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consequences to human life and limb. The fact that the victim had been a terrorist and murderer didn’t make it any better. She’d been acting on impulse, not thinking enough about anything other than vanity and wisecracks. She’d let herself grow complacent. That couldn’t happen again.
    She hadn’t even remembered the other Neogaian cultists until the police on the scene had asked her in haste to explain the situation. They’d alerted their search parties to retrieve Bast and Taurean, only to find them gone. They had escaped in the confusion, perhaps with the help of the fourth terrorist, who was never found. They were now back home in their own habitat, sheltered by its government.
    UNECS had declared a trade embargo against Neogaia, as had the Mars Confederacy, the Cerean States, and most of the major Vestan nation-states; but of course it wouldn’t be universally obeyed and couldn’t be enforced. The Striders clung proudly to their hard-won independence, so getting them to agree on anything was like herding cats. Not to mention the growing population of fringe groups that had emigrated or been exiled from Earth and its orbital space, transhumanists who’d probably sympathize with Neogaia or extremists who’d be busy making trouble of their own. Prefab, auxon-built habitats were easy to obtain and aggressively subsidized by a UNECS eager to ship more people off the overpopulated birthworld, especially the troublemakers who weren’t even welcome within cislunar space. The Troubleshooters kept the peace as best they could, but they were just a private organization who’d squander the Striders’ goodwill and their own resources if they began meddling in how people lived on their own habitats. They’d keep an eye on Neogaia, try to catch any future aggressions, but that was all they could do.
    Except hand out medals to people who didn’t deserve them and try to take comfort in the gesture. Emry avoided letting Sensei see what was in her eyes, instead looking up at the open sky that stretched clear to the far side of Demetria’s two-kilometer-wide habitat sphere (with no heavy skylights or mirrors to hang over her head), and out the annular sun window to where Ceres drifted past on its endless rounds, once every seventy seconds as Demetria rotated. The sunlit side of the dwarf planet was a dusty gray, except for the bright glints where craters or mining operations had exposed fresh ice beneath. On the dark side, beacons and spotlights limned hundreds more of the mines whose ice and organic compounds sustained life for most of the habitats in the Belt and Inner System. Beyond it, so large that its elongated shape was clearly visible even from a third of an orbit away, was the Sheaf: the clustered habitats of the Cerean States, fourteen counterrotating pairs of massive, elongated O’Neill cylinders and a half-dozen chains of smaller Bernal spheres like Demetria, scaffolded together in parallel but spaced widely enough to leave room for their respective sun mirrors, radiators, and support facilities, all adding up to a symbiotic cluster that housed nearly two hundred million people. Around them, at a large enough radius to leave room for future cylinders, she could see the fragmented halo of the Band, the massive ring habitat which, once its parallel toroidal components were all complete and linked together, would become the single largest populated megastructure in Solsys, with triple the habitable volume of the current Sheaf.
    The Sheaf and the Band were the fullest realization of the natural tendency of space settlements to expand over time. The early, small habitats had demanded a regimented existence; birth rates must be strictly controlled, environment strictly balanced, safety protocols carefully followed. As habitats grew larger and more advanced, their ecologies better able to absorb fluctuations, their safety systems more foolproof, their populations given more room to grow, a more relaxed, liberal