Leander had arranged for tea and cakes to be served on a low table nearby. We sat on thick pillow cushions from the Republic shuttle. Besides Charles and Leander, only two other Olympians were present: Nehemiah Royce and Amy Vico-Persoff. Point One had dictated that for the duration of the emergency, no more than four Olympians be in one place at one time. The others were being housed at Tharsis Research University , under tight security.

“How much does it all weigh?” I asked Leander as Charles poured the tea.

“About four hundred kilograms,” Leander said. “We pared it down considerably in the last version. Most of the weight is in the pumps.”

“So tell me,” I said, crossing my legs and warming my hands on the cup.

Charles poured his cup last and kneeled on his pillow. He glanced at me, I smiled, and his eyes darted away as if in shyness. He focused on the table and cakes. “We guessed what was happening right away. So did Ti Sandra.” The words seemed to come with difficulty. I stared at Charles as if feeding a new hunger, feeling a mix of awe and intense affection.

“Ti Sandra instructed us to get to Phobos any way we could, with the tweaker, and take a trip.”

“She knew you were ready to do this?” I asked. “I didn’t.”

“She guessed, or she just made a wild request… We certainly weren’t ready for so much, so soon. We fueled the Mercury, moved everything we could on board. The most difficult part was guaranteeing a clean power supply for the pumps. We managed that. We were ready for take-off twelve hours after the Freeze began.”

“What about coordinates, navigation?” I asked.

“We worked it out while waiting for further orders from Ti Sandra. Stephen and I made up a working hypothesis on the relative position tweaks, worked out the momentum and energy descriptor co-responses and scaling, specified final position and state, stimulated the tweaker to access descriptors for every particle in Phobos, considered as a complete system…”

“Charles had to hook himself into the QL,” Leander said.

“Are you all right?” I asked Charles.

“I’m fine,” he said. “They all did good work. Nobody knew everything except Stephen and myself, but everybody felt the urgency. They all knew it was important.”

“A lot of medals should be awarded,” Leander said.

“Not least to Charles. He guided the QL,” Royce said.

Charles shook his head. “I don’t remember most of that. It’ll come back in time. We had a pilot with us — ”

“One more medal,” Leander said.

“He had no idea what was going to happen. We told him without checking his security clearance.”

“He’s fine,” Lieh said, seated outside the circle around the low table. “We debriefed him separately.”

“Why did you link with the QL?”

“The interpreter wasn’t getting across everything we needed. The QL began returning trivial results, nonsense strings. I think it was exploring the possibility of an alternate descriptor system. It found that more amusing than the real one. I steered it back to giving relevant results. The whole apparatus became coordinated then.”

“It hummed,” Amy said, shivering suddenly. “My God, it really hummed. I was afraid for them. I left the Mercury and they launched.”

They all seemed a little in shock even now.

“What did it feel like?” I asked Charles.

“As I said, I don’t remember exactly. We — the QL and I — were communicating and I made my requests and it pulled answers out of its non-trivial syncline searches.”

“Answers?”

“Instructions, actually. To pass on to the tweaker. Without the QL, we might have been able to do the same thing — with about six months of high-level thinker programming. The QL cut the time down to a few hours. Within eight hours, we were secured to an old mining base in Stickney Crater on Phobos. We’d measured what we needed to measure, everything was still connected and coordinated. Ti Sandra told us to go. She’d been in an accident, and it took us days to establish communications with her again.”

I had been left completely out of the loop, despite being in charge of the entire project. I didn’t know whether I felt resentment, or relief, that Ti Sandra had shouldered all of this particular burden.

“She was in pain,” Charles said, as if reading my thoughts. “I don’t think she had time to tell you what was planned. When she first gave us the instructions, we didn’t know we could do it. It was all very confused.”

“I understand. You went to Earth. What was it like?”

“The stars changed,” Charles said. “We felt something shift inside of us — very minor. We’re still not sure what it was — gravitation, psychological response, we don’t know.”

“Everything combined, probably,” Leander said.

“We looked through the shuttle ports, saw a sunrise limb, the sun much brighter and larger… Earth. We scrambled to check our distance and orbital path. We were right on the money, effectively, but about a hundred kilometers behind the projected orbital insertion point.”

“We’re still working on that,” Leander said,

“We listened but broadcast nothing. About fifteen minutes passed before someone sent us a signal. It was from a private analog radio operator in Mexico . He spoke to us in Spanish. He said, ‘Hello, new moon. Where are you from?’ ”

We laughed. Charles smiled. “Our pilot said, ‘Don’t ask. You won’t believe us.’ ”

“We started getting official signals a few minutes after that,” Leander said. “We had instructions from Ti Sandra what to say. We broadcast the same words — over and over again.”

“We were waiting to be annihilated,” Charles said. “But that was pretty silly, I suppose. Some of the officials sounded terrified. Some behaved as if nothing at all had happened, the most routine diplomatic communications. We spoke to government negotiators and diplomats from the Eurocon, GEWA, GSHA, and half a dozen others. We told them all the same thing.”

“What was that?”

“ ‘Mars is under attack by unknown governments on the Earth. You have ten hours to pull back and remove the threat, or there will be a retaliatory response.’ ” Charles’s voice sounded hollow as he repeated the statement, burned into memory.

“What response? What retaliation?”

“Ti Sandra told us to remotely convert the White House in Washington into mirror matter,” Charles said. “A symbolic gesture.”

Silence around the room.

“Could you have done that?” I asked.

Charles nodded. “Without very much precision. She did not tell us to have it evacuated first, but I was going to give some warning. A half hour or so.”

I covered my mouth with my hand, suddenly nauseated. The sensation passed. I closed my eyes and dropped my hand slowly. “You have all been exceptionally courageous,” I said.

“Yes, Ma’am,” Charles said, with a flippant salute that jarred me. I looked up at him, shocked and puzzled. Charles leaned forward, eyes narrowed as if in pain.

“We have followed our instructions. We’ve done everything we’ve been told, at the expense… almost… of our souls. We’ve understood the strategic necessity, and we believe enough to give ourselves to this cause, but, Casseia, I could not give a flying fuck about medals or patriotism now. I am scared to death of what is going to happen next. We’ve had our fun, we’ve made a flying circus run with Phobos and given nightmares to children and adults all over Earth. Do you think it’s going to end there? Do you think we have any time left at all?”

“No,” I said.

“Good,” Charles said, biting the word off and leaning back, his face red with emotion. “God damned good. Because I’m half convinced this is going to be the end of the human race. Impart some of your thinking to us, oh master of politics. We are children lost in the woods.”

“So am I, Charles,” I said quietly. “We all know what’s going to happen now. Ti Sandra knows. They saw you move Phobos. They have the resources, in people and machines and laboratories, to duplicate your discoveries, given this clue. And as soon as they can do what we can do, it’s just a matter of time before somebody strikes somebody else.“