We immediately started using the pointers to further refine and rank the list while we waited for input from Dad on the special two. That input turned out essentially useless; their few contacts with him had left little or no impression, and he had recorded no notes on them that weren’t already in the archives.
With Dad’s blessing, I reported the results of our analysis to Titan Colony Security, who shared it with police throughout the System. The results proved astoundingly accurate: Over the next two weeks, the suspects were questioned and a cell of seventeen plotters was uncovered, including five names on our short list of eight.
And … that was it. The whole plot required just seventeen people to hatch and execute. The investigation’s results were so conclusive that myth-building around the mysterious Chaser nuke incident, which had looked to be inevitably major over the next few years, died before it could get started. Instead of becoming the center of a decade-long witch hunt that would have scarred civil liberties and Earth–Titan relations, the plotters acquired all the historical resonance of Charles Guiteau, the “disappointed office seeker” who assassinated U.S. President Garfield in the 19th century, and the explosion became just another disaster in mankind’s long history of disasters.
The calls for all the expensive and intrusive programs died down quickly without meaningful action being taken, and everyone returned to business as usual. That stilling of the hurricane was my contribution to ending the Time of Chaos.
I’m immensely proud of that, and I’ll probably never play a bigger part in advancing humanity during my lifetime, although it’s hard to brag about the historical importance of an avoided event on a résumé.
With the pressure off, I took time to mine some other data out of the Earth First archives. Who else in the party was likely to be unhappy now? Almost all of my father’s long-time buddies—including President Abdul Akbar Guebuza! Hmmm.…
In that relatively stormless couple months, I corresponded with Dad intensively. When I asked what he would do next, his answer didn’t surprise me: He couldn’t think of anything that would fill the gap. So I proposed he sound out his allies on rejuvenating Earth First—taking it back from the hysterical radicals who had made the Chaser nuclear incident seem inevitable.
The Guebuza administration ended up tabling an omnibus bill to normalize Earth–Titan relations by abolishing the Ad-Hoc Committee to Investigate Corruption in the Titan Colony Support Infrastructure, ending the outgoing trade sanctions, and changing the practice of the HX-Derived Technology Import Authority, from presuming such tech “harmful until proved harmless” to assuming “harmless unless there is reasonable cause to support harmful”.
Of course failing to pass that bill, despite all the Earth First whips could do in enforcing party discipline, brought down the government.
In the ensuing election, the radical MPs who’d opposed the bill splintered off to form the Earth for Humans party. With the new political atmosphere, nearly all of them lost. The rump Earth First party—Dad, Guebuza, and their allies—won, partly by convincing the electorate that trying to tell another sovereign state what it could do with its own resources was at least economically counterproductive and probably immoral. They formed a government in coalition with a few of the lesser parties who’d picked up seats, with Guebuza as President again. The new parliament’s first order of business was passing the omnibus bill that had precipitated the election.
My own first order of business was taking advantage of Dad’s euphoria to finally ask his blessing for marrying Sherry. I think what finally brought him and Mom around was that I’d lined up three volunteers to vidcam the ceremony on the HX Chaser, so it could be shown at a big formal reception on Earth.
With the Second Siege of Titan lifted, Titan Colony’s unofficial counterembargo of Kansora ended the day Chinese jumbo vole reappeared in CEO Hountondji's Executive Dining Room, a much newsvidded moment. But the Chaser was unable to leave on schedule: Construction accelerated so much that it had to launch nearly three months ahead of the planned date!
Sherry and I did get married on board—and by the time the Chaser got to the HX, we’d started our family. But that’s another story.