The Quiet Pools

CHAPTER 29 —UGA— “These ships are frail”

Prainha had become a prison for Mikhail Dryke.

In the moment he fired the first bullet into Jeremiah’s body, he had understood that Sasaki would not approve. He had recognized that, by passing on the opportunity to simply collect Jeremiah, he was crossing a significant line. He had known that the decision would look different in Prainha than it had in the underground room.

And though Sasaki had said not one word in reproach, her actions argued loudly enough that Dryke had been right. It began with Sasaki’s explicit order that Christopher McCutcheon be left free and alive. She had never interfered with Dryke in that way before, and he read the message clearly: I can’t undo what you’ve done, but I will not permit you to repeat the mistake.

“We can’t kill all our enemies, Mikhail. I do not consider the son a risk,” she had said. “Separate him from us and leave him there.” She neither invited nor accepted Dryke’s counsel on the decision.

Another clue: In the two weeks since the event, no official announcement of Jeremiah’s death had been made, even within the Project. The committee and senior security staff knew, and the Houston center was rife with apparently unsquelchable rumors. Marshall had offered token congratulations; Matt Reid had gratefully welcomed the news. But that was the extent of it.

Even more telling, it seemed as though he was being insulated from the real work of his own department. Part of it was his own doing—there was no place for him in the everyday operation of Corporate Security unless he shouldered aside one of his own handpicked lieutenants.

But Sasaki seemed determined to keep him from his accustomed role as fire fighter, as well. She had placed the entire First Directorate under travel restrictions, meaning that he needed her explicit permission to leave Prainha. And there was always some new reason why he couldn’t leave. He spent his days chasing down problems which were beneath him and sitting through meetings to which he had nothing to contribute. He understood that, too. She wanted him in sight at all times, on his invisible leash.

The maddening part was that there were problems that cried out for his attention.

Item: In the street outside the twenty-six-story building housing the Tokyo training and processing center, the carnival of militant demonstrations continued its daily run. The strategy of the mostly youthful protesters consisted of blocking the street and baiting Tokyo police, Corporate Security, and—in absentia, since they had largely ceded the battlefield—the starheads. The police and security had shown restraint, even in the face of taunts punctuated by hurled bags of excrement.

The starheads, however, had not. There had been fly by shootings, gas grenades lobbed from blocks away, kamikaze drivers. Just three days ago, a small group of starheads had slipped into the fifteen-story tower facing the Allied building, taken over the roof, and rained thousands of marble-sized steel bearings down on the throng. In a particularly vicious twist, the starheads had begun shouting amplified insults down into the walled canyon just before the hail reached the ground.

Five demonstrators were killed and more than a hundred injured by the hail, some horribly so, with cheeks torn open, eyes splattered like eggs, facial bones shattered, skulls fractured as they turned their faces up to look for the enemy. In the riot that followed, the Allied building was breached and a fire set in the main atrium, and seven more died, including one policewoman and three starheads found dead by their own hand on the rooftop.

Item: In Cologne, Greens and Homeworlders together were trying to shut down an Allied-owned specialty metals plant by lying down in front of the haulers trying to leave the plant, which was producing both molded and machined parts for Memphis. More than three hundred had been dragged away from in front of the wheels and arrested, but there seemed to be no shortage of volunteers to replace them, even after a woman and a teenaged boy were crushed when one omni driver lost patience with the game.

Item: Yvonne Havens, director of operations at Kasigau Launch Center, had abruptly and unexpectedly resigned within the week. After the fact, she informed Sasaki that she had done so to “ransom” her mother, who had been kidnapped from her apartment in Cairo by a group calling itself Jeremiah’s Hands. Emboldened by their success, the terrorists had just taken the husband of a HELcrew launch chief and the daughter of the supervisor of Vehicle Manufacturing, making the same demands.

There were mitigating factors in all three situations. The Tokyo center was effectively mothballed, anyway, under Contingency Zero, but it was important to keep up appearances. The metals plant had completed more than ninety-five percent of its Diaspora contract, including all of the critical high-stress system fittings. And Kasigau’s efficiency had never been what it should have been under Havens.

Still, it was not in Dryke’s nature to discount such threats or to entrust others with the responsibility of responding to them. But he was faced with doing both, because Sasaki “needed” him in Prainha.

He would have been more upset, except for the odd conviction persisting that, with Jeremiah dead, it should be over. He did not have the old fight in him; he was merely annoyed, not aroused, by the news coming in. Even so, he would have talked to Sasaki about it, but she had disappeared beyond barriers of bureaucracy. His former access had dried up; he did not see her and could not get to her.

Overlooked and underworked, Dryke was left with time to wonder, more time than he cared for. Had he any taste for alcohol or other drugs, he probably would have used them to shorten the day. But his fetish for control in his life was too strong to permit him that escape. Were he less duty-driven, he might have declared his war over and gone home. But he could not abdicate, even though it was harder each day to see any reason for his being there.

He no longer knew what Hiroko wanted from him or what she wanted him for. At times, he wondered if she was merely keeping him on hand to throw to the wolves when the snarling and howling grew too loud. Dryke had neither expected nor wanted to be greeted as a conquering hero—he felt too much ambivalence himself for that. But neither had he dreamed he would find himself recalled in disgrace, spinning out his days as the pariah of Prainha.

At midmonth, Dryke was granted a brief, tantalizing glimpse into what was happening in the inner circle. It came in the form of a visit from Roger Marshall, one of two outsiders on Sasaki’s seven-member advisory committee.

Though Marshall came and went from Prainha at will, Dryke had had only glancing contact with the billionaire California real estate developer. He knew him only as a well-dressed, well-mannered, well-spoken man. A reasonable man, as Dryke defined the term. Someone who listened before he questioned and thought before he answered.

Dryke knew a little more about Marshall’s company, Cornerstone Management. The problems of building a residential superscraper overlapped a great deal with the problems of building a starship, and Cornerstone had shown itself the reigning master of the former art, with Marshall the financial wizard who made the deals go. Marshall and Co. had put up Daley Tower in Chicago, the Gold Coast complex north of Sydney, and several other headline projects. Of the dozen or so architectural monuments around the globe which rivaled Memphis for cost and complexity, Roger Marshall had had a hand in five.

His expertise was unquestioned, but Dryke had always wondered at his interest. The committee was unpaid and unsung, second only to Sasaki in influence but invisible behind her. It seemed an odd place to find a Roger Marshall, unless he simply considered the Project as an interesting hobby, interesting enough that he was content with a secondary role. Dryke had no idea what a man who commanded wealth on Marshall’s scale did for self-indulgence.

That day, Marshall appeared at Dryke’s office without warning. “Good afternoon, Mr. Dryke,” he said, showing a friendly but measured smile. “Is there any chance I might steal you away from here for a while?”

It was like asking Sisyphus if he had any interest in a five-minute break. “A pretty good chance, I’d say. What’s the problem, Mr. Marshall?”

“Roger, please. I understand we’re processing a lot of the pioneers through Prainha,” Marshall said, folding his arms over his chest. “I’d like to talk to some of them. I want to get a handle on how they’re coping with all the disruption from C-Zero.”

The first part was both true and common knowledge. Twenty-seat T-2s packed with colonists were flying out of the castle a dozen times a day, day after day. But for the twin bottlenecks of security screening and ferrying them from the low-orbit stations to Takara, the pace would be even brisker.

The second part was both insulting and puzzling. Have I been demoted to tour guide now? Marshall did not need Dryke’s permission to visit Building 5, where the arriving pioneers were being assembled into groups, taken through a T-2 mock-up and orientation, and given a place to wait comfortably until their flight was called. And Training Section could provide far more knowledgeable escorts than he.

But Dryke acceded to Marshall’s request, all the same. They took a wirecar over to Building 5, where Dryke ran interference with the harried Move managers. Then he stood in the background while Marshall talked with a group of Block 2 pioneers waiting for their midafternoon launch. One confessed to annoyance, one to apprehension. But the rest were almost defiantly eager—for them, the adventure had already begun.

“We’re not going to let them stop us,” one woman told Marshall. “This is something that belongs to us, and nobody has the right to take it away.”

Marshall did not seem to have to hear much to satisfy him. After fifteen minutes, he shook hands, wished luck, and took his leave.

“Walk with me, will you, Mikhail?” he said to Dryke when they were outside.

Mystified, Dryke sent the wirecar back and fell in beside Marshall. The unscreened sun was fierce. After a few dozen steps, Dryke was perspiring.

“It’s going surprisingly well,” Marshall said. “Surprising to me, in any case. Nine thousand colonists, a thousand or so from Training—that’s a lot of bodies to move in less than a month. A lot of coordination. And so far, none of our watchdogs have barked. That’s a credit to you.”

“It’s all being handled by staff,” Dryke said, already starting to feel the midday heat. “I haven’t had anything to do with it.”

“Take the compliment and forget the blushing. You’d be blamed if they screwed up,” said Marshall. “Besides, I haven’t gotten to the tough parts. Tell me about the centers. What’s happening in Tokyo?”

“Tokyo is closed down, for all practical purposes,” Dryke said. “The work that could still be done there under siege conditions isn’t worth the risk to our people. We have a hundred or so security officers and a couple of dozen operations techs inside, which is about the limit we can support from the air, with the roof pad.”

“It’s important to protect the building,” said Marshall. “We do want to go back there—or at least be able to sell the building—when Memphis is gone and things have quieted down. What about the other sites?”

“Still more or less normal, except for the absence of the pioneers. Munich can thank the German government. Houston has its own airfield and its own housing, of course—they can probably ride out most anything so long as the fences hold.”

Marshall nodded. “It’s good to know that we’re still ready to fight on some fronts. This new strategy—I guess I’m a bit more of a scrapper than Hiroko. I hate to see us cede anything. Did you sign off on Contingency Zero?”

“It wasn’t my call.”

“And if it had been?”

Dryke was wary. “If it had been my call, I wouldn’t have put the training centers in urban sites in the first place. We’re a lot more secure here than they are in Houston.”

Nodding thoughtfully, Marshall said, “Maybe we should be keeping those people we just talked to here, then. Maybe shipping everyone up to Takara and Memphis is an overreaction.”

“That’s where they’re going eventually,” Dryke said, wiping the sweat from his forehead with his sleeve. “And as you said, that part is going smoothly, at least. No harm, no foul.”

The scream of a T-ship passing overhead distracted them briefly.

“Some of us have noticed that you’ve been taking a back seat since you reeled in Jeremiah for us,” Marshall said.

“Resting on my laurels,” Dryke said. A touch of the bitterness slipped out with the words.

Marshall smiled. “I knew Bill McCutcheon. Were you aware of that?”

Eyes widening, Dryke admitted, “No.”

“Well, you would be soon, I imagine. I assume that you’re building a matrix of his contacts, looking for the rest of the Homeworld leadership.”

“Yes.” The truth was that he had not been able to work up any sense of urgency about what was certain to be a massive undertaking, and so had not even begun.

“He beat me to a parcel of land in Mexico a few years back,” Marshall said. “I offered him more than it was worth, too, but he wouldn’t sell it to me. He never did anything with it, either. A lot of his holdings were undeveloped, as a matter of fact.”

“Oh?”

“If ten percent of what he owned produced income, I’d be surprised. He was land-rich and cash-poor. Not your traditional land speculator, though. More a land investor. Up until the last few months, he bought more than he sold—which is the hard way, since you don’t realize any gains until you sell.”

“What was that about the last few months?”

“Bill moved ten or twelve parcels since August. Knowing what we know now, I suppose he needed operating funds—but I’m not telling you anything you didn’t know. I imagine you’re following the money, too.”

Dryke squinted sideways at his companion. “Why did you want to see me, Mr. Marshall?”

“I always valued your perspective, Mikhail,” Marshall said. “Just because the Director is looking past you at the moment, I didn’t see any reason I couldn’t avail myself of it on my own.”

Dryke could find no argument with that. “What do you want my perspective on?”

“Has Homeworld been eliminated as a threat?”

“I wouldn’t assume so.”

“Nor would I. How would you characterize our strategy at this point?”

Lips pursed, Dryke considered. “A controlled retreat under cover of darkness. Abandoning a vulnerable position for a more secure one.” It was clear now that their conversation was a footnote to an argument that had taken place behind closed doors.

“But we’re most vulnerable now—halfway between.”

“Yes.”

“If they find out what’s happening before we’re finished, it’ll be like showing a gimpy leg to a wolf pack.” There was no need to define they—it embraced Homeworld, the media, and any other opponent or obstacle.

“It wouldn’t look good, no.”

“And it could happen.”

“Disinformation campaigns are always vulnerable to the truth.”

“Yes,” said Marshall. “Do you know why I wanted to talk to the pioneers?”

“I assumed it was for the reason you told me.”

“I spoke with Karin Oker this morning, and she told me something that raised the hair on the back of my neck. According to her, when the early call to report went out for the Block 2 and Block 3 pioneers, more than seven hundred—almost twelve percent—opted out. Quit on us.”

It was a stunning, disturbing figure. In past calls, including those for Ur, no more than two percent had failed to report. “I hadn’t heard that.”

“That’s seven hundred leaks waiting to happen. I know the calls didn’t contain any damning information, but the circumstances are damning enough. Someone’s going to talk, and someone else is going to figure out what we’re up to,” Marshall said. “I’m wondering if perhaps we ought to announce it ourselves before that happens.”

“What does that gain us?”

“I know, it sounds like shooting yourself in the foot,” said Marshall, flashing a crooked, humorless smile. “Here’s my thinking. In his last address, Jeremiah hammered at the importance of keeping the colonists here. But once we’ve whisked them all away off-planet, there’s only one way to do that, and that’s to disable or destroy the ship. We’ve done our enemies a favor, really. Instead of a hundred strategies and a dozen attack points, they can concentrate on one goal and one big, fat, inviting target. Do you agree?”

“Yes.”

Marshall stopped and faced Dryke. “Then it seems to me that we can best protect the ship by making sure anyone and everyone knows that there are already three thousand people aboard, with more arriving every day. Considering how the Homeworlders feel about losing them, the pioneers are as good as hostages. They won’t dare a major assault.”

“It doesn’t add up that way to me,” Dryke said with a shake of his head. “If they stop Memphis, they stop Knossos and Mohenjo-Daro and Teotihuacán as well. The numbers don’t look that bad—sacrifice a few thousand to slam the door on tens of thousands. If they were really sure of themselves, they might warn us in advance, tell us to evacuate the ship. But I don’t think that’ll happen. I don’t think they’re going to be as worried about who’s aboard as we’d wish they would be.”

“Then why haven’t they done it yet? What’s holding them back?”

“I think that Jeremiah held them back,” Dryke said slowly. “I think he believed that he had the compelling case—that the ethical and logical correctness of his position guaranteed eventual victory. He wasn’t dueling with us. He was debating with us.”

“Evan Silverman wasn’t debating. Those people in Tokyo aren’t debating.”

“No. Jeremiah saw the writing on the wall. He knew he was running out of time. The game’s being played by different rules now.” Rules that Silverman introduced, and I ratified. “Matt Reid brings up this every time we talk. He agrees—the question isn’t if, it’s when and how. It’s entirely a question of logistics now. As soon as they figure out a way to take a shot at Memphis, they will.”

Marshall’s cheek twitched, and his gaze narrowed. “Is the ship safe?”

Dryke placed his hands on his hips and cocked his head before he answered. “I could run out a long list of precautions that we’ve taken and send you away happy and reassured. But it’s not the doors we bar that we have to worry about. It’s the one we don’t. It’s the surprise. Is the ship safe? The truth is, I don’t really know.”

Well into the second century of the Space Age, it was no secret that the best way to destroy a space habitat was to throw things at it. The things did not need to be big, complicated, or explosive, so long as they were thrown hard enough. A few kilometers per second was just fine, as everyone who remembered the inglorious end of Freedom knew.

Just nine years after it was completed, the American space station’s main module was shattered—and three astronauts killed—by an in-falling bit of space flotsam. According to one reconstruction, a fifty-gram binding rivet lost during the construction of the first Japanese direct-broadcast platform was the probable culprit.

But it was very hard to throw things at Memphis—as hard as throwing a bowling ball out of the bottom of a well. Most of the major habitats, including all but two of the satlands, were part of the “Ring of Pearls,” only two thousand kilometers above the Earth. Memphis was riding along in tandem with one of the exceptions—just ten klicks west of Takara, in Clarke orbit, thirty-six thousand kilometers above the blue Pacific and the atolls of the Gilbert Islands. Nothing orbited higher save for a geophysical survey satellite or two and traffic bound for Mars or Heinlein City.

Being at the top of the well was a considerable advantage. The fastest operational missile—the Asteroid Watch’s nuclear-tipped Stonebreaker—would take nearly an hour to arrive from low orbit. The Peace Force’s aging “shotgun” battle-suppression satellites could not do much better—their hypervelocity railguns would bridge the gap in twenty-six minutes at closest approach.

But orbital mechanics was not Memphis’s only defense. The universe threw things, too, especially at starships traveling at an appreciable fraction of the speed of light. Memphis had several layers of protection, including an ion deflector, the plasma bow cushion, and a particle defense system built around a pair of HEL free-electron lasers. Twenty-six minutes was more than enough time for the big gyros to turn the bell-shaped starship and bring the PDS to bear.

And against the one threat Memphis was not expecting to face in deep space—laser weapons—Reid had deployed around the starship several agile crane-trucks bearing huge square scatter plates in their construction grapples like shields. Dryke thought of them as the Knights Peculiar.

In that context, sabotage from within shaped up as a more likely prospect. But the memory of Javier Sola was strong, and putting a bomb aboard Memphis would be no mean feat.

The loyalty of the Takara workers, already securely anchored by community pride, was guaranteed by a simple expedient— the finishing crews were made up solely of those who had been selected to the mission. The small fleet of buses which ferried workers and materials across the ten-kilometer moat to the ship was owned by Transcon and operated by Diaspora pilots. And Governor Wian was allowing Matt Reid to supervise the screening procedures in the satland’s euphemistically named immigration and import office, Takara Welcome.

No possibility was too wild to take seriously—not even a pocket nuke smuggled into Takara and detonated there, turning the satland into a giant fragmentation grenade. Even the one scenario which most troubled Dryke, involving the hijacking of a Takara shuttle and its use as a 120-ton battering ram, had been covered nine ways to Sunday.

Secure without, secure within. The slogan was displayed in English and kanji throughout the Project quarter on Takara and Memphis. Seen so often, it had become a state of mind, a statement of reality. It would be unfair to say that Reid’s team was cocky, but they were confident.

Which is why the attack on Memphis, when it came, was every bit as much a surprise as Dryke had projected.

The black cylindrical satellite had been on station three and a half degrees east of Takara for nearly three months. It was listed in the Highstar registry as Slot 355, 177.5° East, Hughes TC-2000—a dedicated data communications satellite owned by RJR Financial Services, Wilmington, Delaware.

In adspeak, the TC-2000 was referred to as a mature technology—which in this case meant it was guaranteed to be slow, expected to be reliable, and presumed to be a bargain. In spacespeak, the TC-2000 was disparagingly referred to as a tin can. Compared to the huge Skylink 4 and Nikkei N-2 com platforms at 175° east and 5° west, the little satellite was a mouse among the lions.

But the mouse had a secret: It was not the satellite that RJR had ordered, that Hughes had built, that the United Parcel Service had accepted for delivery to a towing and retrieval company on Technica. It was, instead, a seven-year-old TC-2000 which had been originally built for the Royal Sultanate of Brunei, but was never placed in service. It had appeared on the secondary market in midsummer, offered by the People’s Revolutionary Government of Brunei during a budget crisis—a bargain Jeremiah could not resist.

When Taiwanese technicians were finished modifying it, the TC-2000 featured a high-thrust ascent engine concealed behind the antenna skirt, an extra guidance package wired to the satellite’s transponder 4 relay circuits, and five hundred kilos of enhanced chemical explosive. For all that, it weighed just eleven kilos more than the satellite it was to replace. The switch was made at the UPS depot outside Miami, at the price of a Corvette sport flyer for the depot chief and a joybird’s enthusiastic friendship for the driver.

Three days after Dryke and Marshall’s conversation, a man in a white turtleneck and brown duck pants walked into an RJR office in Hong Kong. He inquired about certain new stock offerings and applied for a modest life insurance policy. Both transactions were bounced to the home office on transponder 4 of the satellite in slot 355. A monitor program took note, a nanoswitch closed, and the mouse roared.

Trackers at Highstar saw the satellite start to move in its orbit within seconds. But Memphis, looking ahead in its orbit past the bulk of Takara and the clutter of Skylink 4, saw nothing, even after the Highstar alert was received.

It was well past midnight in Prainha, and Matt Reid’s call roused Mikhail Dryke from a light sleep. Barefoot, hair tousled, with only a pair of half-jeans hastily added to the briefs and T-shirt he slept in, he ran down the stairs and through the halls to the orbital operations center.

By the time Dryke reached it, the center staff had a plot up on the main window, and the danger was apparent. Relative to the starship, the satellite was already moving at nearly 1,500 kph, on a looping path that would hide it behind Skylink 4 or Takara for most of its journey. The orbital mechanics were tricky, but predictable. By the time the satellite skimmed over the top of Takara, it would be just a few short seconds from its target.

“Takara’s got nothing to knock it down with,” Reid was saying, his face grave. “We’re turning the ship now”—Dryke could hear the alarms sounding in the background—“but it looks like the only shot we’ll have will light up Takara as well.”

“How much can the skin take?”

“I don’t know. Probably not enough to take the spill. I’ve got someone on the line to Governor Wian’s office. Wait—I’ve got the PF on another channel.”

Reid did not mute the link to Prainha, and Dryke listened as he talked with the Peace Force monitors on Technica.

“Yes, that’s right. We’ve got a threat to Takara and Memphis. Can you help us? No, our angle is bad. A destruct on the Hughes? No, I don’t think so. Beth—are you on with RJR? Ask them if they’ve got reentry destruct on the satellite.”

“Range, five hundred ten kilometers,” said an AIP voice in the background.

“They say reentry destruct failed,” said a woman.

“Shit,” said Reid. “Look, RJR can’t control it and they can’t destroy it. Can you do anything from the line?” He was talking to the Peace Force again.

“Not enough time,” Dryke said to himself, studying the plot of the several satellites.

“What? Was that you, Mikhail?”

“Matt, there’s not enough time. We can’t burn Takara—”

“Funny, that’s what Wian says, except he’s shouting.”

“Can’t we move the ship?” The question came from behind Reid, or from one of his open links—Dryke could not tell which.

Reid shook his head. “All we have are station-keeping thrusters. The drive is dead cold. Mikhail? What about the castle? Are we above your horizon?”

Dryke quickly got the HELcrew boss on a second window. “Just above, the long way through the atmosphere,” he reported back. “Between the scatter and the absorption, the boss says the best we can do is a suntan.”

“Range, three hundred kilometers.”

“Anybody seen the oars for this boat?” a gallows humorist muttered.

“You’re going to have to throw something at it,” Dryke said.

“Yeah. Any ideas what?”

“How about the Knights Peculiar?”

Reid turned away from his telecam. “Martin—plot collision intercepts for CT-5, CT-9, and CT-10. Plug in the masses—I need to know what happens to the pieces afterward. See if you can get me a deflection that’ll throw both of them clear.” He turned back to Dryke. “I knew I should have played more billiards when I had the chance.”

“Three-body no-cushion bank shot, on a warped table. Nothing to it.” Dryke’s words were clipped, his worry undercutting the joke.

“Range, one hundred ninety kilometers.”

“I can give it a pop with CT-9,” Martin called. “The others are too far away.”

“Get it moving, then.”

“Already is. Matt, I’ll do my best. But to knock it clear, I not only have to hit it, I have to hit it square center. Otherwise it’ll just blow by and kick the truck into a tumble.”

“Mister, either you hit it fucking square or I’ll put you outside to walk home.” The words were said calmly. “Bobby, bring up the PDS, just in case. Track it all the way, and if Takara slips out of the hairs, do me a favor and fry the damned can.”

“Sure,” the tech said with a grin. “I’ll cover Martin’s butt.”

“You toast that Hughes and you can cover my grandmother,” Reid said. “Mikhail, you still with us?”

“Yeah,” said Dryke. “So glad to see you’re all taking this so well.”

“Range, eighty kilometers.”

Reid said, “Yeah, well, there’s one other thing. The section has authorized me to tell you that we all quit.”

“No, you don’t,” Dryke said, matching Reid’s deadpan. “If you’re still there in two minutes, consider yourselves fired.”

“Noted. All right, everyone. Let’s be sharp. Marty?”

“On track.”

“Bobby?”

“I’ll pick it up off Takara’s horizon.”

“Range, twenty-five kilometers,” said the AIP.

Reid nodded, looking at a display off-screen. He drew a deep breath and pursed his lips. “Funtime,” he said under his breath. “Here she comes.”

Six and a half kilometers from Memphis, CT-9 glided stalwartly toward Takara, carrying the reflector before it as though it were entering the lists for a joust.

It went into the duel with two disadvantages—size and speed. At a spidery twenty-nine tonnes, it was only two-thirds the mass of the satellite. And even after a full minute of acceleration, its propulsion systems—designed for construction, not interception—had pushed it to a paltry few tens of meters per second. Since the equations being solved and plotted on Memphis’s bridge depended entirely on the mass and velocity of the objects and the location of the starship, those were meaningful disadvantages.

But CT-9 also had one meaningful advantage: a guiding intelligence. The satellite’s engine had finally burned out; it was coasting now, committed to its trajectory. Only the truck could counter and adjust, and so it sped in its own plodding way for the spot where the satellite would meet it.

The intercept point was just four kilometers from Memphis. If the two objects meeting there were perfect, incompressible spheres, the satellite would follow the track on Martin’s display and miss the earthside curve of the hull by less than a hundred meters. Elementary physics of inelastic collisions.

But these were spacecraft, not billiard balls, and no computer on Memphis could predict the outcome.

“Range, twenty kilometers.”

The chatter on the starship’s bridge had ended. Dryke watched the panoramic and the tracking plot on his display wall, both relayed from Memphis via Highstar. They said enough.

“What—”

Something was happening to the truck. The shield had broken free from three of the grapples and was twisting to one side. A moment later, it went spinning away down toward the Pacific night like a discus. As it vanished, the Hughes appeared, a twinkling star skimming Takara’s moonside pole. Dryke’s breath caught.

“Range, ten kilometers.”

“Eight—”

“Five—”

The satellite closed, the Hughes rose, and for an instant—but only an instant—they merged. The violence with which the truck was hurled aside, spinning crazily, underlined the missile’s frightening speed. If it was deflected at all, no one watching could tell.

“Oh, shit—” said Dryke.

Suddenly, the Hughes brightened, as though it were caught in a spotlight. Dryke’s mind locked, and he watched without understanding. Then the display wall strobed blinding white, like a giant photographer’s flash, as the satellite exploded.

The panoramic went black, and Dryke could barely see through the afterimage that the tracking plot had splintered into dozens of diverging lines, some heading directly for Memphis. One second, two, three, four—whatever was going to happen should have happened.

“Matt?”

There was no answer. Then the tracking plot suddenly vanished, and Dryke realized that he was hearing shouting, cheering, the bubbling over of giddy relief. “Bridge link,” he said quickly, and the scene came up in window 1. Reid was being hugged by someone. “Matt?”

Reid escaped the hug and turned toward the cam. “I guess you’ve still got a starship, Mike. You can fire us now.”

“Firing’s too good for you,” Dryke said. “Besides, I wouldn’t want to deny the Director the pleasure of firing us all at once. Did the ship get tagged?”

“We had a little bump, so we must have taken something. But it can’t have been much, because all the important lights are still green. The chief engineer’s on his way out in a boat to take a look.”

“What happened there at the end?”

Reid looked over his shoulder. “Marty?”

The tech looked sheepish. “The reflector was blocking the truck’s rendezvous radar, and I wanted a little insurance for a center hit. I thought it was worth a hundred kilos, so I threw the reflector away.”

“Highstar’s gonna ticket you for that.”

“Ticket, hell,” said Martin. “Do you know how long it’s been since I did this to my shorts?”

Reid laughed. “I’ll buy you a new pair.”

“I’ll pay the ticket,” Dryke said. “Get us a report on damage ASAP, will you?”

The postmortem was not a happy gathering. Marshall was there, and Oker. Talbot, the construction manager, and Reid were linked from Memphis. Edgar Donovan was fresh in from Los Angeles. Dryke was nursing a cold fire and trying to hide it; at the opposite end of the table, Sasaki was hollow-eyed and startlingly frail.

They heard from Reid and Talbot first. The ersatz missile had been detonated by the PDS lasers 2.1 kilometers away from the ship. The explosion was a mercy—it hurled the bulk of the disintegrating satellite away from, rather than toward, the target. Fifty-eight fragments, the largest the size of a child’s fist, escaped the HEL beam and tore through the fringe of the aft structural skirt. It looked worse than it was—no critical systems had been hit, and no pressurized spaces had been breached.

Then Sasaki ordered the links closed. “We did not deserve the luck which befell us,” she said to the others. “This is unrestricted war, and we were not prepared. We were not prepared, and no one stood ready to help us. Governor Wian bears a measure of the blame—he has been unreasonably opposed to allowing weapons or weapons platforms on Takara. I believe he has sufficient reason now to reconsider—”

“He’d better,” said Marshall, the only one present who would dare interrupt Sasaki at that moment. “Who knows if there are any more sleepers parked up there?”

Sasaki’s gaze flickered in Marshall’s direction, but she did not otherwise acknowledge him. “Our opponents are still strong, still determined, and growing desperate. We must take Memphis where they cannot reach us, at the earliest possible date.”

“We’ve got an opportunity here,” Donovan injected. “The real damage isn’t serious. How serious do we want the official damage to be?”

“Will anyone who counts believe it?” Oker’s expression was skeptical.

“I hear that the explosion was visible all around the Pacific rim,” said Marshall.

“It’s number one on the nets,” said Donovan. “Even though they’re starved for facts. That’s the best time to feed them bullshit—if you can get there before they start producing their own.”

“This discussion does not interest me,” Sasaki said. “Issue what statements you wish. Mikhail, I would like to hear from you.”

Dryke looked down the table to her. “This feels like the Kasigau incident. A variation on a theme.”

“The same mind?”

“No. But someone schooled under it. Someone’s taken Jeremiah’s place at the helm.” He frowned and looked away. “Goddammit, it didn’t do any good to kill him.”

She nodded. “Mikhail, I am sorry. It is possible I was wrong about Christopher McCutcheon.”

Shaking his head, Dryke said, “I can’t gloat. It looks like I was wrong about Anna X.”

“What do you mean?”

He touched his earpiece. “I heard from Horizon a few moments ago. The McCutcheon kid passed through there five days ago on his way to Sanctuary.” He stood up, driving his chair away from the table. “With your leave, Director, I’m gonna go correct those mistakes.”