“So it failed,” the girl leaned back in her chair, looking up at the ceiling in the darkness, puffing out her cheeks.

“What should we do next?”

“Wait two months, wait until the second nuclear bomb is ready, then launch again,” the person on the headset replied. “That’s the only option now. There’s no possibility of recovering the Time Courier lost in space, OVER.”

“Two months… it will rain in two months,” the girl said.

“Rain?”

“Spring will arrive in two months, and there will be heavy rain,” Ban Xia explained. “Then my cameras placed on the streets will be ruined by water.”

Bai Yang held his head in his hands.

This was yet another problem.

What could they do? They’d just have to reassemble two cameras when the time came. If they were reassembling a nuclear bomb, what were two tiny cameras?

“Also, in two months the wind direction here will change, it won’t be a northeastern wind anymore,” Ban Xia added. “That will affect the plan too, right?”

Bai Yang let out a long sigh toward the heavens.

This was beyond his ability to handle. Fortunately, he was just a communications officer, not a planning decision-maker. No doubt the decision-makers at command were getting massive headaches right now.

With one operation’s failure, just cleaning up the mess was a handful. Zhao Bowen cursed hysterically, but after cursing he still dutifully got back to work. Command had no choice but to split the project team into two groups—one group cleaning up the aftermath, another working overtime to advance the second launch.

Last night the nuclear bomb recovery failed, and tonight those three including Dad were out all night, gone to some meeting somewhere. They hadn’t returned even past 1 AM. Only Wang Ning had sent Little Zhu over around midnight to collect some materials. One could imagine another sleepless night with lights blazing in some meeting room at the provincial committee or Nanjing University. Lian Qiao was organizing files in the living room, burning the midnight oil, until she fell asleep at it, and collapsed unconscious on the coffee table. Mom had to carry her to the couch and cover her with a blanket.

Everyone was too exhausted.

All of them were completely drained.

It was hard to say what was still driving them to persist now. When someone is so tired their head spins and their eyelids droop, they probably aren’t thinking about humanity’s future. What was humanity’s future anyway? Was it more important than a pillow? Moreover, most people at command no longer held hope for the plan’s success, though no one dared say it outright. Defeatist thinking was forbidden in the project team, but some things didn’t need to be said to be read in people’s eyes. Someone privately told Zhao Bowen that the higher-ups were discussing whether to gradually shift focus toward military preparations, implying they no longer had confidence in the Nanjing command’s operations.

Bai Yang asked Uncle Zhao what help he could offer.

Old Zhao smiled weakly: “Keep her happy.”

Bai Yang nodded.

Old Zhao added: “And keep yourself happy too.”

Compared to the dejected bunch at command, Ban Xia was much more open-minded, probably because she had always lived in a world of destruction. How much worse could things get?

So in the end, it was Ban Xia who ended up comforting Bai Yang:

“BG, look, living here is quite nice. You’ll get used to it, maybe even come to like it.”

“Yes, I’ll certainly get used to it, young miss. In your world, I’m dead.”

“…Oh.”

By the third night after the recovery failure, December 29th, there was still no sign of the spacecraft returning. By this point, even Lian Qiao had to admit the mission had most likely failed. Miss Qiu was lost in the vast expanse of space. As Zhao Bowen had said, it would either arrive on schedule or never arrive at all.

Bai Yang grew increasingly depressed, muttering nonsense like “We’ve only got five years left before it’s all over, should I go enjoy life?” and “What would you do if you had five years left to live?” and “Young miss, are you afraid of death?” and “How to bravely face death?” Even Dad couldn’t stand it anymore. He didn’t want his son to turn into a bottomless Socrates of a philosopher. Dad said if you have nothing to say, just go over the mission details with her again.

So Bai Yang took his tablet and recited the mission details to the girl. This work was originally meant to be done after the spacecraft’s successful recovery, but now that the mission had failed, they had nothing better to do.

They entered video call mode so Ban Xia could see the images.

“This is the Long March 5.”

Bai Yang held up a photo of the Long March 5, keeping it in front of the camera for several seconds, then held up a white paper with those six characters written on it.

“The spacecraft is housed here.”

He drew a circle on the rocket’s fairing head with a pen, marking it with an arrow and text.

“This is the spacecraft, the nuclear bomb is inside it.”

Bai Yang switched from the rocket photo to one of the spacecraft, the clean new-generation crewed spacecraft sitting in a dust-free workshop like he was giving a PowerPoint presentation.

“This is the nuclear bomb.”

Miss Qiu was a deep red sphere. In the technical documentation provided by the nuclear industry, its size was specified as 36.6 centimeters in diameter, weighing 19 kilograms, slightly larger than a basketball.

But its internal structure was far more complex than a basketball’s—the outer composite shell, buffer lining, internal safety interlocking mechanism, explosive lens, detonator, reflective layer, nuclear charge, neutron source, layer upon layer. Bai Yang couldn’t explain these things because he didn’t understand them either.

“This is the key.”

The key looked like a tiny USB drive but was an electronic key. The key would be placed inside the spacecraft to accompany Miss Qiu into space, serving as her dowry from her maiden home. To ensure the nuclear bomb’s safety, the project team had put great effort into designing an extremely complex locking mechanism—Miss Qiu had dual security with both a password and key. To unlock the nuclear bomb, one needed to possess both the password and key simultaneously, first inserting the key and then entering the password. And only the girl knew what the password was.

“Only I know it?”

Five minutes passed, and the video call switched speakers. The girl appeared on camera, holding a flashlight and notepad with a question written on it.

She brought the question close for Bai Yang to see, then ducked her head down to write new sentences a few seconds later:

“But nobody ever told me the password.”

She wrote several lines in succession:

“Answer my question quickly.”

“Switch! Switch!”

“It’s your turn now.”

The signal transmission switched, and Bai Yang wrote on the tablet:

“I’m not sure either, but that’s what they said: when you see it, you’ll know what to enter.”

“When it changes from red to green, that means it’s successfully unlocked.”

“We can discuss specific details when we can talk directly, I’m tired of typing so much.”

“I’m done, switch!”

The signal transmission switched again, and the girl had already prepared a pile of questions:

“How do I enter the spacecraft?”

“Does the spacecraft have a door lock? Is there a key or password?”

Bai Yang scratched his ear with his pinky finger, thinking what’s the use of asking these questions? The spacecraft couldn’t return anyway, who knows where it had crashed by now?

But he still answered with text and illustrations:

“This is the spacecraft.”

Bai Yang drew a large circle on the photo of the new crewed spacecraft, specifically framing the command module, then typed text below the image:

“The spacecraft you’re seeing now is complete, including the command module and service module, but it won’t look like this when it returns. Only part of it will re-enter the atmosphere—note, this module I’ve circled is the return module, the nuclear bomb is placed inside it, and this is the part that returns to Earth. When the spacecraft lands, the hatch will open automatically, no manual opening needed.”

“The spacecraft in this image is too clean. It will be scorched by high temperatures during atmospheric re-entry. Wait, let me find you a similar image.”

Bai Yang searched Baidu for a photo of a blackened Apollo spacecraft return module to show the girl.

“What you’ll see will look something like this.”

I’m just doing useless work.

Bai Yang sighed silently.

What was the point of explaining all this when the mission had failed? It was like Master Puti teaching Sun Wukong to catch the moon’s reflection in water or look at flowers in a mirror—in reality, you could never catch that moon or pick those flowers.

The signal transmission switched again, and Ban Xia’s bright eyes appeared on camera. She blinked, seeming to recall something, then after a moment raised a piece of paper from below:

“I’ve seen this before.”