by Gregory Norman Bossert

Greg Bossert is doing music and sound effects, as well as editing and computer graphics for famed Star Wars sculptor and animator Tony McVey’s new science fiction stop-motion animation project “The Gardens of Miranda.” The details for this endeavor as well as other news and thoughts about the craft of writing are available at Greg’s blog: www.gregorynormanbossert.com. Although he’s already been the author of an Asimov’s cover story—”The Union of Soil and Sky” (April/May 2010) and has another tale waiting in our wings—Greg is thrilled to be attending the 2010 Clarion Writers Workshop in San Diego. We can’t wait to see what stories come pouring out of that experience, but in the meantime, we warn you to hold onto your seat while Greg whisks you along for a thrilling adventure aboard a . . .

NaN, Our Lady of Omissions, opened her eyes onto the black of her coffin, and lifted herself up. And cracked her head against the lid, which was minus one for the all-a-dream-after-all. The dark, the silence, the feeling of floating, the inability to move, all that was the stuff of contented reverie to her; “fine and private” she mumbled hopefully at the stars that flared in her head. But the pain was not, nor the stale air, nor the cracked sound of her own voice in a tight space, and surely not the feeling of something grating inside her left arm. She reached up with her right, and just eight inches above her head was the lid, metal and solid and cold, grave cold, death cold.

She tried to kick, down or up, but her legs were heavy. Not dream heavy, but wrapped in something, layers of something, smothering but icy, and slowly, firmly pulsing, and that’s when she lost it, flailed and screamed, more a squeal from her shriveled throat; she just went away for a bit, then, to a simpler, more accustomed darkness.

But the cold was insistent, and the throb in her head, and a flashing green, that wasn’t from the smack into the coffin; it was a display mounted in the lid above her face:

[Door—Open? RIGHT-Yes LEFT-Cancel]

With helpful icons illustrating the concept of left and right, but nothing clarifying “open,” or indeed what exactly would open. Idiots, she thought, while the lizard brain went back to flailing, because there was something on the lid above her right hand, an LED and a nub, a switch, and she slammed it right, yes yes yes open let me out, right through a series of warning screens which belatedly scrolled onto the display:

[Pressure Differential—Continue? RIGHT-Yes LEFT-Cancel]

[Life Support Active—Disengage? RIGHT-Yes LEFT-Cancel]

[External Locks Active—Disengage? RIGHT-Yes LEFT-Cancel]

A downward whirring, and the clunk of latches disengaging down the length of the coffin, and then the hiss of air, the exact volume and tone of her earlier shriek.

“Idiots!” she said out loud, and fumbled the switch left, just once this time, and waited for the display to update, as her ears popped.

[Open—Abort? RIGHT-Yes LEFT-Cancel]

Once, just once, to the right, and the hiss stopped. The display offered:

[Open—Resume? RIGHT-Yes LEFT-Cancel]

“Cancel” just redisplayed the same prompt, but the switch pushed down as well, and up, and that gave her a menu, and options to restart the life support systems, and reactivate the locks; she chose “yes” to both, lay there, and caught her breath, which had, she suspected, been depleted more by panic than actual decompression.

“So then, factcheck,” she said to the display. “I’m in a box. A box designed by cube-dwelling monkeys. It’s cold, it’s dark, my intestines are trying to switch places with my lungs, and there’s no air outside. Where does that put me?”

The display said [Main Menu], but it was bzzz, sorry, thanks for playing, “space” is the answer we’re looking for, even if that’s

“Totally whacked,” she croaked,

who had just dozed off, what felt like a few minutes ago, on her couch in Reno, which might be vacant and vacuous, but was firmly, relentlessly Earth-bound.

Inventory, then. One coffin, previously mentioned. One self, NaN, Our Lady of Omissions, likewise. Panties, one pair, in a bunch, or so it felt, under some kind of heavy, stiff . . . she tried to shift her legs again, which were wedged a bit askew, one foot not fully into what felt like an attached boot, and then she had to shut her eyes and breath against the claustrophobic panic that bubbled up again, along with her damn floating guts.

“Heavy, stiff overalls,” she continued. “Whatcha bet, spacesuit?” The dim light from the display didn’t illuminate anything beyond itself, so she probed about with her free hand, and it felt spacesuit-ish enough, tubes and straps and rigid panels. A bit gritty, outside and in, and a full size too big, and something suspiciously like duct tape; not at all the shiny tech on the tube ads, but that was reassuring, in a way: more real, less likely that she was stark raving, which was otherwise Occam’s opinion on the situation.

The suit was not exactly on right, either, which was the reason her legs were so tangled; the left side was unzipped and pushed down to her waist, something achy cold against that breast no matter how she shifted, and her left arm pinned, straps, it felt like, and tubes running up from somewhere below and into sockets in her arm. Well, the sockets weren’t actually mounted into the skin; no alien neurotap tech, which might have confirmed the stark raving theory. The sockets were mounted on needles, and the needles were taped down, their tips somewhere deep in her forearm, which was plus one for nausea, minus one for crazy: an IV, drugs, keeping her under, keeping her fed, maybe, which brought up questions like “when” and “how long.” Better, she thought, to stick to the inventory for now.

But that was as far as she could reach; no way to bend and follow the IV tubes toward her feet, past the tangle of suit around her waist, and nothing else but smooth, frigid surfaces, excepting the switch by her hand and the small display panel over her head.

In front of my head, she corrected herself; over my head

“Is where I am,” she said out loud,

but she, if she wedged her elbow up between her cheek and the display, she could reach past her ear and touch something chill and sharp: metal, but not the end of the coffin. A curving rim, and a rubbery lining, and some sort of latch that rattled on the side, and that was just like the shiny spacesuits on the tube ads.

So, then, time for summary, and never mind that word “time” and the associated questions, she could deal with that when she had more data (but I’m skinny, those are my ribs making icy ridges against my arm, and how long would that have taken?) more solid data to work with. No, the issue here and now was:

“Do I, NaN, Our Lady of Omissions, lie here like a good little stiff where someone stuck me, or do I pull this helmet on and get out of this damn box?”

Not a Number, she thought, and reached up for the helmet.

* * * *

It had taken her a while before she was ready to risk the coffin switch again. It had taken her a while just to get the tubes disconnected from her arm; in the end, she had unscrewed them from the sockets, one dribbling something cold and slimy onto her hip, and decided to leave the needles where they were, in hopes of finding better light, or a first aid kit, or a flying doctor. Likewise for the strap around her chest, angled like a bandolier, stretchy and embedded with sensors; she’d disconnected the attached cable and tucked it next to the tubes.

And then she had wiggled into the left side of the suit, and spent the good part of half an hour trying to get the zipper up and the overlying seals pressed down, everything made that much harder by fits of convulsive shivering. There had followed a few minutes of raging frustration trying to get a grip on the slick rim of the helmet; eventually she shoved with her legs and slid herself up into it. Fortunately, the helmet latches had been designed for clumsy gloves; even more fortunately, the suit powered up automatically when the latches were engaged.

Nothing for it, then, but to flick the coffin joystick down to the emergency menu, and right, right, right, the hiss barely audible through the helmet, and the display flew back and around; she could just catch it flashing

[OPENING]

as it tilted out of view, a desperate grab after the lid, and then she was tumbling out into deep space. Deep space was dark and cold and about eight feet high; she pinballed off two walls and headfirst into the side of the coffin, slamming the same spot on her head against the helmet visor.

“Airbags,” she muttered; she was keeping a list, and some designer’s ass was gonna smolder as soon as she got messaging access. She was wedged head-first against the coffin, feet dangling into the void, such as it was. She bumped through the suit menu with her chin, found

[Lighting/External/Helmet]

The headlights picked out the coffin, plastic crates in a web of webbing, a far wall. She pushed herself loose, hit three walls this time but missed the coffin; difficulty four and a half, she thought, and she was not going to hurl, which proved true, but only because her stomach was empty.

The other direction: more crates, more webbing, more walls, and double doors at the end. Deep space looked a whole lot like a shipping container.

She wormed her way through to the end with the doors. There was an emergency release marked in yellow stripes, but it was wedged, or maybe it was just that she was dazedskinnyweak (how long?). She crawled back to the coffin, looking for a lever,

“Find a crowbar, I’m using it on you first,” she said to the coffin display,

The coffin was deep, and full of gizmos, all miniaturized and delicate and firmly attached. Strapped to the outside, however, was a bag, and in the bag was a shielded electronics pouch, and in that was

“A(i)da!” she cried, or croaked.

Her baby, and alive alive o; she came up in war-mode, and NaN let her spin because you never know, but “no networks found.”

“S’okay, A, we’re in space,” NaN explained, though A(i)da couldn’t hear her with the vacuum and all, gotta fix that, but first make sure that she was inviolate. “Driven snow” A(i)da assured, via her screen, NaN’s own code, burned onto a PLD hidden under a blob of solder. But someone had made a pass at her, and had been clueful enough to block the camera while doing so. The logs showed the attempt as 2042.10.14, which was tomorrow-that-was, and that brought up the issue of today-that-is, but with A(i)da there, NaN was fearless, mostly, and anyway too late, she’d looked. It was okayokayokay; she drifted for a bit, but it wasn’t really a surprise, given the skinny ribs and all. 2043.03.10. Five months, not even, she could handle that, and anyway, it was done, and she was out, and about to be more out.

The bag also contained some cables, a pen, postums, a mug, a dirty spoon, all quite familiar: someone (who?) had dumped the entire contents of her desk-cum-table. No crowbar; she was definitely keeping one next to the mug from now on.

With A(i)da tucked into a pocket on her hip, NaN shimmied back to the door. The spoon just bent, first try. But her brain was getting straighter; she looped some webbing through the handle and wedged her feet and pulled, and felt the clunk as the latch gave way. Feet wedged the other way, and the webbing clipped to her waist in case deep space was deeper this time, she pushed the door open.

And space was vast, maybe fifty feet “down” past the container edge to a wall, and a bit less up and side to side; the far end lost in shadow, and all filled with shipping containers clamped to each other, and to a grid of steel supports. She let herself drift to the end of her leash, spun slowly; in the other direction, maybe forty feet and a wall, this one with features: panels and cables and doors: a huge hatch, and a pair of smaller ones, and another at the top, and that one with a dim green light over it.

“This way to the egress,” she said to A(i)da, despite the vacuum. She tugged on the webbing and spun slowly; the hold was too big, she was thinking, way too big for some corporate suborbital or LEO shuttle. She pulled herself back into the container, got the bag, threw in a couple of lengths of webbing, and then out again, and down the length of the container via a series of handy handholds; some decent designing, at last. The gap between the end of the container and the door was forty-fifty feet, and at an angle. She held onto the handles, and tucked her legs under her; no way to look up and adjust her aim,

“Helmet camera,” she added to the list,

and let go, a bit of a roll, but her stomach was reconciled to the floating now, and she rotated far enough to see the door coming at her fast, just time to get an arm out and snag the surrounding grid; she hit hard but took it on her knees and hip this time, not the head.

The green side did not say “Exit” after all, but “Bridge” worked for her. There was a keypad and display, dark and dead. No doorbell, so she pounded with a gloved fist, her feeble, skinny fist (five months!), then grabbed hold of a handle and kicked until her feet throbbed, gasped out a sob, and saw the sign above the handle, that read “Airlock Manual Override.” Some government safety bureau had screwed up and accidentally got it right, down to the helpful arrows that said “pull out, rotate up,” and the door swung in. More handles, more arrows, and then there was hissing and clanking and a long airy sigh (that was her) and the inner door opened.

The bridge was empty, no one home, and she suspected no one just out for a walk, soon to return and find their porridge gone and their bed full. No bed, for that matter, or sign of porridge; just an all-business control room, twenty by fifteen by ten or so, with lockers along one wall and consoles along another, and a narrow strip of window blocked on the outside by a metal shutter. At least there was air, if she could trust the suit indicators. The suit was pretty ripe, or she was, so she risked it, popped the latches, ready to slam them back. But the process was hiss-free, and the cabin air coldly metallic but breathable.

The consoles were blank and unresponsive, all but a display that demanded

[Insert key]

alongside a thumbslot. NaN guessed that leaving the ship entirely unlocked wasn’t in the regs . . . but why was she guessing? She fumbled the pocket open.

“A(i)da, A(i)da babe, howzit?”

“NaN, it’s all good,” the tablet replied, in her low, sweet voice. NaN’s voice, to be sure; the stock personas had been tragically lame, and anyway NaN didn’t use anything stock. “All good” meant just that, a full system check; A(i)da’s makers claimed she was vacuum-proof-radiation-proof-water-proof-down-to-thirty-meters, but marketdroids were inveterate liars, no matter how perfect the product.

“Whatcha know about low energy transports?”

“Context?”

“Spaceship. Unmanned. Big.”

“Low energy transfers: trajectories between stable orbits requiring minimal delta-v, utilizing weak stability boundaries, often at Lagrange points. Within the solar system, colloquially, the Interplanetary Transport Network. In short, a cheap but slow way to travel between planets and/or moons. More?”

“What about real ships? You know, active?”

“Active low energy transport routes in order of tons of cargo carried, Earth Transfer Orbit to—”

“Wait, what about passenger routes?”

“Negatory, there are no active passenger routes using low energy transfers; while efficient, the trajectories are much slower than Hohmann transfers. Life support costs and passenger comfort outweigh fuel savings.”

“The hell. You were saying?”

“In order of tons of cargo carried, Earth Transfer Orbit to Lunar TO, Earth TO to Earth-Luna L1, Earth TO to Mars TO, Earth-Luna L1 to Earth TO, Earth TO to Sol-Earth L2, Europa TO to Ganymede—”

“Whoa, stick to those from Earth. And narrow it down to routes that take more than five months.”

“All the active routes take more than five months. Again: a cheap but slow way to travel. More?”

NaN had drifted up and over; she pushed off the ceiling and wrapped her legs around one of the console chairs, blinked up at the lack of view.

“Ah, okay, look, do you have a schedule of departures from Earth for, um, the two weeks after October 14, 2042?”

“Yes, there were seven ships that match the parameters ‘spaceship,’ ‘unmanned,’ departure from Earth Transfer Orbit, low energy transfers, October 15 to October 28, 2042. Clarify ‘big.’”

“Oh, uh, maybe eighty by eighty feet wide, and, whoof, a hundred feet long? That’s the hold, and the bridge here, no idea about the engines and crap.”

“Four of the scheduled departures were to the Earth-Luna L1 transport hub, shuttling light manufactured goods and pharmaceuticals, size well under the given parameters, adjusted for your customary margin of error.”

“That’s why I have you, babe.”

“The other three departures fit all parameters: October 15, Earth to Luna; October 19, Earth to Sol-Earth L2; October 22, Earth to Mars.

“How long? I mean, what are the arrival dates?”

“Tata-CASC Flight L287A, Luna via L5, inserts Lunar Transfer Orbit on May 10, 2043, transfer to Low Lunar Orbit on May 12. ESA Ex92-NASA Gen20 inserts Sol-Earth L2 halo orbit on September 29, 2043. MarsCon E15 inserts Mars Capture Orbit February 15, 2044.”

NaN was frantically scanning for some sort of corporate logo, business card, pinup calendar, whatever. The console was sullenly blank, so she went through the cabinets; a toolkit, made in China, that was no help; two emergency one-size-fits-all space suits, less stinky than hers, but far more flimsy, duct tape aside; a dozen bottles of air for the same, which could be useful; four packets snacks-ready-to-eat, and four liters of water, half a liter of which disappeared in a few painful gulps. Under the food packets was a pen, which she grabbed at, and subsequently chased around the cabin: “Courtesy Orbital Savings and Loan.” She flicked it at the useless window tink and rotated in slow, thoughtful circles.

Windows.

“A(i)da, if we could see the stars, could you, you know, triangulate our position, figure out where we’re headed?”

“Unlikely. My camera has insufficient resolution to measure stellar parallax.”

“Ah, bugger me.”

“No can do. However, a visual survey would be able to distinguish between the Lunar trajectory and the other options.”

NaN grabbed the seat back.

“A(i)da, my dear, how’d you like to go for a walk?”

* * * *

The airlocks on either side of the hold’s main hatch had manual overrides, but they required a few extra steps; gotta keep the average newbies from accidentally launching themselves, she guessed. And not like she herself was a noob—five months flight time, after all, if unconcious, but hey, muscle memory etc. etc.—but she went back and got some more webbing, and rigged two separate lines to tie points in the airlock, and tugged on them as hard as she could, before opening the outer door. She was breathing fast and shallow, blood thumpathumpa in her ears; so much for the silence of space. Then the door slid sideways out of her headlights and it was dark; her eyes scrambled to adjust. There was a haze, air, maybe, escaping and condensing, but it didn’t move with her headlights. It was stars, the Milky Way, she guessed; she really didn’t go out much at night, or in the day, for that matter. Out was where she was going now, though, like it or not, hand over hand along the edge of the door.

“A(i)da,” she whispered, “you seeing this?”

The tablet was strapped to her forehead with duct tape from the toolkit; the only way NaN could think to give her a view and yet be able to talk.

“Somewhat,” A(i)da answered wryly; “Wryly” was one of the first behaviors NaN had added to her persona profile. NaN bobbed her head down.

“Better?”

“Still somewhat. We’ll have to move clear of the ship.”

“Shoulda just tossed you out on a leash.”

“My inability to maneuver would make a complete survey difficult.”

“Yeah yeah, always with the same excuse. Like it’s easy for me.”

But it was. She just had to let go.

“Okay, on three. One. Two.”

“Three,” said A(i)da, and then they were drifting. The front of the ship was a squarish hole cut into a million zillion stars. Her heart jumped as an angry red spot slid into view, but it was just some sort of running light on the ship’s nose. She reached the end of the line, one of them, and begin to spin toward the ship, and then the other line went taut and she started a slow, complex swing, out past the black edge of the hold. Her heart was still revving, but it was a bit quieter in the helmet, as she’d postponed the breathing for a bit. Maybe too long; her vision suddenly dimmed along the right side, but A(i)da caught her worried grunt.

“Visor polarization. We’re drifting into sunlight.”

And there was the ship, stretching away, and the sun, all blindingly brilliant despite the visor, and as she continued to spin, that’s all there was: ship, sun, stars, and one small spinning dot with a suddenly full bladder and a computer taped to her head.

NaN gasped in a thick lungful of air, and said “Earth, maybe behind. . . ?”

“Negatory. Earth is in view, approximate apparent magnitude minus two point five, currently about twenty degrees upper left of center of your field of view.”

There was nothing there but stars, teeny little stars, and maybe one brighter than the rest.

“Well. Frig. Me. Raw.”

“No can do,” said A(i)da.

* * * *

New list: least favorite places ever. First and only entry: right where she was, back in the coffin. It was cramped, dark, smelly; but then again, so was her studio in Reno. What it also shared with her apartment was air, and food and water, even if the latter were courtesy a needle and a pump. Getting back in had not been easy; she’d taken the long way back through the hold, checking the other storage containers, which were barcoded and tagged, but no handy packing slips, no logos for, say, frozen pizza or Blind Rage Cola (beverage of choice for Our Lady of Omissions). And then she’d spent longer investigating the coffin. It was much larger on the outside, with a control console that was more complete, if no better designed, than the one inside the lid. BengaTek RETAIn. “Rescue Emergency Transport Autonomous Internetworked” A(i)da expanded; NaN thought “lame,” but kept her mouth shut, since A(i)da shared some of that acronym. There were red lights, and a backlog of alerts: “Sensors disconnected,” “Intravenous supplies disconnected,” “Oxygen usage below nominal range.” But before that, a series of warnings from the brainstate maintenance subsystem: “Intravenous pump two failure,” “Sedative flow 0%,” “ALERT: Patient exiting coma state.”

“And I’m gonna, any minute now,” NaN said to A(i)da.

But the nutrition subsystem was online, and the oxygen/pressure, both showing around 80 percent supply, whatever that worked out to, and while the bridge had air, it wasn’t exactly overstocked with food and water. What she needed, even more than those essentials, was a place to sit and think, and now that she knew what it was, the coffin was actually pretty close to her ideal environment: dark and distant and sealed from distracting contact, excepting A(i)da, of course. A(i)da agreed, but then again, she usually did; no thinking out of her carbon composite box for A(i)da, particularly not out here, way off the Net, and working off of what snapshots she had downloaded and stored that last night on Earth, five months back.

A(i)da, unfortunately, had no better information on what had happened than did NaN. Her camera had gone dark, across the spectrum, at 02:40:15 2042.10.14, and she’d lost connectivity at the same time; popped straight into the shielded pouch, most likely. A few hours later, a cable was plugged into her STB port and the not-entirely-lame but ineffective crack attempted; there were a few blurred frames of fingertips. And after that, the only useful data was from her accelerometer, which suggested that they’d been shipped into orbit the following morning, and banged about randomly for the following week. That was enough to rule out the Moon flight, but the fact that they were in the middle of nowhere had already done that. A(i)da didn’t have enough info on the L2 and Mars trajectories to narrow it down further. She’d recorded audio, anything significantly over the noise floor, but it was useless, just low-frequency rumble and her own slipping about inside the pouch.

“Well, they’re not noobs or kiddies or monkeys,” NaN said, meaning the soon to be dead and desecrated bodies who’d kidnapped her. “They knew how to handle you, figured out how to get us into orbit, stuck us in here; I mean, there are serious inspections for customs and security and export fees; heard enough about that at the Damn Convention.”

The Damn Convention had been NaN’s one public appearance as her cyberself. Like Irene Adler for Sherlock Holmes, it required no further qualification, and cast a dark and dubious shadow across the personal mythology of Our Lady of Omissions.

She’d hit a export fees database a few years back, actually, Chinese and thus to some degree government, which was rare for her; she stuck to corporations as a rule, but this one had been tracking end-users versus media purchases, and that seemed like personal information to her, and what she did with personal information in databases was Omitted it. Substituted with similar but fictitious data, when possible, to further gum up the works, or just the repeated word “omitted,” and always tagged somewhere with the local encoding of “NaN.” Our Lady was an epithet from the boards, which she liked well enough to adopt, but only between A(i)da and herself: never encourage the fanboys.

A government would have the resources for this sort of thing, but why the subterfuge when they could arrest her or just disappear her? Mind you, she was damn well good and disappeared; who knows, maybe she was headed to some sort of space gulag at L2, or a labor camp on Mars, which was pretty much all there was on Mars, from some points of view. But governments had military ships, and colonist transports, and anyway, this setup was too competent, and too cost effective, for any of the governments she’d crossed bits with.

Corporations, now, there were plenty of corporations who would gladly pay well to see Our L. of O. well and gone. More than she could list (though A(i)da could). It still didn’t really add up, though; the usual corporate approach would be to break her, body and soul, in the civil court system. Or just break her body and leave it in a ditch, hell, on her couch; it’s not like anyone could link her meat self to NaN and her corporate conquests. So why the hassle of shipping her away? And why, apart from terminal idiocy, would they stuff A(i)da into a pouch instead of exposing her to some serious supercomputing; not that they were going to crack her, not with NaN’s mods, not for a long, long—

NaN sat up and

“Ow!”

smacked her head again. “A(i)da, any idea what kind of protection that console has? The ship’s controls, I mean.”

“Negatory. My data on spacecraft in general is just wiki-level.”

“Yeah, but, I’ll bet that lock’s nothing specially space-y, just software, some kind of general corporate-level access control. I mean, it’s not online, so what’s the attack analysis? Space pirates at the Lagrange points? I doubt it. Crew, workers, maybe someone with a hankering and an orbital shuttle. All they need to stop are nuisance attacks, worse case a couple of weeks of cracking. We might . . .” She rubbed the bump on her head and winced. “We might have months.”

“Insufficient data. You’re the expert,” said A(i)da.

“Damn straight, babe, damn straight,” said NaN.

* * * *

Cracking the console’s key meant leaving A(i)da in the bridge; NaN was using a resource attack, looking for fluctuations in power usage caused by CPUs switching in and out: a vulnerability in several popular corporate key systems. That meant A(i)da was plugged into a power jack, despite her fuel cell. But it worked out, well enough; NaN slept in the coffin, but spent her days—she drifted about a bit, but tried to keep her schedule on Reno time—in the cabin, or poking about the hold. Which was what she was doing now, literally: jamming a screwdriver into the pressure release on one of the shipping containers.

She still didn’t have a clue what was in most of the containers; with luck there’d be a manifest on the console computer, once they’d cracked it. But there were a handful of oddball containers, some clearly containing liquids; a stack of smaller, shielded units, electronics was NaN’s guess; and two dusty, battered containers stenciled in Cyrillic, which A(i)da translated as “Volga Grain Consortium.” It took a solid day of effort with the little toolkit from the bridge to get one of them open, which proved to be a seriously newbie move. There were two layers of pressure seal, and the obvious pressure valve had only evacuated the outer shell. She’d actually heard a hiss—air hitting her suit—before the inner panel blew, sending her careening and bruised into a support column, and evenly distributing what must have been tons of grain throughout the hold. The cabin smelled like breakfast cereal after that; sheer torture it was, and she’d resorted to scraping up scant handfuls and bringing them into the cabin to chew, with what little saliva she could muster up.

Necessity was a mother, though, and within a month or two things were looking, or at least tasting, a bit better. The first breakthrough was the cabin air, which had started to get stale after a few days; she’d been lucky that the loading crew had left the cabin pressurized, though she guessed that anyone who worked in space would be loath to dump perfectly good air, not when a crew would be getting on at the far end to do more spaceman stuff. She’d been likewise lucky that the air recirculation system wasn’t under the console lock; she tracked the ducts back to a panel just outside the bridge airlock, and turned the scrubbers on. More of those useful safety regulations, and maybe she’d pay her taxes next year in appreciation. Pro rata, mind you, for time spent in space.

The air system lead her in turn to water. It turned out the ship was full of it, tanks between the hull walls and the outer layers of the ship, propellant and oxygen supply and shielding for delicate cargoes. Excess mass wasn’t a worry on low energy transits, apparently. Given the effectively infinite supply of water, she drained the four liters in the bridge cabinet, which she’d been saving for a last, desperate binge, and that left her four empty bottles, one of which was currently wedged against the inner pressure valve she was abusing with the screwdriver. A bit of fiddling, and a steady stream of oats shot out, some reasonable percentage of which ended up in the bottle.

Back to the cabin, then, for a tasty and nutritious meal of drammach, which was cold water mixed with oatmeal, according to Robert Louis Stevenson. A(i)da had been reading out a selection of appropriate books when NaN was in the bridge, doing the voices and occasional sound effects; they’d been through Robinson Crusoe, and The Count of Monte Cristo, and Kidnapped, hence the drammach. The “tasty” bit was, of course, untrue; it tasted like cardboard with a hint of radiator, some of which could be blamed on the tank water. And NaN was pretty doubtful about the “nutritious” as well; she had random pains and periods of dizziness and confusion and some thoroughly unpleasant spots, a combination of vitamin deficiencies, scurvy and pellagra and other ugly words, and space adaptation syndrome according to A(i)da, to which list NaN added stress and terminal boredom.

The coffin IV presumably helped with the vitamins, so she hooked it up when she was sleeping. Its levels were going down shockingly fast, however; there was some sort of feedback system, via the sensors in the chest strap, designed for maintaining a patient in a coma, not one who was alternately exercising and vigorously plotting the painful deaths of her many foes, not least the kidnappers, and the BengaTek RETAIn design team.

She’d done her plotting for that day, over breakfast; it was time for exercise. A(i)da’s information on low gravity exercise was minimal, and heavy on the dedicated equipment, so NaN had developed her own program, which largely consisted of bouncing off the walls of the bridge. When she got going, she could do laps, floor to wall to ceiling and back around; centrifugal, artificial gravity, she explained to A(i)da, who seemed dubious. Music was a key element, too, maintenance of cadence, and proper breath control, which meant top-of-her-lungs and A(i)da on sampled piano and harmonies and asides,

* * * *

. . . we’ll buy a talking Mynah,

(he can have my job)

that sings “Slow Boat to China”

(or Mars)

We’ll make the wandering waves our home.

(beats a storage crate)

From the warm sun of June.

(remember the inverse-square law?)

To the big harvest Moon,

(looks pretty tiny from here)

Across the deep our hearts will roam.

(deep space, that is beep NaN?)

Shanghaied by moonlight,

(beep NaN! beep)

Just the two of us, alooooone!

* * * *

“Sheesh, babe, you were way off on that last bit,” NaN added, and slammed into the ceiling, because A(i)da was beeping, and that could only mean

“You cracked it!”

“Key retrieved. Elapsed time: 156 days, 14 hours, 6 minutes and 44 seconds. Ship consoles active.”

NaN bounced over to a chair, strapped herself in. The glow of the console, indicators and screens flashing, set her head swirling; she had a sudden, visceral sense of something there with her, alive, and on its heels a wave of loneliness, first time this whole trip, first time since third grade, really. She scrubbed a few itchy tears from her cheeks.

“Sorry, babe,” to A(i)da, feeling strangely guilty on top of it all. “Stupid, stupid. Got to find some vitamins, get my head straight. So, um, were we right? Context destination, that is.”

They could still be headed for the observatories at L2, in which case they only had six weeks left. But the ship had made a couple of automated corrections in the last few months, tiny jostles, compared to the suborbital flights NaN had taken, but heart-stopping out here, and consistent with the somewhat hybrid Mars route, rather than the almost perfectly efficient path to the Lagrange point. And anyway, what would a few hundred researchers want with two full shipping containers of oatmeal?

“Affirmative. The ship identifies itself as MarsCon E15.”

NaN kicked the chair, braked with one hand on the ceiling, glowered at the glittering console below.

“Six more months.”

“One hundred and eighty-four days, nine hours, two minutes until insertion into Mars Transfer Orbit.”

Another one hundred and eighty-five days chopped out of her life, that was. Our Lady of Omissions would be ancient history, a cautionary tale told to misbehaving wannabes and kiddies. NaN kicked the chair, did a flip. “You got a manifest?”

“Affirmative.”

“Damn it, babe, let’s go shopping.”

* * * *

NaN sat up, halfway, and threw her arm up over her head, legacy of the coffin. But she was on the bridge, strapped to the wall; the coffin had finally run dry, the air going a few nights before the nutrient, in a panic of blaring alarms and a wedged helmet. The coffin’s value had been more mental than physical in the last few months, anyway; supplied with the ship’s manifest, which included the access codes for most of the containers, she’d found a crate of vitamins and a selection of packaged foods that would do a Reno casino buffet proud.

She’d found wine, too, plastic barrels of it. Bottles were too heavy, apparently, even for the slow boat; or maybe this wasn’t the sort of wine that got bottled. If her cosy coffin was no longer a refuge, a empty barrel might substitute, or the emptying, and she’d been working dedicatedly at it. So she’d substituted the nausea and dizziness of space adaptation and poor nutrition for those of good old drunkenness. At least she had gotten rid of the spots, and some of the pain, and the fear that the wave of loneliness might crash down again and sweep her so far out she’d never come back.

Those were the sorts of dreams she’d been having; just now, she’d been on some creaking old sailing ship, the spray lashing sideways as she struggled through a tangle of rigging, shackled to other struggling souls, and a team of corporate suits shouting urgent, overlapping orders in meaningless marketspeak from the quarterdeck. She wasn’t a cubemonkey, she’d shouted back, or some d00d kiddie they could offline with a lawyer and few chains; she was a hacker and a cracker, and she’d been crimped, dammit, shanghaied . . .

NaN blinked against the blur in her eyes and brain. “A(i)da,” she said, “I’m an idiot.”

“Confirmed. As previously discussed, this continued abuse of alcohol is producing measurable deleterious effects on your psychological and physiological health.”

“No, no, I mean, yeah, alright, but listen. I’ve spent a year now, wondering who wanted me off Earth, and why, and it just hasn’t added up, and that’s been driving me crufty. But when they shanghaied sailors, it wasn’t to get them out of San Francisco, it was to get them onto a ship and make them work. Or no, look, they put you on the slow boat to China to get you to China.”

“Measurable deleterious effects,” A(i)da repeated.

NaN hissed and fumbled the straps loose, floated over the console to stop with her nose against the now unshuttered window. “What I’m saying is, someone didn’t want me off Earth. Someone wants me on Mars. And I think I know who it is.”

* * * *

NaN didn’t do meatings. Our L. of O. worked strictly virtual and alone, the scene unseen, that was the rule. But NaN didn’t do rules, either; and now and again she’d venture into realspace just to prove that she could. The mission was usually social engineering; when the hack was stalled, and voice and text messages just weren’t hitting the mark, she’d go in realtime. More rarely, and reluctantly, she’d risk a face-to-face with someone in the scene, for an offline key exchange, or a sneakernet transfer. And once, just once, she’d faced a group, a Damn Convention it was, under cover of a much more public event. While the press were clustering wannabes and d00dz at the blackjack tables, a group of real names, wizards and legends all, met in a quiet bar to finalize the first interplanetary darknet. The excuse for the meat was key exchange, though NaN and others had argued that there was a sufficient web of trust to bootstrap the network. The real issue was that the new network cut across scenes, hacktivists and crypto-anarchists and privateers and bankers and infoterrorists, maybe some real terrorists, certainly some plain old crooks; there were interface issues at the cultural level, and a few of the organizers had insisted on an in-the-flesh session.

There’d been no “Hello, my name is” tags, of course, not even with handles, but everyone was engineering everyone else, making educated guesses, and there were a few gimmes. NaN, for one; the only woman there not leeching off a guy, and ever since she’d publicly flamed a famous cypherpunk who also happened to be a misogynistic bigot, Our Lady was known to be just that. And there was a hackivist whose day job was as a bloghead; a self-proclaimed expert on the human-tech interface, but, NaN had to admit, a pretty good hacker, and going after her sorts of targets: corporate databases, click trackers, face identification systems, anything thing that chipped away at people’s privacy. His reasons were political, and hers were personal, but they came to the same end.

And then there was Leco. That wasn’t even a handle; Leonardo ‘Leco’ Stirling Guarana was the name he went by, cyberspace and otherwise. Son and heir to one of the most powerful of Mars’s elite clans; a family with holdings in ice mining, farming, shipping, an almost feudal control over whole communities, and an outspoken aversion to influence, either political or cultural, from Earth. His physical arrival at the bar, strolling in wearing a five thousand dollar suit, had caused half the group to head toward the exit; he’d had to show his forged passport and travel documents to get everyone settled down again.

He was there not as a hacker or cracker; he was one of the organizers, though, with interests at either end. His family was supplying vital hardware and bandwidth up front, not just on Mars, but throughout the System. And they were committed to being users, and to covering much of the operational costs; the reality was, the families still needed to deal with Earth, but they were eager to do so out of sight of the corporations and governments they detested.

Afterward, as the clusterface was disintegrating into smaller discussions, Leco had carried a chair and a pair of beers over to where NaN and A(i)da were lurking. He’d done his homework; he knew so much about her exploits that she gave A(i)da the special poke that rotated her keys right then and there, while she smiled and nodded at the Martian.

He was fierce and passionate and darkly handsome, talking about his family’s plans, and his own plans; the natural evolution of culture, a new trajectory, trajectories, actually, everyone on their own path. This meeting, the new net, it was the start of a revolution, and the people here the visionaries, the leaders, the first freedom fighters.

“But it can’t happen here, on Earth,” he said. “It’s too deep down its own well, too heavy with history. The revolution might be starting here, today, but the battles, and the victories, will be out there, on Luna, in the Belt, and on Mars, leading the way. We need people like you out there, people who know how to hit the corporations where it hurts.” He put his hand on her shoulder. “Whatever you need, money, equipment, assistants, we can get it for you.”

He leaned forward, and smiled, his breath hot on her face, thick with beer and privilege, and said, “Come with me.”

And NaN smiled her own dazzling smile, that she usually kept to herself, and put her beer down, and her hand on his, and said, “No,” and got up and walked. Because he was, after all, wearing a suit.

* * * *

There was an airlock directly off the bridge, a small one, for emergency evacuations, NaN suspected, largely because of the oversized button that said “Emergency Evacuation.” The airlock was dark, and cold, and small enough she could wedge herself sideways. She’d tried sleeping there, a few times, but the view out the tiny window was too distracting; a sprawl of stars, individual and uncountable. She wasn’t sleepy now, though, a bit drunk, perhaps, and jazzed on a bag of coffee beans she’d been chewing raw. “Jazzed,” she thought, and beat a bebop pattern with her fingers, taptaptap on the emergency button; she’d levered up the protective cover, and the plastic of the button itself was smooth, and neither warm nor cool to the touch.

If she tapped too hard, just a little flam on the downbeat, and the system triggered, and sent her spiraling out the door in a swirl of air, would her body stay on course down that long low-energy trail to Mars? Was the atmosphere there thick enough that she would leave a bright streak going down, or would she just make a small crater somewhere and lie lost and exposed until the dust storms erased her? A(i)da might know, but A(i)da was sitting on the console, and the inner airlock door was shut against her complaints. Alone and away had always been Our Lady of Omissions’ trajectory. The only true freedom was anonymity, and true anonymity was an unachievable goal toward which to strive, against the enormous pressure to culturalize, incorporate, conform.

And now anonymity had been handed to her; someone else’s doing, admittedly, but she could claim it for her own with a tap, no effort at all. Any other path would be a struggle against physics and fate and forces far greater than herself.

She huffed, her breath clouding the little porthole, and tapped the button once more, middle-finger, a crash of cymbals. “Omitted,” she thought, was getting lame. And then she spun the inner hatch open, and kicked back into the bridge. A(i)da started up immediately. “NaN, your behavior has become indicative of a serious depressive—”

“Belay that, babe; we’ve got stuff to do. Open a project file.”

“Project file . . . Affirmative. Title?”

“Payback, Our Lady thereof.”

* * * *

The shape loomed over her, huge-headed and alien in the bridge, her bridge, wrapped clumsy fingers around its own neck and wrenched. The helmet came off; a thin, pale face, hair likewise, eyes huge and twitchy in the wide-angle lens.

“It’s not him. Plan B,” NaN said, with a swallow; three months of planning, cracking crates for parts, navigating an unstable trajectory between the wine and the despair, and her kidnapper hadn’t kept the appointment?

“Motion on the hold camera, two people,” A(i)da replied.

“Let me see.” A(i)da flicked her screen to the other camera: two spacesuited figures pulling themselves along a strut. They stopped at a familiar container, checked the markings, popped the door.

“Yo ho ho, no coincidence, that. Plan A after all. Keep an eye on those two, switch back to the bridge.”

Just in time; the man on the bridge had already found the key jack, and was pulling out a tablet. Not an AID, thank you, or some funky new Mars device; it looked like a cheap Brazilian clone, a lightweight client, tethered via wireless and not designed for space use, and that confirmed it; this wasn’t the official crew, here to pilot the transport into Low-Mars Orbit. The only question now was his tablet’s OS, but if this guy was with Leco, no way was he running an Earther corpo-imperialistic system. He had wrestled one arm out of his suit to use the touch screen. NaN tried to read his finger motions, but the angle was bad, and the picture suddenly squished left as A(i)da split her screen. NaN bit down on a complaint; the hold camera showed crates floating, and the other two already emerging from the shipping container, with the coffin between them.

“Efficient little f— bridge cam!” and A(i)da switched fullscreen just as twitchy-eyes jacked in a thumbdrive and flicked the screen, a familiar gesture, and NaN said “That’s BazOS 3. Do it!”

“Done.”

Twitchy-eyes popped the thumb out, jacked it into the ship’s console. What would have happened next, if NaN hadn’t had her way with the console, was a confirmation of the key on the thumbdrive, and access to the ship’s system. What was happening was a flashing alert reading:

[Drive Formatting Invalid. Help?]

Twitchy-eyes blinked, tapped the console screen. The help screen would be displaying:

[Drive unreadable. Please insert another drive, or STB connection.]

“Wait for it,” NaN muttered. Twitchy reached for the thumbdrive, stopped, adjusted his mic instead.

“Uh, Leco? This is Stan. There’s a problem with the key.”

But Stan wasn’t getting any help that way. The two emergency suits in the bridge cabinets were hacked and blasting out static on the standard suit frequencies, at a level that would drain their batteries in another few minutes; she’d turned them on last, once the clatter of the newcomers’ docking had stopped, before diving for the emergency exit.

“Leco? Hey, can you hear . . .”

“Now,” NaN said, and she could see the red glow of the new warning reflected in his eyes. What it said was:

[Unauthorized Access Detected: 60 seconds to console lock. Insert key or connect to override.]

and a countdown timer started, accompanied by a piercing beep.

“Shit,” said Stan, and he yanked the thumbdrive, plugged it back into his tablet, frantically tapped at the screen.

“Do the air,” NaN said, and A(i)da started cycling the fans, little pressure pulses at two cycles a second; not a relaxing sensation, that.

A(i)da split her screen again, briefly; the coffin crew was about halfway to the bridge airlock. “Yeah yeah,” NaN said. “Dec the counter ten seconds . . . now!” Stan looked back up from his tablet, managed to lose what little color he had.

“Leco, dammit, I need help in here!” But all he was going to get that way was an earful of static. For a second he just froze there, mouth gaping, and NaN did the same; the whole attack relied on the mark not being a total loser. But no, he came out of it, started looking around; classic reaction, that hope for an answer lying in plain view, and look, look. . . .

“No, idiot, up here, on the console,” NaN gritted. “Crap. A(i)da, set the counter back to fifteen secs, and up the alarm.”

Stan spun back around to the console as the beeping went double time, and gasped, and reached over the camera to grab the cable that NaN had left coiled and casual on a monitor.

“Hah!” NaN said, and A(i)da replied with another split screen; the other two had the coffin lashed near the hold hatch, and were opening the outer airlock to the bridge.

Stan yanked his thumbdrive and plugged in the cable, fumbled the other end into the console jack.

“That’s right, any port in a storm,” NaN said, as Stan leaned over the console display; it would now be telling him

[Connection detected. Transfer key to abort lock.]

and his fingers danced over his tablet now, everything under control, the ship’s system popping up on his desktop and all he had to do was authorize the connection and drop the keyfile onto the icon like a good monkey and . . .

[Access granted. Console active.]

the display would be telling him, and it was true, the console was online, the ship was his to control, and he was too busy shaking his head and letting out a sigh to notice the brief glitch on his tablet, as NaN’s code inserted itself into his system.

The airlock door opened, as Stan struck a thoughtful, focused pose over the console; in control of the situation, was Stan. The others pulled their helmets; one was an angry-looking woman, worry lines across her brow and down her cheeks, and the other was Leco, with his dark skin, dark eyes, dark hair with its swirls of dust-devil red dye. NaN took a long breath in, a surge of conflicted chemicals spinning through her, and let it out again. The hack was still running, and realtime; there’d be plenty of time for reactions afterward.

“What’s with the radio?” Leco demanded.

“Interference. May just be the shielding in here,” Stan replied, with a wave of his tablet toward the metal walls.

“Huh,” Leco replied. “Something’s off. The hold is trashed; some sort of gritty brown stuff everywhere. And the coffin, it’s on, seems like it’s running, but the controls are wedged.”

NaN had had her final revenge on the coffin display.

“Damn, is she. . . ?” Stan started.

“No, no, the monitoring works, and her vitals look good,” said the woman. “We just can’t get to the menu, which means we can’t unlock the damn thing.”

“We can worry about that later, once it’s on our ship and we’re out of here,” Leco said.

“Sounds like our cue, babe,” NaN said to A(i)da. And then over the console speakers, she purred, “Oh, I’d worry about it now.”

The three in the cabin spun to the console, and then looked down in perfect sync toward the coffin in the hold. NaN stifled a laugh; no need to let on about the camera.

“Oh dear, I hope you didn’t already sign for the package; looks like your shipment’s short a few items.”

The woman cursed, gave the bridge a quick survey, and pulled the bag slung over her back around, started rummaging through it. Leco stepped toward the console.

“You can hear me, yeah?” he asked.

“Alas, alack, I can,” NaN replied. “Is it time for the speech about Earth corpo-cultural imperialism, and how it’s time for Mars to break free and fly its own orbit? Because, you know, since I last heard that one, I’ve learned a lot about orbital mechanics, and I’m not sure you’ve got your physics right.”

Leco went a shade darker, and looked back at the woman. She’d pulled a gadget out of the bag, and was sweeping it around; thermal scanner, most likely. She shook her head at Leco. He gestured toward the airlock; the woman nodded, and put her helmet back on.

“NaN, I realize that this might all seem a bit abrupt . . .”

“If you can call fourteen months gone ‘abrupt.’”

“You’d have wasted those fourteen months anyway, with that Our Lady of Omissions nonsense. So you annoy a handful of corporations, generate a few insurance claims. Have any of your hacks ever brought a company down, toppled a government, eliminated just one of the assholes who dictate their own tastes and misguided morals on the masses?”

Split screen: the woman was working her way down the hold, long sweeps with the scanner.

“It’s a zero-sum game, NaN. We have to sweep away the old to make room for the new. And there’s nowhere left to sweep the trash down on Earth, it’s . . .”

NaN muted the audio. “He can keep this up for hours; good time for us to move.”

“Affirmative, switching to wireless.” NaN unplugged and drifted, one eye on the hold camera, and on Leco’s fervent form. Two heart-pounding minutes later, they were resettled, and he was still going. She bumped the volume back up.

“. . . just some fantasy figure for fat, sweaty hacker boys, but a real hero, one of the elite, one of the few that step into the gap and seize destiny.”

“Little dreams,” NaN said. “Little dreams for little people. That guy there, Stan, is it? He one of your real heroes? Kind of . . . twitchy, isn’t he?”

Stan actually looked hurt, poor thing, and she wasn’t done with him yet.

“Good thing you’re aiming low.” Leco tried to interrupt, but she upped the speaker volume. “You think you’re confronting people, but all you’re doing is discarding them, replacing them. Trivial. Lame. Changing people, now that’s hard. You can’t do that with speeches and slingshots, not at first, anyway. You have to start with doubt. My hacks, maybe all they create are a few sleepless nights, some anxious meetings, a few questions, but once you’ve got them doubting, and uncertain about what they know, then they’re yours.”

Pretty good, she thought, Leco was steaming, and the timing was on. The airlock swung open, and Ms. Angry came through, with a shake of her head at Leco. He grimaced back, opened his mouth, and shut it again, eyebrows raised, with a look toward the window.

“You’re outside, aren’t you? Think you’re a clever girl, huh? No way you’ve got a real EVA rig; you’re still in that beat up old emergency suit, I bet. How much air you got? All we have to do is wait here; another twenty minutes and you’ll be promising us anything we want to let you in.”

“I’ve got extra air bottles, from the suits in the bridge cabinets. Check for yourself; I emptied out the rack. I can last out here about twelve hours, I reckon; tell me, how long before the official crew gets here? Can’t wait to hear you explain what exactly you’re doing on their ship.”

Angry Woman and Stan exchanged glances, as Leco grabbed the edge of the console and snarled, “So we come out there and drag you in. You’re in our space now, Earther; we were wearing suits when you were still in diapers.”

“Yeah? No wonder you’re still crapping yourself. You gave me fourteen months to learn what I didn’t know, and I’ve figured this ship inside and out. You want to play tag, little boy, you come on ahead.”

Leco’s face filled the screen, purple and sweat-streaked; any second now he was going to see the camera.

“You stupid dirtpounding geek, we have sensors on our ship that could find you thirty klicks out. You got two minutes to get your ass in here, then we’re coming for you, and that’ll be something else you’ll have to pay us back for the hard way. No onewalks out on me twice.”

NaN nodded to herself; she’d figured his reason, under all the revolutionary bluster, would be personal, though she doubted he really understood that himself. She’d been thinking a lot about unconsidered motivations, lately, and where they could land a person.

“Ooh, sensors, sounds pretty technical. Who’s gonna do that for you? Stan there? Hmm. You sure he knows how to work that thing?”

And Stan, who’d been having a bad day, pulled up his tablet and tapped, fingers furious on the screen.

There was a loud clunk.

“Here’s a couple more things we learned about spaceships in the last fourteen months,” NaN said. “They pretty much fly themselves. They use cheap-ass off-the-shelf security. And their airlocks all have manual overrides.”

Stan was still tapping, brows down. “The remote app is acting weird; it’s not accepting the ship key. What’s it mean, ‘Not a Number’?”

Angry Woman spat another curse, and dove for the window. “Those were the docking latches,” she said. “Our ship . . .”

Leco had found the camera. He leaned in and whispered a few personal promises to NaN; later, during the trial, his lawyers would try to have the transcript omitted, but would be overruled.

* * * *

NaN propped A(i)da in what seemed to be a pure titanium cup holder. Slick ship, this was, Mars-built, Guarana family logos, and Leco’s name in platinum on the airlock door, just above the manual override handle; she’d used it as a target during the terrifying leap between ships. Solid design work in the bridge, though, if a bit gaudy; everything clearly labelled and within reach. Once she had the access key, courtesy of Stan and his attempt to log in to the ship remotely via her own software, a huge central display lighted up, clear and concise, right down to the arrow icon labeled:

[Initiate Nav Segment: “return course”]

Engines thrummed below her, a real sense of up and down for the first time in a year and a half. MarsCon E15 slid backward out of view. The display updated, colored tracks tracing graceful trajectories, and

[Destination Phobos Station]

“Sheesh, babe, we’ve got an hour to kill.”

“Fifty-six minutes thirty-two seconds from course engage,” A(i)da said. “That should be sufficient time to complete our interrupted game of go.”

“Nah, I’m going to quit while I’m ahead. For, like, the next ten years.”

“Position analysis suggests that I will win by nine stones.”

“You’re not accounting for sheer genius, babe. It’s a common mistake,” she added, with a glance at the display; MarsCon E15 was a shrinking dot. “Open a new project file: ‘Mars: At Which Our Lady’s Triumphant Arrival.’ A shower, first, and a pizza with everything, and I mean everything. And then a little video editing, I’m thinking, before the press conference. Hmm, better start arranging that. Set us up a message to every tube channel and news site on Mars.”

“Affirmative. Note it will take approximately sixty-three minutes to bounce the email through our usual anonymization route, including speed of light roundtrip to Earth. Unless you wish to trust the Guarana family proxies on Mars. We may still have a ‘NaN’ account there.”

“Heck, no,” NaN said, and stretched her arms wide. “Route it direct. And sign it ‘Anna Alvarez Martin, of Reno, Nevada.’ A(i)da my dear, we’re going public.”