Kira forced her thoughts elsewhere.

“Everything shipshape?” Falconi asked when Nielsen came floating through the doorway a few minutes later.

“Shipshape as can be,” said Nielsen. “We shouldn’t have any problems with inspectors.”

“Aside from Itari,” said Kira.

The first officer smiled with a dry expression. “Yes, well, at least they can’t blame us for breaking quarantine. There hasn’t been proper biocontainment with the Jellies since day one.” Then she went and sat in the crash chair on the other side of Vishal.

Sparrow made a disgusted noise and looked over at Nielsen. “You see what the Stellarists are up to?”

“Mmm. No worse than the Expansion or Conservation Parties. They’d do the same if they were in charge.”

Sparrow shook her head. “Yeah, you keep telling yourself that. The Premier is using this whole state of emergency thing to really clamp down on the colonies.”

“Ugh,” said Kira. Why was she not surprised? The Stellarists were always putting Sol first. Understandable to a point, but it didn’t mean she had to like it.

Nielsen assumed a pleasantly blank face. “That’s a rather extreme point of view, Sparrow.”

“Just you watch,” the short-haired woman said. “After this whole mess is over, if there even is an after, you won’t be able to so much as spit without getting permission from Earth Central. Guarantee it.”

“You’re overst—”

“What am I saying? You’re from Venus. Of course you’re going to back Earth, just like everyone else who grew up with their heads in the clouds.”

A frown settled on Nielsen’s face, and she started to answer when Falconi said, “Enough with the politics. Save it for when we’ve got enough drink to make it tolerable.”

“Yessir,” said Sparrow in a surly voice.

Kira returned her attention to her overlays. She never could keep track of the finer points of interstellar politics. Too many moving parts. But she did know she didn’t like the Stellarists (and most politicians, for that matter).

As she watched, Orsted swelled in size until it dominated the aft view. The station looked heavy and brutal, like a gothic gyroscope, dark of hue and sharp of edge. The stationary shield ring appeared undamaged, but the rotating hab-ring mated to it had several large rents along one quadrant, as if a monster had raked Orsted with its claws. Explosive decompression had peeled the hull back along the edges of the holes, turning the plating into lines of jagged petals. Between the petals, rooms were visible, white and glittery with a layer of frost.

The top face of Orsted’s central hub (where top meant pointing away from Ganymede) was a bristle of antennas, dishes, telescopes, and weapons, standing motionless on their frictionless bearings. Most of the equipment appeared broken or slagged. Fortunately, the attacks didn’t seem to have penetrated to the fusion reactor buried within the core of the hub.

The spindly, cross-braced truss that extended for several hundred meters from the bottom face of Orsted’s hub appeared intact, but many of the transparent radiators that fringed it had holes punched through them or had been shattered, reducing them to knifelike shards that dribbled molten metal from their severed veins. Dozens of service bots were flitting about the damaged radiators, working to stanch the loss of coolant.