"Got to get command of this thing…"

"They won't answer? You're sure?"

Max was dead.

"— They can't keep the system hacked for long. The local police will be down here any minute."

He had been all she had of family and home. If he was gone, so were they, forever.

"What's that!"

A smell of burning wafted up from behind Rue. She craned her head around the side of the seat.

A roving patch of fire was moving in loops and arcs across the ceiling. Behind it, charred paint dropped to the floor and what was left behind glowed with outside light, like foggy glass.

"Or they could do that," said Herat. "Shine the lasers right through the hull. It's transparent, after all."

"We have to get out of here!" shouted Mike. "Take control of this sub, now!"

"I'm trying," snapped the marine. The smoke was everywhere.

Rue leaned back and shut her eyes. Maybe it didn't matter anymore. They were all about to die.

Something exploded with a bang!; she jerked in surprise and pain spiked her ears from sudden overpressure. Now she heard sizzling sparks and a cracking sound.

"I've got partial control," said Barendts. "Taking us down." The decking lurched under Rue. She kept her eyes closed, her fists balled at her ears. One last bang sounded and Barendts cursed lividly.

The seconds dragged and no new sounds issued from the back. After a while she opened her eyes, found thick, smarting smoke in them and turned to look behind her.

The three men were all alive. They were sitting on the deck looking at one another grimly. Herat coughed once or twice and shut his eyes. "Gotta rest," he said.

Rue cleared her throat. "What's happening?" she asked.

Barendts glanced at Mike, then gestured to a blackened, half-melted box against the wall. "That's the ship's computer," he said and coughed. "I told it to dive just before the boys upstairs got a lucky shot and took it out. We're still diving and we're out of touch with anybody."

Rue looked around herself. "Aren't there manual controls?" she asked.

"Maybe. Yeah, there must be," said the marine without much optimism. He came forward and eased himself into the seat next to hers. "These look like they might be…" He pulled on a joystick that jutted up next to the seat. Nothing happened. "Well, that's great."

The blue light outside was rapidly fading to black. Barendts fiddled with some switches and succeeded in turning on some internal lights and external floodlights. These showed an irregular wall of ice some meters away, rising steadily out of darkness below and into darkness above.

Darkness… Rue shut her eyes and let herself cry.

RUE AND PROFESSOR Herat were resting on cots at the back of the sub. Michael sat next to Barendts, watching the wall of ice slide inexorably upward.

They'd been dropping for nearly an hour. Every now and then the sub creaked from the pressure; every time it did Michael tensed, waiting for the walls to collapse around them. The walls of the sub were icy cold now; little heaters under the seats were working overtime, but without much success, to keep the cold at bay.

Michael and Barendts had been trying to slow their descent, with even less success. They'd gone over every instrument and switch in the narrow space, finding nothing that might help. They had control of a set of manipulator arms outside the craft, but there was nothing for them to grab onto. It seemed as if the sub's cruising controls were centralized through the computer. With it gone, they were helpless.

They weren't falling very fast, luckily. They'd only dropped four or five kilometers and so far, the sub shrugged the pressure off. If they were five kilometers down, there were still fifteen kilometers of empty water to fall through before they hit bottom. Michael had no illusions that the sub would survive those depths. Thousands of atmospheres of pressure awaited them at the bottom of the abyss.

After yet one more run-through of their checklist of possible fixes, Barendts sat back with a frustrated sigh. "I should have acted earlier," he said.

Michael looked at him appraisingly. "You're the saboteur," he said. He didn't mean it as an accusation, just a statement of fact.

The marine shrugged. "Card-carrying member of the rebels, that's me."

Michael seized on the distraction. "Tell me about that."

"I had been ordered into deep cover two years ago. Told to get close to Crisler, which I did." Barendts seemed relieved to be talking. "When the Envy showed up, it seemed like a pointless distraction. I didn't pay much attention until Crisler moved us all to Chandaka and hired Linda Ophir. He needed some Chicxulub inscriptions translated. She agreed to that and then the whole matter was dropped. That's the way it looked, anyway.

"One night my contact at Chandaka called me. Ophir had been trying to get out, he said. She had some kind of information about the Envy— something that had scared the hell out of her. That was two days before you and Herat showed up.

"I didn't get a chance to find out what she'd discovered. She was murdered— well, you know about that. Crisler went into overdrive. I guess he looked calm in public, but boy he was on the edge the last day or so. Wanted us to get the hell off Chandaka in a hurry.

"And that's why the rebels attacked the city," said Michael. "But not the Redoubt. Why?"

Barendts grinned mirthlessly. "They did. You didn't see that attack, and you weren't told, on Crisler's orders. The attack failed. Crisler put a lockdown on all news about the war after we left. Well, he got those orders from higher up, I guess. The fact is, the R.E.'s losing."

Michael put his head back and stared out at the dark water. "Unbelievable," he muttered. He was remembering the riot he'd been caught in during the attack. Years ago, he had helped instigate such chaos. Was Kimpurusha still part of the R.E.? Or had it been liberated while he was away? The thought filled him with a pang of something— regret, loss, he wasn't sure. He scowled at the dumb metal of the sub's controls. Maybe if he'd stayed there, he might have been able to help…

"What do you think that is?" Barendts was pointing through the window.

Something long and threadlike rose past the sub. It couldn't have been more than a few millimeters thick and when the floodlights hit it, it shone pale white. But outside the lights, it glowed pale green against the darkness.

"Is there supposed to be indigenous life here?" asked Barendts.

"I have no idea. We never got to that part of the tour." They watched as more of the threadlike things passed. They seemed benign enough.

"Anyway," said Barendts, "The R.E.'s taking a beating. They can't exempt their own ships from the economy, after all: even the Banshee has to keep up her micropayments for all the shipboard systems. They're living on credit right now, but if the ship stays here in slow space too long, they'll run out of credit… and the whole ship'll just shut down."

Michael stared at him. "You're joking."

"If a ship can operate without oversight from the Economy, it can be used to set up an independent colony," said Barendts with a shrug. "Lots of military ships would join us in a second, if they weren't utterly dependent on the Economy."

Michael laughed without humor. It made sense, in a sick sort of way. "They used to say, back home, that the R.E. only survives by continuing to expand. The core worlds are utterly dependent on revenue from the colonies to function."

"Yeah. An ecologically sustainable economy can't require surpluses. The R.E. does. So it has to keep growing to exist. If places like Chandaka join us, the core worlds stop dead just like the Banshee would. The Rights Owners would either have to give up their franchises, which they won't do, or else… no money, no transactions, no operating machinery."