Raven knelt on the grass between Alicia and Umber. She heard sounds of shouting and breaking glass from inside the Chemlab Building. The plaza was littered with fallen bodies. Ambulances were gliding to a stop, white-coated medics scrambling out of them.
This is what a riot looks like, Raven said to herself. Utter confusion. Mayhem. Hell on Earth.
AFTERMATH
It seemed to take hours. The medics bent over the injured slumped across the plaza’s grass and walkways. Men and women tottered out of the Chemlab Building, many glassy-eyed, staggering. Only a handful of security guards were still on their feet, disarmed, dazed by the ferocity of the protestors’ attack.
Slowly, slowly order was restored. Most of the protestors stumbled through the carnage and staggered toward their homes. Ambulances carried away the injured, then came back for more.
Reverend Umber had sunk into unconsciousness as the medics lifted him carefully, tenderly, onto a stretcher and bore him to the nearest ambulance.
Raven sat next to Alicia, who hadn’t moved at all. She lay on the grass, eyes closed. Raven could not tell whether she was breathing.
A tendril of smoke was twisting out of one of the Chemlab Building’s shattered upper windows. Raven looked up at it with bloodshot eyes. Her back felt stiff, sore. Somebody must have hit me there, she thought dully.
Looking across the plaza at the medics carrying the injured to the waiting ambulances, Raven muttered to herself, “I guess we won. I guess we shut down the Rust production.”
The still unfinished Haven II habitat orbited around Uranus’s huge blue ball alongside the original Haven. In its completed section, where the scientists from Earth were housed, Tómas Gomez was roused from a blissfully deep sleep by his phone announcing, “Big Eye imagery has arrived.”
His eyes snapped open and he sat up in the desk chair he’d been using.
“On screen, please,” he commanded.
The wide-angle views from Farside Observatory’s Schmidt cameras had picked up three objects that might be former moons of Uranus, driven out of their orbits around the planet and hurled into the depths of interstellar space. Now the Big Eye telescope’s much more detailed view came up on the bedroom’s wall screen.
Sitting bolt upright in the desk chair, Gomez stared at the imagery.
Centered in the picture was an irregular, misshapen chunk of rock. The figures on the bottom of the screen showed it was just short of two hundred seventy kilometers across.
Tómas stared at it, goggle-eyed. That’s one of them! he shouted silently. That’s one of the moons of Uranus that was bounced out of its original orbit and is now coasting through interstellar space!
Glancing around the darkened living room, Tómas asked himself, Where’s Vincente? Then he saw that the apartment’s bedroom door was shut. He’s asleep. In bed, sleeping.
Tómas went to the bedroom door and pounded on it. “Vincente!” he shouted.
Mumbles and grumbles from the other side of the door. A thump and a string of what was obviously swearing.
Then the bedroom door slid open.
Zworkyn’s bleary-eyed face stared at Tómas.
“We’ve got one!” the younger man exclaimed.
Vincente’s eyes widened, and he croaked, “You’re sure?”
Tómas’s excitement evaporated. Very steadily, he replied, “Pretty sure. We’ve got to get its trajectory parameters and see if they lead back to Uranus.”
“Right,” said Zworkyn. “Let’s get to work.”
Raven sat in the hospital corridor outside Reverend Umber’s door. The hospital staff had given the minister an entire room to himself. The rest of the hospital was filled to bursting with demonstrators and security guards who had been beaten senseless or breathed in Rust or other narcotic vapors once they started shattering the Chemlab Building’s processing glassware.
Doctors and nurses and orderlies were hurrying past Raven’s sitting form. Bodies of men and women—unconscious, raving, struggling, or blank-eyed and docile—paraded past her. But all Raven could see was Alicia’s dead body, the back of her skull crushed by a truncheon’s blow, bits of bone and brain dotting her blood-stained dress.
She’s dead, Raven kept repeating silently. Alicia is dead. Killed. Murdered.
As the habitat’s lighting system brightened to its full daytime level, Gordon Abbott studied the starry image on his office wall screen, and the alphanumerical symbols running across the screen’s bottom.
“The data seem rather convincing,” he said into his desktop phone. “That chunk of rock probably did originate in orbit around Uranus.”
Tómas Gomez’s voice sounded more tired than triumphant. “Mr. Zworkyn and I agree,” he said. “The numbers point to that conclusion.”
“This is extraordinary,” Abbott said, consciously resisting the urge to tug at his moustache.
“It is,” Zworkyn’s voice concurred. He sounded much more buoyant than Gomez.
“Two million years ago,” Abbott muttered.
“That’s when the latest ice age started on Earth,” said Gomez.
“Incredible.”
In the makeshift analytical laboratory that had originally been Zworkyn’s living room, the engineer beamed happily at Tómas. “You’ve done it, lad. You’ve proved that the Uranus system was shattered and sterilized two million years ago.”
“But how? By natural causes? Or alien invaders?”
Zworkyn smiled. “That’s going to keep this entire generation of cosmologists busy for the rest of their lifetimes. And probably their children’s, too.”
“It’s a helluva way to find extraterrestrial intelligence,” Tómas muttered.
The engineer’s smile faded. “If this wasn’t a natural event… if it was caused by intelligent creatures…”
His voice died away.
“If it was caused by aliens,” Tómas finished the thought, “they might return some day and do the same to us.”
Zworkyn simply stared at Tómas, wide-eyed, suddenly frightened.
CONSEQUENCES
Tómas shuddered, like a man trying to forget a nightmare. Looking at the clock numerals in the corner of the computer’s screen, he saw that it was well past 7:00 A.M.
“We’ve worked the night through,” Zworkyn said, then yawned. “I need to get back to sleep.”
“Do you think you can sleep?” Tómas asked.
With a shrug, Zworkyn replied, “I’m sure as hell going to try.”
Tómas nodded as he pulled his pocket phone from his trousers. “I should call Raven.”
Zworkyn made a bitter smile. “Ah! True love.”
“You should try it some time.”
“I did. Wasn’t so great.”
Raven’s face appeared on the phone’s screen. Tómas saw the bustling commotion of the hospital in the background.
“What’s going on?” he asked. “Where are you?”
“In the hospital,” Raven said.
“The hospital?”
“We had a demonstration in front of the Chemlab Building. It turned into a riot. Reverend Umber was beaten unconscious. Alicia…” Raven struggled to hold back tears. “…Alicia was killed.”
She broke into sobs.
“Are you all right?”
“Yes, yes. But Alicia… she’s dead.”
Tómas forgot everything else. “I’ll be there as soon as I can get a shuttle. I’ll be there, Raven!”
Evan Waxman had turned off his wall screen hours earlier. He sat in his silent office as the habitat’s outdoor lights slowly turned up to their morning level.