"Whoever conducted this atrocity was amateurish in the extreme." This was John Cleavage talking about the Chaser Nuking three weeks after it happened. This was the preface to the first official, but preliminary, report on what had happened. There was still a lot we didn't know, but there was a lot we did, and he was summarizing.
"The HX Chaser is designed with eight-fold redundancy. These barbarians killed hundreds of innocent people, but knocked out only one of eight centers. The HX Chaser now has sevenfold redundancy instead of eightfold."
He leaned into the camera to make his next point, "WE WILL LAUNCH ON SCHEDULE. AND, WE WILL BUILD IN NINEFOLD REDUNDANCY BEFORE THE CHASER REACHES THE HX."
It was the classic "stiff upper lip" response that every government leader from King Tut on has given to bandit attacks that were big enough to scare them, but not strong enough to unseat them. This speech was nothing that would change the chaos of the moment, and it would do nothing to stop the huge spending and social scarring that Titan Colony and Earth governments were gearing up to bring down on their respective communities.
I did my homework while I waited to hear from my father. I started my people and my 'bots working over the First Earth archives that were publicly stored here on Titan. I was mildly surprised: there was a lot here already. I was even more pleasantly surprised when my staff generated a "short list" of suspects even before my father had a chance to reply. It turned out to be easy because my kind of analysis was so new that no one had thought to cover their tracks from it ten years ago -- which is when these radicals would still be at the "talking stage" of their drift to this kind of extremism. With what looked like 20-20 hindsight, the list named "hotheads" who had been some of First's Earth more enthusiastic members of five to ten years ago. In that time frame over a thousand previously enthusiastic people had left the First Earth organization, and another thousand remained. Of those, my research had singled out five.
Now I was waiting to hear from my father mostly to get his blessing, and to add some refinement to the list I had generated. He might know more about these people, two in particular seemed to have had contact with him.
I was still waiting to hear from my father... and in spite of myself I was getting impatient. If he got my message immediately and answered immediately, I would hear from him in eight hours. It was now approaching twenty four hours. Patience is normally a virtue, but the Moment of Chaos was passing, if I didn't get a break of some sort soon, it wouldn't matter what I found out. I decided that in thirty six hours after I transmitted, I would act on what information I had, hear from him, or no. Having decided that, I worried no more about hearing from him, and continued working on my analysis to firm it up.
At T-plus-twentyeight hours forty two minutes, my ring tone finally chimed... and boy was I relieved! No matter what my brain said, my heart had not wanted to act without hearing from my Dad. My fingers trembled a bit as I sat down and took my Dad's message...
It was hard to read the look on his face. It wasn't one I'd seen before. His voice had a peculiar ring, too....
"Son, it was good to hear from you... for so many reasons. I apologize for this message getting back to you with such a delay. Judging from the delay between your sending and my receiving, and as you may have anticipated, many people saw this before I did.
"Your message was not a complete surprise to me. I'm your father, and even if we don't get together every weekend, I'm still very interested in what you do, so I know more about your career than you think I do. What has kept me awake at nights is deciding what I should do when your message came.
"You see... those people's heads were horribly misguided, but their hearts were in the right place. It is my feeling that they were trying to save us from an even bigger disaster. What if those HX aliens decide to follow one of our ships back to the Solar System and wipe humanity out? What good will all those HX treasures do us then?
"But... these aren't new words to you, are they? And... Damnit these are trying times!" I thought his face was becoming even more of a cypher, then it hit me: His face was saying he had changed his mind about something! "If we weren't in such a rush... Anyway, I've decided that what is most important is that we humans work together. So... those people may have had their hearts in the right places, but they were fools, and seriously wrong fools, for forcing this issue.
He now looked at the screen with resolve, he had made a choice, "I will support your effort to find those murders, son. And I will do what I can to have First Earth condemn them formally, as well.
"I'm enclosing the pointers you asked for.
"If there's a silver lining in this disaster, I hope it's that you and I can get closer in the future.
"Bye for now... son."
And that was the end.
But I could see from the look on his face, and his speech pacing, that something more was in Dad's future: he would leave First Earth -- the organization he had spent forty years passionately supporting, his world. I now knew what the historians were writing about when they talked about civil strife pitting brother against brother and father against son. What they neglected to mention was that it also pitted many people against themselves, and my father was now one of those people.