The Bull Dancers.

  Lightbull.

  And it all came together for him in an implosion of insight. J. Appleseed and Lightbull cooperating to spread the island plague. A hidden hard Green agenda behind his life’s work with the foundation, not to mention everyone else’s. They planned to crack Seattle like an egg to cover their tracks. Not just J. Appleseed’s tracks. Lightbull’s tracks using the foundation as a front. Which meant the zero-pop rewilding plan hadn’t passed the tipping point yet.

  The world could still be saved.

  The whole business made a horrific sense. These people had been hired to fake the destruction of J. Appleseed by creating a disaster on an epic scale, that would bury the evidence forever beneath a mountain of hot rock, steam and ash, with a million bodies to keep the alleged corpse of the foundation company. A million bodies who’d done nothing to deserve a stone dropped on them from heaven.

  Except they wanted to destroy the infrastructure for real. Leave no pockets undisturbed. Which would free Lightbull to go into a radical metastasis and begin the process of launching the island plagues and pursuing zero population. With Seattle a cauldron of hot ash, no one in a position to stop the plan would be able to uncover any evidence in time to be useful.

  That was never what they were about. Lightbull had to have suborned the foundation and its AIs decades ago. Perhaps even back when William Silas Crown was alive, Bashar realized, recollecting some of the irregular behavior of the triplet AIs near the end of Crown’s life, when the two of them had briefly been in contact one last time.

  He swept the room with his best staff meeting stare, what a colleague used to call his “speaker-to-morons” look. These people thought he was one of them. One of the Bull Dancers who had destroyed his beloved Cascadiopolis all those years ago. That gang of idiots with the helicopter-rocket down at Schaadt’s Shack had been waiting for a contact from Lightbull. Instead, they’d got him.

  Everybody eventually made a terminal error. Bashar would do his level best to make sure that taking him into orbit had been theirs.

  “You don’t know what kinds of things I’d say, Mr. Bibendum.” He used his coldest voice. A century of being a hard man gave Bashar a tone of authority few could match.

  The pink-eyed kid shrank back for the first time. Perhaps no one ever pushed him hard.

  Live and learn, Bashar thought with a vicious glee. “Light pen?” he snapped at Moselle.

  She tossed him hers. In the microgravity of the conference room, it flew oddly. “Where are we headed right now, by the way?” he asked, with a nod toward the bulkhead.

  The look she gave him told Bashar he’d almost blown his newfound cover with that question. “Orbital Zero. Where else?”

  The larger of the two asteroids was being gutted by Green Space Mining for minerals while simultaneously being hollowed out for long-term habitats. Where the mining packages came from. “Not GSO Prime?”

  Moselle grunted and exchanged an unreadable-to-Bashar glance with Lu. Bibendum just glowered.

  Bashar turned his attention to the map, still thinking furiously. As a site consultant, he had no power here. He was just a data source and a form of verification. But playing the role of a representative of Lightbull, he could wield their power. Perhaps even authority, depending on who’d precisely contracted this job.

  “You’ve got most of the coverage correct here.” He traced the same series of hotspots Moselle had minutes earlier.

  She glared at him. “All major infrastructure, distributed as it is, has been accounted for.”

  The AIs were the core of J. Appleseed. Crown’s old triumvirate of Heinlein, Hubbard, and Kornbluth, supplemented by the rest of the board of directors. There hadn’t been a human seated on that board in forty years or more. And AIs could live, well, anywhere their code was compiled and running and properly hardened.

  Like cores embedded in Seattle’s subterranean infrastructure.

  Or anywhere with enough processing power. In a grove of trees. Inside someone’s head.

  Anywhere at all.

  “You’re missing some physical plant.” He picked a random location in Bellevue, across Lake Washington from Seattle proper. They wouldn’t have time to do spot checks on the ground. Bashar hoped. “Even J. Appleseed has motor pools, maintenance shops, that kind of thing.” Another random location in the Queen Anne district. He stared at the map a long moment as his thoughts continued to race ahead.

  “Mr.Biòu?” prompted Moselle.

  “Apologies.” Bashar pulled himself abruptly back to the discussion. He could die here, at any time, for a moment’s inattention, or just the wrong word. He wondered what the first name of his cover alias was supposed to be. Damn it, he hadn’t been in this deep with this little preparation since, well, ever. “I was just thinking about the blast shadow of Capitol Hill. You drop your rock in Elliott Bay, you won’t hit Bellevue with enough force to wipe it. You’ve only got eleven thousand tons, and you’re coming in shallow. That’s admittedly a damned big kinetic payload, but we’re not talking the Chicxulub dinosaur killer here. I can’t think your crater will be more than a few hundred yards wide.”

  “About a kilometer, actually.” Lu said, “We’re not trying to nail the whole West Coast with this one. We did consider a strike on Capitol Hill, but that doesn’t bring enough impact into downtown Seattle where our critical targets are concentrated.”

  The AIs would be getting out, Bashar thought. There must be physical evidence they’re concerned about, one-and-done stuff stored as single-copy security in the buried server rooms of J. Appleseed.

  “The seawall,” muttered Bibendum.

  “What he means,” Moselle added, “is that we want to strike Elliott Bay immediately west of the seawall. The resultant flooding will significantly confuse the issue.”

  “What if you come in shallow and skip?” asked Bashar. “Like what happened to Sault Sainte Marie. Nail the bay, then drop the payload on top of or behind Capitol Hill?”

  Bibendum fluttered his eyes. “Math on the skip isn’t reliable.”

  Moselle nodded. “The degree of confidence on a direct strike is high. Anything else is too complex.”

  “And,” Bibendum added, “we won’t be putting enough kinetic energy into the bay with a skip. It’ll make an unholy mess, but not big enough.”

  Bashar could appreciate the problem, even from the other side of it. “Then you’ll need to content yourself with obliterating the downtown targets and hope no one cares too much about the outlying locations.” He glanced at the map again. “All the old computing cores are downtown.”

  The conversation devolved into an hour’s discussion of precise locations of particular facilities, and their known purposes as well as likely occupants. Such as his daughter. At least Charity was tucked away far enough from Seattle to avoid the direct consequences of such a strike.

  Most of what he said was even true, within the context of a certain desperation.

  Could he somehow make a secure, anonymous data connection out of this spaceship that his hosts wouldn’t know about? He knew how to tap comsats from the surface, but the channels he relied on weren’t listening for orbit-to-orbit signals.

  Bashar realized desperately that he didn’t understand nearly enough about the orbital infrastructure to make a sensible move. He had to be away from these people.

  “When we arrive at Orbital Zero, I will inspect the mining package,” he finally announced.

  “Why?” Moselle’s voice was flat and hostile.

  Bashar stared her down. “So my report will be as complete as possible.”

  Bibendum stirred again. “Let him. You know how the damned Bull Dancers are. And we’ll be living with them for a long, long time.”

  Which confirmed what he’d already suspected—these people weren’t Lightbull. How many of the hard Greens were? Bashar let his grin grow feral once more. All three of his putative colleagues shrank back.

  “I’ll … I’ll need clearance,” Moselle said weakly.

  “Lady,” Bashar told her, “we’re the people who issue clearances.”

  From greenwiki:

  Earth-to-orbit and orbit-to-Earth transport. Since the end of the sponsored heavy lift era at the conclusion of the GSO project, the vast majority of Earth-to-orbit launches are via lighter-than-air vehicles carrying booster sleds to 30,000 meters or higher, then dropping them for independent burn-to-orbit. A few very large corporations and still functional governments have preserved limited classic heavy lift functionality for essentially strategic purposes, but as most non-crewed space assets are now in the form of cube sats or pebble swarms, demand for such heavy lift is infrequent. Space-based industrial capacity has expanded to the point that with the available resources from the Project Precious asteroids, it is generally cheaper to manufacture or construct additional required infrastructure in situ. This is increasingly true at higher mass tiers. The exception to this trend is the limited number of orbital weapons platforms still maintained by the remnants of the 20th and 21st century great powers.

  Re-entry is of course another proposition entirely. With the notable exception of the mining packages themselves, there tends to be very little justification for dropping mass back down Earth’s gravity well. The orbital population practices an intense reuse/recycle ethic that meets or exceeds even that of the most dedicated terrestrial Green communities. Human beings are the primary orbit-to-Earth payload, and most of them are returned either via glider or fall bag. Fall bags are a far more expeditious re-entry path than orbital gliders, but plummeting a hundred kilometers to the ground in a sealed environment the size of a small camping tent is a psychological challenge for a surprisingly large percentage of travelers.

  VIII: MINOAN WOMEN AND ROMAN MYSTERY CULTS AND THE CORRIDA AND THE AMERICAN STOCK MARKET

  A number of questions cascaded through Charity’s head. She cursed her perpetual mild fuddlement—a gift of aging, and the medications that helped keep her alive now.

  She picked one that seemed safer than pursuing Cairo’s request for her assistance. “How would you know that the messenger you killed was from Lightbull? Bashar’s been looking for Lightbull for decades and has never yet found a lead that solid.”

  “Your husband should have listened more closely to William Silas Crown when he was alive.” Cairo tugged the rollaway stool the nurses used close to her bed and sat down. “Crown nearly had it right.”

  “Lightbull doesn’t get found unless it wants to be found.” She paused, her thoughts drifting in a dangerous direction. “Or are you one of the Bull Dancers?” Everything seemed ready to collapse in on itself, all the old paranoias and conspiracy theories.

  Cairo laughed, his amusement seeming genuine. “I am with Lightbull, yes. But never a Bull Dancer. I have neither the right genetics nor the right sponsors to become one of them, Mrs. Charity Oxham. You have to be born and raised into that lineage. The rest of us are just … agents of destiny.”

  Charity set that thought aside for very careful review at some future point.

  He continued: “Consider this—every organization has many hands. They do not all communicate. Or agree. The Greens come in hard and soft varieties, yes?”

  “Of course.” She and Bashar had been aligned with the soft Greens all along. That agenda had worked through J. Appleseed since Crown’s death had swollen the foundation’s funding with the bequest of his rather considerable fortune. Not to mention his trio of emancipated AIs.

  “You might imagine that while all the Bull Dancers leap the horns of fate, if not of an actual bull, they do not all follow the same beat.”

  “Bashar always thought Tygre Tygre had come from you,” Charity told him.

  “Which ‘you’ do you mean?” asked Cairo. “Our name is legion, for we are many.”

  “Many but few. Conspiracies don’t last when they’re run by committee.”

  Cairo’s voice dropped. “Minoan Crete was a very, very long time ago.”

  “And why are you telling me all of this?” Charity demanded. “Or any of it, for that matter?”

  “So you will believe me when I say that thirty-eight centuries of effort comes to a head tomorrow. Not everyone who dances believes this is how the measure should be brought to a close.” He leaned toward her again. “And you can help those of us who oppose this effort.”

  It was her turn to laugh. “You expect me to believe that some Bronze Age cult planned to nuke Seattle four thousand years in their future?”

  “No.” Patience loomed in Cairo’s voice.”That would be stupid. I hope you will believe that a Bronze Age cult survived, pursuing one end then another, to evolve into something that has an effect on the modern world. The Catholic Church has been around for over two thousand years. How much more improbable is this?”

  Charity stared at him. “And after almost four thousand years of secrecy, you decide to come out to me now?”

  Cairo shrugged. “How secret is secret? Ever seen the statue of the Bowling Green Bull on Wall Street? We’ve always been here. Always been visible for those with the right eyes. But now … Let me get to the point. Your darwin file is correct but incomplete. Lightbull is behind that effort, working through J. Appleseed.”

  “You’ve done something to make Bashar disappear,” Charity said. “He’s gone to ground somewhere.”

  “Oh, quite the opposite of going to ground, I assure you. He’s in orbit right now. Trying to keep thousands of tons of rock from dropping on Seattle.”

  She was rarely at a loss for words, but that news was just bizarre. “… Bashar? In orbit?”

  “If you’d like, I can probably open a low bandwidth channel to him.”

  “Yes,” Charity said unthinking. Then: “No. I don’t want to compromise him. And I have to understand. How will him stopping that rock from hitting Seattle keep the island plague from being released worldwide?”

  “It won’t,” said Cairo simply. “It will just keep the people behind the island plague from effecting an undetectable disappearance. Then, maybe, they can be dealt with before it’s too late. Cures may be possible, but only with all the relevant records and research in hand as swiftly as possible. Like I said, we have … someone … inside. But they cannot work alone.”

  “You couldn’t have done this sooner?” Charity asked.

  “These were contingency plans until quite recently. Subject to much disputation. I wasn’t willing to betray my trust for possibilities. Now, well, it is all becoming real. And so treason is born.”

  She thought about that for a little while. “Do you have a ride into orbit yourself, Mr. Cairo? Or are you in the hard Green death camp with the rest of us?”

  His smile was thin that time. “Well, and that would be another problem with zero population rewilding, wouldn’t it? And so we come to here and now. Where I need your help.”

  “What’s in it for me?” Charity asked.

  He shrugged. “Saving the world? Some justice for Cascadiopolis.” Cairo pulled a small vial from his pocket, the frosted silver sheen of a nanomed carrier catching her eye. “And perhaps the fountain of youth.” That was accompanied by a wink bordering on the lascivious. “William Silas Crown was not the only one with good medical tech.”

  She cleared her throat, feeling her pulse pound to a heady mix of panic, hope and dread. “I think I would like to speak to my husband after all, if I can do so without compromising him.”

  IX: THEY BOMBED YOU FROM ORBIT JUST TO MAKE THEIR POINT?

  Bashar was discovering the hard way that it was impossible to fake expertise in handling himself in microgravity. Neither Lu nor Bibendum seemed to expect anything better from him, so presumably his cover identity didn’t include any history of orbital operations.

  They were hand-over-handing down a series of corridors aboard Orbital Zero itself. He’d assumed rock tunnels, but what he saw didn’t look much different from the corridors on the carrier ship that had snagged the Earth-to-orbit rocket copter he’d ridden up on. It even smelled the same. Bashar was desperate to ask questions, but didn’t dare.

  “Mining control is already in late countdown,” Lu said over his shoulder. “You won’t be able to make a long inspection.”

  Long inspection, short inspection, it didn’t matter. Bashar wanted to see the damned thing, figure out if there was anything he could do to stop or even redirect it. Not that a rock drop inland would be much of an improvement, but he could at least reduce the body count. As well as keeping these clowns from covering whatever tracks they planned to cover with the strike.

  And Samira. His Sooboo.

  He didn’t figure on being able to influence the rock drop directly, but maybe he could talk his way into mining control afterward, and … what? Take on an entire habitat’s worth of experienced microgravity dwellers in hand-to-hand combat?

  If he ever saw Baldie-with-no-name again, Bashar promised himself he’d beat the man blue, then extract a forced if retroactive briefing from that smiling little bastard.

  “Suits,” Lu announced, as they fetched up against a heavy metal door. “Bibendum will take you through the safety drill.”

  “You’re not coming?” Bashar was in fact relieved, as the pudgy and indifferent Bibendum was someone he could probably handle even in microgravity. Not Lu, whose physique and style of movement showed all the signs of being an extremely old school ass kicker. With the emphasis on old, but Bashar was perfectly well aware of what an old guy could do. It took one to know one.

  “I don’t go Outside much,” Lu admitted.

  “Kenophobe,” Bibendum put in. He couldn’t keep the sneer out of his voice. “Fear of the void. A lot of people get seriously jittered Outside.”

  Lu said nothing, but Bashar wouldn’t have cared to be on the receiving end of the look he gave Bibendum. Should the kid meet with an accident Outside, here was one man who wouldn’t mourn long.

  Belatedly, it occurred to Bashar to wonder if he himself was kenophobic.

  * * *