Janet Blyleven came by, looking worried. “They’ve blown up Nemesis. Roald has analyzed the video, and guesses they hit it with a bunch of hydrogen bombs.”
They went next door to Carr’s big city offices, where Arkady had spent most of the previous two weeks. Alex and Roald were inside watching the TV. Roald said, “Screen, replay tape one.”
An image flickered and held: black space, the thick net of stars, and midscreen a dark irregular asteroid, visible mostly as a patch of occluded stars. For a few moments the image held, and then a white light appeared on the side of the asteroid. The expansion and dispersal of the asteroid was immediate. “Fast work,” Arkady remarked.
“There’s another angle from a camera farther away.”
This clip showed the asteroid as oblong, and it was possible to make out the silver blisters of its mass driver. Then there was a white flash, and when the black sky returned the asteroid was gone; a shimmering of stars to the right of the screen indicated the passage of fragments, then they steadied and it was over. No fiery white cloud, no roar on the soundtrack; just a reporter’s tinny voice, chattering about the end of the Martian rioters’ doomsday threat, and the vindication of the concept of strategic defense. Although apparently the missiles had come from the Amex lunar base, launched by rail gun.
“I never did like the idea,” Arkady said. “It was mutual assured destruction all over again.”
Roald said, “But if there’s mutual assured destruction, and one side loses the capability . . .
“We haven’t lost the capability here, though. And they value what’s here as much as we do. So now we’re back to the Swiss defense.” Destroy what they wanted and take to the hills, for resistance forever. It was more to his liking.
“It’s weaker,” Roald said bluntly. He had voted with the majority, in favor of sending Nemesis on its course toward the Earth.
Arkady nodded. It couldn’t be denied that one term had been erased from the equation. But it wasn’t clear if the balance of power had changed or not. Nemesis had not been his idea; Mikhail Yangel had proposed it, and the group in the asteroids had carried it out on their own. Now a lot of them were dead, killed by the big explosion or by smaller ones out in the belt, while Nemesis itself had created the impression that the rebels would countenance mass destruction on Earth. A bad idea, as Arkady had pointed out.
But that was life in a revolution. No one was in control, no matter what people said. And for the most part it was better that way, especially here on Mars. Fighting had been severe in the first week, UNOMA and the transnationals had beefed up their security forces in the previous year. A lot of the big cities had been instantly seized by them, and it might have happened everywhere except that there turned out to be so many more rebel groups than they or anyone else had known about. Over sixty towns and stations had gotten on the net and declared independence, they had popped out of the labs and the hills and simply taken over. And now with Earth on the far side of the sun, and the nearest continuous shuttle destroyed, it was the security forces who were looking under siege, big cities or not.
A call came from the physical plant. They were having some trouble with the computers, and wanted Arkady to come have a look.
He left the city offices and walked across Menlo Park to the plant. It was just after sunrise, and most of Carr Crater was still in shadow. Only the west wall and the tall concrete buildings of the physical plant were in sunlight at this hour, their walls all yellow in the raw morning light, the pistes running up the crater wall like gold ribbons. In the shadowed streets the city was just waking. A lot of rebels had come in from other towns or the cratered highlands, and they slept on the park grass. People sat up, sleeping bags still draped over their legs, eyes puffy, hair wild. Night temperatures were being kept up, but it was still cool at dawn, and those out of their bags crouched around stoves, blowing into their hands and puttering with coffee pots and samovars, and checking to the west to see how close the line of sunlight had crept. When they saw Arkady they waved, and more than once he was stopped by people who wanted to get his opinion of the news, or give him advice. Arkady answered them all cheerfully. Again he felt that difference in the air, the sense that they were all in a new space together, everyone facing the same problems, everyone equal, everyone (seeing a heating coil glowing under a coffee pot) incandescent with the electricity of freedom.
He walked feeling lighter, chattering into his wristpad’s diary file as he went. “The park reminds me of what Orwell said about Barcelona in the hands of the anarchists— it is the euphoria of a new social contract, of a return to that child’s dream of fairness we all began with—”