LITMIR.BIZ

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included a Commonwealth submarine base and a high-­security naval prison.

      “Well, there is that. Don’t worry, though. If you go to Atlantica, I’ll bake you a cake with nano-­D in the flour.”

      “Thanks so much. I’ll have to remember to practice holding my breath before I use it, though.”

      “Seriously, Elliot. If they were going to lock you away, or even send you for deep neurophysiological rehab, you would not be walking around free now. They might decide to kick you out of the Navy just to be rid of you, but nothing more. Okay?”

      I shrugged. “I’m sure you’re right.” What I didn’t add was that getting booted out of the Navy would be as bad as having my brain rewired. I’d found a home here, a place of my own, a meaningful career.

      Not to mention Joy. We were still deep in the initial rampant lust phase of our relationship, but I could see it moving beyond sex and pleasant companionship to something more permanent. Maybe.

      If I could just shake off Paula’s ghost, and put her to rest at last.

      The waitress returned with our drinks—­a Cosmic Dehibitor for Joy, a Metafuel Thruster for me. I paid her by linking through to the restaurant’s e-­pay AI, and included a generous tip for her. She thanked me, then took our orders for dinner. Meat from Earthside has to be shipped up-­El and is expensive, but there are some locally nanufactured proteins indistinguishable from nature. Real cow meat from the Amazon prairies is just for status; the stuff built up molecule by molecule really can’t be distinguished from the real thing. We both ordered local cultures, mine in the form of lobster tail, hers looking and tasting like steak.

      “So what’s the news?” I asked when we were alone again.

      “War, of course. At least there’s serious talk of war. The Commonwealth is blaming the CAC for hijacking that mining station … and for trying to drop an asteroid into the ocean. That’s an act of war in anyone’s manual.”

      I shook my head. “I have trouble believing that the CAC government would be openly behind something like that. Some extremist Islamic sect, maybe … or a rogue paramilitary group operating in the shadows. But the ­people, the ruling council in Dushanbe, they aren’t crazy.”

      “They are neo-­Ludd,” Joy pointed out. “Or strongly supportive of the movement. And a tidal wave in the Pacific wouldn’t touch them.”

      “No, but the outraged survivors of the rest of the world would.”

      “True. But maybe they didn’t count on you figuring out where those tangos hailed from.”

      A shrill squeal sounded from overhead and we both looked up. A ­couple had managed to propel themselves clear of the hydrosphere and had landed in the nearly invisible netting surrounding the water in case of just such an eventuality. Laughing, naked and glistening wet, they half-­scrambled and half-­flew across the netting toward the sphere’s zero-­gravity poles to re-­enter the water. I half expected some of the flying spray to reach us … but subtly directed air jets were in place to whisk away any stray flying droplets and keep the diners below from getting rained on. The illusion of dining in a rain forest did have reasonable limits, after all.

      “I don’t buy it,” I told her, as the squeals died away again. “Those men had to know that someone would pull a DNA analysis on them if they were killed or captured.”

      “Maybe they just didn’t count on the U.S. Marines coming in and spoiling their party,” she said. “Either they would have their demands met … or they would all be incinerated on impact. Either way, no DNA left to sample.”

      “I suppose.”

      But I wasn’t convinced.

      The terrorists who’d seized Capricorn Zeta had clearly had a neo-­Ludd agenda. Their demands had been that all asteroid mining be stopped—­not only in Earth orbit, which was a song they’d been singing for a long time, but out in trans-­lunar space as well.

      They needed high-­tech help. The Chinese were out, because if something had gone wrong and the asteroid had come down anywhere in the Pacific, the tidal waves would have washed them away. The CACs had the ideology, yeah, and they were far inland, but why use their own ­people in the attack, inviting military retaliation? It seemed likelier to me that those Central Asians we’d captured had been mercenaries, hirelings being used by someone else, possibly with an eye to calling attention to Dushanbe and away from the real masterminds.

      Who would profit, I wondered, from having asteroid mining stopped? Or from having a one-­kilometer asteroid fall out of the sky, killing a few hundred million ­people or more?

      And with their plan for extortion blocked, what would they do next?

      An inner ping alerted me to an incoming call request. I glanced at it, saw that it was another GNN e-­comm request, and dismissed it. I’d become a pretty popular guy, it seemed. “A highly newsworthy commodity,” like Joy had said. Reporters, both on Earth and embedded at HQ, wanted to talk to me.

      Well, I didn’t want to talk to them. I felt used and ambushed, and I wouldn’t have opened the channel even if Gunny Hancock hadn’t told me he would skin me alive and hang me out an airlock to dry if I did.

      “Let’s change the subject,” I told Joy. “I don’t really want to discuss work when the most gorgeous U.S. Marine in the Galaxy is sitting here right across from me.”

      “Flatterer.”

      “I like the utilities.”

      She dimpled. “Thank you. I put so much work into it.”

      In fact, she was wearing ordinary ship utilities, a black skinsuit that clung to her like paint. She’d stroked the top away, though, to give her the currently fashionable Minoan Princess look, proudly bare breasted. She’d programmed the remaining nanofabric to give it an illusion of depth, scattered through and through with gleaming stars.

      She was radiantly beautiful.

      “Elliot, someone is pinging our ID.”

      The voice wasn’t Joy’s. It was my AI secretary, a smart bit of AI software that normally resided silently within my in-­head hardware without making its presence known. That it was speaking now, interrupting my conversation with Joy, meant that it had detected a close-­in attempt to physically locate me by homing in on my personal electronics. Normally that stuff is pretty heavily firewalled, with name and rank only out there for public access, but I’d opened it wider in order to pay for the drinks and the meal.

      Or maybe the name and rank had been enough. Damn it!

      “Where is he?” I asked my secretary.

      “Highlighting. To your left.”

      I looked, and saw a conservatively dressed man coming through the restaurant entrance, about forty meters away, painted with a green nimbus by my in-­head. He stopped, looked around … and our eyes met. He smiled and started walking toward us. His pace was slow, shuffling, and a bit awkward; I pegged him as a groundpounder, someone who hadn’t been in space much and wasn’t used to walking in low-­G.

      “What’s the matter?” Joy asked. She must have seen the blank look on my face while I talked with my secretary.

      “We’ve got company,” I told her. “Wait here.”

      I got up and walked over to meet the guy. I pinged his ID as I approached, and got a readout: Christpher Ivarson, Global Net News. By the time I reached him, three-­quarters of the way up the curve of the sphere, I was at a slow simmer but well on my way to coming to a boil.

      “Petty Officer Carlyle—­”

      “What the fuck are you doing, following me around?” I demanded. “Can’t a guy have any privacy?”

      “You’ve been blocking our newsbots, sir, and we really would like to have you answer a few questions.”

      “Maybe

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