In the cocooned, silent warmth of the plane cabin, she shivered.

Like many of her generation, Bella still had nightmares about the sunstorm. Now it was Bella’s job to listen to the bad dreams.

Edna’s face, in the softscreen on the seat back before Bella, was flawlessly rendered in three dimensions. Edna was only twenty-three, one of the first generation of “Spacers,” as Bella had learned to call them, born in space during Bella’s post-sunstorm rehabilitation stay on the Moon. But Edna was already a captain. Promotions were fast in a navy with few crew in ships so smart, or so Edna said, they even had robots to swab the decks. Today, with her Irish-dark hair pulled severely back and her uniform buttoned up around her neck, Edna looked tense, her eyes shadowed.

Bella longed to touch her daughter. But she couldn’t even speak to her in a natural way. Edna was out in the navy’s operations HQ

in the asteroid belt. The vagaries of orbits dictated that at this moment Edna was some two astronomical units away from her mother, twice Earth’s distance to the sun, a tremendous gap that imposed an each-way time delay of sixteen minutes.

And besides there was a question of protocol. Bella was in fact her daughter’s commanding officer. She tried to focus on what Edna was saying.

“This is just a head’s-up, Mum,” Edna said now. “I don’t have any details. But the scuttlebutt is that Rear Admiral Paxton is flying to London to brief you about it…”

Bella flinched. Bob Paxton, heroic footprints-and-flags explorer of Mars, and a royal pain in the butt.

Edna smiled. “Just remember, he’s got a chest full of fruit salad, but you’re the boss! By the way — Thea is doing fine.” Edna’s daughter, Bella’s three-year-old granddaughter, a second-generation Spacer. “She’ll be on her way home soon. But you should see how she’s taken to microgravity in the low-spin habitats!..”