by Spider
Cameras caught the entire incident—there are always cameras rolling around the docks—and replay established conclusively that Robert was following me, keeping me in his blast shadow, when he was hit. Or else that shrapnel might have hit me.
The explosion had shocked me, and Glenn’s ghastly death had stunned me, but learning of Robert’s comparatively minor injury just about unhinged me. I think if Reb had not been present I would have thrown a screaming fit…but his simple presence, rather than anything he said, kept me from losing control. He got us all inside, kept us organized and quiet, did triage on the wounded and had them all prioritized by the time the medics arrived. Sulke was the last one in, but when she did emerge from the airlock she paused only long enough to inventory us all by eye, and then went sailing off to goddammit get some answers.
Robert was pale, and his jaw trembled slightly, but he seemed otherwise okay. The sight of his torn foot, oozing balls of blood, made me feel dizzy, but I forced myself to hold it between my palms to cut off the bleeding. It felt icy cold, and I remembered that was a classic sign of shock. But his breathing was neither shallow nor rapid, and his eyes were not dull. He seemed lucid, responded reassuringly to questioning; I relaxed a little.
The medical team was headed by Doctor Kolchar, the doctor I’d seen briefly during my first minutes at Top Step. He was a dark-skinned Hindu with the white hair, moustache and glowering eyebrows of Mark Twain, dressed as I remembered him in loud Hawaiian shirt and Bermuda shorts. He handed off Nicole to Doctor Thomas, the resident specialist in vacuum exposure, and came over to look at Robert. He checked pulse, blood pressure and pupils before turning his attention to the damaged foot.
“You’re a lucky young man,” he said at last. “You couldn’t have picked a better place to drill a hole through a human foot. No arterial or major muscle damage, the small bone destroyed isn’t crucial, most of what you lost was meat and cartilage. Even for a terrestrial this would not be a serious injury. Do you want nerve block?”
“Yes,” Robert said quietly but emphatically. Doctor Kolchar touched an instrument to Robert’s ankle, accepted its advice on placement, and thumbed the injector. Robert’s face relaxed at once; he took a great deep breath and let it out in a sigh. “Thank you, Doctor.”
“Don’t mention it. That block is good for twelve hours; when it wears off, come see me for another. Don’t bother to set your watch, you’ll know when it’s time. Meanwhile, drink plenty of fluids—and try to stay off your feet as much as possible.” He started to jaunt away to his next patient.
I was in no mood for bad jokes. “Wait a minute! Are you crazy? You haven’t even dressed his foot. What about infection?”
He decelerated to a stop and turned back to me. “Madam, whatever punctured his foot was the size and shape of a pen. There’s nothing like that in a cargo hold, and that’s the only place I can imagine a bug harmful to humans living on a spacecraft. And you know, or should know, that Top Step is a sterile environment. His bleeding has stopped, and there was a little coagulant in what I gave him. If it makes you happy to dress his foot, here.” He tossed me a roll of bandage. “But I’m a little busy just now.” He turned his back again and moved away. I looked down at the bandage and opened my mouth to start yelling.
“It’s all right, Morgan,” Robert said. “Believe me, I won’t bang it into anything.” He smiled weakly in an attempt to cheer me up.
My rage vanished. “Oh, darling, I’m so sorry. Are you all right?”
“Nerve block is a wonderful thing. That hurt like fury!”
I pulled his head against my chest and hugged him fiercely. “Oh, Robert, my God—poor Glenn! What a horrible thing.”
He stiffened in my arms. “Yes. Horrible.”
A thought struck me. “Her body! Somebody’s got to go and retrieve it! Teena, is anyone retrieving Glenn’s body?”
“No, Morgan.” Her voice was in robot mode; she must have been conducting many conversations at once.
“But someone has to!” Why? “Uh, her family might want her remains sent home. They can still track her, can’t they?”
“Her suit transponder is still active,” Teena said. “But in her contract with the Foundation she specified the ‘cremation in atmosphere’ option for disposition in the event of her death.”
“Oh. Wait a minute—her last vector was a deceleration with respect to Top Step. She was slowing down in orbit—so she’ll go into a higher orbit, right? I did the same thing myself yesterday. The atmosphere won’t get her, she’ll just…go on forever…” Oh God, without her legs, boiled and burst and dessicated! Much better to burn cleanly from air friction in the upper atmosphere, and fall as ashes to Earth—
“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 t
hreaten 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 be
hind 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.”