Up Against It - M. J. Locke [25]
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 onto Xi-Upsilon-Alpha’s tether rail, then reeled in the slack, jostling her onto her new trajectory: a high-tech primate swinging on her vine. 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 brilliant button, dominated the dark 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 blob about which swarmed a flock of orange, green, blue, and white sparks: the confiscated ships.
Two handspans above the faintly visible 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 the moon a faint dot snuggling beneath it.
It was as her gaze fell on Earth that she heard the Voice.
Jane? It said, Jane…?
It held a hint of inquiry, and spoke in a timbre so resonant—so saturated with love-passion-mercy-Beingness—that tears stung her sinuses. Though barely a whisper, it rang through her like tones from a great, distant bell. Jane 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 commlink. 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 that despite its velvet-gentle touch, its departure left her limp and useless as exhaled vapor.
Calm down, Navio. Think. She slowed her breathing and waited for the pounding in her chest and throat to subside as her starboard tether’s electrostatic 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 Nirvana, 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 old-timers hallucinated, though, once in a while—when they were out alone in four Kelvins with nothing but their helmet light, tethers, and pneumopacks for company; when the cold seeped in or the pneumopack faltered and they remembered how far they were from the nearest aid station; when they reflected on just how many people had died out here, with their frozen corpses not found for years, if ever. Or when they were grieving, or in shock.
She had heard her mother’s voice once, shortly after her parents had died. She had dreamt of their death before it happened, too, in a bizarre dream sequence that made it seem as if she had somehow known—though of course that was nonsense. She wasn’t the type the unexplainable happened to.
I’m sorry, she told the Voice; you’ve reached an address 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. She spotted it: