Chapter four from the work in progress follows after the jump.

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Chapter one.

Chapter two.

Chapter three.

Chapter five.

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Chapter 4.
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Jane Navio heard the Voice late that evening, as she jetted home along the commuter treeway that fanned out among the asteroids of the Phocaean Cluster.

This summons from Beyond—or this psychotic break; she could not decide which was worse—was the last thing she needed. Her suit stank and her back hurt. Her fatigue went right down to the cellular level: her DNA, she felt sure, was knotted in snarls of disarray. Even her mitochondria hurt. She couldn’t possibly feel this lousy otherwise. During the past forty-five minutes, jetting along Klosti Alpha cable, she had let the suit systems navigate for her and tried to empty her mind of thought.

She had to be back in Phocaea in ten hours. There were a million things to do, and the funerals were to be held tomorrow. Ostensibly, she was only going home to pick up a few things for an extended stay in town, till the crisis was over. She could have waited a day or two—and she should have; at the very least she would have gotten a couple more hours’ sleep tonight. But she needed to go home so badly she could not stand it. She needed her own bed and Xuan’s arms around her.

The suit gave her an alert. Klosti Xi-Upsilon-Alpha was coming up: her exit. Jane launched her port tether. It shot out. Ten minutes and twenty kilometers later, the tether latched magnetically onto Xi-Upsilon-Alpha’s tether rail, then reeled in the slack, jostling her onto her new trajectory. As she detached her starboard tether from Klosti Alpha, she glanced back over her shoulder.

She often wondered afterward why she looked back just then. She couldn’t think of a particular reason, yet it seemed significant. As if she would not have heard the Voice, if she had not.

Beyond her retracting starboard tether, Cable Klosti Alpha’s receding marquis of red lights did its stately march. Sol, a blindingly brilliant button, dominated the black sky. A quarter of the way across the heavens, back the way she had come, was 25 Phocaea. The stroid shone in the middle distance, a small bright blur about which swarmed a flock of orange green blue and white sparks: the confiscated ships.

Two handspans above the faintly visible iron-nickel-manganese cable and the arrays of buckybeam branches that made up the commuter treeway—along with a scattering of asteroids moving against the starry backdrop—hovered distant Earth: a bright cerulean fleck with Luna a faint dot snuggling up beneath it.

It was as her gaze fell on Earth that she heard the Voice.

Jane? It said; Jane…?

It held just a hint of inquiry, and spoke in a timbre so resonant—so saturated with love-passion-mercy-understanding-Beingness—that tears stung her sinuses. Though quiet—barely a whisper—it rang through her like tones from a great, distant bell.

Jane gasped, and spasmed in the confines of her suit. Hairs bristled along her arms and on her neck. “What the hell—?”

Even as the Voice ebbed she looked around for the source, wondering if someone was playing a prank, cracking her private line. Just as quickly, she knew that couldn’t be. She had not heard it outside, she had heard it inside. Something had filled her: a presence so vast—so there—that despite its velvet-gentle touch, its departure left her limp and useless as exhaled vapor.

Calm down, Navio. Calm, and think. She slowed her breathing, waited for the pounding in her chest and throat to subside, as her starboard tether’s magnetic grappler slid into its wrist holster.

She was no fool. She had lived out in the stroids for most of her adult life, and she was as tough-minded as they came. She had no patience for the damn religious freaks who came out here looking for God or magic or space angels or beneficent aliens, and heard voices out in the rocks. Noodgers, Pagans, Viridians, conspiracy nuts, abductees. They were a hazard to themselves and everyone else. Crackpots and losers, the lot of them.

Even oldtimers hallucinated, though, once in a while—when they were out alone in four Kelvins with nothing but their helmet light, tethers, and jet pack for company, when the cold seeped in through the insulation and they remembered how far they were from the nearest aid station; when they reflected on just many people had died out here, with their frozen corpses not found for years if ever. Or when they were grieving, or in a state of shock.

She had heard her mother’s voice once, shortly after her parents had died, back on Earth. She had dreamt of their death before it happened, too, in a bizarre dream sequence that made it seem she had somehow known—though of course that was nonsense.

She wasn’t the type the unexplainable happened to. Space jitters, maybe; she could accept that. Nothing more.

I’m sorry, she told the Voice; you’ve reached a url that has been disconnected or is no longer in service. She said aloud, “Let’s hear it for free will!” and smiled, feeling better for this small rebellion against Fate.

Which would have been fine if that had been the end of it.

#

Twenty minutes later, her telemetry told her that she was nearing home. Within seconds she spotted it: a dim dot in the blackness. She launched her starboard tether and it blasted away. The weighted tip steered itself with puffs of air, like a kite in gusty wind, as it homed in on the little stroid’s mooring beacon. Ten minutes later the tether magnet latched on, and a moment after that the line tugged at her, sending Jane into a lazy loop until her jets and processors stabilized her.

She detached her starboard tether from Klosti Xi-Upsilon-Alpha, an arc that passed by twenty kilometers away with its own sparkling marquis, and turned on her jet brakes as the tether began the long process of reeling itself into her holster. Soon she could make it out: carbonaceous peanut of a rock, a phrenologist’s dream. The rock neared quickly, but her deceleration was swift: within moments she was falling slowly toward the two-kilometer-thick carbonaceous-chondrite rock that housed the habitat she shared with Ngo Minh Xuan, her husband of thirty-nine years.

She shut off the autopilot and signalled the tether binding her to the rock to reel her in. As usual, the stroid had rotated once since she had latched on, and the tether had wrapped itself around the asteroid’s middle. She reeled her port tether in with the asteroid tumbling under her, her suit making the needed corrections, till she had circled the small asteroid, and touched down at the mooring station. She stumbled, braced herself on a boulder.

This was a tiny world, a single-serving planet: perpetually twilit on this side, with its pole of rotation pointed near the sun. Its horizons were coarse and close, curving sharply away underfoot on all sides. It gave her a hell of a view of the wheeling, starry sky.

They had claimed the stroid together, she and Xuan, back in ’57, when they had migrated here from Ceres. Officially it had only a number, but they had dubbed it No Moss.

Ordinarily she took a few moments to soak in the view, but today her thoughts were tormented. I killed eight, she thought. Ten dead, and eight of them because I made it so. The knowledge weighed on her, even in No Moss’s trivial gee. She propped herself against the boulder for a moment to rest, with sweat cooling on her face and under her arms, and stared blindly out at the Big Empty. Dread washed over her: dread for herself, and the fate of her people.

Suck it up, Princess, she thought, then. Don’t fade now. There’s still work to be done.

From there it was a dozen steps home. She pulled herself along the handrails set into the rocks, overbalanced in the feather-light gravity by her jetpack. She took great care not to launch herself into orbit with too much spring in her step.

Then she jumped down to the airlock in their crevasse, and anchored herself there, one-handed, while her port tether detached from the asteroid’s mooring station. The line retracted into its holster seconds before the starboard tether finally snapped in place also, and she zipped the airlock closed. The vents opened up, air rushed in, and the walls and outer hatch, made of pillowed nylon, quivered with the eager energy of a puppy. A sigh escaped between her lips. “Hello, House,” she said.

The all-clear sounded and the inner hatch opened underfoot. Xuan floated there, two fingers on the handle, a smile ghosting his lips and worry ghosting his eyes. “Hello, yourself.”

She smiled back, and chinned herself down into the habitat. Xuan moved aside and closed the inner lock. Jane pulled off her helmet. As her ears crackled with the pressure change, she drew in the smells and sounds and sights of home. Cool, moist air, pine hammock-pillows and mantle-pot cooking herbs and chilis, must and dust and cleaners, twisted-hemp netting and molded-plastic fixtures, machine lubricants and twenty-four years’ living. Home.

#

From the instant Jane took off her helmet, Xuan could see the toll the past day and a half had taken. The locks of her sweat-soaked hair that were not plastered to her head were tangles of frizz; but that was not all that unusual after a long commute and a long day. No, it was other things. The stiffness in her movements, for one—the way her shoulders hunched as she carefully climbed out of her suit. At eighty-nine, at the apex of her middle age, Jane prided herself on keeping fit. She took her anti-aging meds; she ate well; she worked out almost daily. Her motions were normally swift and self-assured. No. It was the disaster that had caused this unnatural stiffness.

And the toll was written also on her face. It was as smooth and unyielding as a marble bust. Others would read nothing there. But Xuan was a geologist, and knew how to look beneath the surfaces of rocks, and read the processes happening below. He saw all the anguish compressed beneath her calm demeanor.

He lifted his eyebrows at her in a subtle invitation to talk about it, but she did not respond. Well. There would be time later. Xuan removed her jet pack, and put the batteries and air tanks in their rechargers, and did shutdown checks on her jet pack’s processors. Meanwhile, Jane removed, cleaned, and checked the suit itself.

As always, this process consumed a good ten or fifteen minutes, and as always, they performed it together in comfortable silence, bobbing like soap bubbles on air currents as they did so—wafting across the room’s upper reaches, lofting themselves with a lazy toe- or hand-push back over to the equipment racks. All these equipment and physiological checks were tedious, but people who did not do them did not last long.

With a stifled groan, she slipped off her boots and flexed her foothands, clinging to the wall netting with her fingers. She wrung her feet together, rubbing the arches with her thumb-toes, while Xuan checked her radiation levels. “Your numbers look good.”

Jane pulled his radiation monitor off his belt and checked it. “Yours are high.”

“I was out in the field for the past two days.”

“Take your shirt off,” she said.

“I bet you say that to all the gents.”

That brought a brief grin. “Only the cute ones.”

She pulled the bone density scanner out of its cupboard and charged it up. Xuan kicked back, and she ran the scanner over and under him, front and back, while he floated in midair. She gave him his anti-rad and bone regen shot in the upper arm, then kissed him on his belly with a hand under his back. Then she slapped him on the ass, sending him tumbling. Xuan yelled, and grabbed her. They kissed, long and slow and deep. He ran his hands down her back. She wrapped arms and legs around him, releasing a breath, and he felt some of the tension drain from her muscles.

“OK, bone checks,” he said, and she stretched out obligingly. He did the scans. All normal. He gave her a booster shot anyway.

“Healthy as a horse, my love.”

Now that Dominica and Hugh were gone, Jane and Xuan had what amounted to a mansion, by Stroider standards: a four-room (not counting the head), 115-cubic-meter habitat of nylon, plastic, insulation, and alloy that burrowed like a plantar’s wart into the side of their asteroid. Right now they were sharing their spare room with a surly miner who had recently drifted Down from Troy. Jane was doing a favor for a mutual friend from her Ceren days. This guy was no trouble, really, other than the completely non-trivial fact that he was using up their food, water, power, and air.

It was the Upsider way. The Upsider social network was tight, for all that it was spread across vast differences. You could be an anti-social recluse all you wanted, but when someone in need showed up at your door and asked for help, you gave it. The mostly-Japanese First-Wavers who had populated the asteroids had called it giri. The European and North and South American Second- and Third-Wavers called it the sammy system, and built software to keep a tally. Whatever you called it, the fact was that selfish, hoarding pricks did not last long, Upside.

Xuan bounded past her, ricocheting off of the ceiling into his office, a nook nestled in the rock above the kitchen, to put some of his tools away. He noticed her checking their Stroiders numbers, in her office nook.

“Your numbers are up,” she said. She seemed mildly amused.

The Stroiders fans back on Earth ranked Phocaeans on a daily basis. You had two sets of Stroiders numbers: eyes (how many people watched you), and thumbs (what they thought of you on a scale of one to ten, plus the ability to choose a set of keywords that told you why you got the ratings you did).

His current popularity resulted from some help he had given his university colleagues with a strategy they had used to pull off a coup the day before yesterday: a big new corporate mining co-op contract moving into Phocaea from Themis. For some reason the conflict, and his handling of it, had caught the attention of “Stroiders” fans, and to his bemusement, his viewer ratings had, at least briefly—before the disaster struck—rivalled Jane’s.

“Yeah,” he said. “Weird.”

Her expression didn’t change as she continued to scroll through the reports, but he could tell she was viewing her own numbers.

Her thumbs were in the toilet: her popularity had dropped through the floor last night—though, not surprisingly, her eyes were thicker than ever. Clearly, “Stroiders” viewers were blaming her for what had happened.

“Whatever,” she said, and switched off the console.

“Good thing they can’t dole out bad-sammies.”

“True enough.”

Sammies were the counts that mattered: the confidence of the people of Phocaea. Xuan had logged into her public waveface and checked her sammy cache earlier. To his great relief, she had plenty of good sammies in her cache, and the numbers were holding steady. Phocaeans, at least, were not jumping to conclusions about her performance. Yet.

Xuan threw his arms around her and planted a big kiss on her neck.

“I don’t give a damn about the viewer ratings,” she told him. “Honest. I’m all right.”

“My widdew cobhog.” Cranky Old Bitch with a Heart of Gold: a columnist’s phrase for Jane, which they had come across on the net.

“Give me a break.” But she turned and kissed him back. The moment lasted. “Foot rub?” she said hopefully.

“I’ll go you one better. Full-body treatment.”

“Oooh.”

“Food first, though. I’ll wager you haven’t eaten all day.” Even as he said it, Jane’s stomach growled noisily.

“You’re on. Er, is Ferdy around?” Ferdy was the miner they were putting up.

Xuan shook his head. “Gone for several days, he said. Maybe for good this time.”

“Oh ree-e-e-lly?”

“Reee-e-e-lly.” Xuan leered.

“Mmmm.” Jane gripped his hips with her foot-hands and pulled him close, massaging his sore back muscles with her nimble toes. Xuan loved her foot-hands. They drifted to the floor in a meandering tumble for some prehensile snuggling.

A timer went off in the kitchen.

“Damn.” She nuzzled his neck.

“Later. I promise you won’t regret the wait.” He disentangled himself. “Dinner in ten.”

“Thanks,” she said. “I’ll make some calls.”

#

While Xuan cooked—whatever he was cooking, it smelled fantastic—Jane entered the net and worked the crisis virtually. She met with her managers and peers, reviewed her staff’s emergency measures to get the storage hangars and tanks up again and the distribution schedules back in order—probed their life support systems, to ensure they had recovered. Then she spent some time leaving messages for her political allies: shoring up her support and fending off the predators. Xuan floated over with a bowl and waved it under her nose. Her stomach growled again.

“Come eat. Trust your people. Let them do their job.”

So she signed off, and they ate. It was a green curry with non-specific vat-grown protein and enough chili to take the lining off her sinuses. Her appetite returned as she ate, and she wiped her eyes and nose repeatedly.

“Just what I needed,” she said, as she carried the dishes into the little kitchen. “Thank you, dear.”

Xuan informed her that his kin were packing up tonight and would be heading into town tomorrow. “I’ll be helping them move.”

“Good. By tomorrow night I’ll have a space set aside for them in town.”

Once she finished the dishes, she headed to the bedroom and turned off her interface nanoprocessors. Her waveware disengaged—the overlay images in her vision vanished. She disconnected and removed the processor behind her ear and tucked it into its tiny case. Xuan headed over to his work station to shut down his equipment. Then she pulled off her clothes. Undressing in microgee isn’t as easy as you might think, but she had had decades of practice. At that moment, the house phone unit chimed.

“One of the kids,” Xuan said from the other room, “they’re worried,” and answered it.

“It’s for you!” he called.

Jane pulled on her favorite pair of old sweats and then activated the wallscreen bedroom display.

It was Chikuma Funaki. She was tiny—not much more than a meter and a half tall—and thin, with clear, pale skin soft and wrinkled as crumpled tissue. Her eyes were the color of hot chocolate, and her hair was space-black, run through with streaks of white, which she piled atop her head and pinned there with jeweled sticks. She wore the basic stroider tunic and leggings. An attendant stood beside her, whom she dismissed with a nod.

Jane smiled. “Sensei! I’m so glad you called.”

Chikuma was a hundred-forty, perhaps older. She was a First Waver. She had moved to Phocaea at the age of sixteen, a mail-order bride for a miner back in the days when Phocaeans were a few hundred Japanese miners, clinging to the asteroid’s surface and the ancient ways in their rickety domes, awash in radiation. After her husband had been killed in a mining accident, Funaki had taken over her husband’s small business. Petite body, quiet voice, fullerene-strong spirit: Chikuma had fought, finessed, and extorted her way to success. Over the decades, as Phocaea had grown, Chikuma Funaki had become a major power. Among the bankers of Phocaea’s Sky Street, a network of mostly-Japanese investment houses and securities and commodities traders, Chikuma was supreme matriarch. She could be rather awful, in fact, if you got between her and something important she wanted. But she and Jane had always gotten along, particularly since Chikuma had supported Jane’s appointment fifteen years ago, as Phocaea’s resource czar.

Chikuma never saw anyone these days. She had grown rather frail. Only her very close friends or members of her family had ready access to her. Jane was of course a member of Chikuma’s inner circle, but her own reluctance to disturb Chikuma’s peace caused Jane to maintain a certain reserve. (Also, there was always a risk that if one alerted Funaki-sama to what one was up to, she would decide to involve herself, which was akin to releasing the whirlwind.) But nobody knew better than Chikuma Funaki the threat that Anton & Sons posed to Phocaea. She would be interested in this one. If Jane could choose a single ally to back her in a fight against Anton & Sons, it would be Chikuma Funaki.

Jane said, “I apologize for not calling. Matters have been hectic.”

Chikuma nodded. “Of course. You have been dealing with a terrible crisis. I want to offer my support and that of the banking community, in whatever way we can help.”

“Thank you. You are aware of the Anton & Sons ice, I take it?”

Chikuma nodded. “I just learned. Have you been able to learn anything about Anton & Sons’s angle in this?”

“A little. Perhaps we could meet soon to discuss this in more detail.” She probably knew Jane had something specific in mind. Though Chikuma was one of only four Phocaeans whom Upside-Down Productions wasn’t permitted to record, and she used the best encryption money could buy, she and Jane never got too specific inwave.

“I would be delighted. Will you come for tea Friday afternoon? I may be able to provide some useful information for you, as well.”

You made time for Funaki-Sensei. Jane bowed deeply.

“I’d be most honored, Sensei. Thank you.”

“Bring your husband and his family,” she said. “We’ll arrange some activities for the children during the ceremony.”

They say old prejudices die hard, but they also say that in space either your prejudices die, or you do. Some of the city’s First-Waver Phocaean-Japanese still harbored their ancestors’ disdain for the Vietnamese, Korean, and Chinese immigrants who had trickled Upside over the years. Chikuma wasn’t among them. Still, Jane recognized in her invitation the kind of moral courage that Jane had always respected.

“Thank you, Sensei. I’ll extend the invitation.”

#

The kids both called after dinner. Lag from Earthspace was a good forty-four minutes right now, so it wasn’t a conversation, merely an exchange of messages. Dominica called first, from Port Heinlein on Luna.

“Checking in again,” she said. “Tell the Agres…I’m very, very sorry.”

And then Hugh, anguished—distraught. “How could this have happened? It doesn’t feel real. I wish I weren’t so far away.” A long, heavy pause. “There’s a rock I left on my shelf. It was a gift from Carl. I want you to give it to Geoff. He’ll know why.” Pause. “And Mom.” Another long pause, with him breathing heavily, blinking rapidly, looking away from the camera. Then he looked back with a sharp breath. “Don’t blame yourself.” He cut the connection.

Jane and Xuan looked at each other for a moment.

“Can you come tomorrow?” she asked. The look on Xuan’s face told her just how big a mess this crisis had created in his own professional life. But he nodded. “I’ll be there, if at all possible.”

He did not know the Agres well; he was going for her sake.

Jane shook her head. “On second thought, never mind. But I will take you up on dinner in town tomorrow night, if you can swing it.”

#

Xuan made good on his promise for a full-body massage. Under his strong hands, the knots in her shoulders and back begin to let go their hold; she hissed in what he recognized as mingled pleasure and pain. Other pleasant activities ensued.

You have to really want sex, to achieve it in low gee; Newton’s three laws play havoc with bodies in motion. Fortunately, Xuan had rigged all manner of pulleys, levers, and other gear, enabling them to achieve a high degree of mutual, sweaty satisfaction. Afterward they lay in each others’ arms in their webbing—drowsy, skin touching skin. Xuan had optic upgrades, and he loved looking at her, naked in the dark. It was the one time she truly relaxed. Her skin glowed like liquid jewel; the muscles of her face relaxed, lips slightly parted in a smile; the warmth from where his own flesh had pressed against hers was slowly fading from her breasts, belly and thighs as she cooled. Xuan kissed her open palm, cupped her breast one last time for a tender squeeze and kiss, then folded her hand in his, and looked searchingly at her.

“So,” he said finally.

Jane’s face crumpled. He took her into a hug, stroked her hair, and kissed her. She lay her head on his chest, her shoulder’s shook, and her eyes ran with tears. He held her, saying nothing.

After a while, she wiped her eyes and caught her breath.

“It shouldn’t have happened.”

“Any clues yet about the cause?”

She shook her head. “Tania has her people running tests on the life support failsafes. Ahmed is still evaluating the impacts. Sean has been tied up getting repairs done. I haven’t been able to get with him yet about his root cause analysis or Kovak.” Ivan Kovak was the driver who had caused the accident. “Tomorrow is the memorial service, and I have a debriefing the day after tomorrow with Benavidez. The Diet is threatening to launch an independent investigation. I don’t see how he’s going to be able to hold out against all this pressure to offer me up.”

“Hmmm. I doubt it. The cluster needs you. Everybody knows it.”

“I’m not so sure. But if not me, then they’ll pressure me to finger someone in my organization. Someone has to go. They need their scapegoat.”

After a pause, she said, “There’s something more. The eight who died in the other warehouse…”

“Yes?”

“They didn’t die right away. Sean had a rescue team trying to free them. I told him to divert the team to save the ice.” Her face was hot, and the skin of her cheek warmed his chest. He could feel her breasts pressed against him, and her heartbeat, solid and strong, against the muscles of his belly.

“If I hadn’t, we’d only have a few days of ice stores left, and I don’t know how we’re going to make it through, even now. But Xuan”—her voice broke again—”I condemned eight people to die.”

He made no comment, merely nodded, and held her, stroking her hair.

He knew this pain. He had spent his adult life till he was almost forty, Downside, and seen a great deal of evil there. As a teen, he had held his own grandmother in his arms, as she lay dying on a dung heap in some shanty-town on the borders of the people heaps. Most of his family was gone, obliterated over the past two generations by wars and famine.

He sighed, and held Jane close. “This is small comfort, love of my heart, and I would not want to trade places with you. But you did what you had to.”

She nodded.

“I know.” Then she drew a deep breath, and pushed back in the netting to face him. “You need to know this also. I just called Okuyama-Sensei at the university this evening. We’re going to have to shut Kukuyoshi down.”

He was not surprised—everyone at the university had been speculating that about this. It was unavoidable. Still. He felt himself tense under the impact of her words.

“I’m sorry,” she said. “There wasn’t any choice.”

Phocaea was the second largest asteroid community after Vesta, and the reason was the fabulous, huge, multi-gee garden Zekeston housed, Kukuyoshi. If they couldn’t save Kukuyoshi—somehow—all his friends’ and colleagues’ decades of scientific research, all the biotics and natural beauty that they had somehow managed to nurture in the teeth of the harsh hostility of interplanetary space, would be lost forever. Phocaea would be reduced to a backwater once more. A diminished place—a place of chemicals, steel, hard corners, and bulkheads. He grieved, and pulled her close. She sighed. He recognized it as relief.

“How many days till you shut off the power?”

“Three more days at full power. Then five days at gradually declining temperatures. We’re going to stabilize temps at Hollow ambient—minus ten C. The university botanists tell us that a few creatures and plants may be able to hibernate or use other strategies to attempt to survive. They’re not optimistic, but, well. It’s the best we can do.”

#

Xuan fell quiet, cradled next to Jane in their hammock that bobbed easily in the bedroom’s center, and his breathing grew even. He had fallen asleep. He had always been like that, able to sleep no matter what. She envied him.

Jane rose and turned on a night light. She pulled on and belted a silk robe, and floated through their home into the main living area. Near the equipment racks was a corner filled with family holograms and knick knacks; a smiling golden Buddha; an incense burner. Jane pulled a large, blank holoframe out of a drawer. She pulled some pictures off the waveweb of those killed and arranged them in the hologram. She hesitated over Ivan Kovak’s image, and in the end left him off—to put him with the victims of his act seemed an abomination. But she doubted he had intended this awful outcome. What could have driven him to such an act?

She lit a stick of jasmine incense, and looked at the images of the dead for a while. Her dead, she thought. I won’t forget you, she told them silently. Not for a day; not for a minute. I’ll try to make your sacrifice mean something. Smoke spiraled out on the room’s air currents. Carl’s face floated in the center of the montage. She laid her hands on Buddha’s cool metal belly, and just breathed, and mourned.

Finally, exhausted to the point of stupor, she returned to the bedroom and fumbled back into the hammock next to Xuan. He stirred and mumbled, wrapping his arms around her, but didn’t fully wake.

Jane stroked Xuan’s creased face, ran her fingers lightly along his naked flank. She had always loved his face, his body. He had started the anti-aging treatments later than many, and consequently he was deeply creased. He was so ugly he was cute. His stature was lean and short—a couple of inches shorter than she—with rock-brown skin; rather small, wide-set, sad-looking eyes; silky black hair (his one truly gorgeous feature), and big, splayed feet with amazingly prehensile toes (he would never need to bother reëngineering his feet). And he was brilliant, loving, and great in bed; at sixty-two his libido still ran high and they had not yet had to resort to other marital methods than her very favorite, except when they felt like it, for variety. Jane adored every pug-ugly centimeter of him.

She pillowed her cheek against her palm. She remembered the Voice. She could feel the echoes of it, now that she was paying attention: like a bell ringing through her, just beyond hearing. Had that Voice even happened? The very notion seemed absurd. The stress she had been under since the disaster had been enormous. That could easily explain it. Fatigue; stress; neuro-stimulants; a temporary breakdown in neurotransmitter function. She would see a doctor as soon as the crisis abated.

She drifted off to sleep, many thoughts swirling through her mind: whether Xuan would truly be able to forgive her for the impending death of Kukuyoshi; how much time they had before the citizens started dying; how get Anton & Sons’s ice without paying for it in blood.

But there was one question she wasn’t pondering that, if she had known how important it was, would have crowded out all the others. She did not spare a single thought for why, during those eight seconds Carl had been struggling to reach the doors, the life support systems had failed.

**end of chapter 4**

_____________________

Chapter one.

Chapter two.

Chapter three.

Chapter four.

Chapter five.