Everyone in the cafeteria froze. The only one who moved was Shi Qiang. He put his gun back into the holster under his left arm and placed his hands together calmly.
“Our demand is simple: Let the commander go,” the young woman said. “Then we can play whatever game you want.” Her tone suggested that she wasn’t afraid of Shi Qiang and the soldiers at all.
“I stay with my comrades,” Ye said, calmly.
“Can you confirm her claim?” Da Shi asked an officer next to him, an explosives expert.
The officer threw a bag in front of the three ETO members holding the spheres. One of the ETO fighters picked up the bag and took out a spring scale, a bigger version of the ones some customers brought to street markets to verify the portions measured by vendors. He placed his metal sphere into the bag, attached it to the spring scale, and held it aloft. The gauge extended about halfway and stopped.
The young woman chuckled. The explosives expert also laughed, contemptuously.
The ETO member took out the sphere and tossed it on the ground. Another ETO fighter picked up the scale and the bag and repeated the procedure with his sphere, and ended up also tossing the sphere to the ground.
The young woman laughed once more and picked up the bag herself. She loaded her sphere into the bag, hung it on the hook of the scale, and the gauge immediately dropped to its bottom, the spring in the scale having been fully extended.
The smile on the explosives expert’s face froze. He whispered to Da Shi, “Damn! They really do have one.”
Da Shi remained impassive.
The explosives expert said, “We can at least confirm that there are heavy elements—fissile material—inside. We don’t know if the detonation mechanism works.”
The flashlights attached to the soldiers’ guns focused on the young woman holding the nuclear bomb. While she held the destructive power of 1.5 kilotons of TNT in her hands, she smiled brightly, as though enjoying applause and praise on a spotlit stage.
“I have an idea: Shoot the sphere,” the explosives expert whispered to Da Shi.
“Won’t that set off the bomb?”
“The conventional explosives around the outside will go off, but the explosion will be scattered. It won’t lead to the kind of precise compression of the fissile material in the center necessary for a nuclear explosion.”
Da Shi stared at the nuclear woman, saying nothing.
“How about snipers?”
Almost imperceptibly, Da Shi shook his head. “There’s no good position. She’s sharp as a tack. As soon as she’s targeted by a sniper scope, she’ll know.”
Da Shi strode forward. He pushed the crowd apart and stood in the middle of the empty space.
“Stop,” the young woman warned Da Shi, staring at him intently. Her right thumb was poised over the detonator. Her face was no longer smiling in the flashlight beams.
“Calm down,” Da Shi said, standing about seven or eight meters from her. He took an envelope from his pocket. “I have some information you’ll definitely want to know. Your mother has been found.”
The young woman’s feverish eyes dimmed. At that moment her eyes were truly windows to her soul.
Da Shi took two steps forward. He was now no more than five meters from her. She raised the bomb and warned him with her eyes, but she was already distracted. One of the two ETO members who had tossed away fake bombs strode toward Da Shi to take the envelope from him. As the man blocked the woman’s view of Da Shi, he drew his gun with a lightning-fast motion. The woman only saw a flash by the ear of the man trying to take the letter from Da Shi before the bomb in her hands exploded.
After hearing the muffled explosion, Wang saw nothing before his eyes but darkness. Someone dragged him out of the cafeteria. Thick, yellow smoke poured out of the door, and a cacophony of shouting and gunshots came from inside. From time to time, people rushed through the smoke and out of the cafeteria.
Wang got up and tried to go back into the cafeteria, but the explosives expert grabbed him around the waist and stopped him.
“Careful. Radiation!”
The chaos eventually subsided. More than a dozen ETO fighters were killed in the gunfight. The rest—more than two hundred, including Ye Wenjie—were arrested. The explosion had turned the nuclear woman into a bloody mess, but she was the only casualty of the aborted bomb. The man who had tried to take the letter from Da Shi was severely injured, but since his body had shielded Da Shi, his wounds were light. However, like everyone else who remained in the cafeteria after the explosion, Shi suffered severe radiation contamination.
Through the small window of an ambulance, Wang stared at Da Shi, who was lying inside. A wound on Da Shi’s head continued to ooze blood. The nurse who was dressing the wound wore transparent protective gear. Da Shi and Wang could only talk through their mobile phones.
“Who was that young woman’s mother?” Wang asked.
Da Shi grinned. “Fucked if I know. Just a guess. A girl like that most likely has mother issues. After doing this for more than twenty years, I’m pretty good at reading people.”
“I bet you’re happy to be proven right. There really was someone behind all this.” Wang forced himself to smile, hoping Da Shi could see it.
“Buddy, you’re the one who was right!” Da Shi laughed, shaking his head. “I would never have thought that actual fucking aliens would be involved!”
25
The Deaths of Lei Zhicheng and Yang Weining
INTERROGATOR: Name?
YE WENJIE: Ye Wenjie.
INTERROGATOR: Birth date?
YE: June 1943.
INTERROGATOR: Employment?
YE: Professor of Astrophysics at Tsinghua University. Retired in 2004.
INTERROGATOR: In consideration of your health, you may stop the interrogation temporarily at any time.
YE: Thank you. I’m fine.
INTERROGATOR: We’re only conducting a regular criminal investigation now and won’t get into more sensitive matters. We would like to finish quickly. We hope you’ll cooperate.
YE: I know what you’re referring to. Yes, I’ll cooperate.
INTERROGATOR: Our investigation revealed that while you were working at Red Coast Base, you were suspected of murder.
YE: I did kill two people.
INTERROGATOR: When?
YE: The afternoon of October 21, 1979.
INTERROGATOR: Names of the victims?
YE: Base Commissar Lei Zhicheng, and my husband, Base Engineer Yang Weining.
INTERROGATOR: Explain your motive for murder.
YE: Can I… assume that you understand the relevant background?
INTERROGATOR: I know the basics. If something is unclear I’ll ask you.
YE: Good. On the day when I received the extraterrestrial communication and replied, I learned that I wasn’t the only one to get the message. Lei did as well.
Lei was a typical political cadre of the time, so he possessed an extremely keen sense for politics and saw everything through an ideological lens. Unbeknownst to most of the technical staff at Red Coast Base, he ran a small program in the background on the main computer. This program constantly read from the transmission and reception buffers and stored the results in a hidden encrypted file. This way, there would be a copy of everything Red Coast sent and received that only he could read. It was from this copy that he discovered the extraterrestrial message.
On the afternoon after I sent my message toward the rising sun, and shortly after I learned that I was pregnant at the base clinic, Lei called me to his office, and I saw that his terminal displayed the message from Trisolaris that I had received the night before….