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Kharbage Collector produced 0.7 gees. To Michael, it was nothing. “That’s why I’m not standing up and applauding.”
    “Applauding?”
    “I don’t want to go to freaking Titan.” Kelp turned to his father. “Dad, all we need is somewhere safe to hide out. We don’t need to go that far. 99984 Ravilious would do, wouldn’t it?”
    Michael grinned gratefully at the other boy. He said, “Engineering & Maintenance is a zero-gee environment. You could hang out there if you would feel more comfortable.” He realized that might sound as if he were trying to kick Kelp off the bridge. “I mean, that’s where I usually hang out. I have lots of stuff down there, like a bunch of different printers and a Gravimetric Upcycler.”
    Captain Haddock stroked his goatee, hiding his expression. “Yer argument is not without its merits, sprog o’ mine,” he allowed. “Against that, the ‘frag you if I ever see you again’ thing is not a concern to be dismissed lightly. But then again, there’s a war on. ‘Twould be a small man who couldn’t put aside old grudges in the service of the common good!”
    For some reason, he winked at Michael. Then he set his ostrich-feather hat at a new, rakish angle.
    “Cap’n,” he ordered Codfish, “plot the swiftest route to 99984 Ravilious!”
    “Yay!” Michael and Kelp shouted together.
    Codfish scowled. “I don’t know how. You do it.”
    “All ye have to do is tell the astrogation computer where ye want to go, numbskull.”
    “All right, all right. I still think this is a bad idea, but no one ever listens to me.”
    Anemone poked her head up through the hatch in the floor that led down to the crew quarters. “Dinner is served,” she said. “Lucky I’m good at cooking with nutriblocks.”
     

iii.
     
    99984 Ravilious no longer existed.
    Where once an M-type asteroid, massing 1.5 x 10 15 kg, and measuring ten kilometers at its longest axis, had rotated in a lonely orbit around the sun, there now drifted a cloud of gravel. The pieces ranged from a few centimeters to three kilometers in diameter.
    It was not easy to blow up an asteroid made mostly of iron.
    They had done it by packing explosives into the cavity at the big end of 99984 Ravilious.
    Until ten days ago, that cavity had been filled with air. It’d had a sun-tube running down the middle. Thorium breeder reactors had supplied heat and energy. They’d also powered the thrusters that had spun 99984 Ravilious up to 0.25 gees of rotational gravity. Hydroponic farms had provided enough food for the asteroid’s population of six-and-a-half thousand, with a freezable surplus. They’d even had pigs. Chickens, of course. The boss-man had kept a herd of goats on his farm down at the desert end of the cavern. Although it was organized on different social principles, the colony used to remind Kiyoshi Yonezawa of his home, 11073 Galapagos, a hollowed-out Venus trojan.
    11073 Galapagos had been destroyed by the PLAN.
    Nuked.
    The fruits of all their hard work flung into the vacuum like so much worthless garbage.
    And now the boss-man had done the same thing to 99984 Ravilious, on purpose.
    Kiyoshi did not believe it had been necessary, could not visualize the better future the boss-man kept talking about, and dwelt bitterly on the sheer waste of it.
    Oh, sure, they’d evacuated the goats beforehand. Big whoop. Kiyoshi hated goats. The farms were gone. All 6,503 people who had inhabited 99984 Ravilious were now squashed into a fleet of Bigelows—inflatable habs designedto hold fifty people each, max—which the boss-man had procured, a few at a time, over the years. Kiyoshi had even bought a few of those Bigelows himself, not knowing what they were for, just following orders. Now he felt stupid.
    He had evacuated his own people to his ship, the Monster, and moved the Monster to a safe distance. Those asteroid fragments were dangerous. Drifting around, crashing into each other, shattering into smaller pieces, shooting off