Barnes asked, “What about the stuff in memory? The stuff we got through the I/O?”
“That’s a little easier,” Martinez said. “We suggest that the I/O material be sequestered in the main memory banks, at a location known only to Admiral Fang-Castro and her most-trusted people, and accessible only with a code. We should make it accessible through any terminal. If we hit a crisis point… somebody accesses the memory and hits delete.”
“I don’t see why that’s necessary,” Greenberg said. “The Chinese can’t make use of our data. We’ve been scrupulous about following the security protocols. Every bit of alien data that came in over the I/O is quantum-encrypted and the intermediate stores are scrubbed as soon as the backup’s been verified. We can’t even read our own records. The only copy of the decryption key is in Santeros’s hands. We’ve never seen it, it’s never been out of secure storage. Without it, the encryption’s unbreakable. The Chinese can’t get in. If there’s even the least chance of keeping or regaining control of the data, we can’t consider throwing away knowledge we won’t get for another hundred and fifty years.”
Crow shook his head. “That’s just it. As far as we know, the encryption’s NP-complete, secure even under quantum attack for aeons. But we might be wrong. The encryption could’ve been compromised from the beginning. Look what happened with the American atomic secrets during World War Two. The country built an entire top secret town out in New Mexico, and guarded it with the most paranoid military men you could imagine, and every bit of tech was stolen and delivered to the Russians. There are back doors into a lot of supposedly secure systems. The sabotage of the Nixon’s power systems demonstrates that we can’t blindly rely on a belief that we’re impregnable.”
He looked around the room, then continued. “Even if we are… today… well, if I were the Chinese and I got my hands on that datastore, I would fund the mother of all Manhattan Project hacks. It might take me a century to figure a way in, but if there was any way in, I’d find it. That’s a long-term view. The Chinese are good at thinking long-term.”
Barnes said, “I kind of don’t like the whole ‘accessible from any terminal’ business. If I were the Chinese, and I took over the ship, I’d make sure that no terminals were accessible that they weren’t watching. Even if I had to shoot them out. I’d be a lot happier if we had the same kind of kill switch we’re using with the QSUs. Something that would send a signal directly to a receiver hidden someplace, that would invoke the memory-wipe. Primary memory and system backups. We should be able to do that, shouldn’t we?”
Fang-Castro nodded at Martinez, who sighed and said, “Yeah, we can do that. But this stuff really does scare me. The thought of losing all that information… I can’t sleep thinking about it.”
And more to worry about.
Fang-Castro nodded at Barnes. “Major Barnes: your assessment of our overall physical security.”
Barnes picked up a coffee cup and said, “It’s pretty simple, ma’am. If they attack us, we’re screwed. We have no major weaponry. The Nixon has very little maneuvering capability and it is very slow to respond.”
He turned the cup in his hands, as though warming them. “Even if the Celestial Odyssey has no traditional weaponry whatsoever, which I would hardly assume, they can cripple us. All they have to do is maneuver alongside us, turn tail on and rake their exhaust across one of our radiator masts or booms. The nine-thousand-degree plasma’ll take it out in an instant. That’s it for us. We’ve got no propulsion without the radiators. The auxiliary power plant system can provide us with ship-support power forever, but without the big generators online we’ve got insignificant thrust.”
Fang-Castro: “So with hardly any effort on their part, they can leave us adrift in space with no damage to the rest of the Nixon, no immediate loss of life, zip. A perfect surgical strike. There is absolutely nothing we can do to prevent it. If we try to outmaneuver them or counter with our own engines, they are ten times more nimble than we are at our best. If they want to disable us, they will.”
Barnes nodded: “Yes. Then, if we assume they don’t do that, and we take them on board, and they managed to hide some weaponry… well, we have a dozen sidearms and four Taser rifles. The Tasers will disable any EVA suits I’ve ever heard of, and at lower power stages will take down a human. But frankly, that’s not much equipment, if we’re facing a takeover by trained military personnel with more sophisticated equipment.”
“We can’t allow any weaponry on board,” Crow said to Barnes. “I assume your marines will take any baggage apart, molecule by molecule.”
Barnes said, “Yes. Frankly the biggest danger is that they’d take a weapon away from one of us, get a group of us together as hostages, and threaten to start executing people. So we need really good weapon control. Weapons only to people who really know how to control them.”
Crow nodded.
And finally, Fang-Castro asked, “The Odyssey hasn’t even asked for help, yet. Not ship-to-ship. I don’t want to call Zhang, I’d rather have him do it. But suppose we manage to take the Chinese on board and all they really want is help. Where are we at on consumables? Do we need to transfer some from the Odyssey? How would we do that?”
The meeting went on for two hours.
Then Comm pinged them: “Admiral, the Celestial Odyssey is calling us.”
54.
A day and a half after departing the Maxwell Gap and the deadly alien constellation, the Celestial Odyssey was closing in on the Nixon. The two ships were separated by a few thousand kilometers, and the gap was narrowing at a kilometer per second.
Zhang was considering the good news: the Nixon had stayed its course and made no efforts to evade the impending encounter. They had sufficient reaction mass to follow the Nixon, however it maneuvered, but the ship was badly battered, and he didn’t want to put any more stress on it than he absolutely had to.
Cui pushed for contact with the Nixon: “Sir, we’re only hours away from the Nixon. Shouldn’t we contact the Americans and ask for rescue?”
He smiled what he hoped was an enigmatic smile: “I feel that ambiguity serves us better, for the moment.” Seeing that Cui was not satisfied, he said, “Speak plainly, Cui.”
“I don’t see how that helps us. In fact, I don’t entirely understand why you didn’t reach out to her much earlier.”
“This isn’t about the Nixon. It’s about the people on Earth, playing their games. We have not been entirely candid with those ben dan on Earth about the condition of our ship. I don’t want anyone to know how damaged we are, how weak we are. People talk. If American intelligence learned what we know, the terms of the rescue might change. l want them frightened of us, I want to be treated as equals. Unfortunate victims of shipwreck, but equals.”
Cui shook her head, still skeptical. “But how can we not look like a threat to them, sneaking up on them in silence? It’s dangerous. They must be going crazy over there. It would make me crazy if I were their captain, this kind of suspicious behavior.”
“No doubt it would, Mr. Cui, and it would make me crazy also. But tell me this: If the situation were reversed, what would you do? Would you initiate hostilities, fire upon the other ship? When it has not, in fact, overtly demonstrated a hostile intent? You, yourself, commented on how flimsy their ship is, how easily we could cripple it. Would you really fire upon us?”