The outlaw Phoebe Jones gazes earthward through Helia’s viewport. Shrunken icecaps bracket Earth, the place where she is no longer welcome. Interdiction. That’s what Fundamentalists call her dismissal.

Strangled laughter arises. Her hiccups resemble Earth’s landmasses, abbreviated and lapped by planetary fluids. Responsive to Phoebe’s increased metabolic rate, her ship floods the cabin with relaxing scents.

“Edicts be damned. Right, Luna?” The greyhound presses her head against Phoebe’s thigh. As she strokes the hound’s silky fur, Phoebe’s biobots, her little helpers, reduce her stomach’s hydrochloric surge to harmless levels. Tenacity is one of Phoebe’s selected traits; adherence to theocracy was not.

“It’s not like I didn’t see this coming.” A coppery taste fills her mouth.

For Phoebe glimpsed this criminal stupidity; first through extrapolation, then via waking dreams. Her biobots activated epigenetics into coherent structure. Now at random intervals, time opens to Phoebe in panoramic second sight. Paradoxically, her ability reinforces the case against her. Fundies loathe what they’re incapable of understanding.

Her bots deactivate lethal genes, too. She’s less ambivalent about this. Unlike her grandmother and mother, Phoebe will never develop metastatic breast cancer.

She contemplates the rivers of dust and extreme weather systems shrouding her home world. Desperately vulnerable to cataclysm, the bright orb hurts her eyes. Yet she navigated dimensional warps and wormholes to return with her results. Phoebe’s findings will save this earth if she can make landfall. Where’s the Fundies’ Rapture, dubbed Recall of Defective Parts, when you need it? According to calculations and her glimpses into myriad futures, an extreme solar event could occur at any moment.

Phoebe switches to diagnostic mode. Glaring red zones illuminate gaping holes where ozone once protected the world’s soft underbelly. Since her stint onboard space station Phaedra I, she has played a substantial role in rescuing terra firma. She designed the global supergrid conducting solar and wind produced electricity along with hydrogen fuel. When Phaedra II unfurled her solar nanopanels and harvested the first gigawatt of sun’s energy, transferred by microwave to receiving stations, she participated. That initial burst tipped communications offline for 48 hours. Yet infrared lasers solved that particular glitch. Thus power-to-payload ratio exceeded their predictions.

She keys her solar-enhanced scope. Helia’s orbit carries her over southeastern Eurasia where Phoebe glimpses that sector’s fusion reactor. Along the shifting coast, algae farms convert excess CO2 from North American Global (NAG) and Sino-Indo Conglom (SIC) into biofuels. Still NAG and SIC’s insistence on coal burning plants swamp most gains.

Unofficially the international definition for insanity has been updated. NAG’s actions triggered the event cascade that drowned coastlines, melted glaciers, and reduced ozone to insignificant levels. Through their determined lack of effort, global weather systems tilted into hyperdrive. As mightily as geo-engineers strove, icebergs require geological time to regenerate. Yes, sanctions finally forced both NAG and SIC to extract carbon byproducts from coal plants even if mercury persisted. True recovery only began after a half century of stabilization.

In Helia’s hydroponics bay, Phoebe’s bioremedial plants live, each capable of replacing ozone at astronomical rates. For three months, this interdiction has banned not just her, but her botanical fix. Another solar storm like the one six months ago could be Earth’s death knell. A downbeat of utter rage and sorrow engulfs Phoebe. Her cabin responds with calming scents.

Chiming alarms sound as Helia navigates debris left from Phaedra II. The defensive satellite that killed the station and all hands hovers along this orbital path. Ironically, those same hands built the object of their destruction. She trusts the crew’s biobots to have ended their agony. Cataclysmic death remains outside bots’ repair capacity.

“Am I next?” She buries shaking fingers into the fur at Luna’s neck.

Phoebe’s fingers trail along tensile muscle to the hound’s sides, where Luna’s belly swells with life. The puppies will spend their early months on board until Phoebe joins Phaedra III’s outbound colonists. Riding solar winds toward deep space, Phoebe’s transmittal reached Phaedra III near Saturn’s rings. Pleas for her to join them cram her InComm.

A swell of fury hits. When biobots attempt to modulate, her internal snarl sends them skittering. Or it would have if biobots skittered. She touches the transistorized spreader jury-rigged to her CommUnit, noting one worn key. Before the Fundies murdered Zülfü, they communicated this way.

A bioengineer, he once told Phoebe that he lived in a constant state of collapse. Nanos stopped working in degrees, thus functional ones refused to let him die. Perfect parasites keep their hosts alive indefinitely. For Zülfü, that meant constant pain. Unlike biobots, which foster cell growth and protein cascades, nanos use the equivalent of hammers, chisels and nails.

Not long after physicians assimilated nanos for critical cases and the death-cheating wealthy, biotechientists like Phoebe synergistically melded living cells into the ultimate repair unit. When biobots are placed with raw nano, though, the equivalent of war breaks out. The byproduct of those internal battles? A dead host. An unforeseen side effect occurred when, unlike nano, biobots develop emotional bonds with their hosts.

Why can’t the Fundies believe their all-knowing deity would leave room for processes like evolution or symbiosis?

The killer satellite hovers into view. Phoebe asks her console, “Status of defense satellite?”

“All systems nonfunctional,” Zülfü’s voice answers.

“Weapon systems?”

“All systems nonfunctional,” the processor repeats without humor. Not Zülfü after all.

“So Phaedra got a piece of it.” She maneuvers Helia toward the monster, its red eye blinking in mechanical distress, then engages robotic arms at her ship’s bow. Phoebe rips the satellite apart, tucking each component into Helia’s storage bays.

As she finishes, alarms clamor. Phoebe feels the solar storm in the rush and flow of her biobots. Bots switch to maximum potency, maintaining her metabolism in the carnage left by gammas’ wake.

This is why biobots were created. Without them, the solar system remained beyond soft bodies. Despite possessing hardware for space travel, the high energy of lethal solar rays grounded humans. No longer. Phoebe relaxes to let her bots do their work. Blood thrums in her ears as endorphins lull her.

Luna recovers from the onslaught first. The hound lays flat against her padded deck bed and pants. By the time Phoebe becomes fully functional again, Helia’s porthole faces earthward. Her ship’s cameras record the results of the sun’s emission. What Phoebe sees...what she sees...

Without intact ozone, high-energy rays ignite the atmosphere. She cannot bear to look directly at the glowing sphere, turning instead to the recorded version. Horrific pops and static permeate the cabin. She mutes the audio. As atmosphere burns away and destructive beams hit oceans, steam rises, obscuring her investigation. Continental edges disappear within the firestorm. Glowing bundles of lightning fill the screen, obliterating her view. Next the Earth’s tilt will adjust as ocean’s ballast transforms to water vapor. Phoebe dreamt this.

Hours later, when attempted contact fails, she plummets into an altered state filled with visions from Dante’s archaic Inferno. Fundies scream and beg for mercy—no sign of ecstasy at their unexpected recall. Only Zülfü’s face offers a sense of calm. She awakes to soft yips. Submersed in dreams of extinct prey, Luna twitches. Soothing aromas drench the cabin. Phoebe wipes her tight face, then strips off her rank suit.

The biobots mediate her shock, self-medicating her with an endorphin drip. By now, violent megastorms along with lethal smoke and superheated steam completely obscure Earth. She catches hints of crimson fissures and maws—what can only be erupting volcanoes. An audio survey gives her nothing but pings and crackles. Still Phoebe cannot bring herself to go—or to stay.

In the end, Luna tosses the lifeline. The dog’s birthing process shakes Phoebe from her stupor. While biobots prove capable process regulators, Luna depends upon her human for encouragement. As Phoebe sinks onto her heels while the greyhound licks membrane from six healthy pups, she registers the grunge coating her own nakedness. She offers Luna recycled water. Afterward the new mother collapses into a deserved rest. Phoebe quickly programs sanibots to recognize the puppies and clean only their waste, then heads for an overdue sonic shower.

Clad in a clean bodysuit to ease skin sensitivity during journeys, Phoebe settles into her pilot’s net. Beside her Luna sighs while mewling pups feed. Phoebe unfurls Helia’s solar sails, turning her ship from the planet. A trick of timing brings the blushing moon into sight. Rosy light reflects the mother planet’s throes.

“Beautiful,” Phoebe murmurs.

Then she requests her bots to restore the cell cluster in her uterus to a normal environment. Within nine months, Phoebe will be among her own kind. She whispers, “Our child lives Zülfü, my love.”

Phoebe sets her navigational systems to the outer solar system. Helia executes a freefall pirouette. If anything but bacterial cells had been on earth to see, hearts would lift.