Up Against It - M. J. Locke [30]
“Any clues yet as to the cause?” he asked.
She drew back, shaking her head, and wiped at her eyes. “Sean has been tied up getting repairs done. I haven’t been able to get with him about his root cause analysis. Tomorrow is the memorial service, and I have a debriefing on Friday with Benavidez. Parliament is threatening to launch an independent investigation. I don’t see how he can hold out against all this pressure to offer me up.”
“The cluster needs you. Everybody knows it.”
“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 second 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.” She settled against him again. The skin of her cheek heated his chest. He could feel 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 stroked her hair. “Tough call.”
He felt her head nodding. “Toughest yet.” Then she drew a deep breath, and shifted in the netting to face him. “You need to know this also. I just called Okuyama-sensei at the university this evening. We have to shut Kukuyoshi down.”
He was not surprised. Everyone at the university had been speculating. It was unavoidable. Still. He felt himself flinch.
“I’m sorry,” she said.
Phocaea was the largest asteroid community after Ceres, and the reason was their fabulous, multigee arboretum, Kukuyoshi. If they couldn’t save Kukuyoshi, all his colleagues’ decades of scientific research, all the biotics and natural beauty they had somehow managed to build in the teeth of harsh vacuum, would be lost forever. Phocaea would be reduced to a place of chemicals, steel, hard corners, and bulkheads.
He pulled her close once more. She sighed, and he recognized it as relief. Had she truly expected anger?
“How many days till you shut it down?”
“Three more days at full power. Then five at gradually declining temperatures. We’ll stabilize temps at Hollow ambient—minus ten C. Some creatures and plants may be able to hibernate or use other strategies to survive. It’s not an optimistic scenario, but it’s the best we can do.”
* * *
Xuan’s breathing told Jane he had fallen asleep. She climbed out of the webbing, turned on a night-light, and floated up into the main living area. A corner near the equipment racks was dedicated to family holograms and sentimental knickknacks. It also housed a small gong, a smiling golden Buddha, and an incense burner, in which a stick of incense still burned from Xuan’s earlier meditations.
Jane pulled out a blank holoframe, and filled it with pictures of those killed. She hesitated over Ivan Kovak, and in the end left him off—to honor him alongside his victims seemed an abomination. What could have driven him to such an act?
She mounted the frame on the wall, lit a stick of Xuan’s jasmine incense, and looked at the images of the dead for a while. Smoke spiraled out on the room’s air currents. Carl’s face floated into the center of the montage. They were her dead now. She owned, not them, but their ends.
I won’t forget you. Not for a day; not for a minute. Somehow, I’ll make your sacrifice mean something. Somehow. She laid her hands on Buddha’s cool metal belly, 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 along his naked flank.
He had started the antiaging treatments later than many, and consequently he was deeply creased. He was so ugly he was cute. His eyes and orbital sockets had been enlarged, so he looked a bit silly, like those