It seemed an interminable time passed before his body began to react to the increase in pressure. He felt himself contracting — deflating to a more normal human shape. After a time the resin sealing his lips and nose softened, and he rolled it away before taking his first breath. Inside her suit his mother had also returned to normal, so it was much easier to remove her from the suit than it had been to put her in it. He next installed her in a sleep bag, and was looking for medical equipment when he discovered that what he had at first taken to be lockers lining the walls were in fact cold-coffins. Eventually, locating what he wanted, he returned to his mother with a diagnosticer that seemed primitive to him. It revealed she was unconscious and had a skull fracture, so he administered the drugs it prescribed and left her to recover — hopefully. It was all he could do, and he did not know if the drugs or dosages were right for an Outlinker, but there was no AI to advise him — nothing.

In the cockpit extending across the front of the landing craft, he was in familiar territory again. The controls there were similar to the manual controls on which he had trained. A quick check showed him that the craft was increasing its speed, though that acceleration was still small — the engines having been set for the least wasteful burn. Another quick check showed him that the course keyed in was not to the nearest inhabited world. It was with a cold lack of surprise that he calculated that there would have been quite enough supplies on board to have taken them all there rather than to 'Masada or nothing'. For a moment he stared at one screen that gave him a view back towards the now distant General Patten. Increasing magnification, he saw now only a cloud of floating wreckage dispersing from around its assailant, Dragon. With a cold sick feeling he reckoned how long it would take for him to return to that area, but realized there was only an outside chance that any Outlinkers who had survived the destruction of the ship would be alive by the time he got there. Dare he risk such a rescue mission with Dragon still in the vicinity? He dared not, and surely they were all dead — and sometime soon he knew he would begin to feel that.

Fethan closed the casing on the control column of the aerofan, clicked down a sequence of bright red buttons on the panel below the joystick, and stepped back. Something in the thick floor of the aerofan droned and engaged with a clunk and, starting with a low susurrating whine, its fans began to get up to speed. A second clunk notched up that speed, and from where she stood Eldene felt the blast of air. Upon the third clunk, the machine lurched from the ground like a rock hauled up by elastic and, twenty metres up, it tilted and slid away as if caught in a vicious crosswind. As soon as this happened, Fethan rested his hand on Eldene's shoulder.

"About now, girl, they'll be getting the return signal from this fan. They'll know Volus's Gift died, but they won't know for sure about him. We'll soon see if he's been found," he said.

"What do you mean?" Eldene asked.

Fethan did not reply: the sky did. A greenish flash ignited the air, leaving afterimages on Eldene's retinas. Shortly after this there came a thunderclap and, as her vision cleared, she saw that the aerofan was now just falling debris and a drifting cloud of black smoke.

"Guess they found him," said Fethan. "That was the battery EL-41, unless I miss my bet: artificially lased emerald focusing in an argon field-cylinder. It's their oldest array and the only one of that type they have up there."

Eldene stared at him. If Fethan had ever come out with a mouthful like that before recent events, she would have thought the old man's mind going, but now she had to contend with the fact that what was speaking here was not wholly a man. Also, she had to contend with the fact that she now did not have very long to live. Pulling away from Fethan, she stepped to a nearby tricone shell resting on the damp soil and sat down on it.

Fethan gazed at her. "That gives us a breathing space. If we're not seen, we should get to the mountains with no real problems," he said.

Eldene laughed. "You don't need to breathe," she pointed out.

"Ah," said Fethan, then quickly moved over to the flute grass near to where he had been working on the aerofan. Soon he returned, carrying a tangle of equipment it took a moment for Eldene to recognize. "You've got enough in this bottle for a day or so, and the spare should provide you with enough for another two to three days."

Eldene now recognised Proctor Volus's helmet with its tinted visor, lower breather collar against which the visor sealed, and a tangle of pipes leading to a flat square bottle which was worn on the back. For a little while she felt the urge to continue feeling sorry for herself, but Fethan was now offering her a chance at life. She stood up and held out her hands for this equipment.

Fethan withheld it for a moment. "Not yet. You want to get as much as you can out of your scole before it dies and that could be in anything from six to twelve hours — anyway, start direct-breathing oxygen now and it'll just take it out of you to store up," he said. Eldene well understood that, as she knew that the oxygen keeping them alive during the working day was stored up by the scole during the night they spent in the compound bunkhouse. She nodded, and he then allowed her to take the breather.

Eldene inspected the helmet and breather unit — she'd seen proctors wearing these without the helmets and visors, just using a muzzle-shaped mask like Ulat had worn, which hinged up from the collar and sealed over the mouth and nose. After a moment she noticed a pack of such masks — compressed fibre and disposable — clipped to the side of the pack containing the oxygen bottle. She detached the helmet and visor and discarded them, placed the collar around her neck, closing its clip at her nape, then fitted the mask to its hinge below her chin. Hooking her arms through the straps, she hung the oxygen pack on her back — the spare she slung from its straps over her shoulder. With the mask hinged down — for closing it up against her face instantly started the flow of oxygen — she turned back to Fethan.

"You said the mountains?" she said, noting that Fethan now had the Proctor's stinger and pistol at his belt.

"Yeah, we head there and find ourselves an entrance to the Underground. Should take about three days so let's get moving." Fethan led the way across the sodden ground and began tramping a path through the flute grass.

As she followed, Eldene could not help but speculate on how the figure of three days so closely matched the extent of her remaining oxygen supply. Perhaps Fethan was merely humouring her in the last days of her life.

The flute grass was last season's, and consequently dead, dry and brittle. Just by walking into it, Fethan had it breaking and collapsing before him. Each stalk was hollow and the thickness of a human finger, with holes down its length where side shoots had earlier broken away. In gentle breezes, strange music issued from these stands of vegetation, but anything more than a gentle breeze would turn them into snowstorms of papery fragments. Under Eldene's feet, the ground was thick with fragments already trodden down by Fethan, or what had fallen from the plants earlier, and it was this layer, over the plants' rhizomes, that prevented her from sinking into ground that was becoming increasingly boggy. Stabbing up from the rhizomes themselves, she noticed the bright green-and-black tips of this season's new growth poised to explode into the air. When the temperature rose above a certain point — something due to happen soon — the plants would begin growing at a rate that was sometimes visible.