The Stardance Trilogy (58 page)

Dorothy Gerstenfeld had arrived just after the medics, and now she was the center of a buzzing swarm of people. She wore the impervious expression Mother wears when the children are throwing a tantrum, and spoke in firm but soothing tones. We jaunted in that direction, with me making sure no one jostled Robert’s foot.

“—no hard information,” she was saying. “We simply must wait until the investigation is complete. An announcement will be—”

“How do we know there aren’t more missiles on the way right now?” Dmitri called out, and the crowd-buzz became more fearful than angry. I felt my stomach lurch; it had not occurred to me that we might still be in danger.

“At the moment we do not,” she said. “But a UN Space Command cruiser is warping this way right now, and will be here in minutes. It has much more sophisticated detectors than we do. But if our assailants were planning any further attacks, I can’t see why they would wait and give us time to regroup.”

“How come our own anticollision gear didn’t pick up that missile?” Jo demanded.

“Because it’s designed to cope with meteors and debris, not high-speed ASATs at full acceleration,” Dorothy said.

“Why the hell not?” Jo said shrilly. “You mean to tell me this place is a sitting duck?”

“Any civilian space habitat is a sitting duck,” she said patiently. “Not one of them is defended against military attack.”

“That’s what the United Nations is for,” Ben said.

Robert chimed in. “An effective defensive system for this rock would cost millions, maybe billions. It’s not too hard to swat rocks and garbage—but if you want to stop ASATs
and
lasers,
and
particle beams,
and
—”

“I don’t care
how
much it costs,” Jo said angrily. “It’s fucking crazy to have something this big and expensive undefended.”

“Robert’s right,” Ben said. “There’s just no way to do it effectively. What I don’t understand is why we even have a system as good as we do. I mean, why did the Foundation burrow into Top Step from the front end instead of the back? If the docks were around behind, in shadow, there’d be a lot fewer collisions to defend against.”

I recognized what Ben was trying to do by presenting an intriguing digression. Unfortunately someone knew the answer. “They figure it’s more important to keep the Nanotech Safe Lab back there.”

“You mean the Foundation thinks microscopic robots are more important than people?” Jo squawked.

“Jo, you know that’s not fair,” Dorothy said. “Nanoreplicators are important precisely because they could conceivably threaten people—all the people in the biosphere, not just the handful in this pressure.”

“The hell with that,” Jo said. “We’re naked here…and you’ve got a responsibility to us.” A handful of others buzzed agreement.

“Teena,” Dorothy said calmly, “have the UN vessels arrived yet?” We could not hear the reply, but Dorothy relaxed visibly and said, “Repeat generally.”

Teena’s robot voice said, “
S.C. Champion
and
S.C. Defender
have matched our orbit and report ‘situation stable.’”

There was a murmur of general relief.

“Teena,” Dmitri called suddenly, “who fired that missile at us?”

“I do not know,” Teena said.

There was a bark of laughter behind me. “Nicely done.”

I spun and saw that Sulke had returned. She was smiling, but she looked angry enough to chew rock.

“What Teena means,” she said to all of us, “is that she doesn’t know the name of the individual who pushed the button.”

“Sulke—” Dorothy began, with a hint of steel in her voice.

“You can’t sit on it,” Sulke said. “It’s already on the Net, for Christ’s sake. And they’re entitled to know.”

Dorothy took a deep breath and let it out with a sigh. “Go ahead.”

Sulke’s smile was gone now. “Credit for the attack has been formally claimed by the terrorist group known as the Gabriel Jihad.”

Another incoming missile could not have caused more shock and consternation. “The fucking Caliphate!” Jo cried.

Dorothy’s voice cut through the noise of the crowd. “The Umayyad Caliphate does not officially support the Gabriel Jihad.”

“Oh, no,” Jo shouted back. “The best police state since Stalin just can’t seem to stamp out those nasty renegades somehow!”

“The Caliphate has publicly disassociated itself from the attack and denounced the Jihad,” Dorothy insisted. “They maintain that the terrorists stole control of one of their hunter-killer satellites and launched one of its missiles.”

“Yeah, sure! What is it, fifteen minutes since the fucking thing went off? That’s plenty of time for a government to react to a total surprise!” That provoked a collective growl of anger. “The goddam Shiites have always hated Stardancers, everybody knows that.”

“The Jihad are claiming that they’ve destroyed us,” Sulke said. “The exact words were, ‘the phallus of the Great Satan has been ruined.’ They think they finished us.”

“What, by blowing up a water-ship?” Ben said.

“Bojemoi,”
Dmitri burst out. “They did not know the ship would be there—it was not supposed to be for hours. They were trying to destroy the docking complex!”

“Jesus!” Robert exclaimed. “If the docks were destroyed, we…my God, we’d have to evacuate Top Step! We’d have to—there’d be no way to reprovision.”

There was a stunned silence as we absorbed his words.

“There is nothing further we can accomplish here,” Dorothy said. “Please return to your rooms and try to calm yourselves. We are safe for the present—and Administrator Mgabi and the Foundation Board of Directors are pursuing every possible avenue to ensure that nothing like this ever happens again.”

“What avenues?” Jo said. “Diplomacy? Fuck that! My friend Glenn is dead, they hard-boiled her head—I say we all go see Mgabi and—”

“Jo?” Reb interrupted.

“—demand that…what, Reb? I’m talking for Chrissake—”

“Dorothy said ‘please.’”

Jo stared at him, and opened her mouth to say something, and stared some more. It was the closest thing to anger I’d ever heard in Reb’s voice.

“She did,” Ben agreed, iron in his own voice.

“That’s right,” Robert said. “I heard her clearly.”

“Fair go, Joey,” Kirra urged. “Mgabi needs us like a barbed wire canoe right now. Let the poor bastard do ’is bleedin’ job, eh?”

Jo closed her mouth, looked around for support without finding any, and then shut her eyes tight and grimaced like a pouting child. “All right, God dammit,” she said. “But I—”

“Thank you, Jo,” Reb said. “Our sister Glenn was Episcopalian; funeral services will be held by Reverend Schiller in the chapel this evening at the usual time, and as usual there will be observances in all other holy places. I will be free from after lunch until then if any of you need to speak with me.”

He spun and jaunted away, and the group dispersed.

I carried Robert back to our room like a package of priceless crystal, determined to bury my confusion and heartache in bandaging and nursing my wounded mate. Ben and Kirra discreetly left us alone and went on down the hall. And in less than five minutes, Robert and I were having our first and last quarrel.

I hate to try and recreate the dialogue of that argument. It was bad enough to live through once.

It came down to this: Robert wanted to go back to Earth. As soon as possible.

No, I must recall some of the words. Because what he said first was
not
“I think we ought to go back to Earth as soon as possible.” It wasn’t even, “I want to go back to Earth; what do you think?” Or even, “I plan to go back to Earth, how do you feel?”

What he said, as soon as the door sealed behind us, was, “Can I use your terminal? I want to book a seat on the next ship Earthbound. Shall I book one for you too?”

Any of the other three would have been shock enough. God knows I had already had shock enough that day. But the way he phrased it added a whole additional layer of subtext that was just too overwhelming to absorb. He was saying, I want to go back to Earth so badly that I do not care whether you want to or not. He was saying, I can want something so much that I don’t care what you want. It took me days to get it through my head, to convince my brain—I
refused
to know it, for just as long as I was able—but an instant after he said that, the pit of my stomach knew that Robert did not love me.

My brain reverted to the intelligence level of a be-your-own-shrink program. “You want to book a seat on the next ship to Earth.”

“If it’s not already too late. But it should take the others awhile to work it out. Hours, maybe days. None of them is exactly a theoretical relativist. Glenn probably would have caught on fast.”

“And you want to know if I want you to book a seat for me.”

“Come on, Morgan, I
know
you’re bright enough to figure it out.”

“I’m bright enough to figure it out.”

“Marsport Control to Morgan: come in. You know exactly what I mean. We have to get off this rock.”

He was right—I did know what he meant. And he was wrong—because that was only half of what he meant, and the least important half. But that was the half I chose to pursue. “Leave Top Step?
Why?
” I said, already knowing the answer.

“Why? Because
they’re shooting at us!
This pressure is not safe anymore.”

Perhaps I should have taken a long time to absorb that too. It made me remember Phillipe Mgabi’s words to us, our first day inboard:
You are as safe as any terrestrial can be in space, now.
It should have been a shock to realize how unsafe that really was, that even in vast Top Step I was terribly vulnerable. But I come from the generation that grew up being told that rain is poison and sex can kill. Part of me wasn’t even surprised.

Argue it anyway. This argument is better than the next one will be.

“Just because some religious fanatics stole a missile?”

“Remember the mysterious something that hulled us on the way up here? You know that was a laser—hell, you and Kirra told me. And the failure in the circulation system that first week—do you have any idea how many failsafes there are on an air plant? That was only the fifth failure there’s ever been, in fifty years of spaceflight! And now this. You know what they say: ‘Three times is enemy action.’”

“But they’re just a bunch of terrorists in burnooses, for Christ’s sake—nobody can even prove they’ve got the Caliphate behind them.”

He drifted close, stopped himself with a gentle touch at my breast. “Morgan, listen to me. If the People’s Republic of China were to declare open war on the Starseed Foundation, I would not be unduly worried. But terrorists are
weak
—that’s what makes them so terribly dangerous.”

“They fired one lousy missile. If they could hack their way into a hunter-killer satellite, they could just as well have fired a dozen if they wanted to.”

“What they did was scarier. They used precisely the minimum amount of force that would achieve their objective. That tells me they are
not
fanatics in burnooses. They’ve studied their Sun Tzu. One missile, all by itself, should have done the job. That it didn’t is a miracle so unlikely I’m still shaking. If that water-ship hadn’t sprung a leak at
just
the right time on its way here, we’d all be trying to figure out how to walk back to Earth right now. Without the docks, this place can’t support life.”

Oh God, he was right. I wanted badly to be hugged. He was close enough to hug. “Jesus Christ, Robert—they’ve been trying to kill us for two months, and the total body count is five. We ought to have time to finish out our course and Graduate.”

“You just said yourself, they could send more missiles any time they want. There could be more on the way now.”

“There are two goddam UN heavy cruisers out there!”

“Right now, yeah. They may even stay awhile. But have you considered the fact that
the Starseed Foundation is not a member of the United Nations, and the Caliphate is?
”

“But—that’s ridiculous!”

“Sure, there’s a friendly relationship of long standing—the member nations all know perfectly well there wouldn’t still be a UN if it weren’t for the Stardancers, whether they’ll admit it or not—even the Caliphate knows that, that’s just what’s driving them crazy. But you tell me: if it comes to it, is the UN going to go to war to defend a corporation from one of its member nations? When, as you pointed out, it can’t even prove the Caliphate is involved? You wait and see: within two or three days, India will have lodged a protest over the diversion of UN resources to protect a Canadian corporation, and then Turkey will chime in, and finally China…and one day those two ships will quietly warp orbit.”

“They wouldn’t.”

“They might have no choice. Suppose there were a plausible diversion somewhere else. Say, somebody bombed the Shimizu Hotel? At any given time there’s upwards of seven trillion yen on the hoof jaunting around inside that pressure, some of the most influential humans there are. The Space Command hasn’t got a lot of military strength in space to spare: most of their real muscle is the Star Wars net, and that’s aimed one way, straight down. I don’t know how soon the next ship leaves here for Earth, but I do know I’m going to be on it.”

Whether I’m beside you or not.

“You’re just going to run away?”

Think well before saying that to your man, even if it’s true—maybe especially if it’s true; I might just as well have stuck a knife in his belly. Even his unexpressive face showed it. For an instant I remembered his torn foot, injured in trying to shield me, and almost said something to at least try to recall my words. But I was too angry.

He didn’t let the pain reach his voice; it came out flat, firm, controlled. “You bet your life.”

“You mean, just go home and waste all this? All this time, all this work, forget Symbiosis and run away?”

“It will not be wasted. We can always come back, sometime when it is safe again. Even if we never do come back, it hasn’t been a waste: we’ve learned a lot and acquired a lot of very useful skills, and we found each other—”
You’re a good three or four minutes late in mentioning that, buster.
“—but surely you see that all of that will be wasted if we die?”