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Crow said, “Joe, it’s not really about what mankind would lose: it’s about the competition between us and the Chinese.”

Martinez nodded. “I know that. But I don’t want mankind to lose it. I don’t want to lose it. I won’t be alive in a hundred and fifty years. I want to see what’s in the alien package. Like, now. Before I die.”

____

Fiorella and Sandy put together a quick vid of Fang-Castro graciously agreeing that the Americans would do everything possible to rescue the Chinese. Fiorella’s carefully crafted commentary left no doubt that American science, technology, and humanitarianism—the Americans were risking their lives—were key to rescuing the cruder Chinese mission, to allow Cui to get back with her handsome husband and pretty children. She didn’t say that, but everybody watching the vid understood it.

“I think you just made Ultra,” Sandy told her, when the vid had been dispatched to Earth. “Santeros will owe you big-time, and as big a bitch as she can be, nobody ever claimed that she didn’t take care of her own.”

“I’m not one of her own,” Fiorella protested.

“Not exactly, but she’ll feel the debt. Not a bad place to be,” Sandy said.

Fiorella thought about that, then changed the subject. “You’re done with your meds now, right?”

“Yup.”

“How are you feeling?”

“Still hurts, but I’m functional. What happens is… Do you want to hear this?”

“Yes.”

“What happens is, your brain gets stuck in a feedback loop. Why did this happen? Is there something wrong with me that it keeps happening—first in the Tri-Border, and now here? What could I have done? What could I have said to her that I didn’t? You get these flashbacks and every time you flash back, the loop intensifies. The meds break the loop and smooth out the thought processes, and eventually time starts to erode the power of the flashbacks. Somewhat, anyway. Still get them, but less frequently, and with less force. So. That’s where I’m at.”

“I asked because… Fang-Castro says you’re back on military status. Which means, if there were a conflict with the Chinese…”

“You’re worried that I’m fragile.”

“I worry about you.

“I’m good. And sad. Both at once. But: functional. My brain’s working again.”

“We’re sure that’s a good thing?”

Sandy gave her his toothy smile: “You gotta work with what you got, sweetheart. I just try to keep up….”

53.

The alien tech was kept in one of the rooms that earlier had been used as a temporary jail. Because it had been specifically designed for that purpose, it had been lined with thin sheet steel on all six sides, which effectively made it a Faraday cage, shielding the room from most electromagnetic radiation.

With a heavy, nearly unbreakable lock, it would also resist physical interference, for at least some period of time. All by itself, it might serve.

“The only problem,” Martinez said, as he, Sandy, and Crow stood in the room, looking at the carefully packaged alien tech where it sat on newly fabbed plastic shelves, “is that it’s too big. Any amount of explosive big enough to guarantee that the tech would be destroyed might also knock a hole in the ship.”

“Not good,” Crow said.

“We need a small, tough isolation box, inside the hard room, connected to a little tiny receiver buried in the wall outside the steel, where the Chinese can’t see it. If we keep the fire in the box, and put the box on a heat-resistant stand of some kind, that’ll restrict the fire until we can get inside the room and kill it. And we probably ought to have a camera inside the room, in case they figure another way in.”

“Box won’t be that small,” Crow said. They all looked at the readers, which were the size of a standard office printer.

“Why not just fab a box for the memory modules?” Sandy asked. “Kill those, and the readers are useless, anyway. I mean, maybe we could take four readers, and give four to the Chinese, and we could all race to see how they worked. We could even call it a sign of goodwill.”

Crow said, “You’ve been thinking about this.”

“My history in the Tri-Border: trust no one, everything breaks, nothing works as advertised, and if anything can go wrong, it will.”

“And you’re so young.”

“But getting older by the minute,” Sandy said. “I can fab the steel box, if Joe can work out the kill trigger switches, which is going to be the hard part. I’ll need to measure the modules. Actually, I can scale them with one of my Reds.”

“How long will that take?” Crow asked.

“I can fab the box in a couple of hours,” Sandy said. “Compared to building a guitar, it’s nothing. If we get Elroy to work with Joe on the kill trigger switches… I don’t know, we should be done before midnight?”

Martinez nodded: “But we’ll have to hustle.”

The dinner briefing was quiet. Not much had changed. Santeros had confirmed the ship’s preparations for the Chinese, “although I’ll be pretty goddamned unhappy if you blow that tech.”

Sandy had finished the box and gave a brief description of the work: “Made out of steel, with a steel lock. It’ll have a bed of raw magnesium taken from Mayday flares. I didn’t want the magnesium to actually touch the memory modules, in case there might be some chemical reaction, so I fabbed a tray that sits inside the box, near the top, with individual grooves for each module. The tray’s made of non-reactive plastic, so the modules should be fine. That’s ready to go. Joe can tell you about his switches.”

Martinez said, “We created two electronic ignition circuits inside the magnesium bed—this is a very thin layer of the stuff, because it burns really hot, and we want it to burn out in a hurry. The circuit is battery-powered—two batteries sit inside the box, and either one can provide juice to the firing circuits. It’s got a radio link to a coded transceiver embedded in the wall of the room that would be almost impossible to find—it’s about the size of your little fingernail. Only two people know where it is, and the Chinese, even if they knew, would virtually have to tear the middle of the ship apart to get at it. Anyway, it’s a deadman circuit. If it doesn’t get a picosecond ping from at least one of the kill triggers each second, it’ll go off. Just in case the Chinese do manage to find the transceiver or otherwise isolate the box from a possible kill signal. We built three triggers for Admiral Fang-Castro to distribute as she wishes. We assume the actual holders of the triggers will be secret, trusted people known only to the admiral.”

“This all makes me very nervous,” Fang-Castro said. “Though it’s exactly what I asked for. How do we fire the switches, if we need to?”

He reached down into a briefcase and pulled out three gold slate styluses. “These actually work, of course. If you drop them, throw them, whatever, nothing happens. But if you look carefully at the middle of them, you’ll see a very faint line. That’s a cut point. You turn the two halves against each other, rotating them, it doesn’t matter which way, then just snap it in your hand. Like you were breaking a wooden pencil. It takes some effort, more than breaking a pencil, but nothing that would be a problem for any active person. No way that could be done accidentally, both the turn and the snap. Do it, and BOOM. The box blows.”

“Are they armed?” Barnes asked.

“Yeah, they’re functional, but the box isn’t. Not yet. I’ll arm that just before the Chinese come aboard. Once that’s done, it’s done.” He pushed the styluses across the table to Fang-Castro, who pulled them in, looked at them, and said, “God help us.”