Dads watching me everywhere. Enough to bring on hot flashes and me only forty-two. My knee-jerk reflex was to feel guilty, like he’d caught me in something. But what did I have to squirm about? A respectable member of the Vigil now, sashaying out with a master proctor and an admiral, for God’s sake. I could hold my head up no matter who was looking at me… including people I’d gone to school with, all looking saggy middle-aged and none showing the slightest click of recognition as we passed in the street.

Faye Smallwood, vertical and sober, not cursing, not dirty, not dressing slut. Why should they recognize me? And why should I want them to?

Christ, I was happy when our strained little tour got cut short by the probes reporting success.

One success, two alerts.

Alert #1 = a whispery chirp from a remote-link in Festina’s pocket.

Alert #2 = an image ghosting up in front of my eyes.

Image = snowy forest: the transitional kind, halfway between sparse bluebarrel tundra and boreal woods filled with chillslaps and paper-peels. You only saw such forest near water, a lake or river big enough to moderate the temperature a titch… a nudge up from tundra-only cold but not quite warm enough for no-holds-barred timber-land.

In my mind, I couldn’t see the water, wherever it was; but I could see a hole in the ground. Not long ago, the hole must have been stuffed bushy with weeds and bramble. Now, the overgrowth was cleared away — hacked down, dragged out, heaped up. Nearby sat the grotty remains of a campfire: half-burnt branches black and slick with melted snow. Many weeks old, by the look of it… covered white by blizzards and just now reappearing in the thaw.

"Are we seeing things, Smallwood?" Tic whispered to me.

"Yes."

He smiled… maybe pleased for me that I’d got a vision from Xe, maybe pleased for himself that he wasn’t just hallucinating.

"We’ve got a positive hit fifty klicks south of here," Ramos reported, checking the readout on her remote. "The probe gives 73 percent confidence this is a ‘meaningful find.’ " She gave a small snort of doubt. "I’d take that with a grain of salt, but it’s worth checking."

Tic and I didn’t speak. We could see the find was more than just "meaningful."

Ramos locked in the probe’s reported position, then ordered the missile back to its programmed search pattern, looking for other "meaningful" sites that might be lurking in the wilderness. The second she punched in the probe’s new orders, my vision of the hole in the ground winked out.

Meanwhile, Paulette and Daunt rang up Cheticamp for instructions. Should we take a run out to see what the probe had found? Or sit stony till a larger squad could fly in? After much hemming and hawing, Cheticamp gave the go-ahead to "proceed with caution"… which meant he’d totaled up his belief that Maya was already dead, plus Festina’s doubt that the probe had found something, minus the waste-time inconvenience of sending cops on another fools’ errand to Sallysweet River. Our two ScrambleTacs promised to call for backup at the first hint of trouble or genuine evidence; but we all knew help would take a long time coming.

Half an hour later, Festina’s skimmer hovered over the site. Everything matched my ghostly vision: the mixed forest, the hole in the ground, the punky campfire leftovers. Enough to call in Cheticamp? Paulette and Daunt shook their heads; the fire could belong to hunters or naturalists snowshoeing through the area anytime over the winter. The same people might have cleared brush away from the hole, out of pure curiosity or because they saw a storm brewing and decided they’d have more protection underground.

Ramos said she agreed with the ScrambleTacs — this might be nothing. But her bright eyes had tamped down their glint to a controlled focus: sharp-fierce-alert. The "game face" of an Explorer making ready for a mission.

We didn’t land straightaway… not till we’d flown four passes over the area, scanning through four different ranges of the EM spectrum. The survey showed nothing but trees and tundra-dogs, teeny rodent-niche animals that chewed out nests under the carpet moss. Were they dangerous? Ramos asked me. Could they bite? Did they carry disease? I told her they were no worse than Terran squirrels. Yes, they had teeth and on occasion they could carry a nasty microbe or two; but come on, Festina-girl, they were just squirrels.

Ramos gave me a grim look and flew around for another pass.

At last we landed: two hundred meters from the mine, on the shore of a small lake. Our charts called the place Lake Vascho, Oolom for eclipse. Probably the lake got mapped the same day one of our flyspeck moons pranced across in front of our sun. Not that we ever got true eclipses, not with our moons so small; occasionally the sun just acquired a darkish beauty mark on her face.

Thanks to spring, Lake Vascho had cleared its center of ice; but the shores were still frozen, with a thin crust that would take another few days to thaw completely. Everything — land, lake, air — bristled with pure northern silence.

Hold-your-breath beautiful.

Ramos holstered on a stun-pistol before leaving the skimmer. ("Not that hypersonics will affect robots," she said, "but if those tundra-dogs get uppity, zap!") Paulette and Daunt wore full body armor (gray/black urban camo) and they each carried an over-the-shoulder rocket launcher whose magazine packed four smart robot-poppers: tiny missiles designed to coldcock machines with a massive electrical jolt. Supposedly the missiles could distinguish androids from humans, and were programmed never to juice a living target. I wished I could take a minute to talk with them… make sure the popper missiles knew me as a chummy good-time gal. But the cops might get the wrong idea if I asked for a chat with their ammunition.

Ramos took the lead through the forest. No useless fuss about the cold this time. She’d put on gloves, but probably not to keep her hands warm… more likely, to avoid bites when wrestling rabid tundra-dogs. In one hand, she carried the paint-can device she’d used at the dipshits’ house — the thing she called the Bumbler. Its screen showed a fish-eye view of the woods around us, but Ramos scarcely gave it a glance; she was too busy scanning trees and ground and sky, trusting her own eyes more than the machine’s.

A stone’s throw from the hole, Ramos stopped. "Do you want us to go ahead?" Daunt asked.

"I never let someone take risks for me." Ramos glanced my way. "But if you and Tic want to stay out here, feel free."

Tic shook his head. I did the same a moment later. "Okay," Ramos said, "forward. Immortality awaits."

The hole was artificial — that became precious obvious as soon as we got close enough for a peek inside. Not a random crack in the shield-stone, but a tunnel with a well-engineered slant floor. A ramp down into the bedrock, like the ancient mines back at Sallysweet River, except more overgrown.

"Do we go in?" Paulette asked.

"Absolutely," Tic said, bold as blood. He’d found a chemical torch-wand in one of the skimmer’s equipment chests. Now he tapped the activation stub and the torch lit up like a two-hundred-watt baton of silver-shine.

"Let’s go."

Ramos and Daunt moved to the lip of the tunnel; Paulette slid behind Tic and me, taking rear guard. "You aren’t going to panic, are you?" she murmured to Tic with ham handed cop sympathy. "I know Ooloms don’t like cramped, confined—"

"I’ll be splendid," he interrupted. "A monument of imperturbability. Proceed."

But his ear-lids showed just a hint of the shivers.

The tunnel’s center was bare wet stone, washed clean with meltwater. Out toward the edges, things got messier: spongy compost made of animal droppings, plus mud slopped down from outside. For centuries, tundra-dogs, thatch beetles and gummylarks had wandered in here, built nests, brought up babies. A great bleeding lot of them had died here too, leaving behind dirt-crusty litters of bone and carapace.