Up Against It – M. J. Locke (Laura J. Mixon) (2011)[ENG][DjVu|scan|OCR]{Kaefer}

Jane Navio is the resource manager of Phocaea, an asteroid colony poised on the knife edge of hard vacuum and unforgiving space. A mishap has dumped megatons of water and methane out of the colony’s air lock, putting the entire human population at risk.
Jane discovers that the crisis may have been engineered by the Martian crime syndicate, as a means of executing a coup that will turn Phocaea into a client-state And if that wasn’t bad enough, an AI that spawned during the emergency has gone rogue … and there’s a giant x-factor in the form of the transhumanist Viridian cult that lives in Phocaea's bowels.
Jane’s in the prime of her career—she’s only a bit more than a century old—but the conflict between politics and life-support is tearing her apart. To save her colony and her career, she’s going to have to solve several mysteries at once—a challenge that will put her up against all the difficulties, contradictions, and awkward compromises entailed in the human colonization of outer space.

Rigorous extrapolation with an imaginative flair, characters you can care about, and clean, lean, muscular prose are some of the hallmarks of M. J. Locke, a bright light on the science fiction scene. Fans of hard SF will eat this up and shout for more.

Both original—full of smart new ways of looking at science fiction ideas—and old-fashioned—full of the kind of whiz-bang action-adventure that made so many of us fall in love with SF in the first place.

Up Against It starts with a bang and only gets more intense in the pages that follow. M. J. Locke fills the novel with the exciting, mind-bending combination of action and wild ideas that makes for the best SF.

M. J. Locke is an engineer in the American Southwest with a background in the energy industry. This is Locke’s first novel.