Interdiction

The outlaw Phoebe Jones gazed earthward through the view port in Helia's pilot station. Interdiction, the Fundamentalists called this total rejection of her. You're dismissed.

At odds with the big bang of her fury, strangling laughter arose. Responsive to the increased metabolic rate of Phoebe's impending hysteria, her ship's sensory controls flooded the cabin with overtones of lavender and ylang ylang.

Phoebe sniffed, then muttered, "Fundamentalist policy, my gluteus maximus. Helia's sensors may not register a saber-toothed tiger, but a retro predator has most definitely struck."

She eyed the defunct transistor circuitry that allowed her to make forbidden contact with Earth. Antiquated tech. She wondered if Fundies had spurned this inoffensive transmitter at first, too. Despite the steady temperature inside her cabin, Phoebe shivered. Unlike the laws of physics, you could choose to follow Fundie directives--or not. Tenacity was a trait for which she had been chosen; adherence to a theocracy was not. Edicts handed down by a vague deity made her stomach roil in the best of times.

"Not one of the good times, though, is it, Luna?" Her greyhound lifted mournful eyes and pressed her narrow head against Phoebe's thigh. As she stroked the hound's silky head, Phoebe's biobots, what she dubbed her little helpers, reduced the surge of hydrochloric acid in her stomach to a harmless level. She sent the bots a silent thank you.

"It's not like I didn't see this coming." A coppery taste filled her mouth. For Phoebe had glimpsed the onslaught of this criminal stupidity; first through the extrapolation of a disciplined mind, then via waking dreams. In a unique display of unplanned consequences, her biobots had learned not only to express dormant chromosomes, but to piece together odd bits of genetic materials into coherent structure. Now at random intervals, the dimension of time laid open to Phoebe Jones in panoramic second sight. The Fundies remained ignorant of this, although paradoxically, her new ability reinforced their case against her.

Eyeing her modest breasts, she admitted to being far less ambivalent when her bots switched off lethal genes. Unlike her grandmother's mother, Phoebe Jones would never develop metastatic breast cancer. Not that her bots would allow a cancer to develop anyway...

With a cleansing breath, she contemplated the view through her porthole. Shrouded periodically in rivers of dust along with natural cloud covers, her home world rotated within the same space she did. Earth--bright enough to hurt her eyes and desperately vulnerable to cataclysm. Neither dimensional warps nor wormholes kept her from returning. Her only barrier was an artificial ruling decreed by xenophobes, who awaited a one-sided Rapture--what Phoebe dubbed RDP, Recall of Defective Parts. According to her calculations, the recall could occur at anytime. Her solar activity monitors predicted as much. Not to mention the recent glimpses she has had into myriad futures.

Phoebe switched her field of view to diagnostic mode. Glaring red zones illuminated the gapping holes where ozone once protected her world's soft underbelly. A century of change had attempted to alleviate the problem. She herself had played a substantial role in rescuing terra firma during her rotation on the orbital space station Phaedra I. There Phoebe had helped design the global supergrid that now conducted both electricity and hydrogen fuel around the world. She thrilled when Phaedra II unfurled her solar nanopanels and harvested the first gigawatt of sun's energy, transferred by microwave to receiving stations on earth. That initial burst tipped communications offline for 48 hours. Yet infrared lasers solved the glitch and the power-to-payload ratio more than made up for the original outlay.

She flipped on the solar-enhanced scope. As Helia's orbit carried her over southeastern Eurasia, Phoebe caught a glimpse of that sector's fusion reactor. Along the coast, algae farms converted excess carbon dioxide from North American Global (NAG) and Sino-Indo Conglom (SIC) into biofuels. Not enough to counterbalance the output of those transcontinental bullies, who had yet to fully embrace the need to contain carbonization. In the 21st century, NAG and SIC's insistence on coal burning plants swamped any gains made by curtailing gasoline engine outputs for CO2 emissions.

Unofficially at least, the international definition for insanity had been updated. NAG's actions triggered the cascade of events that irrevocably drowned global coastlines, melted glaciers, and reduced the ozone to insignificant levels. Through their determined lack of effort, global weather systems had tilted into hyperdrive. For as mightily as geogineers strove, icebergs required time to regenerate. While worldwide sanctions finally forced both NAG and SIC to extract much of the carbon byproduct from their plants, mercury continued to persist in the environs--and kill. The torrent of damage had taken half a century to stabilize and only now had true recovery begun.

Yet here Phoebe sat in orbit while in Helia's hydroponics bay thrived a solution to the depleted atmosphere. Her plants had been perfected through years of research; each one capable of replacing ozone at astronomical rates. For three months now, this interdiction had banned not just her, but her botanicals, too. Another solar storm like the one six months ago could be Earth's death knell. A downbeat of utter rage and sorrow engulfed Phoebe. Her cabin responded with whiffs of bergamot, cedar and balsam to smooth her jagged edges.

Chiming alarms sounded as her ship navigated yet another field of debris; what was left of the Phaedra II space station. Phoebe consciously relaxed her clenched hands. Somewhere along this orbital path hovered the defensive satellite that had killed the station--and all hands on board. In the ultimate irony, those same hands had built and maintained the object of their destruction. She trusted in the crew's biobots to have cut their agony short; even biobots had limits to regeneration. Cataclysmic death remained outside the repair capacity.

"Am I next?" She buried shaking fingers into the rabbit soft fur at Luna's neck and took comfort from the dog's warmth. Through blurred eyes, the greyhound's fur took on aspects of a planet with continents of jet punctuating the underlying white. Black and white, which encapsulated the Fundies' view of this intricate and varied universe.

"How can they reject so much beauty? Why choose to be so limited?" Helia's bulkheads dulled the tone of her words, if not her anguish.

Phoebe's fingers trailed along tensile muscle to the hound's sides, where Luna's belly swelled with life. The puppies would evidently spend their early months on this ship, at least until Phoebe joined the colonists on Phaedra III. Despite riding the solar winds toward deep space, the crew on Phaedra III knew of this debacle. Phoebe's transmittal had reached them near the rings of Saturn. Their pleas for her to join them crammed her InComm. Yet she still needed to contact Zulfu. The Fundies had blocked every attempt.

Another swell of fury hit and when the biobots attempted to modulate her response, her internal snarl sent them skittering. Or it would have if biobots skittered. Phoebe rather visualized them in the flow and surge of her bodily rhythms. She touched the transistorized spreader rigged to her CommUnit and noted how worn one particular key was.

At long last Zulfu's face appeared, all silvered at the temples and tired eyes. Still he managed a smile. "Merhaba, love."

A tsunami of grief washed away hot anger. "Zulfu. Beloved." Her fingertips sent plasma ripples across the cool screen.

He closed his eyes and rubbed them. "I feared they'd vaporize your Helia and you with it."

"Not in this century. Besides, they know my countermeasures work only against space debris and small asteroids. I'm no threat."

"Not according to the Fundies."

Again swirling rage threatened to overwhelm her; she swallowed it like molten metal. "You know they're after you. According to this latest atrocity they call doctrine, you're contaminated."

A spasm clenched his features. "Well, if they understood even the most basic of nanotech, they'd realize I cannot have biobots and nano in the same physical environment."

"Have you been able to engineer a fix to your latest system crashes?" Even as she studied his face, she knew the answer. The old nanotechnology never had stopped crashing--much like those tedious computer programs of the 20th and early 21st centuries. However when systems crashed in living and breathing bodies, the results proved more problematic than a reboot.

A ping of warning made her clench. The Fundies had detected their connection. Given enough time, they would trace it to its source in the Anatolian sector of what had once been Turkey. Yet another paradox that the Fundies used sophisticated tech to find renegade scientists.

"Sorry, love. We need to break contact for now. We'll try again later," he said as his image faded.

Later. Did they have later? At the top of the Fundie purge lists were scientists like Zulfu, a nangineer with a failing circulatory system. He had installed nanotypes in himself to further his research and to gain more time to perfect his tools. He once told Phoebe that he felt as though he lived in a constant state of collapse. Yet the nanos did not stop working all at once, thus the functional nanos refused to let him die. Elementary biology told her that the perfect parasite kept its host alive indefinitely. For Zulfu that meant constant pain as his circulatory systems underwent repairs. Unlike biobots, who fostered cell growth and protein cascades, nanos used the equivalent of hammers, chisels and nails. Just the thought made her shudder.

Not long after nanos began to be used for critical cases and wealthy patrons who intended to cheat death, the vanguard of biotechientists like Phoebe had synergistically melded living cells with resident chemistry for the ultimate repair unit. When biobots were placed with raw nano, though, the equivalent of war broke out. The byproduct of those internal battles equated with a dead host. An unforeseen side effect occurred when, unlike nano, biobots developed an emotional bond with their hosts. Host. An empty word once biobots formed mutually beneficial relationships with the bodies they inhabited. The actual miracle of true symbiosis dwarfed the uninformed nonsense spouted by Fundies.

Why can't the Fundies believe their all-knowing deity would leave room for processes like evolution or symbiosis? The creator Phoebe put her faith in obviously relished diversity... Then the killer satellite hovered into view of her porthole.

As cold washed her gut and biobots followed, Phoebe decided the satellite looked nothing like a murderer. Yet space station debris told a different story--as did Phaedra II's final transmission. Now the dealer of death wobbled through space along an erratic path. She prepared Helia to change course and engage countermeasures as the satellite's strange motion registered.

Phoebe keyed her console. "Status of defense satellite?"

"All systems nonfunctional," Zulfu's voice, which Phoebe had installed as her ship's primary Comm, answered.

"Weapon systems, too?"

"All systems nonfunctional," the signal processor repeated with no trace of humor. Not Zulfu after all.

"So Phaedra was able to get a piece of it. Good." She maneuvered Helia toward the monster, its one red eye blinking in mechanical distress, and engaged the robotic arms at her ship's bow. Fueled by wrath, Phoebe ripped the satellite apart, then tucked each component into Helia's storage bays. The least this killer could do was provide her with extra parts and recyclable materials. Alarms clamored as she finished.

Phoebe did not depend upon devices to tell her what approached; she felt it in the rush and flow of her biobots. A century storm of cosmic rays swept over and through her. The bots switched to maximum strength in order to maintain her metabolism beneath the carnage left in their wake.

This was their raison d'etre--why biobots had been created. Without them, soft bodies could never have inhabited the solar system. Despite possessing the hardware necessary for space travel, for a century the high energy of lethal solar rays had grounded humans to Earth. Not anymore. Phoebe relaxed and let her bots do their magic. Blood thrummed in her ears and endorphins lulled her.

Luna recovered from the onslaught first. The hound lay flat against her padded deck bed and panted. By the time Phoebe became fully functional again, she registered that Helia's porthole faced earthward. Her ship's cameras had recorded what happened in the wake of the sun's emission. What Phoebe saw...what she saw...

Without intact ozone, the high-energy rays ignited the atmosphere. She could not bear to look directly at the glowing sphere through her porthole and instead turned to the recorded version. The horrific static and pops of a planet in its death throes permeated the cabin before she muted the audio. As atmosphere burned away and destructive beams hit the oceans, steam rose and obscured the view. Edges of continents disappeared beneath the smoke of all-consuming firestorms. Glowing bundles of lightning filled the screen, further obliterating what occurred along the planet's surface. Next would come adjustments in the Earth's tilt as ocean ballast changed to water vapor. Phoebe knew.

Hours later when all attempts to make contact failed, she plummeted into an altered state filled with visions from Dante's archaic Inferno. Fundies screamed and begged for mercy--no sign of ecstasy at their unexpected recall. Only Zulfu's face, his expression loving and open, gave her any sense of calm. She awoke to soft yips. Submersed in dreams of extinct terrestrial prey, Luna twitched and whiffled. Herbal scents drenched the cabin. Phoebe wiped her tight face, then stripped off her rank suit.

The biobots mediated her shock and self-medicated her with the equivalent of an endorphin drip. By now, violent megastorms along with lethal smoke and superheated steam completely obscured Earth. She caught hints of crimson fissures and maws--what could only be erupting volcanoes. Another audio survey gave her nothing but pings and crackles. Still Phoebe could not bring herself to go--or to stay.

Instead she drifted. Helia held her safe as any baby in the ship's uterus-like belly. Biobots initiated hunger and sleep cycles, then saturated her with adrenalin to force her to exercise. Her bots knew best.

In the end, it was Luna who tossed the lifeline when the dog's birthing process shook Phoebe from her stupor. While the biobots proved able process regulators, Luna depended upon her human for encouragement and a loving touch. Finally as Phoebe sank onto her heels and watched the greyhound lick the membrane from the last of six healthy pups, she registered the grunge coating her own nakedness. She offered Luna water. Afterward the new mother collapsed into a deserved rest. Phoebe quickly programmed the sanibots to recognize the puppies and clean only their waste, then headed for an overdue sonic shower.

Clad in a clean bodysuit that eased her skin's sensitivity to long journeys, Phoebe settled into her pilot's net. Beside her Luna sighed in contentment while mewling pups punctuated their cries with vigorous feeding. Phoebe unfurled Helia's solar sails and turned her ship from the dying planet. A trick of timing brought the blushing moon into view. Rosy light reflected the mother planet's death.

"Beautiful," Phoebe murmured.

Then she made a special request to her bots: restore the cluster of cells in her uterus to a normal environment. Within nine months she expected to be among her own kind. With a protective hand over her abdomen, she whispered, "Our child lives, my love."

Phoebe set her navigational systems to the outer solar system and Phaedra III. Helia executed a freefall pirouette and spread her solar wings. If anyone had been on earth to see, hearts would lift.