Firstborn

Earth.

Bella composed herself. “Show Cassie in.”

Somehow Bella had expected Cassie Duflot to show up in black, as when Bella had last met her when she had handed over her husband’s Tooke medal: still in widow’s weeds, after all this time. But Cassie wore a suit of a bright lilac color, attractive and practical.

And nor, Bella reminded herself, was Cassie going to be sunk in grief as she had been during that visit. It would be easy to under-estimate her.

“It’s good of you to see me,” Cassie said formally, shaking Bella’s hand.

“I’m not sure if I had much choice,” Bella said. “You’ve been making quite a splash since we last met.”

Cassie smiled, a cold expression almost like a politician’s. “I didn’t mean to make any kind of ‘splash,’ or to cause anybody any trouble. All I am is the widow of a navy engineer, who started asking questions about how and why her husband had died.”

“And you didn’t get good enough answers, right? Coffee?”

Bella went to the percolator herself. She used the interval to size up her opponent, for that was how she had to think of Cassie Duflot.

Cassie was a young woman, and a young mother, and a widow; that gave her an immediately sympathetic angle to snag the public’s attention. But Cassie also worked in the public relations department of Thule, Inc., one of the world’s great eco-conservation agencies, specializing in post-sunstorm reconstruction in the Canadian Arctic. Not only that, her mother-in-law, Phillippa, had moved in senior circles in London before the sunstorm, and had no doubt kept up a web of contacts since. Cassie knew how to use the media.

Cassie Duflot looked strong. Not neurotic, or resentful, or bitter. She wasn’t after any kind of revenge for her husband’s death or for the disruption of her life, Bella saw immediately. She was after something deeper, and more satisfying. The truth, perhaps. And that made her more formidable still.

Bella gave Cassie her coffee and sat down. “Questions with no answers,” she prompted.

“Yes. Look, Chair Fingal—”

“Call me Bella.”

Cassie said she had known a little of her husband’s activities in his last years. He had been a space engineer; Cassie knew he was working on a secret program, and roughly where he was stationed.

“And that’s all,” she said. “While James was alive that was all I wanted to know. I accepted the need for security. We’re at war, and during wartime you keep your mouth shut. But after he died, and after the funeral and the ceremonials — you were kind enough to visit us—”

Bella nodded. “You started to ask your questions.”

“I didn’t want much,” Cassie said. She was twisting the wed-ding ring on her finger, self-conscious now. “I didn’t want to en-danger anybody, least of all James’s friends. I just wanted to know something of how he died, so that one day the children, when they ask about him — you know.”

“I’m a mother myself. In fact, a grandmother. Yes, I do know.”

It seemed the navy had badly mishandled queries that had initially been valid and quite innocent. “They stonewalled me. One by one, the navy’s liaison officers and the counselors stopped returning my calls. Even James’s friends drew away.” This blank shutting-out had, quite predictably, incensed Cassie. She had consulted her mother, and had begun her own digging.

And she had started drafting queries for Thales.

“I think because Thales exists, whispering in the ear of anybody on the planet who asks him a question, people believe that our society is free and open. In fact Thales is just as much an instrument of government control as any other outlet. Isn’t that true?”

Bella said, “Go on.”

“But I found out there are ways even to get information out of an AI’s nonanswers as well as its answers.” She had become something of a self-taught expert on the analysis of an AI traumatized by being ordered to lie. She produced a softscreen from her bag and spread it over the desk. It showed a schematic of a network laid out in gold thread, with sections cordoned off by severe red lines. “You can’t just dig a memory out of an AI without leaving a hole. Everything is interconnected—”

Bella cut her off. “That’s enough. Look, Cassie. Others have asked the same sort of questions before. It’s just that you, being who you are, have become more prominent than most.”

“And where are those others? Locked away somewhere?”

In fact some were, in a detention center in the Sea of Moscow, on the far side of the Moon. It was Bella’s own darkest secret. She said, “Not all of them.”

Cassie took back her softscreen and leaned forward, her face intent. “I’m not intimidated by you,” she said softly.

“I’m sure you’re not. But, Cassie —sit back. The office has various features designed to respond to any threat made against me.

They’re not always very clever at decoding body language.”

Cassie complied, but she kept her eyes fixed on Bella. “Space-based weapons systems,” she said. “That’s what my husband was working on, wasn’t it?”

And she spoke of hints from the sky, traces, fragmentary clues that had been assembled by conspiracy theorists and sky-watchers of varying degrees of sanity and paranoia. They had seen the straight-line exhaust trail of a ship sliding across the sky at impossible speeds. The Liberator, of course. And they had seen another vessel, slow, ponderous, massive, moving in the asteroid belt, leaving behind the same kind of trail. That was clearly the tractor, preparing for the Big Whack. These ships had all been shrouded, but mankind’s invisibility shields were not yet perfect.

Bella asked, “So what do you think all this means?”

“That something is coming,” Cassie said. “Another sunstorm, perhaps. And the governments are preparing to flee with their families, in a new generation of superfast ships. That’s not a consensus view, but a common suspicion, I’d say.”

Bella was shocked. “Do people really think so little of their governments that they imagine we’re capable of that?”

“They don’t know. That’s the trouble, Bella. We live in the aftermath of the sunstorm. Maybe it’s rational to be paranoid.” Cassie folded away her softscreen. “Bella, I have followed this path not for my husband’s sake, or my own, but for my children. I think you are hiding something — something monstrous, that might affect their future. And they have a right to know what that is. You have no right to keep it from them.”

Time for Bella to make her judgment about what to do about this woman. Well, Cassie was not a criminal. She was in fact the sort of person Bella had been appointed to protect.

“Look, Cassie,” Bella said. “You’ve picked up some of the pieces of the jigsaw. But you’re assembling them into the wrong picture. I don’t want any harm to come to you, but on the other hand, I don’t want you to do any harm either. And by spreading this sort of theory around, harm is what you may inflict. So I’m going to take you into my confidence — the confidence of the Council. And when you know what I know, you can use your own judgment on how best to use the information. Is that a deal?”

Cassie thought it over. “Yes, Bella, that’s fair.” And she looked at Bella, apprehensive, excited. Scared.

Bella glanced at the clock on the wall. Thirty minutes before she would receive news of what had become of the Big Whack experiment. That desperate drama must be playing itself at this very moment, out among the asteroids, twenty-eight light-minutes away.

She put that aside. “Let’s start with the Liberator, ” she said.

“Your husband’s legacy. Graphics, please, Thales.”

They spoke of the Liberator. And of the Q-bomb it had been shadowing for months.

And then Bella showed Cassie Bob Paxton’s last option.

“It’s just another asteroid, drifting through the belt,” Bella said. “It has a number in our catalogs, and whoever landed that mining sur-vey probe on it”—it was a metallic spark on the asteroid’s coal-dust surface —“probably gave it a name. We just call it the cannonball.

And here is the ship whose exhaust your conspiracy-theorists saw.”