Becca found herself smiling at him. Oh, what the hell. The day after she left, it would be all over the station, anyway. Screw discretion, there ain’t any to be had. “All right. I can do that.”
Sandy retrieved his coffee cup from the other side of the room and they eased into a table and belted down. She let her mug warm her hands and inhaled the steam. Her shoulders were starting to unknot, a little bit. She managed a smile. “So. That vid from yesterday wasn’t terrible. The technical stuff, I mean, not the news stuff. The news stuff—”
“What do you mean not terrible? I’ll tell you what, Johansson, that was about as close to perfect as—”
“Why don’t you call me Becca? It’s Sandy, right? Sanders? Sandy?”
“It’s Sandy,” he said. “About that vid…”
17.
Fang-Castro sat back in her easy chair, drank her morning tea, gazed at the curved horizon of the earth displayed on her giant wallscreen, and sighed. She’d moved to new, single-room quarters and no longer had the pleasure of her living room window.
As part of the weight-saving measures for the Nixon, the design teams had reworked the living modules for more efficient use of space, paring them from their original hundred-meter length down to seventy. Compared to what was being done in the power modules, this was unglamorous reengineering, but eliminating the excess living space would cut the dry mass of the ship by twelve percent. It wasn’t a lot by itself, but it cut the requirements for power, heat disposal, and water for reaction mass, reducing the final size of the ship by a thousand tons.
For all that, it wasn’t asking a lot to give up a window, and her new quarters did have a wall-sized high-resolution 3-D screen, totally state of the art. But it wasn’t real, she thought sadly. It was like the sound system in her new quarters; recorded music sounded wonderful and was a delight to listen to, but nothing like a live performance. Unfortunately rank, along with its privileges, had to set a good example.
Fang-Castro had sent most of the crew ground-side, starting two weeks earlier at the end of January. After the non-essentials had departed the station, construction crews installed temporary bulkheads thirty meters inward of the front ends of the modules. They’d stripped the furnishings from the forward thirty meters and bled the air back into the station’s reserves.
Then they’d fabricated and attached support pillars between the axle and the modules just rearward of the cutting line. In the final preparation for the trimming, each module’s forward elevator shaft had been cut free and moved off to a safe distance. That final bit of prep had finished up yesterday, two days ahead of schedule, Fang-Castro noted. Everybody was working hard: no slackers allowed.
Her slate chimed: John Clover. “You called? I was in the bathroom.”
“Are you close by my quarters?”
“Yeah, I’m in mine. Just got back.”
“Stop in if you have a minute.”
And a minute later, her door chimed, and she said, “Come in,” which released the door.
Clover stepped in, with his cat sitting on his shoulder. He put the cat on the floor, and Fang-Castro got up, went to a drawer, took out a pack of salmon jerky, and gave a strip to the cat, who was expecting it.
Virtually everybody in the station was a technician of some kind: Clover wasn’t, and didn’t much care about tech. He was a thinker, and a conversationalist. Ever since their clandestine late-night dinner, they’d been meeting a couple of times a week, to chat. As might have been expected of a leading anthropologist, he was both intelligent and observant.
“Sit down,” she said.
He took his usual chair and said, “So—do we have an agenda, or are we ruminating?”
“Ruminating—I’m waiting to give them the go-ahead to start cutting up the place,” she said. “Let’s assume there are aliens at the station—a resident crew. Do we need to take weapons with us? If we do, what kind?”
“I’m not a shrink,” Clover said. “But we’ll need a few weapons on board, not for the aliens, but for the humans. As we get further out, there’ll be a lot of stress, and there’ll be some personal conflict. There may even be some good old-fashioned mating-ritual violence… too few women, too many alpha males. We’ll need some electrical stunners…”
Fang-Castro waved him down. “Let’s stick with the aliens. We’ve got the crew problems covered, I think.”
Clover nodded. “Okay. First—”
He was interrupted by a computer voice: “Incoming priority for Fang-Castro from Joe Martinez.”
Fang-Castro held up a finger, and took the calclass="underline" “Joe?”
“We’re ready to go out here. We need you to give the order.”
“Recording with time-note: I’m ordering you to commence the quarters trim.”
“Thank you, ma’am. We’re starting now.”
Back to Clover: “So, do we need a weapons system to deal with the aliens?”
Clover said, “Basically, no. I’ve talked to Crow about this, and there are only a few ways to fight in space. Some of them are suicidal, so we rule those out. I haven’t been able to think of a situation in which we’d destroy our own ship as a method of attacking the aliens. There are some movie scenarios out there—the aliens are an evil life-form that preys on humans. Or they take over our minds and turn us into zombies with some kind of infectious virus and the only way we can save Earth is to blow up our own ship. But if the aliens really want to do that, why haven’t they done it? That’s the critical question. Why haven’t they done it? The fact is, we know they could have destroyed all life on Earth if they’d wanted to, long before this. Or even with this arrival—we only saw them by mistake. If they’d simply accelerated an asteroid into Earth, and we know they can do that, given the size of their ship, we probably wouldn’t even see it coming until too late. From all of that, I’d deduce that they don’t want to destroy us. Simply because they could have, anytime, and didn’t. So, we ignore the movie scenarios.”
“What if they don’t actively want to destroy us, but want to keep us away from their station?”
“That’s what I’ve been talking to Crow about. They’re a century ahead of us, maybe more. I can’t begin to guess what they’d have to stop us, but they’d sure have something! They might warn us off… or we might not even see it coming.”
“Bottom line, we can’t defend ourselves against them, if they get aggressive.”
“No. We can’t. That’s my feeling. We anthros are very good at war—maybe even better than they are. The overriding fact, though, is there really isn’t a very good way to fight in deep space. Fights would lead to annihilation, first of the fighters, and then later, of the warring ships or bases, or even the warring planets.”
“Not desirable.”
“For either side,” Clover said. “Suppose we get out there and find a station. The existence of the station as a stopping point suggests that they really need the place. So what happens if we go out there, and they do something to piss us off? What happens when the next starship shows up, and the gas station has been burned down? They may represent a danger to us, but we also represent a danger to them. It seems to me, it behooves both sides to act with some… courtesy. Some rational approach to contact.”
“You’re suggesting we do nothing.”
“Nah. That’s not safe, either. They might be territorial and want to see how far they can push us. So, they give us a little whack. We give them a little whack back—but only once.”
“The problem with that is, the little whack could be the end of us.”