That was still more than enough time for the pirates – and I was increasingly disliking that word for the enemy – to make a mess of the place. The orbital structures were wrecked. That was the only word for it. Before the crisis, Earth had thousands of small satellites. Most were simple communication and navigation systems. A few dozen were inhabited by people for various things, ranging from tourism to manufacturing. Humanity had two stations which could rightly be called cities, one each at the geosynchronous orbit sites of L4 and L5. And one station – the International Space Colony, distant descendant of the old International Space Station – had become a hub of commerce instead of a colony, taking in goods from bases all around the solar system and shuttling those goods down to Earth, and storing supplies from the mother world to be ferried out to all our far-flung outposts. The ISC was gone. It had been vaporized by the first attack, the hundreds of men and women who worked there annihilated when a rock hundreds of meters across tore through the fragile framework separating them from the void.
