“Yes, ma’am.”
When Fang-Castro got to the conference room, the others were all waiting, Barnes by vid from the isolation suite. She nodded at Darlington and said, “Link this to Comm, highest encrypt, top priority, tagged for the President.”
Sandy nodded and when the link was set, Fang-Castro told the group what had happened.
When she finished, Crow held up his stylus: “We must have told them that the trailing moonlets were antimatter storage?”
“Of course,” Fang-Castro said. “We also told them that the bees were apparently gathering something, but we didn’t know what, or why.”
“Didn’t we ask Wurly?” Clover asked.
“We asked Wurly for all information concerning the moonlets, the bees, and the primary, including technical drawings, manufacturing specs, and everything else we could think of,” said Martinez. “He agreed to give it to us as part of the tech package. But we were so busy gathering information, and checking the validity of what we could see, and making valid copies of it, we haven’t had a chance to look at much of it. We never looked at the details of what the remotes were doing, because we figured we could do that anytime.”
Crow said, “I’m sure the survivors on the Odyssey are talking to Beijing. What I need to get clear here, now, is that nothing we did caused the accident—that we are not to blame.”
“That is correct,” Fang-Castro said. “Mr. Francisco has suggested that the Chinese may have tried to capture one of the bees. That would have been tempting—they’re small and they’re genuine alien tech. If they could have gotten a bee back to Earth, it would have been worthwhile. We didn’t try it because we didn’t have to, and we didn’t actually have time, with the Chinese pushing on us as they were.”
“So we’re not to blame,” Crow said. “Whatever happened, is the Chinese’s own doing.”
“Yes, that’s correct, in my opinion.” She turned to Hannegan. “I’d also like some reassurance that the aliens haven’t been… fooling us. Did they actually deliver what they said they would?”
Hannegan cleared his throat. “We’ve been looking at the science data ever since the I/O went up. There’s an awful lot of it. All the theory behind the production of antimatter, all the underlying supersymmetry stuff. That’s a far cry from working technology, but it’ll still give us a twenty-year jump on the underlying hard science. A lot of theoretical-physicist food fights are gonna get settled when we get back. To me, it looks like Wurly really has given us exactly what it promised at the first meetings.”
Martinez held up a finger. “But understand, we got the science over the I/O link, but not the tech specs for actually building much. That’s on the quantum storage units.”
“Where are you on testing the actual readers?” Crow asked.
Martinez shook his head. “We’re sorting out the electrical connections now. They’re not hard, but we don’t want to screw anything up, either. With everything else we’ve had to do… What I’m trying to say is, we could probably start testing them tomorrow, or even tonight, if you’re in a rush. We haven’t done it yet.”
A call popped up on the corner of the conference room screen: Francisco calling. Fang-Castro tapped her slate, and Francisco’s face appeared: “Admiral, we’re getting a broadcast from Wurly. Or the primary. It’s very short, it’s in all the languages, it says we’re barred from contact with the primary and all the other alien tech for one hundred and forty-four years. It’s a loop, playing over and over.”
“Anything else?”
“That’s it, ma’am.”
Fang-Castro said, “Thank you,” tapped her slate, and Francisco disappeared. She asked, “Anybody?”
Clover said, “Hey, it told us the rules right at the beginning. It’s never done anything to deviate from those rules. It even told us why those rules were in place, and we pretty much played out the part it said we would. Less than two weeks into our First Contact, and we’ve managed to piss off the other party. Well, it would be pissed off, if it had any feelings to be pissed with.”
Crow said, “Stop saying ‘we.’ It wasn’t us, it was the Chinese.”
Clover shrugged. “An irrelevant distinction, I suspect. As far as the AI is concerned, all us humans look alike. I imagine that millennia, or megayears ago, when the face-to-face contactees got into their planet-killing disagreements, they didn’t much concern themselves with exactly which members of the other species had committed the unforgivable offense. I think we came out of this pretty well—a little foul, a little harm. It only banned us for a hundred and forty-four years. We got off easy! That’s almost nothing when you consider the timescales of interstellar travel.”
“All right, John,” Fang-Castro said. She turned to Crow. “Mr. Crow, do you have an opinion on our current situation’s security? Does the AI or anything else in the depot pose a threat to us, in your opinion?”
Crow tapped his fingers together thoughtfully. “I’m more concerned with the Chinese. If they attempt further tampering with the depot, its security systems might be inclined to take countermeasures. I don’t think it would distinguish between them and us. As John pointed out, its policies operate species-wide.
“And I’d point out, they banned us—they didn’t tell us to give anything back. And as far as we know, we have it all. And as far as we know, the Chinese don’t have much. They didn’t have time link to the I/O and we got all the available QSUs. That strikes me as a pretty unstable situation.”
Clover said, “About an alien threat: if there is one, we have no idea what form it would take.”
Barnes added, “We never saw any visible weapons, but there’s so many things a facility like this might be able to do. Some kind of super cybervirus trashing our computers? A swarm of bees chasing us down—we have no idea what their capabilities are. Nanobots, like the ones on the surface of the depot’s primary, gobbling up the ship from under us?”
Clover said, “You guys work too hard at your nightmares. Blowguns would be a lot easier.”
Crow: “Blowguns?”
“Yeah, these guys are making anti-iron by the ton, remember? So a little magnetic peashooter firing BBs at us, that’s what I’m thinking. Except each BB is like getting hit with…” He looked at Hannegan. “Well, I don’t know. You tell me.”
Hannegan punched a few numbers into his slate and volunteered, “Something like a kiloton of TNT?”
Clover laughed: “That’s the ticket! Beats poison blow darts all to hell. And it’s not like they’d have any shortage of BBs. Oh yeah, the AI could’ve slammed us good if it wanted to. But it hasn’t, so it probably won’t.”
Crow said, “You’ve been leaning on that theory pretty hard, the ‘they haven’t, so they won’t’ theory.”
Clover shrugged: “It’s what I got.”
51.
Zhang Ming-Hoa was having a terrible day and it wasn’t going to get better anytime soon. Communications with Beijing had been running nonstop since the accident, on an excruciatingly slow cycle. Beijing would ask a question or make a suggestion. He’d get it more than an hour after they transmitted it. He’d reply. They’d come back with a response two and a half hours later, unless they decided to think it over, in which case later still. And on and on and on.
The explosion had occurred while the alien constellation was on the far side of Saturn from Earth, so the first Beijing had known of the disaster was a short message Zhang had sent back after the ship had come off of emergency status. Their reply was terse: Is the Celestial Odyssey operational? No recriminations, no expressions of concern, no queries about the crew. Just, are you operational?