidney?
A lot, though, was recognizable. Conduits and cables look much the same no matter who built them. They could see lumps that they could tell must function as motors or actuators, odd as they looked, just from where they were and what they were attached to.
There were a handful of larger modules. Those had to include fuel and storage tanks, computing and data-handling functions, and a power source. Assuming, of course, that alien engineering design followed anything remotely like human engineering principles. It was a large assumption, but they’d been able to recognize conduits and cables and motors, so it couldn’t be all that different.
There had to be signals to the motors telling them what to do and power so that they could do it. The electrical engineers started tracing conduits back from the motors. One by one they eliminated modules from consideration, as the scientists peered anxiously over the engineers’ shoulders and kept checking the time. They worked it down to two candidates. One was likely the computing unit, the other the main power supply. The one with the larger cables? Probably power.
They might be wrong, but disconnecting either ought to shut down the spacecraft. They had twenty-five minutes to do one or the other before the Americans would be looking over their shoulders. Rebooting the artifact might be tricky, or impossible, but at least they’d have an intact machine.
“Cut the power supply,” Duan said. There wasn’t time to consult with Zhang on the decision.
The engineers worked rapidly, calling out for tools and instruments that were delivered to them instantly by the surrounding team. Like field surgeons, they contemplated their alien patient. They were down to eighteen minutes to complete the operation. They decided where to make the first incision.
Zhang was talking with Cui, with increasing exasperation about the information feeds, and about the fact that the Americans may have tried to sneak away with the most important information dispensed by the information-bot.
He was doing that when the screens carrying the feed from the ship’s telescopes flared white, at the same moment that blinding light poured through the ports on the bridge.
Cui, several kilometers away, was looking toward the ship as she spoke to Zhang, and saw the ship flicker, as though it had been lit by lightning. An instant later, though, the ship remained as it had been.
On board the Celestial Odyssey, the radiation alarm sounded for a fraction of a second and went silent. As it went silent, all the ship’s screens, all the interior lighting, went dark. Zhang heard a panicked scream, he didn’t know from whom; it was almost immediately stifled by the embarrassed crew member.
The windows’ glare had been dazzling; anyone looking out a port had been temporarily blinded, although the flash had been several kilometers away.
After a long five seconds, lights began to come back, as well as the various vid screens.
“Shenme zai diyu?” That was the helmsman, Lieutenant Peng. His voice was high, panicked. Zhang knew who had screamed.
Zhang took a calming breath before he spoke. “Mr. Peng, that was a nuclear explosion. The ship’s systems and power went down because the electromagnetic pulse tripped the safeties.”
“But, sir, the shuttle!”
Zhang managed to keep his voice from shaking. “Cong, there is no shuttle. Not any longer,” he said very softly.
“Admiral?” The navigator on watch, Lieutenant Sun, spoke up. “I’m confirming that. There’s nothing on the scope.”
“No shuttle?” asked Peng.
“Peng,” replied the navigator, “there’s nothing. No moonlet, no shuttle. Everything that was there… everyone… gone. Vaporized.”
The helmsman began to sob. It was not professional. Zhang found it entirely understandable.
“Mr. Lei, ship’s status now, if you please.”
The watch officer was already hard at work. “No physical damage likely, not at twenty kilometers. The EMP might have fried some hardware. We’re pretty well shielded against that—original ship’s design in case it got caught by a really bad solar storm or a coronal ejection mass. But that’s a whole different level from a close-by nuclear pulse. The major systems will be okay or have backups. We could lose some lesser equipment. I’ll have a survey done now.”
“What about the radiation flash? What effect would that have on the crew?”
“I don’t know. The hull would protect us from normal background radiation, but a short, intense dose like this? I don’t know. I will talk to Medical. We may want to start everyone on radiation sickness preempts, just in case.”
“Do that. Mr. Sun, what is it?” The navigator was signaling urgently.
“Captain, we may have another problem. Those small autonomous spacecraft, like the one we were trying to catch? A lot of them, hundreds it looks like, are changing trajectory. They’re moving in our direction.”
Ta ma de, thought Zhang, we kicked the anthill.
50.
Francisco, the executive officer, had the watch when the bridge klaxon sounded the three-note tone that signaled a radiation emergency. Startled, he lost his grip on the slate he’d been reading; the slate slowly fell to the end of its tether.
He ignored it. “Comm, kill that noise. Engineering, Science, talk to me. Frank, you first.”
Lieutenant LaFarge scanned his console. “It’s a real alert, sir, not a computer fault or test run. Outside sensors reported a radiation spike. Safety systems kicked in like they’re supposed to and set off the alarms.”