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John McBride is a lens technician living in the glittering, industrial underbelly of Pluto’s capital—an artificial city nicknamed “Hell” because its towering hotels and furnace‑lit streets sit atop a massive uranium smelter. He watches the River Styx of molten metal flow beneath a rooftop garden, his thoughts split between the alien heat of his workplace and the distant home where his wife Enid waits, pregnant and far away on the mechanogravitic warp that connects the outer planets.

When a terse spacegram arrives, the message is clear: Enid needs him, but the only way back is a treacherous 6‑G jump that will take days, pushing both his body and the fragile station’s schedules to their limits. As John scrambles to secure a lift, he must balance the urgency of his personal crisis with the demanding politics of a colony that has never known anything but endless industry. The story follows his desperate race against time, the stark beauty of a colonized Pluto, and the human longing that drives him across the cold void.