Except that she had no choice.

She looked to her left. Kallik was next to her, crouched down low to the floor. Beyond her, in the pilot’s seat, Max Perry was holding a square of opaque plastic in front of his face to give him partial shielding from the sluice of light.

“How much longer?” The question came as a feeble croak.

Darya hardly recognized her own voice. She was not sure what question she was asking. Did she mean how long until they could all change seats again? Or until they arrived at their destination? Or only until they were all dead?

It made no difference. Perry did not answer. He merely handed her a bottle of lukewarm water. She took a mouthful and made Kallik do the same. Then there was nothing to do but sit and sweat and endure, until the welcome distraction of changing seats.

Darya lost track of time. She knew that she was in and out of the torture seat at the front at least three times. It felt like weeks, until at last Julius Graves was shaking her and warning, “Get ready for turbulence. We’re going down through the clouds.”

“We’re there?” she whispered. “Let’s go down.”

She could hardly wait. No matter what happened next, she would escape the roasting torture of the two suns. She would dream of them for the rest of her life.

“No. Not there.” Graves sounded the way she felt. He was mopping perspiration from his bald head. “We’re running out of power.”

That grabbed her attention. “Where are we?”

But he had turned the other way. It was Elena Carmel, in the rear seat, who leaned forward and replied. “If the instruments are right, we’re very close. Almost to our ship.”

“How close?”

“Ten kilometers. Maybe even less. They say it all depends how much power is left to use in hovercraft mode.”

Darya said nothing more. Ten kilometers, five kilometers, what difference did it make? She couldn’t walk one kilometer, not to save her life.

But a surprise voice inside her awoke and said, Maybe only to save your life. If young, bewildered Elena Carmel can find a reserve of strength, why can’t you?

Before she could argue the point with herself, they were plunging into the clouds. And within a second there was no time for the luxury of internal debate.

Hans Rebka thought he might need the dregs of aircar power later, and he was not willing to give up any merely to cushion the ride. In its rapid descent, the car was thrown around the sky like a bobbing cork in a sea storm. But it did not last long. In less than a minute they plunged through the bottom of the cloud layers.

Everyone craned forward. Whatever they found below them, they could not go back up.

Was the starship still there? Was there a solid surface around it that they could descend to? Or had they escaped Mandel and Amaranth’s searing beams only to die in Quake’s pools of molten lava?

Darya stared, unable to answer those questions. Thick smoke blanketed the ground below. They were supposed to be above the slopes of the Pentacline Depression, but they might have been anywhere on the whole planet.

“Well,” Hans Rebka said quietly, as though talking to himself, “the good news is that we don’t have to make a decision. Look at the power meter, Max. It’s redlined. We’re going down, whether we want to or not.” He raised his voice. “Respirators on.”

Then they were floating into blue-gray smoke that swirled and eddied about the car, driven by winds so powerful that Rebka’s voice quickly came again. “We’re making a negative ground speed. I’m going to take us down as quick as I can, before we blow back all the way to the Umbilical.”

“Where’s the ship?” That was Julius Graves, sitting behind Darya in the cramped luggage compartment.

“Two kilometers ahead. We can’t see it, but I think it’s still there. I’m picking up an anomalous radar reflection. We can’t reach the outcrop where the ship was sitting, so we have to land on the valley slope. Get ready. Twenty meters altitude… fifteen… ten. Prepare for landing.”

The gusting wind suddenly died. The smoke around them thinned. Darya could see the ground off to one side of the car. It lay barren and quiet, but steam was emerging like dragon’s breath from dozens of small surface vents scattered across the downward slope of the Pentacline’s valley. The dense vegetation that Darya expected to see in the depression had gone. It was nothing but gray ash and occasional withered stems.

“One and a half kilometers.” Rebka’s voice sounded calm and far away. “Five meters on the altimeter. Power going. Looks like we’ll have to take a little walk. Three meters… two… one. Come on, you beauty. Do us proud.”

Summertide was just three hours away. The aircar touched down on the steaming slope of the Pentacline Depression, as gently and quietly as an alighting moth.

Hans Rebka was not happy, but it would be fair to say that for the past few hours he had been content.

Since his assignment to Dobelle he had been unsure of himself and his job. He had been sent to find out what was wrong with Commander Maxwell Perry and rehabilitate the man.

On paper it sounded easy. But just what was he supposed to do? He was an action man, not a psychoanalyst. Nothing in his previous career had equipped him for such a vague task.

Now things were different. At the Umbilical he had been thrown in with a helpless group — all aliens, misfits, or innocents, in his mind — and given the job of taking an overloaded, underpowered aircar halfway around Quake and a toy starship up into space, before the planet killed the lot of them.

It might be an impossible task, but at least it was a well-defined one. The rules for performance were no problem. He had learned them long ago on Teufel: you succeed, or you die trying. Until you succeed, you never relax. Until you die, you never give up.

He was tired — they were all tired — but what Darya Lang had seen as new energy was the satisfying release of a whole bundle of pent-up frustrations. It had carried him so far, and it would carry him through Summertide.

As soon as the aircar touched down, Rebka urged everyone onto the surface. It made no difference how dangerous it might be outside, the car was useless to take them any farther.

He pointed along the blistered downslope of the valley. “That’s where we have to go. The direction of the starship.” Then he shouted above rumbling thunder to Max Perry, who was staring vacantly about him. “Commander, our group was here a few days ago. Does it look familiar?”

Perry was shaking his head. “When we were here this area was vegetated. But there’s the basalt outcrop.” He pointed to a dark jutting mass of rock, forty meters high, its upper part obscured by gray smoke. “We have to get over there and climb on top of it. That’s where the ship should be.”

Rebka nodded. “Any nasty surprises in store for us?” Perry, whatever his faults, was still the expert on conditions on Quake.

“Can’t say yet. Quake is full of them.” Perry stooped to set the palm of his hand on the rocky floor. “Pretty hot, but we can walk on it. If we’re lucky, the brush fires will have burned off the plants around the bottom of the outcrop and we’ll have easier going than last time. Things look all different with the vegetation gone. And it’s hotter — a lot hotter.”

“So let’s go.” Rebka gestured them forward. The thunder was growing, and their surroundings were too loud for long conversations. “You and Graves lead. Then you two.” He pointed to the twins. “I’ll tag along last, after the others.”

He urged them on without inviting discussion. The aircar trip had been an exhausting trial by fire for everyone, but Rebka knew better than to ask if they could scramble their way over a kilometer or two of difficult terrain. He would learn what they could not do when they collapsed.