Now it flew in his night sky, an irregular gray potato, less luminous than Venus or Terra, except that there was a new comet blazing out of its side. Quite a sight. News all over both worlds. Scandalous! Controversial even in the resistance, where people argued pro and con. All that squabbling. Hiroko was going to get tired of it and light out for the territory, he could feel the shape of it. Yes, no, what, where. Who did it? Why?

Ann came on the wrist to ask the same questions, looking furious.

“It was a perfect weapons platform,” Sax said. “If they made it into a military base, like they did Phobos. We would have been helpless under it.”

“So you did this on the off chance it might get turned into a military base?”

“If Arkady and his crew hadn’t fixed Phobos on the off chance, we couldn’t have dealt with it. We would have been killed. Anyway, the Swiss heard it was going to happen.”

Ann was shaking her head, staring at him as if he were mad. A crazed saboteur. Rather a case of the pot calling the kettle black, in his opinion. Resolutely he met the look. When she cut the connection he shrugged and called the Bogdanovists. “The Reds have a catalog of— all the objects in orbit around Mars. Then we need surface-to-space delivery systems. Spencer will help. Equatorial silos. Inactive moholes. Do you understand?”

They said they did. You didn’t have to be a rocket scientist. And so if it ever came to it again, they would not be pounded from space.

• • •

Sometime later, he could not be sure how long, Peter appeared on the little screen of the boulder car Sax had borrowed from Desmond. “Sax, I’m in contact with some friends who work on the elevator, and with Deimos accelerating, the cable oscillations to dodge it have been thrown off in their timing. It looks like the next pass in its orbit might collide with the elevator, but my friends can’t get the cable’s navigation AI to respond to them. Apparently it’s really hardened to outside input, to prevent sabotage you know, and the idea of Deimos changing speed is something they can’t get it to accept. Do you have any suggestions?”

“Let it see for itself.”

“What?”

“Feed the data on Deimos into it. It must get that anyway. And it’s programmed to avoid it. Direct its attention to the data. Explain what happened. Trust it.”

“Trust it?”

“Well, talk to it.”

“We’re trying, Sax. But the antisabotage programming is real strong.”

“It’s running the oscillations to avoid Deimos. As long as that’s in its list of goals, you should be okay. Just give it the data.”

“Okay. We’ll try.”