Empty Cities of the Full Moon, Chapter One Chapter 1 A Boy and His Dog Who Fell to Earth 2032 Universe A "Yo-ho, yo-ho, a spacer's life for me!" John Drinan sang to his big mastiff dog and constant companion, Ozymandias. "Drink to that, Oz m'boy?" Ozymandias cocked his jowly head quizzically at John, who laughed, whipped off his suit gauntlets, and scratched the big dog behind the ears. John brought a half-full bottle of Belgian lambic ale to his lips and drained it. He'd already celebrated enough so that he couldn't tell, without looking at the label, whether the flavor of this particular bottle was pecheor framboises. No matter. More of both flavors waited in the pressure locker, anyway. Taking off his maroon knit cap, he ran his free hand through his longish, greasy dark hair before allowing it to scratch and settle in his thin beard. If he wanted to celebrate around other people, he'd have to clean himself up once he reached the orbital habitat.

Bathe once a year, whether I need to or not, he thought with a smile. Looking at his reflection in the glass of the bottle, he saw a distorted image of a young man with deep-set eyes behind archaic wire-rimmed glasses, his features made all the sharper by the glass's convexity and the gauntness of his face. As always, his thin frame was dressed in bulky gray spacer's coveralls and heavy space boots-the whole uniform overlaid with a Jackson Pollack drip-camouflage of paint and stains. "This place is a mess," John muttered, shaking his head. Around Oz stood archaeologically stratified clutter. The work area in the cabin of his Solar Harvester Travel-All, the Helios, doubled as a long-time bachelor apartment. "But at least we're a rich mess." Less than an hour had passed since he cashed out his completion bonus.

He'd gotten the robotic asteroid miners trained in time and delivered them to the big mass-driver tug Swallowtailright on schedule. His seldom-seen bosses had to shell out the full amount-good pay, but the time had been lonely, even for a solitary guy. A flash from the port side caught his eye. Then a second flash. John hunched forward. Fireworks? To celebrate the impending launch of the Swallowtailand the opening of the two new habitats? No, not in the airless void. The location-low Earth orbit-was wrong, too. Half a dozen bright points of light were flashing into view now, from around the other side of the Earth.

Unlike fireworks, those lights were staying on, not guttering and dying. Voice-activating the main viewing screens, John picked out the distant gleam of the two new space colonies and the shine of the asteroid tug behind him. The first of the orbital habitats shone nearer at hand. Earth stood partly in darkness; those points of light rose away from it. Between Earth and the orbital habitat flashed dimmer glints: the necklace of X-shaped structures he'd heard the media calling X-sats, when he hadn't been too busy to pay attention. He gathered the X-shaped satellites were causing heightened tensions between Earth and its first space colony. John called up the location of one of the X-sats in its ring-around-the-planet necklace. He sat back as the viewscreen's optics zoomed in on that location.

At first he thought it was a wobble in the optics, but he soon saw that something about the X-sat was changing as he watched. The X-shaped satellite was canting over, altering its orientation. It began to slowly separate into halves that reminded John of "greater than" and "less than" signs. He had the screen pan back until four of the X-sats hovered in his field of view. They too were separating into halves and drawing apart, like chromosomes moving from metaphase to anaphase in some enormous dividing cell. He zoomed in on the bright points moving up from Earth. Magnified, each of them w.