Makali did, not seeing anything but black for several seconds. Oh, there it was! Planet Earth, a bright crescent in the sky across the vent, forty degrees above the horizon.

“It looks smaller than I expected,” Makali said.

“It’s a lot smaller than it was last week,” Zack said.

“So we are moving,” Williams said. “I suppose it would be prudent to figure out where.”

“And how to turn around before it’s too late,” Zack said. “Come on.”

“We landed two hundred meters from here,” Zack said. “Brahma wasn’t much farther.” He was already moving; Makali sensed that he was tired of explaining his actions to Dale Scott.

She wondered, briefly, what Dale Scott would look like sailing over the rim of Vesuvius to the hard ground thirty meters below.

The Venture landing site was a sheet of greenish ice, likely discolored by the heat of the nuclear blast. In the center, ten centimeters of a lonely gold landing leg stuck out. Its top was melted. “That was Venture,” Zack said.

“Dear God,” Williams said. “That whole spacecraft—a two-billion-dollar item—vaporized.”

“Along with two of my crew,” Zack said.

“And one of Brahma’s team,” Valya added.

Unbidden, she put her arm around the former Venture commander—clumsily, but heartfelt. Makali could hear labored breathing; she realized that Zack Stewart was struggling with his emotions.

Well, he was entitled. Makali felt as though she’d been through enough fright and wonder in the past four days to last several lifetimes…and Zack Stewart had been living at the same intensity for three times as long. She was amazed that he was upright.

Dale was looking around. “So where was Brahma, anyway?” His question broke the mood, but he had the grace to speak softly.

Makali launched herself. She knew the landing site—at least, as it had been the day both spacecraft touched down. She remembered Bangalore Control Center’s worries about orbital maneuvers and who landed first. What a waste of time and energy that had been.

The distance from the melted Venture landing leg to the Brahma site was no more than five hundred meters. Both spacecraft, NASA’s Venture and the Coalition’s Brahma, had been targeted for Vesuvius Vent, so their proximity was no accident. Still, it must have been thrilling to be on Venture watching Brahma touch down so close…or to have been on Brahma’s flight deck seeing Venture already waiting on the icy ground.

But where was Brahma? She was still on the green ice, though it was no longer uniform; there were patches of regular ice now, and even some rocky areas. Had she gone the wrong direction?

“Zack, over here!” It was Williams. “I found Brahma.”

He was pointing to a large silver can lying on its side. It looked as though some giant foot had tried to crush one side of it, but it was still amazingly intact.

Yes, Brahma, pride of the Coalition…the first mission beyond low Earth orbit ever flown by astronauts who weren’t Americans…and here it was, space junk, blown on its side and destroyed by a fantastically misguided decision.

Makali skipped closer and was startled at how large the vehicle was. “It’s tall, even on its side,” she said.

“Twenty meters high, five across at its widest,” Dale Scott said. Of course, Makali thought; he had worked closely with the Brahma teams. “It looks as though the crew cabin is sort of intact.”

While the lower or left half of the spacecraft showed severe damage, crushing, and melting, the conical nose looked scorched, but whole. “Makes sense,” Williams said. “The return capsule’s designed to withstand the heat of reentry. Heat from a pocket nuke wouldn’t be an order of magnitude worse in this environment.”

“How comforting,” Valya said, not hiding her sarcasm.

“I want to go inside,” Scott said. “If the interior is intact, I guarantee you there’s food and water, enough for a crew of four for a week. Some tools, who knows what else we’d find that might be useful.”

Makali hadn’t been thinking of useful supplies, either, but of sheer curiosity. “There are two hatches, right, Dale?”

Scott was loping around the nose of the craft. “Correct. The EVA hatch on the lower deck, and the side hatch on the return vehicle.”

“Stupid question, but are they locked?”

“Not the EVA hatch. But there might have been a guard on the return vehicle, something you’d enable only on reentry. You know, to keep someone from blowing the thing in flight.”

Makali was searching for the EVA hatch, a squarish piece of metal a meter and a half on each side. “I can’t remember,” she said. “The Brahma crew was not aboard when the bomb went off, so that hatch would be open?”

“Correct,” Scott said.

“Got it,” Zack said. He was on the opposite side of the wrecked spacecraft. Makali circled around the left, skirting the twisted legs and shattered propulsion module. Valya followed her.

Williams was with Zack. They were pointing to a slab of crumpled metal on the underside of Brahma. “There’s the EVA hatch,” Zack said, “open—

“—and completely inaccessible,” Williams finished.

Makali had to agree; Brahma had fallen on the side where the hatch lay open, crushing it and burying it. “It might be possible to push it back,” Williams said.

“Maybe,” Zack said. “But that material looks jagged and we’re wearing…skin.”

“Hey, good news and bad news, friends,” Dale Scott said. He was at the Brahma’s front end. “I found the return vehicle hatch.”

The rounded nose of Brahma, and the silvery skin, looked singed on one side, the one facing Venture and the blast. Other than that, and the fact that the vehicle was on its side, it looked intact, much as Makali remembered it from pictures.

Of course, none of those pictures showed it with its circular hatch open, flopped to one side like a small access platform. “Didn’t you say it was locked?”

“Only a possibility,” Scott said.

“Locked or unlocked, why is it open now?” Williams said.

“From the blast?” Zack said. “Or from being tipped over?”

“Not the hatch I knew,” Scott said.

The five of them were circling the nose and the hatch, as if wary of going closer. The hell with this, Makali thought. She skipped right up to the hatch, which was almost at eye level. Her skinsuit wouldn’t allow her to pull herself up to it, but low gravity meant that she could hop fairly high, high enough for a peek inside.

“The cockpit looks intact,” she said. “And some of the displays are still lit.”

“How is that possible?” Valya said.

“Brahma’s batteries were good for another week,” Scott said. “If the cockpit is still intact, it means that the force of the blast probably wasn’t severe enough to sever the connections.”

“Are we going to talk about this all day?” Makali said. “Or is someone going to give me a boost so I can get inside?”

Even though she had more than a layperson’s familiarity with the Brahma cockpit, Makali’s entry was quite disorienting. Had Brahma been in its nominal, upright position, the hatch opened to the right, allowing ingress and egress to the middle two of four couches. But those two couches folded under the other two for orbital or landing operations.

When Makali stepped through the hatch, she found herself looking up at the commander’s couch and its folded companion, and trying to stand on the other pair. The control panel was to her right. The “floor” of the spacecraft, and the access hatch to the lower, airlock deck, were above and to her left. The immediate left was taken up with the bulkhead covering Brahma’s ascent motor. Which was, she suddenly realized, filled with toxic fuels. She hoped there were no leaks.