“Mr. Darlington, you’re ready?” Fang-Castro asked.
“Yes, ma’am. We’re on the air, straight back to the Oval Office.”
“Then let’s proceed. Lieutenant Langers has confirmed that the Chinese are coming after us.” She nodded toward the slightly nervous navigator. “Mr. Langers? You have the floor.”
The soft-spoken officer kept it short and concise. His summary, accompanied by a few plots brought up on the conference room vids, barely took longer than his original phone call to Fang-Castro.
Greenberg was incredulous. “We’re not helpless! We have power and plenty of delta-vee to spare. If we thrust at ninety degrees to our current trajectory, it would add, oh, a week, maybe, to the trip back. Then our course’d be well clear of the Chinese.”
Fang-Castro looked at the navigator, who was tapping away at his slate. He shook his head. “That won’t do the trick. We’d be a hundred thousand kilometers off to one side when the Celestial Odyssey passed us, on their current trajectory. The thing is, they’ll pick up on a course shift pretty quickly, and once they do, they can adjust their trajectory accordingly. They’ve got over a million kilometers to cover before they reach us. If they can manage a lateral burn of a kilometer or so per second, they can track us. Seems likely.”
Fang-Castro thought about that. “And, without the additional forward thrust from our engines, they’d catch us even sooner.”
Langers nodded. “By an hour or two.”
“There’s also the question of how the Chinese would react to an attempt to elude them and how Earth would react,” Crow said. “If we successfully stay away from them, they die.”
“So we’re going to have visitors,” Fang-Castro said. “We need to prepare the ship for them. I don’t mean baking cupcakes. We can’t allow them to capture the ship, take it away from us. I need ideas on how to secure the ship and the alien tech from possibly aggressive moves.”
Fiorella asked, “What if they’re on a suicide run? What if their plan is simply to take us out? If they do that, nobody gets the tech, and everything goes back to the status quo. From their point of view, that might not be an undesirable outcome.”
Martinez, now looking so sleepy that his eyes were almost closed, said, “Then we’re fucked. Excuse the language. I’ve thought about that, about what we could do about that, and my answer is, ‘Not much.’ Depending on what they’ve still got aboard, there’s lots of ways they could kill us. So I go back to a variation of John Clover’s fundamental position on the aliens…. Since there’s nothing we can do about it, if they intend to blow us up, we might as well plan on the basis that they won’t.”
Fang-Castro nodded, but said, “Mr. Crow, Major Barnes, Captain Darlington—I want you on military status, now, Sandy—and Mr. Martinez, I want you to brainstorm that whole proposition: Is it really true that we couldn’t do anything? If they don’t blow us up, what can we do to secure the ship from a takeover? We need procedures for taking the Chinese on board, without jeopardizing our own position. I want complete recommendations in four hours: that will allow the ship warfare experts on Earth to view this vid, confer, generate their own recommendations, and get them back to us. Four hours, people.”
Barnes held up a hand, and Fang-Castro nodded to him: “Major Barnes.”
“Ma’am, we need to do more than plan for ship security. We also need to plan for what we’d do if security fails and the Chinese manage to take over the ship. That might be a small possibility, but we have to consider it.”
Crow interjected: “You’re right.” And to Fang-Castro: “He’s right.”
“I’m sure he is,” Fang-Castro said. Back to Barnes: “Do you have any practical suggestions for, um, a post-takeover scenario?”
“Yes. I’d suggest that we set up some kind of kill switch that would allow us to destroy the alien tech if we needed to. Joe tells me we’re shipping everything that came over the I/O link back to Earth as quickly as we can, but it’s not fast enough. I suggest we take down all other high-speed commo links with Earth, and use them to speed up the I/O, to capture as much of that as we can before the Chinese arrive. And maybe even refuse to allow the Chinese aboard for as long as possible so we can keep sending it.”
LaFarge, the comm officer, said, “That would double our I/O rate, but we still wouldn’t manage to get a significant fraction of it back. We might get ten percent of it, instead of eight.”
“Yeah, but who knows what might be in the additional two percent?” Martinez said. “Be worth doing, in my estimation.”
“Then we’ll do it,” Fang-Castro said. “Major Barnes—expand on the kill switch. I don’t quite grasp where you’re going with that.”
Barnes nodded. “If the Chinese managed to take the ship, they could probably figure out a way to get a package or several packages, containing a reader and a memory module, back to Earth, no matter what happened to our ships. Put them on a simple rocket, launch it in the proper orbit. Maybe it doesn’t arrive for ten years, but so what? They’d still get it a hundred and thirty years before we did.”
“Maybe we ought to consider that,” Crow said. “We’ve got eight copies—”
Martinez said, “We don’t have time. We’d have to fab a rocket, work out the orbits… they’re going to be here in less than a day. If I had a couple of weeks, maybe. But this wouldn’t be a simple project.”
Barnes said, “To finish my thought… if we can’t launch our own rocket—and even if we did, I suspect the Chinese would see it, and could probably intercept it, either here or at the earth, and either capture or destroy it—then we should protect the memory capsules and the readers from a takeover. We should fab a box, a safe, out of materials on hand, load it with magnesium from our Mayday flares, and build in a coded trigger. Then, we give triggers to Admiral Fang-Castro and a couple other people. If the Chinese take the ship, we tell them what we’ve done, and tell them if they interfere with the box, we’ll blow it. We’ll already have a tech edge on them, from the I/O material. If we do this, it’ll at least give the top people on Earth a chance to work out a compromise.”
Fang-Castro scratched her nose, then said, “Mr. Crow.”
Crow smiled. “Major Barnes has nailed it. This would give us an ultimate fallback.”
Barnes: “Keep in mind, we wouldn’t even have to use the box if we decide ten hours from now that we don’t need it. But if we decide a day from now that we desperately need one, but didn’t have it, it might be too late to fab one. We could fab it now and decide later if we need it.”
Fang-Castro looked at Martinez and said, “Build it.”
“Yes, ma’am. Though…”
“What?”
“Ah, I just hate the thought of blowing all that tech. We’ve got that science stuff on the I/O, but building the tech from first principles is gonna be a nightmare. It’s like this: suppose I went back to the 1700s and cornered Ben Franklin and handed him the plans for a laser, and asked him how quickly he could whip one up for me. Even if he fully understood the concepts, he simply wouldn’t have the tools. He wouldn’t even have the tools to make the tools. Hell, he’d probably electrocute himself trying—he just got lucky with that kite and lightning stunt. That’s where we’re at. We blow that tech… well, we might get some of it in less than a hundred and fifty years, but we won’t get all of it. I bet we wouldn’t even get most of it.”