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Toliver regarded her, then glanced at the ship, and considered. He finally said, “I don’t know. Maybe.”

Reya nodded lightly, avoiding the opportunity to adopt a condescending air. Now was not the time. “Take much to fix it?”

“No,” Toliver replied quickly. “It’s mostly superficial. Flying through that ash, even light as it was, did most of this. We’ll need some serious refitting when we get home.”

“Yeah, sounds that way,” Reya agreed. “Listen, on behalf of Verdant, I want to apologize for the tense moments back there. I know you guys have it rough enough, flying through volcanoes and all, without having to get into fights with my flyers.”

“Yeah. Well,” Toliver conceded, “he was doing his job.” A moment later, he added, “It was a weird situation.” He looked at Reya. “I’m sorry I hit your pilot.”

“Thanks,” Reya said. “I’ll be sure to tell him—”

“Reya!”

Reya turned to the freighter’s hatch, and grinned. “Anise! I wondered if you were in there!”

The young woman who stood at the gangway waved to Reya. She wore a pilot’s jumpsuit, which complemented her slim figure nicely, and had a travel bag slung over her shoulder. More than a few of the cargo handlers paused to check her out as she stood there, framed in the hatchway like a picture. She ascended the gangway, her ponytailed hair swinging merrily with each step, came over to Reya and Toliver, and gave Reya a hug. “How are you, Reya! How’s Daddy? Are you taking care of him?”

“Go on up to CnC, and see for yourself,” Reya replied. “I’m sure he’s wondering by now why you aren’t up there already.”

“Hey, it takes time to shut down a cockpit,” Anise told her lightly. She looked at Toliver. “Please go easy on my Captain, he’s had a rough day.”

“Not as rough as we would’ve had if you’d crashed this thing,” Reya told her. “Now, go on and say ‘hi’ to your father. I’ll see you later.” Anise waved and started off, leaving Reya to return to Toliver. “C’mon: I want to get a better look at your ash damage.”

As the pilot headed in the direction of the lifts that would take her to CnC, she was recognized and greeted by more and more people along the way. “Hey, Anise!” “Nice to see you!” “Hey, Annie, you here long? Call me!” Anise waved or spoke to them all, and saw many more smiles directed at her. Anise was a regular visitor to Verdant, and as she happened to be the daughter of one of Verdant’s senior staff, she was well-known and well-liked throughout the satellite… almost a celebrity. In many ways, she felt Verdant was her second home, much like a favorite vacation spot or port, and could easily imagine making it her first home someday.

The security guards that were stationed at the entrance to CnC also smiled and nodded as she approached, though they didn’t say anything. “Hi, fellas,” she greeted them as she passed, and one of them triggered the sliding doors open for her.

She entered CnC, and saw the usual activity: People at their workstations, doing their jobs diligently, some of them going to and fro. Many of them noticed her entrance, and smiled or waved to her. Anise waved back, and craned her neck about to find her father. She finally located him, bent over one of the weather workstations, and started his way. Her father finally looked up, and smiled widely as she approached.

“Daddy!” Anise wrapped her arms around Julian Lenz’s neck, and he gave her a bear-hug.

“Oh, Daddy, it was the worst,” Anise Lenz said after she put her wineglass down. “I almost don’t want to bring that ship back. It’s like flying through gravel… it scours the hull… and the noise! The counter-sonics couldn’t handle it all! I thought the ship was going to rattle apart at any minute.”

Julian regarded her across the table. They were in his suites, and he’d fixed a simple but well-prepared dinner for her. He rarely cooked elaborately for himself, but when his daughter was on-board, he usually went all-out and whipped up the kind of meals he used to fix when they were still living in North Carolina. Today’s dinner was not as involved as others in the past, however, due to the pressures of the day forcing him to leave CnC rather late in the evening. “The GAA,” he said between bites of salad, “said the air was clear in your window.”

“They didn’t fly through it,” Anise said. “They should have, instead of just taking readings. It’s the ash… it’s too hard to really measure with ground-based fuss sensors, you need to get up there to really know what it is. I sent a report back before I left the
El Cap
, telling them to reconsider their flight clearances.”

“Well, thank goodness you got here in one piece,” Julian said. “I’m still surprised you came at all.”

“Gordon told us to go,” Anise told him. Walter Gordon was the Ceo of RPI, the owners of Lusterne Freight. “He wouldn’t stop moaning about how many billions he was losing by the hour because of the groundings. When the GAA reported the window, he had every loaded freighter okayed for launch.
El Cap
and
Rushmore
were the only two that were ready to go in time to hit the window.”

“The
Rushmore
made it to Fertile all right, I heard,” Julian commented. “But the window has closed back up. Neither of you could manage anything but a southern hemisphere return at this point.”

“That’ll use up more fuel than Gordon will want us to burn to get home,” Anise said. “Especially when he finds out how much that grit wore away at the hull. He’ll tell us to stay put for awhile, hopefully until the northern hemisphere clears.” She took a mouthful of food, and shrugged. “So, I might be here a few days! Enough time to put on a few pounds of this cooking!”

“It wouldn’t kill you,” Julian smiled. “Can’t you get that boyfriend of yours to take you out every now and then?”

“Sergei’s too picky,” Anise shrugged. “It’s easier to stay home. And what about you? Still no one cooking for you?”

Julian returned her shrug. “I’m too picky.”

“Yes,” she agreed, “you are.”

Anise refrained from pestering her father further about his lack of interest in dating or new relationships. Whenever they talked about it, the subject of Mariel came up. It was hard for either of them to talk about his wife, her mother, who had drowned in the Grand Banks floods in the effort to get Anise, then a pre-teen, to safety. She always felt a bit sad that Reya Luis didn’t show any interest in her father, she liked Reya a lot… but then, there was a sizeable age difference there, and to be frank, Anise wasn’t so sure her father could handle Reya, the “petite powderkeg.” So she let the matter drop right there, still high on her list of things to address, but tabled once again, and moved on to other subjects.

They saw enough of each other on a regular basis, Anise being the regular pilot of the
El Capitan
, that they had little need for catch-up conversation. Instead, they talked about the havoc being created by the caldera on the ground. It was not surprising, of course, that the engineers’ projections on how long this equipment, or that service, would last under the onslaught of the ash spread, was proving to be way off in either direction. Some equipment that had been expected to be frozen up by now was still chugging along, albeit a bit roughly, under the ash load… while other systems expected to last for months to years were already shutting down. Without reliable operational projections for—well,
anything
—society was grinding to a halt in North America, and scientists were beginning to use words like “cataclysmic” and “extinction” more and more often. Fully seventy-five percent of the U.S. was now under the ash cloud, and it was beginning to reach across the Atlantic already. Rationing was in effect, since transportation of goods was almost at a standstill. Americans were being warned to hunker down for what might be months of hardship, and no one was willing to predict an end to it all.

As he listened, Julian massaged his temples. It was one thing to hear it from impartial news services. But to hear it from his own daughter, firsthand, was heart-rending.

“And to top it all off,” Anise said, “President Lambert evacuated up here, and left Carruthers running the country. And she’s useless! ‘Cocktail Barbie’ just hides in the High House, gives an occasional address for everyone to stay calm, then ducks into a closet while other departments try to figure out how to get the country through this crisis without real guidance. I could skin Lambert alive, just for that!”

“He’s not exactly making himself welcome up here, either,” Julian told her. “He’s pushing us for higher immigration quotas again.”

“I can’t say I’m surprised,” Anise nodded. “I’m sure he’d love to move all of his cronies up here and set up a little corner of America around his little compound, over there.”

“And what are Americans saying about the satellites?”

Anise looked at her father, and took a sip of wine before responding. “A lot of people want to get up here, Daddy. They’re panicking… and with good reason. They think maybe it’s safe up here in the satellites.”

“I wish it was,” Julian said. “I wish we could take them all up here. But it’s just not workable. Our resources and capacities are very finite. They need to understand that.”

“That’s a rational argument,” Anise said. “But this isn’t a rational time. They think the satellites are going to cut themselves off from Earth, and leave them to stew.”

Julian shook his head. “We need Earth as much as they need us. Where would we be without Earth?”

~

“I gotta get off this rock.”

Walter Gordon was alone in his office, speaking aloud as if there was someone there to hear him. But no one was around, save a few guards on the lower levels of RPI. They certainly couldn’t hear him up on the penthouse level. In fact, most of them probably didn’t know he was still in the building.

But he was there, in his office, all alone. He had been up there for days, since he’d sent most of the rest of his employees home by government order, and only a skeleton force remained at the offices. The picture window behind his desk was obscured by closed blinds and drawn drapes, and the single small desk lamp cast most of the room in shadow. Walter Gordon paced about in the dark, occasionally talking to himself, fretting over the imminent disaster that was his company.

The Yellowstone eruption, and subsequent grounding of his freight lines, meant he was moving virtually no goods, making virtually no money, and watching his daily operating costs eat him alive. “Two billion. Today alone. Two billion.” It had probably been no help at all to launch even the two freighters that had made it through the brief window the GAA alerted them about. Between the efforts to rush two ships off the ground, and the reports of the apparent damage they had suffered flying through skies that were
still full of ash
, no matter what the morons at the GAA said… hell, he’d probably
lost
money on the flights.

“Ash damage. They’ll need major overhauls… God,
not more overhauls
…”

Walter ran a hand through is hair. He’d been just four years away from selling the company and retiring to Verdant, his biggest and best customer. Years of setting up accounts, setting up employees and an office presence in Verdant… not to mention people to help smooth his entry and buy him that hard-to-get citizen’s visa… now, thanks to a
damned volcano
, it was all unraveling before his eyes.

His roof gave out a soft groan. Security told him that there was a good four inches of rock on the roof by now, roughly equal to the weight of eight feet of snow. He would have to leave the building in another day at this rate, before it collapsed under the weight.

“Taking me with it…”

No, he needed to do more than leave the building. He needed to salvage what was left of his fortune, and get to one of the satellites.
Now
. He couldn’t wait four years… or even one. His mandatory retirement began
now
.

But he still didn’t have the visa. The process generally took years, even when you had the financial resources to beat the U.N. lotteries and bribe your way in. And there was bound to be renewed pressure now, with everything shutting down and more people clamoring to go…

But
wait
. President Lambert had gone to Verdant. And as it so happened, one of Gordon’s employees had been cultivating a relationship with Lambert for years, whenever he visited Verdant for a few days. She was the unofficial member of Walter’s lobbying staff, paid to do whatever it took to get on the good side of those in charge. Lambert was stuck there now, so…

“She
must
have access to him.”

Walter reached for the com, and found the number he was looking for after a moment fumbling in the dark. A few moments later, his desk screen lit up, and he looked down at the face that stepped in front of the camera.

“Hello, Shay. Tell me you’re logging some quality time with Lambert.”

“I was the first one they called, Walter.”
Shay Vaughn smiled up at Walter, and brushed a lock of her hair away from her eyes.

“Good. Good,” Walter said. “What are they doing up there?”

“They’re not happy,”
Shay told him.
“They’re trying to force immigration quota increases, but Lenz isn’t having any of it, from what I can tell. Lambert’s off discussing it again with Thompson and the boys, right now.”

“Shit. That’s not good. I need that visa.”

“Maybe not,”
Shay said.
“I’ve been talking to Lambert about using the trade companies to put pressure on Verdant. I’ve dropped your name. If you can get a flight up here, you can work with President Lambert to secure a place for more immigrants. Like, for instance, yourself.”

Walter’s eyes widened and seemed to glow with determination. “Shay, you’re
amazing
. Do whatever you have to do, whoever you have to do it to, to clear me a temporary visitation visa. Get me up there, and I’ll buy you your own compound, y’hear?”

Shay smiled wryly.
“Just make sure they don’t boot
me
off.”

~

“…Well, long story short, the freighter landed okay, and the damage wasn’t that serious. But once it was parked, the Captain found the Wasp pilot, and the two of them had blows right there.” Aaron Hardy took a sip of his drink, as Kris Fawkes looked on with a shocked expression. “Reya—Eo Luis—managed to show up then, probably keeping them from fighting some more. But she told me later that another of our regular visitors told her that tensions are getting worse among most of the Earth-to-satellite crews.”