lots of big bucks and man hours

The Treaty Powers spent lots of big bucks and man hours repairing the New High Dike and pumping the ocean back out of the lowlands.....but there was still a big radioactive mess, so they shot a lot of big dumb boosters with loads of hot crap into outer space....while all this was going on, the nerve center stuff had defaulted to Washington D.C., which once again became the effective capitol city of humanity.....so it was that some functionary somewhere in the maze of the Octagon had the report of a lost asteroid mining vessel come up on his display.....contact lost, no response.....a modern ship which should have had all the needed back-ups and things to deal with any ordinary emergency.....hmmm, are we looking at some kind of terrorism here, like the data bombers, or the hammership droppers? Let's see if we can clear authorization to divert a Security patrol vessel to the provided coordinates .........