How It All Goes Down
- It takes nine months for the asteroid to be brought to rendezvous with Mars, but now it's time to party.
- John expected only a few friends to travel to such a remote site, but instead he gets the Martian equivalent of Spring Break.
- He spends time wandering the tents, chatting it up with the local color and listening to the bands playing.
- Some dirigibles show up. It's Hiroko, Michel, and company, making their long overdue appearance and being classically late to the party.
- The people cheer the reunion.
- Later that afternoon, John gathers the almost sixty First Hundred into a private tent.
- Like a classic detective performing a summation gathering, John tells everyone he knows Hiroko's people are the saboteurs. Dun dun dun…
- What? Yeah, thing is they are doing it without her knowledge.
- How'd he know? Most of the sabotages could not have been performed by anyone on the network, and Hiroko's people are the ones off the record.
- John also informs the First Hundred that someone is trying to kill him—probably the phony investigators working for the transnats. He can't prove it, but Helmut tells him he'll at least get Sam and company off the planet.
- John invites Hiroko for a private talk and tells her he knows about Kasei; Hiroko confesses that the children of her group are made from samples of the males and females of the First Hundred.
- Hiroko defends herself by saying she had a vision of what life on Mars could be like and knew it wasn't going that way. So she left to perform her own experiment.
- John calls this selfish, stating she's needed in the open, in society.
- In the end, they agree to stay in contact.
- John is officially introduced to the Coyote.
- The crowd watches the meteor flying through the atmosphere like a fireworks display, and John gives a speech about how great Mars could be if they all work together to make it great. It's actually a much longer speech than that, so make sure you read it for yourself. Deal?
- John receives many a pat on the back for his grand speech.
- As the First Hundred go their separate ways, they make plans to be speakers for the local population and they also plan to introduce their own draft of the Mars treaty. Too bad we already know how that turns out.