No!

Release of pressure liberated the vaporization energy. The explosion drove the pry bar out of the mech’s grip like a ramrod fired through the barrel of a cannon.

Umolanda was two meters away. The lever buried itself in her belly.

The pellet-memory readout terminated. Carl blinked away tears.

He waited while the mechs cleared the way. There was really no need to hurry.

Mission Commander Miguel Cruz called off operations for two full shifts. The setup crew had been working to the hilt for a week. Two deaths in one day implied that they were making errors from plain fatigue.

Umolanda’s accident had spewed forth a pearly fog for an hour as the inner lake of slush boiled out. Had anyone Earthside been watching through a strong telescope, they could have detected aslight brightening at the cometary head. It was a fleeting memorial. The blinding storm had driven her mechs out into the shaft, dislodged enough ice to bury her. Carl and the others were kept outside until it was too late to recover her and freeze her down slowly for possible medical work. Umolanda was lost.

Carl came up on the last ferry. The mottled surface seemed to darken with distance: the cometary nucleus dwindled to a blackish dot swimming in a luminous orange-yellow cloud. Though the fuzzy haze of the coma was still visible with a small telescope from Earth, from near the head itself the shimmering curtains of ions were lacy, scarcely noticeable. Gas and grains of dust still steadily popped free of Halley’s surface, making cargo piloting tricky. Most of the outgassing now came not from the sun’s ebbing sting, but from the waste heat of humans.

As the ferry pulled outward the twin tails—one of dust and the other of fluorescing ions— stretched away, foreshortened pale remnants of the glories that had enthralled Earth only two months ago. Ragged streamers forked out toward Jupiter’s glowing pinpoint. Oblivious, Carl stretched back and dozed while the ferry rose to meet the Edmund.

When they clanged into the lock, he peeled off his suit and coasted toward the murmuring gravity wheel at the bow. He climbed down one of the spoke ladders and stumbled out into the unfamiliar tug of one-eighth G, feeling bone-deep weariness descend with the coming of weight.

Sleep, yes, he thought. Let it knit up whatever raveled sleeve he had left.

Virginia came first, though. He hadn’t seen her in ages.

She was in her working module, of course, halfway around the wheel. She seldom left the thing nowadays. The door hissed aside. When he slipped into the spherical world of encasing memory shells there was an almost cathedral-like hush, a sense of presence and humming activity just beyond hearing. He sat down quietly next to her cantilevered chair, waiting until she could extract from interactive mode. Tapped into channels through a direct neural link and wrist servos, she scarcely moved. She had to know he was there, but she gave no sign.

Her slim body occasionally fidgeted and jerked. Like a dog dreaming, he thought, and trying to run after imaginary rabbits.

Her long, half-Polynesian features were pointed toward the banks of holographic displays suspended above her, and her eyes never even flicked to the side to see him. She gazed raptly at multiple scenes of movement, sliding masses of ever-flickering data, geometric diagrams that shifted and evolved, telling new tales.

He waited as she worked through some indecipherable problem. Her long face momentarily tightened, then released as she leaped some hurdle. She had delicate, high cheekbones, too, like Umolanda. Like a third of the expedition’s crew, the Percells, products of Simon Percell’s program in genetic correcting of inherited diseases. Carl wondered idly if fineboned, aristocratic features were traits the DNA wizard had slipped in. It was possible; the man had been a genius. Carl’s own face was broad and ordinary, though, and he had been “developed,” as the antiseptic jargon had it, within a year of Virginia. So maybe Simon Percell had taken such care only with the women. Given the gaudy stories told about the man, he couldn’t rule out the possibility.

By anyone’s definition, Virginia Kaninamanu Herbert was clearly a successful experiment. A Hawaiian mixture of Pacific breeds, she had a swift, quirky intelligence, deliciously unpredictable. There was restless energy to her eyes as they moved in quick darting glances at the myriad welter before her. Below, her mouth was a study in quiet immersion, slightly pursed, thoughtful and pensive. She was not, he supposed, particularly attractive in the usual sense of the term; her long face gave her a rangy look. The serene almond smoothness of her skin offset this, but her forehead was broad, the mouth too ample, her chin was stubbed and not fulsomely rounded as fashion these days demanded.

Carl didn’t give a damn. There was a compressed verve in her, a hidden woman he longed to reach. Yet all the time he’d known her she had stayed inside her polite cocoon. She was friendly but little more. He was determined to change that.

On the main screen, obliquely turned girders fitted together in precise sockets. The frame froze. Done.

Abruptly Virginia came alive, as though some fluid intelligence had returned from the labyrinths of her machine counterpart. She stripped the wrist inputs. The white socket for her neural connector flashed briefly as the tap came off and she fluffed her hair into shape.

“Carl! I hoped you’d wait for me to finish.”

“Looks important.”

“Oh, this?” She waved away the frames of data. “Just some cleanup work. Checking the simulations of docking and transfer, when we take everybody down. There’ll be irregularities from random outgassing jets, and the slot boats will have to compensate. I was programming the smarter mechs for the job. We’re ready now.”

“It’ll be a while.”

“Well, a few more days… Oh, yes.” She suddenly became subdued. “I heard.”

“Damn bad luck.” His mouth twisted sourly.

“Fatigue, I heard.”

“That too.”

She reached out and touched his arm tentatively. “There was nothing you could do.”

“Probably. Maybe I shouldn’t have let her go down that hole right after Kato bought it. Thing like that, shakes you up, screws up your judgment. Makes accidents more likely”

“You weren’t senior to her.”

“Yeah, but—”

“It’s not your fault. If anything, it’s the constraints we work under. This timetable—”

“Yeah, I know.”

“Come on. I’ll buy you some coffee.”

“Sleep’s what I need.”

“No, you need talk. Some people contact.”

“Trading arcane jokes with that computer crowd of yours?” He grimaced. “I always come out sounding like a nerd.”

She flexed smoothly out of her console couch, taking advantage a of the low gravity to curl and unwind in midair. “Not at all!” Something in her sudden, bouncy gaiety lifted his heart. “Blithe spirit, nerd thou never wert..”

“Mutilated Shelley! God, that’s awful.”

“True, though. Come on. First round is on me.”

To most people the creature would seem hideous. Vaguely globular, specked with yellow and ocher spots and spiky protrusions all around, it had the sort of looks only a particularly indulgent mother could love.

Or a stepfather, Saul Lintz thought.

Millions of the tiny, ugly things darted about in the crowded confines of a single, glinting drop of saline water, beaded by surface tension into a high, arching meniscus on the glass microscope slide.

Saul played the fiber optic controls until his magnifier zoomed in on a single cyanute. “There we are,” he muttered softly. “You’ll do as a test subject, my lad.”