Then a movement outside caught her eye. She interrupted her fit and went to the window to look: through her tears she saw the blurry blinking image of a human figure, out on the yellow slag, walking toward the station. It moved oddly, wavering, staggering, blinking from one position to another.
“Pauline, can someone walk on the surface here? Outside the station?”
“Their suit would have to be as protective as the station is,” Pauline said. “Please—inform station security of your sighting immediately.”
“Surely they’ll have seen it?”
“That suit out there may be shielded in many ways. Your visual sighting may be the only indication they have. Please hurry. Arguing with me now is untimely.”
Swan growled and left the room. After some hurrying around, getting lost, she came to the room Wahram and she had entered first.
“There’s someone approaching your station on foot,” she said to the startled people inside. A few of them began scanning screens very closely. Swan couldn’t tell them which direction her window had been facing, and had to take them back to it (just barely recalling the way) to show them. By that time nothing was visible on the slaggy landscape extending downhill from the station. Apparently the people back in the control room weren’t seeing anything either.
“Pauline, tell them,” Swan said.
Pauline said, “There was something about three hundred meters downslope. Footprints should still be visible. The figure was moving irregularly—”
Wang hurried into the room, summoned, no doubt. “Lock it down,” he said curtly to his people. Ringing alarms went off in every room, painfully high and loud. Quickly the halls filled with people. Swan and Wahram were hustled along a hallway to the lockdown shelter. By the time they got there it was already crowded, and after they pushed their way in, the door was closed; apparently everyone was accounted for. Now they were inside the smallest Russian doll of all.
There were screens on one wall, and Pauline helped the station AI direct the station’s surveillance cameras. Soon enough one screen zoomed in on a view downslope: there, far down the rumpled and tilted plain of slag, a tiny figure was hopping downhill.
“Not a good idea,” Wang said. “The crust thins down there.”
And then the distant figure sank into a brief flare and disappeared.
“Keep looking around the station,” Wang said after a shocked silence. “See if there is anyone else out there. And put up a drone to have a look around for a hopper.”
The people in the room watched the screens in a grave silence. If the Faraday cage were to lose power, they would be cooked very quickly, every cell in them burst by Jupiter’s radiation.
But nothing seemed to have happened. The station’s power seemed secure, and there was no one else to be seen in the surrounding area.
Then there was a stir across the room. “Call from a ship requesting to land!” someone said.
“Who are they?”
“It’s an Interplan ship, Swift Justice.”
“Make sure it’s really them.”
The image of an incoming ship was shifted to a larger screen, and everyone watched as a small spaceship flared down into the hole in the station’s landing pad. Shortly thereafter a helmeted face appeared right in front of a surveillance camera lens in the landing bay, filling the screen to provide a retinal scan, then waving and giving them a brief thumbs-up. Friends, apparently.
They were let in, and there in the doorway stood three people, helmets off, one of them a small. Swan was startled to recognize the inspector who had visited them at Mqaret’s laboratory: Jean Genette.
“You’re late,” Wang said.
“Sorry,” Genette replied. “We were detained. Tell me what happened.”
Wang made his account brief, ending, “It appears to have been a single intruder. It approached and then went downslope and fell through the crust. We haven’t found any hoppers yet.”
Genette’s head was tilted to the side. “It just ran downslope to its death?”
“Apparently so.”
The inspector looked up at his companions. “We need to pull whatever remains of it out of the lava.” Then, to Wang and the others: “Back shortly. Maybe you should stay in lockdown a little longer.”
And the three of them disappeared back toward the station lock.
All right,” Swan said heavily, staring hard at Wahram in particular. “Tell me what’s going on.”
“I’m not sure,” Wahram said.
“We were just attacked!”
“I guess so.”
“You guess so?”
Wang spoke while still reading their screens. “A very ineffective attack, I must say.”
“So who would want to attack you?” Swan asked. “And how did this Inspector Genette get here so fast? And does this have anything to do with what you were doing with Alex?”
Wahram said, “It’s hard to tell at this point,” and Swan interrupted by punching him in the arm.
“ Quit it,” she said viciously. “Tell me what’s going on!”
She looked around the packed room: twelve or fifteen people all crowded in there, but now ostentatiously focused on their own affairs, leaving Wang and his visitors alone at a small table in a corner. “Tell me or I’ll start screaming.” She let out a little shriek to show them what could happen, and people all over the room jumped and looked their way, or tried not to.
Wahram glanced at Wang. “Let me try,” he said.
“All yours,” Wang said.
Wahram tapped on the table screen and called up a schematic of the solar system, a three-dimensional image that seemed to float inside the table. Spheres of bright holographic colors made something like the familiar solar system orrery, though this one had many more colored spheres in it, Swan saw, and a great number of colored lines connecting these spheres. Also, the spheres were not sized in proportion to the real sizes of the planets and moons.
“This image was generated from Alex’s analysis,” Wahram told Swan. “It’s an attempt to show power, and the potential for power. A kind of Menard graphic. The size of the spheres is determined by a compound function of the factors Alex considered important.”
Swan spotted Mercury, down by the sun, small and red. The Mondragon members were all red, making a constellation of red dots scattered through the system—all small, but there were a lot of them. Earth was huge and multicolored, a bundling of spheres, like a bunch of helium balloons tugging at a fist. Mars was a single green sphere, almost as big as Earth. Colored lines connecting spheres made webs that were dense through the system out to Saturn, sparser beyond that.
“What factors?” Swan asked, trying to calm herself. She was still rattled, more by the appearance of Genette than by the attack.
Wahram said, “Accumulated capital, population, bioinfrastructure health, terraforming status and stability, mineral and volatile resources, treaty relations, military equipment. We can give you the details of the heuristic later. What you can see immediately is that Mars, and Earth, considered as a collective, are tremendously larger than any other powers at this point. And China, the big pink ball, is a very big fraction of Earth’s power. Venus, meanwhile, has such great potential that it’s hard to represent, because at present it has nothing like the power it’s going to have. Venus and China are colored pink because they both have good relations with the Mondragon. You can see that there is potential in the China-Venus-Mondragon nexus for the largest power of all. Alex often said that Chinese dominance is the default norm throughout history, except for the brief period of subjugation to Europe. That may be putting it too strongly, but the image speaks for itself concerning the current situation.
“Also, notice the smallness of almost all the other space settlements. Even taken together, they are still small. However, if you amp up their terraforming potential in the calculation, as I will do now—then look: Venus, Luna, the Jovian Galileans not counting Io, Titan, and Triton get much bigger. They represent the largest opportunities for more power in space. The asteroids are for the most part filled. So in near-term potential, Venus and the big moons are the new powers. And Venus will soon be fully habitable and experiencing a growth spurt, so things are already getting strange there and destabilizing things on Earth.”