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“
Overt
surveillance, on the
other hand, is something I would strongly encourage—look around and ask
questions; put what you find into your reports. So far, they’ve accepted our
requests to take video, so keep your cameras on unless you are specifically
asked to turn them off. We’ll be sending regular packages back to Union
Intelligence, and everybody should be contributing footage and reporting
anything they discover through conversation. Any other questions?”

No one had any, so Shanti gave the
order and they loaded on to the ship. It was different from the one Philippe
rode to Titan: The pilots weren’t walled off from the main cabin, and Philippe
was seated directly behind Pinky, who true to his name had red hair and a pink
complexion.

The only windows were those in
front of the pilots. There were no overhead compartments to store baggage:
Instead, the luggage was thrown, none too gently, into a cargo area in the
back. The seats were considerably narrower and had a bare-bones quality to
them—they had thin padding and didn’t recline. A quick inquiry revealed that
they could fold into the floor so that the ship could be converted into a cargo
hauler.

Philippe buckled in and looked
forward out the window to see the orange Titan fog again. Shanti sat next to
him. “That was a good presentation,” she said. “Food for thought.”

Half a minute later the ship
slammed back—none of the gradual tilting that had so unnerved Philippe in
Beijing. Half a minute after that, they had taken off. Things went almost too
quickly for Philippe to get nervous, but he managed to hit his sick patch the
minute the fog cleared out into the blackness of space.

“Do we use an alpha drive?” he
asked Shanti.

She shook her head as Pinky, who
had obviously overheard the question, snorted with laughter. “We no got no
alpha drive. Is no big enough for,” he said.

“We’re not going that far,” Shanti
said. “Plus, we gotta get through the mines and hit the portal, and you can’t
be going fast and do that.”

“Mines?” Philippe asked.

“Yeah, you know, the portal
defenses,” she said.

“Hey, did you hear?” said Cheep.
“Some of those university types who just showed up were asking if the SF would
clear out all the mines so that they could do a study.”

“Oh, you shit me,” said Pinky.

“No shit, no shit whatsoever,”
Cheep replied, warming to the topic. “Like, sure, we’ll just clear out all
those pesky mines for you, so you can be right there when the invasion comes.”

“University fuckers. Supposed to be
smart. They no got no brains,” said Pinky.

Chip was grinning “Sure, sure,
we’ll just drop all our defenses, so you can get your
studying
done. No
problem!”

“They can look, say, ‘We still no
know what that!’”

The pilots had a good laugh, while
Philippe squirmed, thinking of Yoli. He was about to say something in defense
of the researchers when a beeping began.

“Here we go!” said Cheep.

The two pilots’ fingers began
flying, and they began uttering codes into their coms. As near as Philippe
could tell from their chattering, they were asking someone on Titan station to
send clearance codes to the mines, while also transmitting codes
themselves—and, Philippe assumed, not flying too close to any of them.

He leaned forward to look out the
window and see the mines—a sprawl of small satellites, their lights glinting in
the darkness. The ship was soon surrounded by them.

“Are those nuclear?” he asked
Shanti.

“Yup,” she replied, also leaning
forward to look at the satellites, filled with the terror of a bygone age. She
suddenly snapped up. “How did you know about that?”

“Oh, it was a huge headache for the
DiploCorps, changing all those non-proliferation agreements. I mean, that
technology’s been completely banned for over 20 years,” Philippe replied.

“Yeah,” Pinky chipped in, his
fingers moving without interruption. “I remember, when they went up, they no
was legal.”

Philippe blinked, and then decided
that he must have misheard what Pinky said—the man’s English was hardly Union
standard, after all. “I beg your pardon?” he asked.

“That’s right—32 clear, 32 clear.
It was a big relief when those laws got changed, thanks for that.” Cheep, still
looking ahead, waved back in Philippe’s general direction.

“Could you two focus on flying,
please?
”
said Shanti, her voice suddenly strained. She turned to Philippe, who was
trying to digest what had just been said. “I didn’t have anything to do with
that.”

A
pfft
escaped from Pinky,
while Cheep let out a brief bark of laughter.

“I
didn’t,
” she said, more
forcefully. “OK, it was kind of hard to miss when it was happening, but it’s
not like it was my decision or anything.”

“Oh my God!” exclaimed Philippe.
“I-I-I mean, I know the defenses went up right after the treaties were
modified, and there were rumors that the warheads had perhaps been
manufactured
a little early. But I didn’t, I had no idea—there were
riots
in Japan
over those mines!”

Philippe looked through the window
again. They weren’t facing Saturn and its moons, so the difference in scenery
was subtle—far fewer stars, but equally as many satellites.

But shouldn’t he have noticed?
There were no weird feelings, or bizarre lights. Indeed, there were no lights
at all, except those flashing on the satellites.

“Didn’t there used to be a ring of
lights around the portal?” he asked.

“The aliens put lights there to
mark it when it first opened up,” Shanti replied. “But we had them take them
away—there was a concern that it kind of made for an inviting target. Plus, it
was alien technology, and we didn’t want any of that near our portal,” said
Shanti.

“So we just have our banned,
illegal, deadly nuclear technology?”

“It’s not illegal
now,
” said
Shanti. “Besides, we’ve got no mines on this side, they don’t like that. From a
security standpoint—and this may be useful to you as well, I don’t know—they’ve
really got this idea that there’s
your
space, and then there’s
our
space. And by
our
space I don’t mean
ours
like
theirs,
but
ours
like
everybody’s
.

“
Your
space is totally
yours—you can arm it like you want, and no one can enter it without your
permission, and if they do, you can blow them away, no problem.
Our
space is share-and-share-alike—it’s open, people can do as they please, you
don’t have big weapons sitting around because that makes people feel unwelcome.
As far as I can tell, the living areas on the station and what’s on the other
side of each portal is, like, private space,
your
space. Everything else
is
our
space.”

“Interesting,” said Philippe,
looking at the blinking devices around them. “What are these satellites, then?”

“Surveillance,” Shanti replied.
“They send probes back through the portal every few minutes. If you look, you might
see one shoot.”

Philippe watched, but nothing shot
while he was looking. It was funny to think that with all the advances in
communications technology, the military and the Space Authority had to rely on
sending physical messages, just like the old postal systems or the Pony
Express. But that was the portal—nothing from one side went through to the
other, except for people, ships, satellites. . . . It was so bizarre.

The Titan portal, you could work
your whole life on that alone.

The station—the massive, alien
station—was looming up before them, and Philippe had hardly noticed it. It
wasn’t lit well from the outside, and he stared at it, trying to connect the
lights sprinkled across his field of view into the sunburst shape made familiar
from videos and diagrams.

“It’s not that easy to see, is it?”
Philippe said.

“It’s fucking dark,” said Shanti.

“Yeah,” said Cheep. “Surprisingly
so, right? But we’re really far from any natural light source—they built this place
in the middle of fucking nowhere. What you’re used to seeing is footage from
satellites, and those cameras are made to work in low light, and then the
images get enhanced. It’s a hell of a lot harder with the naked eye, even if
you’re augmented.”

The pilot’s fingers went to work
again, and the ship eased up next to one of the docking bays—Philippe hoped it
was the right one, otherwise some alien was going to have a few unexpected
guests. The ship shuddered as they docked.

“Welcome home!” trilled Patch from
the back.

“Time to see if Patch did his job
right,” Shanti yelled back. She reached up and touched Pinky’s shoulder. “Don’t
you guys leave until we say so.”

“Got it,” Pinky replied.

Philippe was ready to go, but
Shanti stopped him—apparently the SFers had to go in first with their biggest
guns in hand. He heard them shout “Clear!” at each other for what seemed like
an hour. While he was waiting, Philippe went into the cargo area and found his
bag. Eventually Patch stepped back into the ship and told him that, yes, things
were clear, would Philippe like a quick tour of the place? Philippe
enthusiastically agreed, quickly slinging his bag over his shoulder and
following Patch out into the space station.

Stepping through the doorway,
Philippe looked around excitedly, and then rolled his eyes. The living area was
Union-built all right—here he was, nowhere near the Earth’s solar system, out
of his own galaxy, even,
and the hallway he stepped into looked clean
and white, exactly like the hallways of Titan, exactly like the hallways of
Beijing.

And it felt exactly like Beijing
too....

“Hey Patch,” Philippe asked,
interrupting Patch as he pointed out an armory. “Why is there gravity?”

“Uh, yeah,” Patch said, looking slightly
guilty. “The gravity. OK. You know how this area is all supposed to be
outfitted on Earth, with Earth technology, right? So the aliens would say,
like, ‘Do you want to do the atmosphere, or do you want us to do the
atmosphere?’ And we’d say, ‘
We’re
doing the atmosphere.’”

“Uh-huh,” said Philippe.

“Well, then one day they said, ‘Do
you want to do the gravity, or do you want us to do the gravity?’ And we asked
Titan, and they asked Beijing, and the SA was like, ‘What do you mean, do the
gravity? We can’t fucking
make
gravity.’ And the SF was like, ‘Well, we
can’t fucking fight without it,’ right, ’cuz you train mostly in gravity. And
they were arguing about it, because you know, maybe the gravity could be some
kind of weapon or a trap or something.

“So we didn’t get back to the
aliens with an answer, and I was here—I mean on the shuttle, overseeing stuff,
you know—and they asked again. So I, um, I sort of said to them, ‘Why don’t
you
do the gravity?’ Like we were doing them a favor.”

“As though it were goodwill
gesture,” said Philippe.

“Yeah,” said Patch. “And I still
haven’t heard back from Beijing about it, so I guess it must be OK. Except for
that,
and you know, the station itself, there’s no alien technology in our living
area. At least not that we know about.”

Patch resumed the tour: Armory,
enough sleeping cubicles to house a much larger group of soldiers, armory,
entertainment area, training area, armory, armory, gym, communications center,
cafeteria, armory, infirmary, armory.

“And this is your area,” Patch
said, opening a door and revealing a surprisingly large office. He walked
through the office and opened another door, which led to an honest-to-God
bedroom.

“I get all this space?” Philippe
asked, walking into the bedroom and dropping his bag on the floor. There was a
door in the bedroom as well; he opened it to see a small but complete bathroom.

“Yeah,” said Patch, going back out
into the hallway and opening another door. “This conference room is for you,
too.”

Philippe looked in at the conference
room; it was larger even than his office.

“You know, I’m not complaining, but
I feel weird about getting three rooms and my own bathroom when everyone else
just gets a sleep cubicle and a gang shower.”

Patch gave him a genuinely
perplexed look, and then shrugged his shoulders. “It’s a diplomatic mission,
you know. Besides, by SF standards, those cubicles are fucking
nice—
you
can fit two people in one of those, easy—and we don’t always have showers. This
door is—oh, sorry, that’s another armory—
this
door is another office,
which I think the MC wants to use for now, but she could always give it up if
you wind up, like, needing a real staff. Is that all right with you?”

“Not a problem,” said Philippe.
“Even if I need an assistant, my office looks big enough for two.”

“Well, it’s up to you,” said Patch.
“More weapons stations, and then this—” he slapped his hand onto the blast
doors that sealed off the end of the corridor “—leads to the no man’s zone, and
through that is where the aliens are. Which is kind of a flight.”