“Your conclusion is erroneous, Morgan,” Teena said. “She is presently in a higher orbit, yes—but she does not have the mass to sustain it, as Top Step does. In a short time her orbit will decay, and she will have her final wish.”
“Oh.” I felt inexpressible sadness. “Robert, let’s go home. You need rest. And I don’t care what the doctor says, I’m going to bandage your foot.”
“I’m not going anywhere until I get some answers,” he said grimly. “I want to know who shot at us!”
Somehow I had not given that question a conscious thought—but as he said the words I felt a surge of anger. No, more than anger—bloodlust. “Look, there’s Dorothy. Let’s ask her, maybe she’ll know something.”
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.”