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He shook his head again, this time heavily.
“All Kotouč and his people could do would be to die gallantly, Mister Yale. I don’t doubt they’d do that in a minute . . . if it could stop Hajdu. But it couldn’t. They might be able to hurt him badly first, but not badly enough to stop him from carrying out his orders in the end, and no military commander could justify throwing away his own people’s lives when the sacrifice couldn’t make any difference in the end.”
“So what do we do?” Vice President Morris said after a moment.
“We go on doing what we’re already doing,” Vangelis replied heavily. “We’ve got every orbit-capable shuttle, cutter, runabout, and garbage scow in the system moving everyone we possibly can in the time Hajdu’s so graciously given us. There’s already been some panic — you just can’t organize an evacuation on this kind of scale without telling people why you’re evacuating them — but so far, it’s manageable. Commodore Nisyrios’s people are providing armed parties for the major habitats’ boat bays to prevent — we hope — things from getting too out of hand, and we’re beginning with the major residential habitats. We should — should, probably — be able to get between eighty and eighty-five percent of the residents down to the planetary surface in thirty-six hours. That’s almost a hundred and nine million people.”
“And it still leaves eighteen-point-seven million people up there,” Morris said.
“And another one-point-two million in the Alexandria Belt,” Roanoke said. “My God. We’re talking about twenty million dead as our best case scenario!”
She looked around the conference room’s frozen-helium silence, and the clatter of a falling pin would have been deafening.
