They had only two viable crawlers left. Var watched as the flat trailer towed behind one of them was loaded with the corpses from Hex Three, alongside Miska’s, which had been recovered first.

‘No reactor damage,’ reported Lopomac, over com. ‘But plenty of other stuff here is totally screwed.’

‘Is the hex recoverable?’ Var enquired, now sitting in a chair back in her own quarters.

‘We’ve got three replacement windows, and the rest can be sealed with regolith blocks. Martinez’s crew is fetching all the materials now. Those aren’t the possible problem, however.’

‘Possible problem?’

‘Structural damage from the grenades. Martinez is in there right now, using ultrasound scan to check for it.’

‘Tell him to hand that job over to someone else,’ Var replied. ‘I want to see him and all the other chiefs of staff over in the Community Room in ten minutes. You and Carol, too.’

‘Still keeping the same chain of command?’ Lopomac asked.

‘We have to. Democracy and freedom are only available to societies that can afford the dithering and time wasting.’ She hated stating such a truth, because it sounded like it came right out of the Committee manual, but that didn’t make it less valid.

Upon her return to Hex One, weariness had bludgeoned Var. With Lopomac and Carol, she then stepped into the Community Room to inform about a hundred and fifty personnel that the Inspectorate no longer had power over the base, and henceforth the technical staff would control it completely. There had been few questions to begin with; there never were many, since discussing orders or policy statements had never been allowed. Then Martinez had spoken up to ask some of the most relevant ones and, emboldened by his example, others then began to ask questions too. Silence fell again when Var informed them that the enforcers, execs and Ricard himself were all dead.

‘Return to your duties, or to your beds if that’s where you were,’ she urged them, ‘as I’m now going to my own. In the morning I want all the chiefs of staff assembled here at nine, when I’ll tell you exactly what’s happened – and what is going to happen.’

Back in her own quarters, Var turned on her laptop and again took a look at image feeds from the satellites surrounding Earth. What she found there was utterly confusing at first but, on checking back through recorded footage from over the previous ten hours, the images began to make sense. It suddenly felt as if someone had grabbed hold of her intestines and twisted them, and the relevance of this to their own situation could not be denied. Since she had first studied the images from Earth, the situation had changed substantially, indeed catastrophically. She extracted the same footage for use later, at that morning meeting, then fell at once into a deep sleep.