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electronically, completely, the instant of the Moon explosion.
    Even that would only have worked if the Others were just listening to broadcast emissions and not spying on Earth any other way. And it would have been impossible to build ad Astra and the fleet without electronic communication.
    The half of our satellite that’s not under Martian quarantine, Little Earth or, to us, “earthside,” serves as a conduit for communicating between the fleet and Earth. There’s a lot of radio and image transmission that can be disguised as innocuous space industrialization—but the part that can’t be disguised is written down or photographed and sent to Little Earth via “transfer pods,” which guide themselves into a net and are sent down the Space Elevator to an Earth address. Messages that can’t wait that long are de-orbited and dropped to Earth by parachute. I wonder how many of them actually make it to the final address.
    It’s a fragile house of cards, and we could collapse it just by a minute of frank broadband discussion. I talked with Paul about doing just that. What could they do, fire us?
    “No,” he said, “but we could have a tragic accident.” We were talking in VR, walking and bicycling slowly down a country road in Cape Cod, Indian summer, cranberry bogs vivid red with floating berries and the smells of woodsmoke and autumn leaves powerful but relaxing. Squirrels scattered out of our way, and geese honked overhead, swifting south.
    “You think they would go that far?”
    “Well, I don’t think we’re indispensable,” he said, braking the bike into a short downhill. “They could even manufacture avatar duplicates. They do it all the time with politicians.”
    I nodded. “Like that French nonassassination.” The president’s limousine was blown up in a visit to Algeria, and it turned out that neither president nor driver was actually there, actually human.
    “My God.” He stopped pedaling but his bicycle stayed upright; VR couldn’t topple the exercise machine outside our illusion. “Could that be why they sent three soldiers?”
    “To kill us if we broke the rules? That’s ridiculous.”
    “In this brave new world? I don’t know.”
    “Be realistic, Paul. If they wanted us dead, this powerful ‘they,’ they wouldn’t have to send three assassins up into orbit. They could push a button and blow all the air out of Mars side.”
    He started pedaling again. “That’s why I love you, Carmen. You’re such a ray of sunshine.”
    I was sweating a little from the exercise, but a new patch of cold sweat broke out on the back of my neck:
    What if we were twenty- four light-years away and decided to do something subversive, like surrender to the Others? The Earth couldn’t do a thing to stop us.
    But Namir and Dustin and Elza, for all their quiet and civilized manners, had once been trained to kill. And were presumably loyal to Earth.
    What were their orders?

    We weren’t headed out to the iceberg for a couple of weeks, but ad Astra itself—the habitat we’d be living in on the way to Wolf and back—was up and running, and we wanted to live in it in Earth orbit for a while. If something went wrong, we could always send out for a plumber.
    Speaking of plumbing, we did have a week or so of roll- up-your-sleeves work before we took off. The large crew who’d set up ad Astra had the hydroponics working as they would in the normal one-gee environment, on the way to Wolf. But it would take at least a week of zero gee before we hooked up with the iceberg, and of course you can’t have standing pools of water in zero gee. They turn into floating blobs. So we had plant-by-plant instructions as to what had to be done to keep root systems and everything moist en route.
    (Good practice. We’d be doing it again at the halfway point, since we’d be in zero gee while the iceberg slowly rotated around to start braking.)
    Quarantine rules made the transfer into the Space Elevator a little complicated.