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“Oh, get up, woman,” the Badaulet scolded. “Meet your death on your feet, for your girlish cowardice is so undignified.”

“Get down here and hit the deck, stupid! This increases our odds of survival!”

“There are no ‘odds for survival’! There is only what Heaven ordains!”

Having endured many bombs in her past, Sonja ignored him, and doubled up tightly on the spotless airlock floor. “For God’s sake, why are they trying to hit me instead of that huge Mars dome over there? That is China’s greatest prestige construction, it’s got to be a much fatter target than I am!”

“Sonja, my dear wife Sonja: Let us swear to Heaven that if we survive this cowardly attack, we will track down these evildoers and personally kill them ourselves.”

“I love you so much for saying that! That is the greatest thing you have ever said to me! I swear I’ll do it, if you will do it with me.”

The plane smashed into the airlock and shattered. Brittle pieces of airplane plummeted out of their sight.

“Built by amateurs,” Sonja said, craning her neck to stare.

“I am glad that it broke to pieces,” said the Badaulet, still on his feet but panting harder, “but now we will smother to death in this sealed, trapped room.”

Sonja didn’t much mind meeting her own death. Still, to lose him, another husband, right before her eyes…

Sonja never heard the bomb explode.

SONJA’S SUPPORT TENT was scarlet and the moon shone through it.

Any narrow escape from death always made Sonja keenly sentimental. Escaping death had taught her that life had many tags and rags, loose ends, unmet potentials. Sonja rather prided herself on her serene fatalism, but there were always issues she felt unhappy to leave unsettled.

Escape from death put her in a generous, easygoing, affirmative mood. Because, now, all the days ahead of her were a free gift. Like icing on a pretty cake hit by a grenade.

“That drone bomb blew both my eardrums out,” she told her brother, George. “The overpressure broke both of them. So the state built me brand-new ears. I have new and advanced Chinese cyborg astronaut ears. My ears are officially fantastic.”

George blinked from distant Europe, on his video screen. “Sonja, how many attempts does this make on your life?”

Sonja blinked back. “Do you mean me personally?”

“Of course I mean you personally! Stop acting crazy.”

“Why would I keep count of that? After I went to New York and I saw that New York City had been nuked … Why does anyone ever bother to count the dead? I’m just one person! If you don’t count Radmila. Radmila was also there in New York City.”

“Are you talking to me openly about Radmila now?” George was amazed. “Are you on drugs, Sonja?”

“This is Jiuquan, we don’t trifle with stupid narcotics!” Sonja had a raging exfection. An “exfection” was very much like an infection. Except, instead of causing human flesh to waste away rapidly in a noisome mass of pus, an exfection was a kindly state-designed microbe that caused damaged human flesh to heal at more-than-human speed.

There were yellow, crusty, suppurating masses of exfection thriving all over Sonja’s bomb-scorched shins and forearms. The crude bomb had shocked her and burned her, but since the airlock was made almost entirely of fabric, there had been no killing shrapnel.

The Badaulet had faced his own death boldly standing, so the bomb had broken both his feet. Her lucky husband was in a distant safe house hidden in the inflated bowels of the city, undergoing some much-embarrassed Chinese medical hospitality.

“Sonja,” George told her, “if your brand-new ears are really working, then just for once, I want you to listen to me. I have an important proposal for you. I want you to accept it.”

“Do you ever talk to Radmila, George?”

“Do I ‘talk’ to Radmila? I have met Radmila! We were in the same room together in Los Angeles, just last month! Radmila was kind to me!” George was sincerely thrilled.

“Then, Djordje, would you please tell Radmila—that I’m sorry I kicked her ass, that time in New York? That was wrong