"Correct. If we don't leave enough for Sean to build up his disa.s.sembler population fast, even if we do get an ice shipment in time, we won't be able to convert enough oxygen to support our people."

"Give me a date. How long do we have?"

"With strict rationing of fuel, water, and air, and optimal balancing: twenty-six days. That's the best I can do."

Jane heard Sean or Tania inhale. She had known, though. "Several dozen families will be falling off the ends of the treeway before then," Aaron said, "and will either need to be restocked or brought in. That will have to be your call."

"Bring them in. Standard protocol." Standard protocol: they were welcome to refuse the official invitation to camp out in Zekeston or one of the other two towns till the supply crisis eased, but did so at their own peril.

Stroiders were a frontier-minded lot. If some fool fell off the treeway insufficiently stocked, and many years later on the other side of the sun ran out of supplies or had no way back, well, too bad, so sad.

Of course, the reality wasn't quite that harsh. If Phocaea could do something for its citizens beyond the edges of the treeways, it did. Especially if there were children, or if they had racked up a lot of good-sammies. A fleet of craft cruising retrograde in Phocaea's...o...b..t performed antipiracy and search-and-rescue operations.

But troubles were many, s.p.a.ce was vast, and rescue craft were few. Those who had chosen to fall off the treeways not fully stocked were given a lower priority than those who had simply gotten caught in a crisis not of their own making. And this meant that children frequently ended up as victims of their parents' pigheadedness and poor planning. Reading reports of the frozen bodies found on faraway stroids always pained her. But in a wilderness society where there wasn't always enough fuel and air and water to go around, people fell out of touch all the time, they had little choice.

"Will do," Aaron said.

"What about odor management?"

"I've cut the control system back by thirty percent," he replied. "It'll gradually get more pungent, but won't be really bad for a week or so."

"Well, but we are going to have an extra twenty or thirty thousand people coming in from the burbs," Tania said.

Aaron shrugged. "I accounted for that. I checked the actuarial stats for significant violence and suicide impacts, and kept us below that line."

"OK, is that it?" Jane asked. Aaron nodded. "Resource accounting," she said. "Any good prospects from the citizenry?"

Aaron said, "The banks report a small but steady trickle of ice claims coming in. A few sugar-rock reports, but none have panned out. I do not expect them to alter our numbers appreciably."

"Sugar rocks?" Sean looked confused. He was a fairly recent Downsider emigre.

Tania explained, "The First Wave miners used to h.o.a.rd methane and water ice inside their claims, as they tapped them out."

Aaron said, "It's usually a waste of time to bring them in-a large amount of effort for only a little ice-but once, forty or fifty years ago, a sugar rock made a big difference for the Eros cl.u.s.ter. The university is pairing up with the banks to investigate the claims."

"Every little bit helps. But we can't count on sugar rocks to save us. Could you send me your resource balancing calculations?" Jane asked Aaron. "I want to run through them myself, see if I can squeeze anything more out of the system."

"Of course." He pulled up his waveface and sent her some files.

"So," Jane said, "other ice sources. Perhaps from one of the other cl.u.s.ters?"

Sean replied, "Our fellow stroiders-the ones inclined to help, anyway-are all too close to depleted themselves. Saturn, Mars, and Earth are all near opposition-too far away to do us any good. Joves.p.a.ce is our best bet. I've already authorized an emergency expedition. They are outfitting a tug and barge, and will leave tomorrow-I mean, this afternoon."

"How soon can they get us ice?"

"Eight weeks, earliest. More likely nine."

A five-week gap. Not soon enough!

Aaron said, "I have received word from Ilion on an interesting lead. A three-million-ton shipment of methane ice is coming Down from the Kuiper belt, destined for a construction project on the moon. That's the only major ice shipment within four months' travel of us."

"What? But that's all we need! No way anyone would refuse us a reasonable deal. Why didn't you tell me before?" But that's all we need! No way anyone would refuse us a reasonable deal. Why didn't you tell me before?"

Aaron looked apprehensive. "Well, there's a complication. The ice is owned by Ogilvie & Sons."

Ogilvie & Sons. The Martian mob. s.h.i.t. s.h.i.t. She pinched her brow. "Where is it now?" She pinched her brow. "Where is it now?"

"Hitting a parking orbit near Ilion, late today."

Most of the ice that sustained the s.p.a.ce colonies came from the Kuiper belt. It took a really really long time to ship ice from out there. The Kuiper belt was much farther out than people realized-at least thirty times as far from the sun as Earth; nearly ten times as far out as the Phocaean cl.u.s.ter. This left little margin for error. Still, it was much cheaper to ship ice from the outer system than it was to try to lift it from the outer moons' gravity wells. long time to ship ice from out there. The Kuiper belt was much farther out than people realized-at least thirty times as far from the sun as Earth; nearly ten times as far out as the Phocaean cl.u.s.ter. This left little margin for error. Still, it was much cheaper to ship ice from the outer system than it was to try to lift it from the outer moons' gravity wells.

With Kuiper objects, all you had to do was give the ice a nudge, and down into the sun's gravitational well it came, faster and faster, like a big dirty ball of ice rolling down a hill. The real problem was stopping it once it started. Quite understandably, Earth was paranoid about Upsider rocks screaming into the inner system at high speeds. Earth had had enough impact extinction events to last it, thank you very much. By interplanetary treaty, if an Upsider shipment crossed Mars...o...b..t at greater than twenty thousand meters per second, it was confiscated or shot out of the sky with Earth's high-energy beam gaxasers. So shippers usually aimed their shipments at Saturn or Jupiter, using the gas giants as gravitational brakes. They settled the shipments into orbits between Saturn and Jupiter, and when they were ready to ship them farther Downward, strapped engines on and sent them to their final destination at safer speeds.

"The ice could be here in about three weeks," Aaron finished.

"About?"

"Twenty-two days, soonest, according to my calculations."

"Right in the very nick of time," Sean said.

"What a strange and remarkable coincidence," Jane said archly.

Tania said, "I can't see Ogilvie & Sons giving us a trillion troy's worth of ice out of the goodness of their hearts."

"No," Aaron agreed.

Jane said, "Very well. Thank you. Sean, what about the warehouses?"

"Repairs of the housing structures and storage tanks will start soon," he replied. "Our biggest problem right now is the disa.s.sembler circulatory system. We don't have all of the parts we need to actuate the manifolds, and the codes for rea.s.sembling them were damaged during the incident. But my people are jury-rigging a bypa.s.s we can use till the parts come Up from Mars in six months. It'll be crude, but we can make it work. I expect it to be operational by next Tuesday or Wednesday."

"Make it Tuesday."

"You got it."

"So what about stores? Give me the numbers."

"At least one hundred forty million troy's worth of pressure-sensitive goods in our warehouses were destroyed. The rest is inaccessible till our crews and equipment are freed up. The owners are screaming b.l.o.o.d.y murder. Several critical undamaged shipments are being held up due to the ship confiscations. I'm getting complaints out my a.s.s. Shipping's clients are screaming. The insurers have their investigators breathing down my neck."

"Who would have thought it."

"We'll lose business. Pallas, Vesta, and Ceres are vying to cut us out."

"I know. Can't be helped. Until we have a source of fuel on its way, we have to be conservative. "

"Yes, ma'am."

She grinned at his reflexive use of the military honorific. "I'll set aside some time tomorrow to make a few calls and smooth things over with your customers and talk to the insurers. Ask Marty to set up a couple of calls."

"It would be a big help."

"Zap Marty the names and addresses, and copy me."

He nodded, and scribbled with his finger in midair. She scanned the list as it came across her waveface. As she had suspected, two of last night's callers were on the list. "What about the driver?" she asked. "Any more details on how it happened, or why?"

That angry look moved onto his face. "The police are investigating Kovak's background. I'm meeting with Jerry and getting a full briefing at noon." The chief of police, Jerry Fitzpatrick, was a good friend of Sean's.

"What do we know?"

"Apparently he was in a group marriage. A month ago his partners ran off with each other and the children. He'd been on antidepressants and seeing a spiritual guide." Great, a religious nut. Jane sighed. "It appears he killed himself with an overdose," Sean finished. "Why he chose to take his coworkers out with him...." He hunched his shoulders.

"It may not have been a deliberate act-"

"It might as well have been," he snapped. "Suicide-murder. If he were still alive I'd kill him myself. s.p.a.ce the f.u.c.ker."

Jane pinched her lip, observing him. Finally she couldn't help herself. "None of us saw this coming, Sean."

"Don't patronize me!" He slammed a palm down, making them all jump and sending himself into a slow backward spiral. He righted himself. "I watched a kid die while we were trying to get the doors open. It's Kovak's doing. He deserved to go out a lot more slowly and painfully than he did."

There was a tense silence. Tania and Aaron exchanged looks.

"Are we done? I need to get back to the warehouse."

"We're not done. Sit down."

Sean glared at her, an intimidating hulk of a man. Jane glared back. She wondered if he was going to disobey her. But his military training took hold, and he settled back onto his seat. The only evidence of his agitation was his fingers drumming a beat on the table.

Jane said, "Tania."

Tania Gravinchikov was a short, plump woman in her early sixties. Her red hair and clothes were rumpled, and her pale grey eyes were as bloodshot as Aaron's and Sean's. But this crisis did not weigh on her as it did for Aaron or Sean; for her it was like surfing a tidal wave. She flashed Jane a smile. "We've been running checks on life support, and something odd was definitely going on."

"Odd?" Jane frowned. "What do you mean?"

"I mean the life-support computer systems suffered a mini-nervous breakdown in response to the crisis. You know those doors in Warehouse 2-H? Well, my code jockeys tell me they stayed open longer than they should have. Much longer. And they were big doors. The influx of air from the maintenance tunnels kept the dome temperature from dropping as rapidly as it should have. If the doors had closed when they were supposed to, according to our projections, the bugs would have frozen per the design specs, before they chewed through the warehouse walls, and the damage would have been much less severe. The release wouldn't have reached the lake, and only Kovak, the driver, would have been killed-the bugs would likely not have destroyed the emergency life-support lockers before Carl Agre could get to them."

Jane pondered that. "Have you isolated the problem yet?"

"Not yet. We're working on it. We've combed through about ten million lines of code so far. Imagine, Jane, some of our life-support tech goes back to the first lunar base! You should see the stuff we've dug up!" Tania spoke with an enthusiasm only a software designer could feel. "I'm finding all sorts of ancient oddities," she went on. "Did you know we've got chunks of code written by Pater de Felice and his monastic or-"

Jane cleared her throat pointedly.

"Anyw-a-a-ay..." Tania continued, "we're closing in on the problem code, but there won't be much to report until we actually corner the bug, or bugs, that caused the problem. We've been able to replicate many of the conditions that caused the failure, though-in simulation, of course," she added hurriedly, seeing their looks of alarm, "and we're getting interesting results." She gave Jane a meaningful look. "I fully expect to have answers by this afternoon and be able to present you with some options for next steps." Jane got Tania's meaning: she expected to know how it had happened by the time of their offline meeting at one-thirty. Perhaps even how to fix it? Jane did not want to get her hopes up.

"Anything else? Comments?" No one replied. "Very well. Use the eyes-on list for any new developments. Let's get to work."

Her heads-up reminded her with an increasingly urgent graphic that the "Stroiders" privacy costs were stacking up, so she approved the cancellation of the privacy screen. The "Stroiders-live" icon lit up her waveface, and a handful of miniature rovers crept into the room, along with a wave of motes, as her staff left.

Jane called up her staff's reports. Ogilvie & Sons, eh? An awful hunch took shape. She summoned her a.n.a.lytical sapient, Jonesy, and had it pull all available shipping logs for Ogilvie & Sons and its subsidiaries, going back eighteen months. Jonesy tossed them into a s.p.a.ce-time mapping program, and plotted the ships' trajectories, while Jane sat back and watched. The tiny dots-Ogilvie & Sons shipments-crawled around the solar system at 10x speed.

She had to rerun it several times to be absolutely sure.

Ogilvie & Sons had a fleet of about sixty ships it owned or leased. Before about ten months ago, they all moved around the outer solar system in a random shipping pattern-dropping cargo here, stopping for repairs and new orders there. But starting late last year, two dozen of those ships-only the owned ones; and always their newest, fastest, and best-armored models-began a complicated dance that (a) involved a trip to Mars, and (b) thereafter, zigzagged their way to various points in the asteroid belt within about a million kilometers of 25 Phocaea, where (c) at some time within the past two weeks, they docked for repairs or temporary decommissioning.

One last thing to check. Upside-Down may not have their cameras shoved up Upside-Down may not have their cameras shoved up your your a.s.ses, a.s.ses, she thought at the Ogilvies, she thought at the Ogilvies, but I have other ways of finding out what you're up to. but I have other ways of finding out what you're up to.

She sent Jonesy out onto the Solar wave, and in a while it brought her reams of Mars imagery-all online and available for free. She studied various tourists' and satellite photos of the docks where those ships had landed, for a range of dates surrounding when the ships had touched down. What she found was every bit as bad as she had feared. Jane had Jonesy gather all these images, do some calculations for her, and organize the rest of the data for her presentation. Then she sat for a moment, pressing palms to her eyes.

She did not want to dredge up her long-buried memories of her stint on Vesta, and what the Ogilvies had done there. But Benavidez had never taken the Martian mob very seriously. If he failed to this time, Phocaea would be lost. She changed into a clean suit and then lofted herself up the Easy Spokeway to the prime minister's offices.

An angry mob of ships' captains and owners clogged the entry to the prime minister's antechambers. Their vessels had just been confiscated-she had heard it on the news. The faces she recognized among them might as well have been strangers'.

Security made a path for her. Her bad-sammy bar crept upward as she moved through, a growing red stain at the right-hand side of her vision. Shouts of "Who do you think you are?" "Fascists!" and "When do I get my ship back?" accompanied her. The air was thick with mote glamour.

In open public s.p.a.ces, particularly when the event had a high enough newsworthiness quotient, Upside-Down Productions dispersed spy motes in ma.s.s quant.i.ties. The first time Jane had seen them, she had thought they were beautiful. Now they filled her with loathing.

Then she pa.s.sed through the prime minister's "Stroiders" barrier: a curtain of moist, floral-scented air that expelled the choking clouds of "Stroiders" motes. She drew a deep, relieved breath.

Benavidez was one of only six people who lived in a bubble perpetually protected from "Stroiders" scrutiny, and all his support staff benefited, at least during their workday. She envied them that.

Jarantillo, one of Benavidez's senior administrative staff, greeted her. "It's getting ugly out there."

"Sure is."

He preceded her from the entryway into the antechamber itself. A famous hand-blown gla.s.s sculpture, Beatnik Jesus, Beatnik Jesus, showed Jesus wearing swimming trunks and an unb.u.t.toned Hawaiian shirt made of stained gla.s.s that rippled out behind him in an unseen breeze. He balanced on his toes, arms joyfully outspread, hair whipped around his face as he looked back at the blue-green wave that broke over him. It had been a gift from the president of the Christian Federation of American States, on Benavidez's election. Above the executive a.s.sistants' cubbies, a Ceren upside-down plant spread willowy, orangy green tendrils across the ceiling, its roots sprouting purple flowers heavy with yellow pollen; a collection of Jovian lightning-bulbs crackled and flashed, bobbing in a convective column of colored gas, against one wall. Beyond it was a honeycomb of small offices and cubicles, where people crouched over screens at their workstations, shifting anxiously, exchanging whispers. showed Jesus wearing swimming trunks and an unb.u.t.toned Hawaiian shirt made of stained gla.s.s that rippled out behind him in an unseen breeze. He balanced on his toes, arms joyfully outspread, hair whipped around his face as he looked back at the blue-green wave that broke over him. It had been a gift from the president of the Christian Federation of American States, on Benavidez's election. Above the executive a.s.sistants' cubbies, a Ceren upside-down plant spread willowy, orangy green tendrils across the ceiling, its roots sprouting purple flowers heavy with yellow pollen; a collection of Jovian lightning-bulbs crackled and flashed, bobbing in a convective column of colored gas, against one wall. Beyond it was a honeycomb of small offices and cubicles, where people crouched over screens at their workstations, shifting anxiously, exchanging whispers.

Jarantillo shook his head. "I saw two of my neighbors out there. What if they attack us on our way home? Val"-the security chief-"said he couldn't give my people escorts."

"Don't worry," Jane said. "They're just caught up in the initial shock. Val's people will get them dispersed soon enough."

He nodded, but didn't look any less worried. "I'll let the prime minister know you're here."

A few moments later, Benavidez's chief of staff, Thomas Harman, ushered her into Benavidez's office, along with Val Pearce, head of Security, and Emily Takamoro, his chief media strategist. Val was tall, balding, and stout; Emily short and slim, with a pretty face and a streak of white in her dark hair. As the door shuttered closed, she saw that Benavidez was lounging in the conference room webbing. He was big and muscular, with olive skin and dark brown hair and eyes. Usually his affect was cheerful and easy, but not tonight.

Benavidez rubbed his eyes. "Let's get started. Jane, I've asked Val and Emily to join us: Val because of the obvious security implications, and Emily because of the public relations angle."

"Very good, sir."

"Have you had a chance to prepare the latest resource report?"

"I have." She called up her interface and tied them all in. A series of tables and charts unfolded in the s.p.a.ce between them.

"Phocaea normally uses fifteen to eighteen thousand tons of mixed methane and water ice per day. I can crank that down to about twelve thousand with strict rationing, and we've already taken the necessary measures. We've got three hundred nineteen thousand tons. I've created a countdown clock." She transmitted the app. "It'll load permanently onto all your interfaces as soon as you activate it. It's set at twenty-six days, four hours, and"-she checked the time-"two minutes. That's our best current estimate of how much time we have left."

"Three and a half weeks?" Benavidez said.

"That may change a little, as we improve our inventory numbers. The clock will be automatically updated as new information comes in. Mr. Prime Minister, I'd like to transmit this clock to the rest of your staff as well. It'll be important to their emergency response efforts."