And then word came through the news that the Moon had decided—unilaterally—to close all its ports and close its space to incoming vessels.
Jefferson sat up straight, almost committing a major faux pas. It would have been very serious if Fifty-six had noticed it, but he hadn’t. He was looking off in the distance as well.
He had also gotten the news.
Jefferson sent half a dozen messages to various sources, demanding to know why he hadn’t been informed of this before the media had found out. He ended each message with: It’s probably ruined my negotiation with the Disty, and that wasn’t far from the truth.
If the Disty wanted to declare the humans uncooperative, now was the time to do so.
Fifty-six turned his shiny gaze onto Jefferson. “So this entire meeting,” Fifty-six said in his own language, “has been a ruse to cover your duplicity over the Moon situation.”
In a normal meeting, Jefferson would have feigned ignorance. But the closing of the Moon’s ports had already hit the news, and Fifty-six knew that Jefferson was monitoring his links. They had established that open lines were all right, within diplomatic perimeters, at the beginning of this meeting.
Jefferson wasn’t used to truth. Telling it made him more nervous than lying did.
“No,” Jefferson said. “I just found out about it. I can send you a copy of the message I just sent to dozens of my colleagues.”
Minus the last sentence, of course.
“I am here in good faith,” Jefferson said. “I truly don’t know what’s going on.”
His Disty was weak, but he seemed to make himself understood. He wanted to beg that they return to Spanish or English or almost any other language that he knew, but he didn’t. Right now, he was at an extreme disadvantage in this meeting, and he knew it.
“Yes,” Fifty-six said. “Send me that memo.”
Jefferson did, and at the last second, decided to leave the final sentence on. Fifty-six tilted his head as he received it, his eyes widening ever so slightly, a sign of pleasurable surprise.
Fifty-six pressed his palms together, then brought his hands to his face. His forefingers touched what little nose he had, and his thumbs rested below his chin. He stared at Jefferson as if he were trying to see through him.
Jefferson met his gaze and didn’t flinch. Sometimes negotiation was that simple. Staring each other down to see who had courage and who did not.
In this instance, Jefferson knew he would be the first to look away. He was the one on weak ground. He was the one being undercut by his own people.
But he kept staring for a moment longer. And then, to his surprise, Fifty-six nodded.
“Your people on the Moon have made the right choice,” he said in English. “You must notify the other worlds in this system that they cannot accept the Disty craft either.”
Jefferson was glad that Fifty-six had spoken English. Even so, Jefferson was still afraid he hadn’t understood. Jefferson couldn’t believe Fifty-six was calling for the death of his own people.
It actually took Jefferson a moment to figure out how to phrase his next question without causing offense.
“I’m sorry,” Jefferson said. “I must not have heard you correctly. Did you say the Moon should remain closed?”
“Yes,” Fifty-six said. “These Disty are contaminated. We have no way of decontaminating them. We could lose every Disty in this solar system if things do not go well.”
“But if the Moon doesn’t accept them and Io doesn’t and Earth doesn’t, and…” Jefferson just stopped speaking. Then he frowned. “Your people will die, sir. I’m sorry, but if they can’t land anywhere, they’ll run out of fuel and drift. We’ll be condemning everyone who leaves Mars to death.”
Fifty-six kept his hands in front of his mouth, but he leaned forward ever so slightly, placing himself at a subservient position to Jefferson.
That surprised Jefferson even more.
“I understand the implications,” Fifty-six said. “Nonetheless, I make this request, followed by one other.”
Jefferson nodded, his heart pounding.
“I request that we find a place within this solar system, a place with no Disty, where my people can land for a short time, until we get this problem resolved.”
“A place with no Disty?” Jefferson asked. “What do you mean no Disty? There are Disty all over the solar system.”
“A place where these Contaminated Ones can go without contaminating others,” Fifty-six said as if his logical were obvious.
“I understand the requirement,” Jefferson said. “I’m just not sure how far away the other Disty have to be.”
“Best not to have them in the hemisphere—those in the southern hemisphere of Mars are all right for the moment.”
“The Moon doesn’t have hemispheres,” Jefferson said.
“Just so,” Fifty-six said. “So small places will not work for us, except, perhaps, if there are no Disty at all.”
Jefferson shook his head. “I’m not—I—you—.”
He had to stop himself. He had never stammered in a negotiation before. He had never been faced with something like this before, either. A diplomat suggesting the relocation of thousands of his people. Immediately.
“Do you know of such a place?” Jefferson asked.
“If I knew of one, I would suggest it,” Fifty-six said. “My people are already working on this. Perhaps if our groups join forces with the rest of the Alliance, we might find a place that no one has thought of.”
“Perhaps,” Jefferson said. “Or maybe some other solution.”
“There are very few solutions,” Fifty-six said, “that do not involve large casualties.”
“I’m beginning to realize that,” Jefferson said. “But at least we’re working together now.”
Fifty-six let his hands drop. “I would not go that far. Your people have much to answer for.”
He got off the table, then bowed once, a sign that the meeting was over. Still, he said one more thing:
“We shall meet here again within the hour. Use this time to implement our plan.”
And then he left, followed by the other Disty.
Jefferson remained seated. He bowed his own head slightly, and realized the headache was gone. Adrenaline—natural adrenaline—did that sometimes.
And he was filled with adrenaline—caused not by this so-called solution, but by fear. The Disty were savvy and unforgiving. And Jefferson didn’t know if he had just lead his own people into a trap.
Forty-four
Ki Bowles had scored her own broadcast booth at InterDome Media. Thaddeus Ling felt her story was important enough to give her control over where and when the story went out, and how many of the one hundred different types of media controlled by InterDome would carry the piece.
Bowles sat at the booth controls, a tiny angled desk with a dozen glittery chips, designed more for looks than for practicality. The room was dark and too hot. The wall screens around her actually put out a little heat.
Ling had believed in this story, but he hadn’t given her one of the state-of-the-art booths. She still had a lot to prove to him.
And she would do so. She was running the story on a dozen levels, following every angle she could think of. She had a few beat reporters handling the Armstrong part of the tale, as well as the port. But her coup had been a chance hookup with two freelancers who had messaged her because hers was the only name they knew.
The freelancers had managed to get a ship off Armstrong before the port closed, although the freelancers were claiming only incoming ships were banned; outgoing could leave at any time. Bowles wasn’t reporting that. She hadn’t told anyone for fear they might seize on her idea.
Well, actually, the freelancers’ idea. They had recording equipment all over that ship, and they took it out of restricted Moon space. They were going to interview Disty ships that were turned away, as well as get footage of those ships as they left.
If things worked out as both B
owles and the freelancers expected, they’d get some internal footage from the ship itself—face-to-face contact with whomever passed for the captain of the Disty vessel being turned away.
Personal touches were so crucial on a story like this. Most people didn’t realize that these ships contained dozens of lives. No one seemed to understand that those little pinpricks of light above Sahara Dome’s port had meant that Disty were dying at an alarming rate.
Bowles had been appalled at DeRicci’s order to close the ports. DeRicci’s action had confirmed her bigotry. She clearly didn’t want more Disty here, even if it cost thousands of lives.
Bowles wasn’t sure Ling had believed that side of the story until the order came through. He had a hunch that DeRicci’s old partner was only saying these things out of jealousy or misguided hatred.
Noelle DeRicci was a popular public figure, and Ling thought she deserved softer gloves.
Until this.
Until the calls from someone in the Port Authority, questioning DeRicci’s rights to restrict entry into Moon space and to close down the port. And then there was that little message of protest from the train lines, again about DeRicci, wondering if she truly had the right to ask that no Disty be carried from Dome to Dome unless those Disty could show they had been on the Moon for the past week.
Other InterDome offices all over the Moon were getting those kinds of calls, mostly because no one knew exactly what DeRicci’s authority was. Apparently, a few of the port administrators had tried to refuse the order, only to be told that they would breaking the law.
Bowles had an intern investigating which law applied. There were still very few Moon-wide laws. Generally each Dome ran its own port and its own transportation system. And each Dome took care of its own citizens.
This was a mess, and Bowles was relishing it.
All except one part.
It had been relatively easy to think of the dying Disty in the abstract while the crisis had been confined to Mars. Then Bowles had prepared herself for the refugee story, willing to wade into crowds of Disty at the port, asking them how they would deal with the dislocation in their lives.
She had covered refugee stories before. They were always emotionally wrenching—children who seemed lost because they’d never been away from home, adults who were so frightened they could barely speak, and authorities who were just as frightened as they tried to figure out what to do with the influx.
She’d seen tent cities. She’d seen horrible overcrowding. She’d seen violence like none other in one of the refugee camps on Io during her days as a cub. But she’d never ever heard of a world unilaterally denying access at each and every port. Funneling people into one area, yes, she’d seen that. Creating ghettos for the refugees that had their own problems of air, sanitation, and privacy, she’d seen that as well.
But condemning dozens, maybe hundreds, to die in space, unable to land? She’d never seen that.
She knew Earth wouldn’t take them. Getting into Earth had been difficult for centuries now. The Disty might request refugee status on Earth, but they wouldn’t get it. Earth often didn’t let legitimate non-Earthlings onto the planet, humans with relatives there, Peyti with student visas, or Rev with work permits. Disty who had little or no identification, their only possessions what they had carried out of their homes, would have no chance.
That was why the Moon had become so popular with aliens and itinerant travelers, why the Moon’s universities were getting interstellar acclaim. The Moon hadn’t had that overarching central government that made silly unilateral decisions.
This change, which seemed to have snuck up on everyone, boded badly for the Moon’s Domes. All that progress, all that tolerance the Moon prided itself in, had just vanished.
At the cost of hundreds of lives.
Bowles would report that. But she wasn’t going to look at those ships more than she had to. And when the footage came in from the freelancers, she wouldn’t look at the faces of the Disty trapped outside the Moon’s restricted space.
She knew from past experience that the dead stayed with her. She saw them in her dreams—the people she hadn’t been able to save, the people her job forbade her from touching, from helping. She could report, but she couldn’t become part of the story herself.
She could focus the story and point it in the right direction. Noelle DeRicci was the focus of this story, not just her inexperience, but also her ignorance. Combine those two things with unbridled power and a willingness to use it, and the result was visible on everybody’s news links.
Ships hurtling toward the Moon’s space, ships that wouldn’t get in. Ships that might hover there, waiting until someone takes pity on them, or might go from place to place until their fuel runs out.
Either way, the occupants would simply be waiting. Waiting to be set free or waiting to die horribly, homeless, in the darkness of space.
Forty-five
Flint finally found several enclaves of survivors who had moved back into this solar system, apparently trying to get as close to their former homes as possible.
From the interviews he scanned, the messages that had somehow made it onto public boards, vid blogs that a handful of the young had done, the survivors believed no one remembered the massacre here, and they might actually have a chance at living a peaceful life.
Not everyone felt that way—he still got an undercurrent of killing anger from much of what he saw—but enough had to venture within easy travel distance from Mars.
His office was dark except for the lights from various screens. He had turned the environmental controls on cold because he was having trouble focusing in the warmth of the afternoon. He had the sound off—the various reports coming in from Mars only added to his tension. His own links were down as well; all he had on were the emergency links.
The largest group of survivors was on Europa. They had come back to this solar system together after some kind of conflict in the Outlying Colonies. Something about this group of people seemed to anger the already established settlements—which was very unusual in the Outlying Colonies. Usually, they were tolerant of differences.
The Europa survivors hadn’t lasted long as a group. After a few years, many of them went their separate ways—some to different cities on Europa, others back to the Outlying Colonies, and a few into deep-space travel—going as far away as they could.
But then Flint found a note that intrigued him. Five survivors had come to the Moon. They had scattered, none going to the same city. He felt a surge of pleasure at the discovery, even though the move had taken place more than three decades ago.
Before he traced them, he looked at the other data his system had accumulated. There he found twenty more survivors or survivors’ descendents who had ended up on the Moon. Most of the arrivals were within the past fifty years—and only one, a great-great grandson—had been within the last five years.
Flint didn’t care about the descendents, so he selected his parameters to remove them from his current database. Of course, he kept the information in case he needed it. Then he redesigned the searches on his other networks, seeing if he could trace the addresses of the fifteen remaining real survivors of the massacre who, at one point or another, had lived on the Moon.
Two more hours later, he had the information he needed: an even dozen survivors of the massacre still lived on the Moon as of last year. He verified names and addresses—making sure that private records didn’t show other changes, such as deaths, incapacitation, moving to some sort of care center, or selling a home to a relative.
Within a few minutes, his list was complete.
His heart pounded, and he realized he had been breathing shallowly. He downloaded the survivor list into one of his unlinked information chips, then closed his eyes for just a moment. Step One—the hardest step—was done. The rest wouldn’t be up to him. Someone else would have to convince these people to return to the scene of the most hideous event of their lives. Someone else would have to do the t
alking, and make sure that these people trusted them.
And someone else would get to ferry them to Mars.
Flint opened his eyes. On the wall screens, various images of ships superimposed over other images, all of the windows bleeding together thanks to the dark backdrop of space. Only a few of the news reports showed Mars at all.
His stomach twisted, and he realized he hadn’t eaten anything in hours. He wasn’t sure he wanted to know how the crisis had expanded. He would take care of this, then maybe get back into the moment-by-moment details of the entire thing.
He used his most secured link to reach Sharyn Scott-Olson in Sahara Dome. She might be able to use their channels in Sahara Dome to put him through to people who could actually do something with these survivors.
But no matter what he tried, he kept getting the message he had gotten from the public links earlier: the links were unusually jammed, and he should try again later. One link actually told him that communications were down in Sahara Dome. He wouldn’t doubt it, with everything going on.
But that didn’t settle his problem. He now had a list of people who might be able to solve the Disty crisis, and he had no one to give the list to.
He had to find someone who could take action—and he had to do it fast.
Forty-six
It took the governor-general three hours after receiving the emergency communication from DeRicci’s staff to come to Armstrong. The council members for the United Domes of the Moon were on standby, waiting for the governor-general, who insisted on a personal meeting.
DeRicci no longer cared. She had spent the last three hours issuing orders, answering queries from mayors of various cities, and fretting about how to enforce the restricted space law. Bluffing her way through the hierarchies of all the Domed governments had been easy; the problem she now had was that the United Domes of the Moon had no police force, no security team, and no military.
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