He checked his cutter and put on the night goggles. They'd stopped atop a ridge where they could see for kilometers in all directions. Tomorrow they'd cross a narrow basin and begin a long uphill climb into dense forest.

A few flakes drifted onto his arm.

Nightingale glanced over at the sleepers. MacAllister had punched up a mound of snow to serve as a pillow. Kellie seemed to be dreaming, and he judged by her expression that it was not altogether unpleasant. He suspected Hutch was awake, but she lay unmoving, with her face in shadow. Chiang was still trying to get comfortable.

Ordinarily, he would have hated the guard duty assignment. Nightingale liked to keep his mind active. Time not spent in a book or doing research or attempting to solve a problem was time wasted. He had no interest hanging about in a wilderness for two hours peering into the dark. But that night, he stood atop the ridge, watching the snow come down. And he enjoyed the simple fact that he was alive and conscious.

Marcel brought Wendy back to Deepsix. He felt better if he could stay closer to the people on the ground. They were just completing their first orbit when Beekman came onto the bridge. "Marcel," he said, "we've finished the analysis of the material we took from the artifact."

"And…?"

"They're enhanced carbon nanotubes."

"Which are what?"

"Precisely the sort of material you'd want to have if you were building a skyhook. They're extremely light and have incredible tensile strength." Beekman lowered himself into a chair and accepted some coffee. "We'll be taking back a whole new technology. Probably revolutionize the construction industry." He looked quizzically at the captain. "What's wrong?"

"I don't like the plan to get our people off the ground."

"Why?"

"There are too many things that can go wrong. Tess may not fly. They may not even get there in time. There may be some incompatibility between the capacitors and the onboard spike. Another quake could bury the damned things beyond recovery."

"I don't know what we can do to change any of that."

"I'd like a backup option."

Beekman smiled patiently. "Of course you would. Wouldn't we all? What do you suggest?"

"The ship going to Quraqua. The Boardman. It's big, loaded with construction equipment. Mostly stuff they're going to use to put together the ground stations. I looked at the manifest. It has hundreds of kilometers of cable." Marcel laid emphasis on the last word, expecting Beekman to see immediately where he was headed.

"Go on," Beekman said, showing no reaction.

"Okay. If we were to get some of the cable off the Boardman, and tie together about four hundred kilometers of it, we could attach one end to a shuttle."

"And crash the shuttle," finished Beekman.

"Right. We take it down as far as it'll go, which would be within a couple of kilometers of the surface before we'd lose it. It crashes. But the cable's down. On the ground."

"And we use it to haul them out."

Marcel thought it seemed too simple. "It won't work?"

"No."

"Gunther, why not?"

"How much does the cable weigh?"

"I don't know."

"All right. Say it's on the order of three kilograms per meter. That's not very heavy."

"Okay."

"That means one kilometer of the cable would weigh in at about three metric tons."

Marcel sighed.

"That's one kilometer. And this thing is going to stretch down from orbit? Three hundred kilometers, you say?"

He did the math in his head. The cable would have to be able to support roughly nine hundred metric tons.

"You see the problem, Marcel."

"How about if we went for lighter material? Maybe hemp rope? They've got hemp on board."

Beekman made a noise in his throat. "I doubt the tensile strength of rope would be very high. How much do you think a piece one meter long would weigh?"

So they sat, drinking coffee, staring at one another. Once they called down and talked to Nightingale, whom Marcel knew to be the security watch. Any problems? What time did you expect to leave in the morning? How's everybody holding up?

That last question was designed to elicit a comment from Nightingale on his own physical condition, as well. But he only said they were fine.

Marcel noticed that he was beginning to feel disconnected from those on the ground. As if they were somehow already lost.

Walking through these woods, filled with the creatures of an alternate biosystem, constitutes an unusual emotional experience. They are all extinct, or shall be within a very few days. The sum total of six billion years of evolution is about to be erased, leaving nothing behind. Not so much as a tail feather.

And good riddance, I say.

— Gregory MacAllister, Deepsix Diary

Hours to breakup (est): 226

All the sunrises on Deepsix were oppressive. The sky was inevitably slate, and a storm was either happening or seemed imminent

Kellie Collier stood atop the ridge, surveying the woods and plains around her. In all that wilderness, nothing moved save a pair of wings so high and far as to present no detail to the naked eye. Through binoculars, she judged it to be not a bird at all. It had fur and teeth, a duckbill skull, and a long, serpentine tail. As she watched, it descended into a patch of trees and emerged moments later with something wriggling in its claws.

She turned toward the southwest. The land sloped downhill and rose again gradually and then almost precipitously toward a long spine. The spine extended from one horizon to the other. It was going to be a difficult climb with Nightingale and the great man in tow. The wind tugged at her, trying to blow her off the ridge. Reminding her that they had ground to cover and that time was short.

Hutch lay quietly near the fire, and Kellie saw that her eyes were open. "How we doing?" she asked softly.

"Time to go," said Kellie.

She nodded. "Let's give them a little longer."

"I'm not sure we shouldn't push a bit harder."

"It won't help us," Hutch said, "if they start breaking down." MacAllister snored peacefully with his head pillowed against one of the packs; Nightingale lay near the fire, his shoes off to one side.

Kellie sat down beside her. "We've a long way to go," she said.

"We'll make it," said Hutch. "As long as no one collapses." She looked into the fire. "I don't want to leave anybody behind."

"We could come back later for them."

"If they aren't eaten first. You really think either of those guys could stay alive on his own?"

"One of us could stay with them."

Hutch shook her head. "We're safer keeping our firepower concentrated. If we split up, we are absolutely going to lose somebody else." She took a deep breath and looked at Kellie. "We'll stay together as long as we can. And if we get behind, we'll do what we have to."

Kellie liked to think of herself as the last of the fighter pilots. She'd begun her career as a combat aviator for the Peacekeepers. When the Peacekeepers became effectively obsolete (as they did every half century or so), when the latest round of civil wars had been fought and the dictators put to bed, she'd learned to fly spacecraft and transferred to the Patrol. But the job had been surprisingly routine. The Patrol simply didn't go anywhere. They patrolled. When people drank too much or neglected their maintenance or got careless, Kellie and her colleagues had shown up to rescue whoever was left.

But she never really traveled. A zone was assigned and she just went round and round, visiting the same eight or nine stations over and over. And during those years, she'd watched the Academy's superluminals coming in from places that no one had names for yet. Or from conducting surveys of the Omega clouds. Or from examining the space-twisting properties of neutron stars and black holes.