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mother, his father?"
    "No, I didn’t."
    "Oh, right. I forgot. Both your parents are. . ." Etherton paused. "I mean it's odd, isn't it, his fascination with solar astronomy? Like the sun is his father now, and he's on this elliptical orbit, feeling mostly distant, yet constantly pulled back by his father's influence."
    "Right," David said. Remembering some of the nights he'd stared up at the sky, he felt a hint of the same inexplicable emptiness, the dwarfing vastness. He opened his mouth, hoping to explain the real reason for his retirement, his near suicide, but the words still weren’t there yet. The silence was eclipsed by an explosion in the distance, which sounded like the rumble of thunder, except there were no clouds anymore, he knew. It was a clear night, full of relatively close or otherwise high magnitude stars.
    Etherton rushed to the window to confirm the worst. "Oh my God," he said, staring, "it really wasn’t an accident, after all."

7
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    At dawn, as they both stared up at the overhead television monitor from Nasheed's entertainment pit, the screen displayed a close-up of the smoke still rising from a hole blasted out across three floors in the side of the new Dynamic Tower. Panic had replaced fury and chagrin, as the reported body count stood at seven, although judging by the public flight away from city center, a tourist might have guessed seven hundred . When a news anchor claimed one of the damaged floors was still turning, David confirmed the assertion from the window, utilizing the tripod-mounted refractor still positioned there. Only a thin wisp of gray vapor still rose from the Burj Khalifa , he saw, but the Dynamic Tower was partly obscured by it, and any residents within two miles of the building were either on the move, stuck in traffic, or long gone.
    "Sure enough, the Pentagon's disavowing any complicity," Doug announced after flipping through channels with his hand held remote. "President is due for a comment shortly, once the CIA has prepped him."
    David noticed that a beer had somehow magically sprouted from Doug's free hand. "Or dressed him, you mean," he said.
    "What's that?"
    Turning back to the scope, David looked through the eyepiece once more. There were no survivors waving rags from broken windows, or preparing to jump from the roof. No flames that he could see, either. The upper floor of those three affected had once again rotated away from the other two, and smoke had begun to dissipate, spreading out across a wider area. Despite himself, he tracked the scope to the left, and then to the right, half expecting to witness another pilotless drone vectoring in on another landmark.
    "Why are we doing this?" he asked.
    "We?" Doug said. "I don't think it's us, my friend. Although Al-Jazeera certainly does."
    "Who, then? And why?"
    "If I had to guess? Somebody who's got it in for billionaires having fun while the rest of the world can't pay their mortgages or fill their gas tanks."
    "Not al-Qaeda?"
    "With stolen U.S. military craft? Not likely. Dubai is a free zone used by a lot of western corporations, it's true, but al-Qaeda also gets financed by money coming through here, too."
    "What about revenge from someone State-side?"
    "For nine-eleven, or those cargo bombs that shipped though Dubai? That's a stretch. Could figure into it, though, as motive. Along with anger about oil prices and partnerships. What I can't figure is means and opportunity. How would an American terrorist cell, if there is such a thing operating here. . . how could they pull this off? And where would they be staging this from? The Empty Quarter? Because--"
    "Are we safe here?" David interrupted.
    Doug hit the Mute button on his remote. "Say again."
    "Shouldn't we be leaving too?"
    At this, Doug tilted the beer to his lips, considering it. "No, we'll be okay," he concluded. "There's at least two dozen more strategic hits to be made, if they have the birds to do it. Besides, it's gridlock out there."
    "But