Atlas & Ares book 1: Men of the Red Earth

The hold of the August Hawk gleamed spaciously white, floor and bulkheads smooth and antiseptic, corners and crevices rounded away and glowing with a light magically brighter yet more sterile than the light that fell on it. It looked like the hospital of the future.

Into this two-story clean room an airlock belched a stumbling drunk in a battered mining suit. Its patches dropped dirt caked by machine oil. A pair of accordion arms grabbed the smudged helmet and twisted. Out popped a chocolate head.

Rigsby.

His nostrils flared to evacuate the leathery stench of the old suit and replace it with the ship's cool, perfectly humid air. Then he paused and listened. Satisfied that no one was coming to greet him, he crept out from under the ramp and into the rows of tied down crates, nestling into a crevice where he could watch the airlock unseen.

A minute later the door rolled open and Cap appeared, lens already in hand. "I'm in. Let's go." And like a seasoned sailor he seized a fistful of cargo netting and took the tilt of the deck with his knees.

Soon the pressure of ascent lessened until it flirted with weightlessness, and Cap gripped the cargo net to keep from floating away. Cap radioed Udike. "Fast as you can. All nine." Then gravity returned in anger, rocketing up to two and a half times Martian standard. Cap tested his own strength under a full gee. He released the straps. "Rust!"

"I take it we're past high orbit." Rigsby stood before him, his lens up with Halliday's message.

Cap clutched his own lens, no doubt pondering whether to order Udike back. "Why are you here?"

"Fool me twice. I'd suspected you sent me after Bruno Farelli as a distraction, but it was a stretch to figure out you intended to take the Hawk from Deimos to Earth to rescue your sister. You didn't have to leave me behind."

"It was for your own safety."

"Excuse. What's the plan?"

"There is no plan."

"That's why you need me along."

"Rigsby—"

"You do have a plan, and here's how I know: Bruno Farelli is a Swiss electrician. I read the fine print on Zinser's broadside. The executive order banning Martians was issued in response to the kidnapping of Swiss electrician Bruno Farelli. I wasn't the only person you asked to find him, was I? You asked George. What I don't understand is: why have her kidnap him?"

Cornered, Cap twisted off his helmet and took excess pains to wedge it between two stacks of cargo, under the netting. With effort he decided to tell the truth. "When Ambrose and I were going over spectrographs I saw a list on his desk, had Farelli's name. I'd never heard of an Italian on Mars, but I didn't think anything of it until Ambrose wanted scientists from Earth." Cap tugged absently on a cargo strap.

Rigsby said, "Didn't you kibosh Ambrose's plan because it would lead to slavery?"

"I wasn't going to bring Farelli to Mars, just...take one of Earth's pieces off the board."

"How'd you manage to make it blow back on Martians?"

"Ugh, I knew you'd be mad about that." Cap pulled the cargo netting of another stack as he considered his answer. "I may or may not have suggested to George, possibly joking, that when she whisked him away, she leave a small, indirect hint that Bruno Farelli was kidnapped by Martians."

"Why?" Rigsby felt the veins in his forehead bulging.

Cap shrugged. "I wanted to see...how the news was received."

Rigsby hissed as if in pain, but he traced Cap's logic. "Ambrose had a list of names from Earth, and you wanted to know where he got it, so you generated a little Earth-side news to see the path it took to the Bank. Earth to Judith to Zinser to Ambrose."

"Maybe." Cap passed to the next row of cargo.

"Who else could be Ambrose's source?"

"Norse tracked a jumper all the way to Earth, and dollars to dust it was Judith. But if so, she's hardly been down there two weeks and I saw Farelli's name in Ambrose's office two months ago."

"You think it's George?"

"Who else on Earth has contact with Martians?" Cap found a loose strap and pulled it tighter then continued on to the third row of cargo.

Rigsby dawdled behind him, observing, waiting, but Cap continued fussing with straps, oblivious to one other piece of information Halliday had relayed. "I didn't know Gidja wasn't talking to you."

"Frost, tell me you didn't read that in the paper."

"You told Zinser? Why am I the last—"

"Get over yourself, I've told you plenty." Cap yanked hard on the netting, then tested its anchor welded to the deck with a hard kick. "Gidja wanted me to confide in her, and I wouldn't."

"Girls will really break up over that?"

"To live with someone you have to trust them, and to live with someone on Mars you have to trust them absolutely."

He continued down the line, tugging every strap and hook, cinching straps, kicking hooks, systematically testing every tie-down in the hold. Rigsby asked, "What are you doing?"

"We should have unloaded before we left."

"Maybe don't be in such a hurry to leave me behind."

"I can still take you back."

"Then why haven't you?"

"Too expensive to turn around under acceleration. An hour to stop, an hour to return to where we are now but headed the opposite direction, an hour to decelerate to Mars, an hour to accelerate back to this same spot. Four hours of fuel is worth more than your sorry digging suit."

"What are you so afraid of, anyway?"

"What am I—" Cap stormed up the aisle at him. "We have no way through to Earth. No one has the codes for the Argrid, and if there's a new hole in it, we don't know where it is or when. If we're lucky enough not to be Kesslered by orbital debris, we then have to outrun what created all that debris. Assuming we do get through, we'll hit atmo, and not atmo like Mars, thin as tissue paper, believe you me—Earth atmo, like dropping into a blast furnace. If we don't burn up outrunning a missile, we'll descend to the next ring of misery: weather. Cross-winds, clouds as big as mountains laced with electricity and shedding conductive water, releasing volts by the millions. Ever take a walk between the plates of a capacitor? Because that's where we'll be. Equatorial super-storms boiled up by the heat and rotation of the planet, with air pressure so low they lift the ocean ten feet over your head and wash away entire cities. And that's overlooking all the things trying to kill you—"

"Cap—"

"You know what's on the ground? Animals. Snakes, and huge ones. Fanged leopards. Rabid elephants and rhinoceri. Poisonous plants. Plants that eat animals. Diseased mosquitoes. Wasp-things with stingers. Beetles. Mites. Venomous spiders. All of which is a minuscule fraction of the unnumbered hosts that are big enough to see but not big enough to see coming. Add to them the microscopic germs and viruses which consider the whole planet their buffet and living beings their breeding hosts. The whole planet's a reified nightmare, an active biohazard, a hostile creature bred from malice—"

"Cap—"

"But of course people live there too, faceless and numbered in the billions—drunks, brawlers, frauds, deadbeats, hucksters, rakes, pirates, vandals. Like divergent strains of the human race." He left Rigsby and marched back up the aisle. "So don't ask me what I'm so worried about—"

Cap halted.

Rigsby had tried to warn him.

In front of Cap stood a girl in a dirty slipskin shirt, ribs showing through the fabric and arms bare where she'd chewed off the sleeves. Her skin was blue as an icebox. With sunken eyes she looked up at Cap, and trembled.

She was chest high, maybe fourteen, with thin hair pulled back into a ragged ponytail, her skin almost translucent. A blue blood, Cap thought, the ghost of Mars future.

Except the girl wasn't Martian. She was too warm. She'd torn off her sleeves and kept her hair off her neck, accustomed to colder temperatures. A Belter, then, and a long-time one. Not one of Cap's émigrés. She must have gone out with Joshua Benning. No, not emigrated. She'd been born in the Belt.

Assessing her, Cap lost himself. The presence of another place weighed on him, a cramped and suffocating place he'd tried to forget, where he'd only escaped because his arms had been seized in powerful pincers and his small body peeled off a baffle to be dragged up through a square hole in the grating and dropped on the deck. A hold, not the August Hawk but one dim and grungy, suffused in a weak cobalt light that trickled down the walls to pool at the feet of the shadows that surrounded him. The twelve-man crew of Plymouth. Now a jury. Someone spoke to the man who had lifted him out. "How much?"

"Enough."

"The whole mission's fouled."

"Marsha?"

A stout form shifted its weight. "A week in, past the point of no return. We didn't have a twelfth-part margin for error, so..." She calculated. "Worst is fuel. Six weeks with an extra man? We'll come up short."

"We have to get rid of him."

"Is that allowed?"

"We have a mission, two thousand people counting on us. We can't come up short."

A voice of authority gave the command. "Take him to the airlock."

The stowaway's feet left the floor. Bodies parted. A crippling terror seized the boy's chest and he fought, but the hands on him were iron shackles. An executioner had a duty to perform. The boy was taken to the accessway.

A body in his path interrupted. "It won't work."

A gruff hesitation. "What won't?"

"Throwing him out the airlock." An auburn highlight shouldered casually on the bulkhead.

"We have no choice."

"Sure we do. We can slow down, improve fuel efficiency. We'll cover the distance."

"That would put us behind schedule."

"We have an extra body to catch us up."

"And extra food? Water? Air? Work it out, Silva. We're balanced on a razor's edge, zero room for new contingencies. We only have twelve pressure suits."

"And enough spare parts to build another."

"And if any of the twelve need those spare parts?"

The boy understood. Even if an execution wasn't necessary, it was prudent.

An auburn shrug. "Fine. Kill him. But you can't use the airlock. It doesn't work." She reached behind her and produced a spidery knot of glinting wires. "You can kill him, but you can't use the airlock to dispose of his body."

Not until later did the stowaway understand her game. Without the airlock, execution wouldn't be so simple. Wouldn't be clean. They'd have to do it the messy way, wring his neck with their own hands or bludgeon him. And his weight would still be a problem. He wouldn't fit in the incinerator. They'd have to cut him to pieces, dice him up. And having diced him up, they'd have to consider an alternative to the incinerator—for the sake of efficiency. He'd put them behind schedule. They would need to stretch the food supply...

Michael Benning made the call. Twelve bodies en route to Mars on small reserves, and if cannibalism started now, it would be an option at every tight corner down the road. As expedition lead, Benning couldn't rule it out, but neither would he start only a week in. "Find the kid a berth. Marsha, tap the brakes. Everyone else, see what we can spare. No one touches the kid until I say so."

The jury grumbled but dispersed, and the boy was returned to the deck as a heap.

He lay several minutes on the grating before he saw boots at his head. He stood. She said, "Silva Redstone. You got a name?"

"Cincinnati."

"Well, Cincinnati, you owe me one."

He looked up, then threw his arms around her. She reminded him too much of George.

Cap remembered it as he stared at the stowaway aboard the Hawk. You owe me one. He said, "Where are your parents?"

She stuck out her hand. "Name's Hazel. Pleasure to be on your crew."

"I don't have a crew. I have a pilot and two stowaways."

"Yes sir. We learn from the best."

"Where are your parents?" he asked again, and when she didn't answer he headed for the cockpit. "You're from the Belt. Marsha Strange can tell me."

"Four hours of fuel is a lot of money. And I can help you."

Before he could scoff and ask how, Udike called from above. "Cap, a problem. Acceleration is off."

"Let me guess," Cap replied, remembering what Halliday had said of the Prince Pallas's acceleration, "we're off by one Rigsby and thirty-nine kilograms."

Udike appeared on the balcony and assessed the situation below. "Go back?"

Cap wanted to, and for more reasons than to keep safe a best friend who was too loyal for his own good and a girl aping his own teenage misbehavior, but he feared if he went back to Mars now he might choose to stay. And he could use the help.

He reached let loose a cargo strap, freed a crate, and popped its latch. From inside he took a Martiantosh apple. He offered it to Hazel. "Maybe somewhat less than thirty-nine kilograms?"

She lifted the gnarled fruit from his palm with a grateful bow, and clasped the treasure to her chest.

Cap told Rigsby, "Have the garden put it on my tab." That and more, he thought. They'd have to dip a lot further into the cargo before they got home.

Cap had a crew. Not a crew he'd have chosen—the last pilot on Mars, a C.O.O. who'd promoted himself to man's best friend, and a starving fourteen-year-old girl. Motley, but loyal and eager to please. Cap grumbled. They deserved a better captain.

The August Hawk accelerated to a full a gee, and though Cap's body could take the weight, his muscles weren't tuned to the new gravity, upward movements too slow, downward too fast, like an instrument always playing sharp or flat, and no force of will could revise a decade of inlaid calculations. He reverted to being a clumsy teenager. He couldn't coordinate his own limbs, how was he supposed to captain?

There was nothing to do. He spired up from the hold to the bunk room, the bunk room to the bridge, the bridge back to the hold. No one needed orders. Only Udike had a job, and barely. Other than adjusting for minor gravitational perturbations, he fluttered his hands above the helm without touching the controls, practicing for dangerous maneuvers no one had tried in a generation and which for a generation before that no one had succeeded at. Cap's one job was to get the trick from Gidja, and she still wouldn't talk to him.

He lay in his bunk feeling strangely both important and useless. After an hour, he got up and resumed his rounds.

Only yellow points of emergency lighting showed the way along the balcony to the galley and up to the cockpit. Udike sat at the helm. Cap said, "You should sleep."

"I have."

"In the chair?"

"Yes."

Cap considered ordering his pilot to a bunk, but even in his head the order sounded false, and Cap reminded himself that he had signed the Hawk over, so if anyone was the rightful captain of the ship, it was Udike. Cap made a resigned gesture and eased his body onto the floor in front of the helm. He stared out the panoramic windshield at the nothingness of the cosmos.

Before long he adjusted to lay flat on the deck and watch stars through the triangular facets of the overhead dome. The star at the center shone more brightly. Cap found his lens. He held it at arm's length above his face, and the star resolved into an aquamarine crescent.

Blue for danger.

Cap tracked the villain planet, what he had embellished in his imagination as an ugly, cancerous mass, now hung in the sky as harmless as a hangnail. He closed his eyes and remembered how Mars had looked as Plymouth approached. On black velvet had welled up a pink dot, growing day by day into a red bubble. A pinprick. Solange had painted its portrait on a bulkhead. She improvised a beam compass and traced an enormous circle on a bulkhead in the ship's commons, then aimed a telescope through a portal in the deck and began brushing in pinks and browns and dark reds using paint made from blood and motor oil, adding detail as features manifested in the telescope's eyepiece. For the ice caps she feathered in gauze stolen from the medic's bag. Ourson said he hadn't known she was an artist. Solange told him it wasn't art. It was a map. Cincinnati had supposed she intended to explore Mars, but Cap had seen Solange revise the map and add a third color—

He awoke with a start.

Cap lay on the floor of the cockpit, its gentle lights now on and the cargo hold illuminated beneath him and casting a shadow of his prone body on the ceiling. It was day. He hastened to his feet. Udike had gone, and in his place stood the girl. "Morning, captain," she said. Cap sensed sarcasm—not very captain-like to fall asleep on the floor of the bridge—but then Hazel gave her best imitation of a salute, index finger across her brow as if to shade her eyes, and he realized she was doing her best to serve as a member of the crew. "All conditions normal," she reported with a grin. "Three days to Earth."

Foggily Cap remembered they weren't aimed for Mars. He searched for something authoritative to say. "The ship has a radio. Tune into broadcasts and see what we can learn."

"Yes, sir."

Then he left to find breakfast, forcing an uncomfortable nonchalance that suggested captains regularly slept on the floor of the bridge and any stowaway might assume the conn.

Rigsby met him on the ramp. "Dream up any ideas?"

He sneered. "I already asked if Gidj is getting her hands dirty on Earth. That was the last card up my sleeve." He found the galley and browsed a bare cupboard.

"What makes you think Gidja Boyle can get through the Argrid?"

"Zinser had a hunch about Judith's line of inquiry. There are rumors Gidja doesn't answer calls promptly."

"You need better sources."

"I'm lucky to have any sources at all."

"So how do we get through the Argrid if your ex doesn't have the secret?"

"Paint a tunnel on it and hope we're the roadrunner."

"That bad?"

"We have no probes, and supposing we did it would take months to find a pinhole on that big ugly ball, especially a pinhole that only opens a few minutes every few weeks."

"Maybe Kaufman's Gap has reopened."

"After twenty-four years?"

"Complex systems have longer cycles than that."

"Redmond Clarke ran simulations at the time, and he had actual orbital data. He said the Argrid had self-healed, had complete coverage again, with no possibility of a gap reappearing."

"Maybe he was wrong. We could resurvey."

"Too dangerous. Norse's probe was nowhere near low orbit when it was hit."

"Stealth jumper?"

"Not stealthy enough to sneak by Norse."

Rigsby nibbled a corner of hardtack he had found. "Who besides Gidja knows the trick?"

"Judith's pilot."

"He might've told somebody."

"Not everyone brags as much as you."

"True. I don't even brag as much as me. What does George know?"

Cap lay back against the empty cupboard, eyes closed and hungry. "Nothing about the Argrid."

"What about Judith?"

"Hard to say."

"Why's that?"

"Comms are flaky."

"You haven't heard from her?"

"Not in a while."

"Since when?"

"Since...she took Farelli."

"You don't think—"

Cap came up and glared. "No, I don't, and neither do you. George is too smart to let herself be caught in a dragnet after a quarter century living on the lam, so either comms are flaky or..."

"Or she's gone radio silent because the reaction to Farelli's kidnapping is worse than you anticipated."

"Or that, yes."

Rigsby split his hardtack with Cap, and they gnawed the sallow blocks of raw nutrition in silence. When Cap was done, he brushed crumbs from his lap and went about his rounds, circling high and low again without thoughts, without understanding, and without any idea how to get either. After a long pass through the aisles in the hold, he appeared in the cockpit. Hazel again saluted. "Done as ordered, sir. Caught a broadcast from Earth, a big airing of grievances by a Somebody named Sampson Emmerich Wright."

"What'd he say?" Cap asked without interest.

"New radio tower, but same old policy. Liberty and justice for all our friends."

Cap frowned, digging in his memory. "Where have I heard that before?"

She presented a faded yellow paperback. "I've also been reading, sir." Levy's journal.

"Oh." Cap resumed his course along the perimeter walls, circling the rest of the day with his left hand on the bulkheads and windows and railings and cargo netting, slowing, eventually floating each foot long seconds in the air before placing it back on the deck. His stride diminished, steps closer together. He waited for inspiration to strike.

Then, in mid-afternoon, there was a movement from the bunk room. Udike appeared, hustling along the balcony. "She's got something. Hazel—on the radio."

Cap's head snapped up, but before he could wonder if his aimless order that morning had borne fruit, Udike said, "I asked her to monitor comm traffic in case we intersected an unencrypted signal. Long odds, but no cost to listen. Sounds like it paid off."

So not a signal from Earth. Cap's stride diminished again, but he directed himself toward the cockpit, and when arrived above the helm shone the translucent projection of a sphere. Hazel was saying, "I finally figured out the encoding. Matrix of floats."

Rigsby screwed up his face in confusion. "A grid of parade floats?"

"Floating-point numbers. And not in a grid, a matrix. Here."

The sphere vanished and in its place appeared a sheet of orange numbers arranged in three columns and hundreds of rows. Udike pointed to the leftmost column. "Thirteen digits. Those values are a lot bigger than the others."

"Timestamps," Hazel answered. "Milliseconds since a standard epoch. The other two columns are all between ninety and negative ninety, and one-eighty and negative one-eighty."

"Lat-lon pairs."

"Right."

Rigsby, hung up on being corrected, asked, "What's the difference between a matrix and a grid?"

"A matrix can have than two dimensions." Hazel punched a key, and the hovering sheet of numbers faded and slid back as another sheet brightened and rose from behind. "Same number of rows and columns, different data."

"How close are the pairwise timestamps?" Udike asked.

"Thirty seconds."

"Position deltas?"

"That was my guess, so I plotted them."

The spreadsheets dematerialized and the sphere returned, covered in hundreds of tiny red dots, like ants crawling on the surface of a ball. Each ant traced a great circle, crisscrossing the globe. Orbital data.

Udike said, "Enlarge the dots, big enough they touch." Hazel tinkered, and the globe became a swirl of crimson, darker where two circles overlapped. "That'll be the lower bound on the platforms' firing range. They could shoot further than that, but they'll be able to shoot at least that far, otherwise they wouldn't have complete coverage. Are there any gaps?"

Hazel rotated the image. "The spot that gets furthest from a missile platform is here. Twenty-three degrees, forty-two minutes south, a hundred thirty-three degrees, fifty-two minutes east."

"How often is it open?"

"Based on these firing ranges, it's always open."

"The gap's not periodic?"

Cap found his tongue. "Who gave you this data?"

"Picked it out of the ether. No return address."

"Tight-beam?"

"Not based on the strength of the signal."

"Did you triangulate it?"

"It was too quick."

Cap checked his lens. Nothing from Halliday. Nor Gidja.

Rigsby read Cap's concern through the hologram. "You think it's bad data?"

"How would we know?"

"So even odds?"

"You can't invoke Laplace when you're zero for zero."

Udike spoke up. "Better than even odds. At least one pilot knows where the gap is, and pilots chatter, so there's a chance at least one other pilot knew too. I put out feelers. Seems someone was willing to talk, even if they weren't willing to say much."

Cap asked, "Can we verify the data's accuracy?"

"We can spot-check platforms' orbits with radar from beyond their firing range. Won't take long."

Cap studied the red-swirling ball and the pin Hazel had placed, further south than he was used to seeing. "That's not Kaufman's Gap, is it?"

"No," Hazel replied, "this one's in a different location." She jabbed the console, and the sphere beneath the swollen ants colored in blue and green. Landmasses. The pin stuck into a large, double-headed axe of an island.

Cap muttered. "Well, I was right about one thing. Gidja Boyle does have something to do with this. The gap is over Australia."

Halfway to Earth, the August Hawk inverted. The four crew were still in the cockpit as its gray daylight faded to be dominated by the soft glows of the helm controls—and the harsh glare of the round hologram. Cap circled it, wary, as if caught in orbit. Soon his orbit would decay and he would have to plunge headlong into the crawling fire ants that swarmed its surface.

The night became interminable. Cap walked semi-conscious, refusing to be paralyzed by sleep on a stubborn insistence that stuck thoughts could only be pried loose if he kept moving. But without sleep his thoughts circled as much as he did, worrying who had sent the Argrid data, why they had sent it anonymously, whether it was a dangerous secret or a trap. The others drifted in and out of the cockpit, bunking in shifts while one held vigil at the helm, and when Cap blinked his eyes closed for ever longer intervals. Later he would learn that Udike had been running the ship on two clocks, one on Rimstaff time but the other slowly shifting hours to match the time in Washington, D.C., adjusting their internal clocks day by day so Cap wouldn't be quite so ready for bed down when they landed in the middle of the day and needed to act. The boy was clever. Cap considered asking him what to do about the Argrid data.

A tone whistled. It was lost in the stubble of Cap's thoughts, his pondering of the hologram and the world full of latitudes, its myriad cultures and history and traditions and ecosystems and cities, its uncountable individuals that lost in the crowd all the individuals who actually counted. Not until his gaze crept into the northern latitudes, looking down on the pole, did he realize his feet were no longer on the deck. The Hawk's acceleration had cut. The ship somersaulted around him, stars spinning, cosmos in pirouette. Cap arched over the hologram and landed on his head.

Acceleration returned. Cap resumed his feet. In the glass dome overhead the icy crescent shining like a wicked dagger had been replaced by a pink dot, colorless and receding into obscurity among the stars. Udike said, "Forty-five hours to Earth."

The others had left the cockpit to sleep, and Cap gave voice to a notion. "Once we're within high orbit, aim for Kaufman's Gap."

"Kaufman's Gap is closed."

"Aim for it anyway."

Udike's brown, thoughtful eyes probed him, curious, perhaps, if he was speaking from exhausted delirium, but curious without squint or scowl, exploring Cap's possible lines of logic. He found an acceptable one. "Will do."

Cap went for the exit. "And rig up somewhere to sit."

"Front of the helm?"

"Fine, but don't take any straps from the cargo." Cap left before Udike could ask why not.

Cap had bumped his head when the ship rolled over, but not hard enough to blame it for the dizziness he felt the next day. Nor could he fault Udike's tweaks to the their trajectory. The shifts in gravity were too large for that. All through his wanderings down to the hold and up to the cockpit, Cap resisted the urge to steady himself on the railings, bulkheads, cargo netting. He knew why. He had tried to forget. But when he entered the cockpit and found Rigsby with a length of chain, discovered in a crate and now looped around the posts of the helm, Cap could ignore it no longer, Rigsby tied at the waist and shoulders and throwing his body into the makeshift harness to test his knots. In Cap's vision sparks flew—Silva welding an improvised harness to the rear wall of Plymouth's cockpit. The Twelve had debated where their unanticipated thirteenth should ride out atmospheric entry, eventually deciding on a narrow ledge behind the pilot's chair. They found extra cargo netting to hold him.

Udike stepped into Cap's path. "You don't have to ride here."

"Worse to ride somewhere else."

By midday the sun rose in the port windows, huge and hot, half again wider than it appeared from Mars but its area twice the size, too bright to look at, and when Cap braced on the sunward sides of the cockpit his palm felt a burning heat. They were not yet two-thirds of the way to Earth. How hot would it be there? Again Udike read Cap's concern. "We're cutting a straight line from Mars and have dropped inside Earth's orbit, almost halfway to Venus's. But this is as close as we'll get. We're headed away now."

Cap relaxed his breathing. One side of the cockpit continued to radiate, and an hour later Udike put the Hawk into a slow yaw that rolled the white, blinding ball of the sun around to the stern, then starboard, then across the bow until it returned to port an hour later, walls cooled to a pleasant warmth. Udike did it for Cap's sake. The ship could take the heat. But Cap chose not to begrudge the accommodation. It broke the monotony. Rather than creeping across the sky one agonizing degree at a time, the ship's spin gave the sun a kind of minute hand. Inexplicably, it steadied him. He slept less fitfully, exhaustion overwhelming his fear of the dangers in their path, ahead but unseen, unknowns fast approaching from the ship's blindspot dead ahead.

Three hours from Earth, Udike took aim. He steered the August Hawk to arc around and hit atmo right where Kaufman's Gap had been. An alarm buzzed.

"Incoming transmission." Hazel read it from the rear helm console. "Reads like a warning beacon, identifies as Coriolis Base."

"What's it say?" Cap asked.

"Kaufman's Gap is closed."

"And?"

"And...it's providing new coordinates. One three three east, two three south. That matches the data we received."

"Alter course."

Beside Cap, Rigsby's eyes bulged white in horror. "That was your test of the missile grid?"

"No, that was my test of who sent the data. They had no way to know we received it, or that we'd decoded it, and I wanted to see if they'd make sure we got the message."

"You feigned ignorance."

"Page from your playbook."

"So now we know. Someone wants us to get through."

Yeah, Cap thought, and they don't want us to know who they are. But as the Hawk changed course and the blistering white orb of the sun faded into the Earth's umbra, the bridge was cast into a darkness that made Rigsby and Udike dim shadows, and Cap developed a suspicion. Another face was there, highlighted in pale underglow, the one that had received the two radio messages...

Judith had found a ride to Earth somewhere in the Belt. Hazel was from the Belt.

Cap felt increasingly unsteady in the final two hours, almost unable to pace as his body jerked, stumbling like a sailor at sea rather than one in space. He paused to stabilize himself on the aft window. Stars darted left and right. Udike was executing maneuvers.

The bow was still pitched vertical to their direction of travel, engines blazing ahead to slow their approach, but Udike had a radar view of what was ahead, and though he maintained a pilot's exterior of calm, the muscles in his forearms were tense, hands ready, eyes alert, poised for quick motions. It troubled Cap to see him that way, worried yet still. He wanted to shout at the boy to do something. But Cap repressed himself. Pacing wouldn't help the ship, wouldn't help Udike, and for three days hadn't helped him. He retreated to his bunk.

When the time came to enter the atmosphere, he returned to the cockpit in his exosuit, not because an exosuit would suffice for protection if a missile hit the ship, but because it felt proper to ride into battle in a suit of armor.

The lights were low. Unobtrusive. Udike sat belted into the pilot's chair, Hazel at the rear console with one leg lashed to the chair-post, and Rigsby on the floor in front of the helm, legs outstretched and chains across his chest. Udike was taut, preparing to brave a stormy horizon. Cap eased himself onto the floor next to Rigsby. He pulled chains over his shoulders.

"Cutting engines."

A subtle vibration of the glass faded. They became weightless. In the silence, Cap heard a faint patter against the hull. A rain of debris, too small to pick up on radar. External spotlights came on. Empty space sparkled with silvery snowflakes. They floated in a cloud of suspended particles, as if they had left outer space and entered the deep sea, murky and surrounded by decaying alien creatures.

They passed a shipwreck.

The remains were hardly identifiable as a rocket, just a cone and a mangled tube with sharp metal edges feathered outward. Cap muttered a space-traveler's prayer for the lost. The August Hawk proceeded reverently through the orbital graveyard. They passed two more wrecks.

"Pitching down."

Mist geysered at the bow. Ahead, a white curve reared up the like a skull, peeking in the window with dead eyes. They crossed the solar terminator from night into day, and as he adjusted to the glare, the skull's bone-plates sharpened into continents and clouds, an unfamiliar world with a geography out of a fairy tale. Rigsby's scowled at the vast, bald curve. "That's a lot of water."

Blue for danger. You couldn't walk away from a water landing.

Cap gawped at it. In his vision the smooth blue ocean ahead dried into a coarse desert, rough and brown and shriveled with age. Marsha Strange said, "Beginning descent." Cap struggled to understand. His tongue tasted metallic. His pinky fingers tingled. Marsha and Wollam were strapped into their pilots' seats in front of him, working an immense dashboard. The ship rattled.

On Plymouth, worried his weight would make them crash.

Wollam wrestled the flight stick. Marsha tapped a gauge to loosen its needle. When she turned to speak to Wollam, she said unfamiliar words in someone else's voice. "We're in the Argrid's outmost range. I have radar contact. Checking orbital data."

The tingle in his pinkies worsened, spread along the sides of his hands. Panic—

"Data verified."

"Clear to proceed?"

"It's wrong." Marsha's spacesuit tilted left. She scanned the ground through a side portal. "Reading is too high."

"Which reading?"

"Altimeter."

"Cap?"

"How do you know?"

"Practice. Says we're seventy thousand feet but we're under fifty. How'd we calibrate it?"

"Pressure chamber."

"Cap?"

The tingle engulfed both hands, joints of his fingers stiffening. His hands seized into claws.

"Cap?"

"We guessed at the gradient?"

"Had to. You think atmo's too thin to aerobrake?"

"Proceed."

Cap clutched his straps. They'd come to Mars on guesses. There could be any number of atmospheric phenomena waiting to tear them apart mid-descent—jet streams and cyclones and wind shear—or methane hydrates erupting from the sea floor in great plumes of lighter-than-air gas that would rob their wings of lift while causing their barometer to show an increase in altitude, fooling the pilot into pushing the flight stick down and exacerbating the plunge—

Sea floor? Why was he thinking about the ocean? Mars had no oceans...

"There!" A stab of sound, not Marsha's voice, and a finger pointing at the planet. A fast-moving speck, distant yet clear in his mind's eye. A schematic. He'd pored over it, the robotic mesh of irregular hexagons, visible clockwork innards, an orbiting factory as delicate as lace but which ramscooped space debris and spit out missiles—not a robot but a sophisticated, semi-conscious organism—predatory, hunting, eating its kills, then hunting again. An artificial and malevolent life cycle. A living siege engine.

Wollam said, "We need more friction, a dust storm, a pressure front, something turbulent."

"Too low." Marsha quit wasting heartbeats and threw the stick sideways. Plymouth spun onto its back. Marsha craned to peer out the skylight, ground rushing at them like a planet falling. "Airspeed every ten seconds."

"Twelve thirty-five..."

Plymouth rocked.

"Twelve twenty."

His eyes lost their mark, couldn't focus...

"Eleven ninety."

"C'mon," Marsha whispered, "show yourself."

On the windshield appeared a funnel walled by red hemispheres, at the bottom of which lay a scrap of misshapen land, too speckled with green for Mars, the funnel guiding them in—

"Prime the retrotrusters."

"We need those for landing."

"Not gonna land."

The red-sided funnel was closing. His claws ached. Marsha rolled Plymouth onto its belly and flung her small body across Wollam's to shove a throttle without his permission. "Brace!"

Not Marsha, something huge flying at them—

Wreckage.

It smashed into the left wing and the great ship slewed, the massive crumple of titanium somersaulting past their heads. A pilot behind him fought to regain control of the ship.

"Two ten...one sixty...almost out of fuel!"

"Cut it!"

Wollam yanked back the throttle and Marsha lay Plymouth on its back again. She surveyed the ground below. Wind screamed against the hull. Marsha steered with tiny bursts from the attitude controls. She was searching again...

Klaxons.

"Missile fired! Fifty seconds to impact!"

"I don't understand—nothing painted us. We never hit their radar—"

Marsha found what she was searching for, rolled Plymouth, pitched, shouted, "Now!" Wollam hit the throttle, one careful burst of the retrorockets—

An empty jolt.

"Fuel's gone. One forty. Will it be slow enough?"

"Have to be." Marsha punched the intercom. She started, paused, then spoke with intense calm. "Brace for impact."

"You're sure we weren't painted?"

"I—"

"It's targeting the wreckage we hit. We must have knocked it into a firing zone."

"How confident are you?"

"Even odds."

"Take evasive action?"

"Gap is too small. We'll hit radar."

"Cap? What are your orders? Cap?"

Ocean. This wasn't Mars.

A surge of awareness hit him but he couldn't breathe.

The altimeter spun down to zero—

Cap gasped, "She's your ship..."

—and Plymouth hit the ice at a hundred and forty miles per hour.