Firstborn

that. If you nuke Mars even the couch potatoes and thumbheads are gonna take notice. No casualty reports so far. And anyhow they shot first.”

“I can’t believe you’re taking it as coldly as this, Bob,” Bella said with a trace of anger. “You were the first human to walk on Mars.

And now, in a generation, it’s come to war, at the very site of your landing. It’s as if Neil Armstrong was asked to command the invasion of the Sea of Tranquillity. How does that make you feel?”

He shrugged. He wore his military jacket unbuttoned, his tie loosened, and he held a plastic soda can in his bearlike fist. “I feel we didn’t start this. I feel those saps on Mars should have done what their legally authorized governmental representatives ordered them to do, and hand over this screwball Dutt. And I feel that, like the lady says, there’s no point spending terabucks and a dozen lives developing a facility like the Liberator if you ain’t gonna use it.

Anyhow it’s your daughter who dropped the nuke.”

But it had to be Edna. Bella probably could have found some way to spare her daughter this duty; there were relief crews for Liberator. But she needed somebody she could trust — somebody she could rely on not to drop the bomb if Bella ordered her to withdraw.

“So what’s the reaction?”

Paxton tapped a screen at his elbow, and images flickered across the wall, of emptied-out food stores, deserted roads, towns as still as cemeteries. “Nothing’s changed. The alarm has been building up for weeks, ever since the cannonball failed. Everybody’s hunkered down, waiting. So far the numbers after that nuke on Mars are holding up.”

Cassie asked, “What numbers?”

Bella said, “He means the snap polls.”

Paxton said, “The negatives counter the positives, the war lobby versus the peaceniks, the usual knee-jerk stuff. And there’s a big fat don’t-know lobby in the middle.” He turned. “People are waiting to see what happens next, Bella.”

A backlash might yet come, Bella thought. If this dreadful gamble didn’t work her authority would be smashed, and somebody else would have to shepherd Earth through the final days as the Q-bomb sailed home. And that, she helplessly thought, would be a tremendous relief. But she could not put down her burden yet, not yet.

Bob Paxton said, “Message coming in from Mars. Not that Umfraville kid who’s been the spokesman. Somebody else talking to Liberator. Unauthorized probably.” He grinned. “Somebody cracked.”

“So where is Dutt?”

“North pole of Mars.”

“Tell Liberator to move.”

“And — oh, shit.” His softscreen filled with scrolling images, this time scenes of Earth. “They’re hitting back. Spacer bastards.

They’re attacking our space elevators!” Paxton looked at her. “So it’s war, Madam Chair. Does that ease your conscience?”

A live image of Mars hovered over the Wells crew table. The atomic wound inflicted by the Liberator burned intensely at the equator, and now a miniature mushroom cloud rose high into the thin Martian air. A lot of dreams had already died today, Myra thought fan-cifully.

And directly over the pole of Mars hung a single spark, drifting slowly into place. Everybody was watching but Ellie, who sat apart, still working on her wargaming analysis of the Martians’ likely reaction to any signal.

“Look at that damn thing,” Alexei said, wondering. “You aren’t supposed to be able to hover at areosynch over a pole!”

Grendel said, “Well, that’s what you can do with an antimatter drive and a virtually unlimited supply of delta-vee…”

Myra saw that these Spacers were instinctively more offended by the Liberator’s apparent defiance of the celestial mechanics that governed their lives than they were by the act of war.

Yuri glanced at a screen. “Five more minutes and it will be in position.”

Alexei said, “Meanwhile they seem to be hitting all the elevators on Earth. Jacob’s Ladder, Bandara, Modimo, Jianmu, Marahuaka, Yggdrasil… All snipped. A global coordinated assault. Who’d have believed a bunch of hairy- assed Spacers could get it together to achieve that?”

Yuri peered gloomily at his softscreen. “But it doesn’t do us a damn bit of good, does it? The wargamers’ conclusions do not look good. We’re pretty fragile here; we’re built to withstand Martian weather, not a war. And here at the pole we don’t even have anything to hit back with … Liberator doesn’t even need to use its nukes against us. With power like that it could fly through the atmosphere and bomb us out — why, it could just wipe us clean with its exhaust. The gamers suggest Liberator could eliminate a human presence on Mars entirely in twenty-four hours, or less.”

“Almost as efficiently as the Firstborn, then,” Grendel said grimly. “Makes you proud, doesn’t it?”

Myra said, “Look, my mother has her Thomas Edison signal all laid out. And if we’re going to send the say-so to light up, it needs to be before the Liberator’s bombs start falling.”

Yuri said, “Ellie, for Christ’s sake, we need some answers on how those Martians are going to respond.”

Ellie had been working for weeks on her projections of the Q-bomb’s response to Bisesa’s signal. She was always irritated at being distracted from her work, and her expression now was one Myra knew well from her days with Eugene. “The analysis is incomplete—”

“We’re out of time,” Yuri barked. “Give us what you’ve got.”

She stared at him for one long second, defiant. Then she slapped her softscreen down on the table. It displayed logic trees, branching and bifurcating. “We’re guessing at this, guessing the motivation of an entirely alien culture. But given their opposition to the Firstborn in the past—”

“Ellie. Just tell us.”

“The bottom line. It almost doesn’t matter what the Martians do. Because if they act in any way against any Eyes extant in their time-slices — you’ll recall we’ve hypothesized that all Eyes are interconnected, perhaps three-dimensional manifestations of a single higher-dimensional object — they may even be the same Eye — and it would be trivial for them to span the gulf between our universe and Mir’s—”

“Yes, yes,” Yuri snapped.

“That will provoke a reaction in the Eye in the Pit. Our Eye.

And that, almost certainly — look, you can see the convergence of the logic trees here — will cause the Q- bomb to react. It will surely be aware of the forced operation of the only other bit of Firstborn technology in the solar system, and then—”

“And what? Come on, woman. How will the Q-bomb react?”

“It will turn away from Earth,” Ellie said. “It will head for the activated Eye.”

“Here. On Mars.”

Grendel looked at her wildly. “So Earth would be saved.”

“Oh, yes.”

That, apparently, Myra thought, was a trivial conclusion of her logic to Ellie. But there was another corollary.

She asked, “So what do we tell my mother to do?”

Grendel said, “I think—”

“Wait.”

The new voice spoke from the air.

Myra looked up. “Athena?”

“A local avatar, downloaded into the station systems. Athena is at Cyclops. Ellie, I have come to the same conclusion as you, concerning the actions of the Martians. And concerning the likely con-sequence for the Firstborn