Irv Levitt asked the obvious question. “What are they telling us that they don’t want the Russians to hear about?”

“Secrets.” His wife Sarah spoke the word as if it were obscene. She pointed to Minerva rolling by on the monitor. “That’s the enemy, not the people on Tsiolkovsky. Compared to whatever’s down there, the Russians are our next of kin.”

She sounded absolutely certain. She usually did, her husband thought. A lot of MDs he knew were like that-they needed arrogant confidence to deal with their patients’ problems, and it spilled over into everything else they did.

Bragg only shrugged. “Secret is what they ordered, Sarah. Secret is what they’ll get.” He glanced over at Sarah Levitt; in his quieter way, he was at least as stubborn as she was. His voice, though, stayed mild. “I expect that’s why they handed the mission commander’s chair to somebody like me. I’ve been a soldier a long time-I can take orders, not just give ‘em.”

Irv saw a dark flush rise to Sarah’s cheeks, saw her purse her lips for an angry retort. Before she could get it out, Louise Bragg spoke. “Suppose we see what they sent us before we get ourselves all in an uproar.”

“Sensible,” her husband said. Sarah nodded a moment later, her short, curly brown hair fanning out around her face at the motion.

“Good,” Louise said. She was a large, calm, blond woman, about fifteen years younger than Emmett.

Irv remembered that she was Bragg’s second wife; they had not been married long when the selection process for Athena began. Would Emmett Bragg have dumped his ex and gone after an engineer to help himself get picked? Absolutely, Irv thought. That didn’t mean they didn’t care for each other. Had they not, the ship was too cramped to hide it.

Speed of light to Houston, time to react there, speed of light back. A quarter of an hour went by before the message came in. Bragg transcribed the code groups, one by one, and taped them so he would have a backup. “Roger, Houston, we copy,” he said when the transmission was done.