Powell barely hesitated. “Our library only goes up to Twenty-One
Fifty-Eight. After that, there’s only the habitat’s log, input by me. It’s all open to you. You must make your decision by twenty-hundred tomorrow or we’ll be forced to seize Circus by force.
Virgil nodded. “Untie me and bring me a scrim.”
Can’t ask for it too soon. Have to wait a few hours.
Virgil avoided requesting astrophysical information and called up the history section. The attendant, Bailey, had raised his bed and freed up his right hand so that he could operate the scrim’s library controls. After several hours of reading, watching and listening, he turned off the scrim and laid his head back.
The recent history of the System made the fall of Rome look calm and restful. Dante Houdini Brennen in 2116 had not possessed the vantage on the war gained by historians in subsequent decades. The causes of Earth’s degeneration into statism were manifold. The planet’s near trillion inhabitants—previously well-supplied with necessities from the Moon and the Belt habitats—saw extreme danger in the cessation of intrasystem trade. The constant Terran demand for raw materials and goods fabricated in deep space at zero-gee could not be interrupted for the length of time necessary for Earth businesses to begin work in the Belt.
Someone did have the brains to purchase obsolete equipment already in the Belt and crew it. By then, though, someone else had put deep thrust engines on a freighter, armed it with a bevawatt laser and his own private army, and headed for Ceres Beta. Other potential looters followed.
Organization for such an aggressively invasive undertaking resulted in bureaucracy, with all its entrenched interests. The interests gained supporters among the nervous billions. When the supporters began to crush dissenters and neutral alike, a State had—once again—arisen. Mars, far enough from Earth almost to be considered a Belter outpost, remained steadfastly neutral, which meant they were on both sides, selling. Luna, settled by rough-and-tumble frontiersmen, declared solidarity with the Belt. The Earth-Moon war lasted eight years, ending in a bitter, bloody stalemate.
The Belters could not be taken by surprise in this war. When they could detect fusion flares hundreds of millions of kilometers away, they had plenty of time to get ready. After two years in flight, the first Terran assault on the Belt resulted in a thirty-second-long battle. All Earthlings were captured alive from their incapacitated ships and sent to Ceres Beta
where the defense agencies offered them a choice: be set free on an asteroid with a complimentary one-hour tank of air, or work to pay their own fares back to Earth.
The Belters saw no further threat and ignored Earth. The home planet’s trillion scrambled to get into space, into the Belt. Factionalism took hold as the world’s great corporations— Grant Enterprises, D’Asaro Spacecraft, General Cosmos, The Food Combine, and Crockett Mining and Exploration—acquired what they could from private investors and from one another. What some could not buy, rent or borrow, they stole.
Property disputes large enough to be small scale wars ensued.
Virgil read and saw how the Brennen Trust played an integral part in the war.
Just a month after his last update to Virgil, the Earth tried to seize Bernal Brennen. He moved the entire habitat from Lagrange Point 5 to the Belt and began long negotiations with the Autarchists. He thought he could end the war by giving the Belters a cheap method of shipping the Earthlings what they needed. The cost of teleporting freight in unmanned, computerized craft dropped to a point of positive return on expenditures and the resumption of trade. The war very nearly ended.
You didn’t figure on Mankind’s stupidest blunder, though.
Virgil requeued the vid of the anti-matter bombing of Ceres Beta: a sneak attack launched by a secret arm of the Recidivists; an automated slaughter that—once dispatched—could not be stopped.
Sprawling over nearly ten degrees of the Asteroid Belt, the mining civilization defied visualization from anywhere nearby. Like viewing the Milky Way galaxy, anyone inside the huge chunk of space called Ceres Beta saw only a field of bright lights: habitats, factories, smelters, farms. Only from outside could its true shape and size be appreciated.
It was from a distance, then—from Mars—that the destruction of Ceres Beta was both visible and comprehensible. The vid shot from a telescope on Phobos showed simultaneous white dots that waxed and waned almost as one, forming a false star cluster that flared and cooled within moments.
Signaling a schematic of the bomb prototype, captured years later,
Virgil marvelled at the efficient way General Cosmos had used Earth’s last kilogram of anti-matter. The attack, code-named Operation Slow Lightning, consisted of a thousand tiny spacecraft, each carrying one gram of anti-hydrogen, each payload the size of a fist. Launched by laser from Earth orbit, the minuscule armada drifted for years, incapable of
being recalled even after the resumption of trade. The Terran government denied responsibility for the bombing, but someone had to have authorized the use of the anti-matter. On that, the Terran history books were universally mute.
The small rocket flares were hidden from Belter view by the bombs’ laser parasols, painted black on the fore end for further camouflage. The strike was coordinated by one tiny automated command ship that trailed on the same slow Hohmann S-curve orbit as the bombs. No one detected a small, slow-moving, widely dispersed swarm of two-kilogram masses in the midst of the asteroid belt.
Each bomb found its target and destroyed it with brutal simplicity. It drifted toward a Bernal habitat or farm or a factory, hit the side, and shattered. That in itself would generally not have damaged the heavy plating typical of Belter construction. When the bomb broke apart, though, the magnetic field suspending the anti-hydrogen collapsed; the resulting impact of anti-matter with matter released enough energy to blast unsealable ruptures through the structures.
Millions died of decompression, or of suffocation, or of wounds from the explosions, or of starvation from the famine that followed. Billions of auros worth of equipment, livestock, and homes were laid waste. Even so, the decimation of Ceres Beta hardly crippled the widely spread, vastly decentralized network of habitats.
The Autarchists’ retaliation for the slaughter was swift and stunning.
Using the Valliardi Transfer, the Belter government first attempted to send manned warships into Earth orbit. Half the troops died of suicide after experiencing the transfer’s death illusion. Using the Transfer to retreat finished off the rest. Then some bright boy came up with the idea—after stealing plans to Circus Galacticus—of transferring pellets of ordinary matter to the surface of the planet. Then anti-matter pellets, more easily manufactured in deep space than on Earth, were found to provide an even greater blast.
Tens of billions died in the first, last, and only Valli carpet-bombing of Earth. The horrifically massive retaliation against the crowded planet left Earth a steaming ruin and broke the spirit of the Autarchy. Half out of sickened remorse, half out of revulsion at the idea of further war, the remaining Belters abandoned their government and their homespace, splitting up into small family units to head for trans-Jovian realms. Some fled far enough to mine comets in the frigid Oort layer. Most used ordinary fusion power. Others desperately dared to use the Valliardi
Transfer; most of them were never heard from again.
Earthlings seized the Belt, but refused to call themselves Belters: when they encountered them, Terrans destroyed Belters. The Belters, for the most part, did not fight back. Some, maddened by the Transfer, accepted such retribution gladly. Others, shamed by the carnage conducted in their names by the Autarchy, accepted death with fatalistic relief. They knew Man was destined to leave Earth someday, but they never imagined that it would be in the manner of the living abandoning a corpse.