He checked Jeffers. Almost tipped enough…

He blinked to clear his vision; it didn’t help much. “Open her up!”

—I… I can’t just shoot that hillside with a full load! That’s a kilogram of iron at ten thousand KPS… it’d be like setting off a ten-kiloton bomb!—

Carl thought furiously. “Empty casings! They only mass a couple grams. Have you got any?”

—Uh. Yeah. I’d better go at low power, too,—Jeffers said.—Take a minute… lessee… one percent setting…—

Someone screamed. Another near miss. “We’ve got to return fire. Open her up!”

—Okay, okay.—To his relief, Carl heard the braaap braaap braaap resume. The sound was different. Lower, rougher.

—It’s not tuned for this! It’ll shake apart!—

Carl thumbed over to telescopic. All up and down the hillside, plumes of vapor spouted as pellets struck.

“A-Comm auto-override. Jeffers, left!”

—Yo.—

The small gouts of fog leaped high, several a second.

A blue flash from the hilltop, brighter this time. The enemy, too, was zeroing in. Carl turned and saw the ice not far behind him flare and suddenly explode into pearly mist.

“Higher!”

—Gotcha!—

A line of bursting fog walked tip the hillside, erratic but rising, steadily rising toward the specks who manned the big, cumbersome tube.

Two antagonists, each wrestling with weapons too big and powerful to be used deftly…like fighters flailing at each other with steel beams. The first to score a hit…

Carl wondered what would happen if the laser struck him fully. His suit would reflect some, and at this angle the beam was spread over a much larger area… still; he didn’t want to find out.

“Go right! And higher!”

The jittering gouts of fog leaped, swerved, steadied-and struck the milling specks.

Soundless destruction. Carl lay on the ice and watched the pellets pound endlessly into the targets— mere writhing dots and splintered, rolling parts of the laser— as the fog of the assault gathered, spread, and finally obscured the scene.

“Okay. You can… shut it down.”

—We get ’em?—

“Yeah. Yeah, we did.”

Carl felt no elation, no zest. It had all happened so fast, so abstractly. A bunch of dots moving on a hillside. Brilliant, sudden flashes of blue. Then the distant spurts as streaking casings struck ice, struck steel, struck yielding flesh and cracking bone. A science of strict geometry and easy death.

—Hey, we did it! That’ll teach the suckers!—The launcher fell silent. Jeffers leaped out of the trench, exuberant.

“So… so we did.”

He heard Virginia’s voice, and others, and with the returning babble running in his ears Carl walked slowly toward the hammered hillside, not wanting to see what was there but knowing he should. It was part of his job.

Suddenly his mind cleared and he remembered the rest of the poem, the lines that he had idly recalled only a few minutes before…a time that seemed months in the past, now.

Spacesuits were aggravating. They reminded Virginia of how out of shape she was— of the passage of years.

She struggled with the adjustment bands, loosening some and tightening others in all the wrong places. Flab! No wonder Saul’s been so…

Virginia clamped down on the thought. Anyway, she was sure their troubles had little to do with her recent lack of exercise.

Maybe nothing was meant to last, she thought. Perhaps everything good self-destructs in the end.

The image of a red world, new volcanoes bursting forth to greet the dawn…

For the first time since the abortive Arcist attack, Carl had given permission for her to come up and see him in person. Being indispensable had its drawbacks. With human guards and watch-mechs standing in layers around her lab to protect her, she had lately begun feeling like a queen ant, a slave to her own royalty.

Though a queen ant, at least, creates eggs…

Another bad thought. Why were these things all coming to the surface right now?

Because we’ve begun killing each other, here and now? Is that why I’m so depressed?

Or is it because I’m lonely, and no longer young?

Virginia finished dressing and slipped a worn tabard over her suit. She didn’t even have one of her own— had never bothered designing one. This one— depicting a sheaf of wheat above three gold balls— had belonged to Dr. Evans, a Hydroponics man firmly dead for twenty years, now. The suit matron had reregistered it to Virginia and she had decided to live with it.

I wish it weren’t necessary to come up here in person at all, she thought as she began cycling through the lock.

But this business was too important to discuss over any comm line. It wasn’t just fear of being tapped. She wanted to watch Carl’s face when she confronted him.

The outer doors opened and the scene was briefly obscured by a fog of condensing vapor. The snowflakes blew away into space and she looked out across the open icescape.

In a sense it was a bit disappointing. Her linkage with remotes had grown so good that her vision on the surface actually seemed better in surrogate than in person. Skim-walking carefully out onto the grimy crust felt somehow more removed than controlling a mech out here.

There was a fluttering sensation of nakedness, too. After all, she had many mechs, but only one body. And it was out on the surface now, under the unwinking stars.

The landscape was less scarred, out here by Shaft 6, than where her mechs and Jeffers’s factory hands had gouged and rutted the ancient comet. Here the dominant feature was a looming edifice that looked something like a cross between a glass Ferris wheel and a web spun of liquid spider’s silk.

A number of spacers were gathered at its base, gesturing from it to a point in the glittering blackness. She recognized the tabards of Carl Osborn and Andy Carroll, as well as several others— mostly members of the Plateau Three and Survivors’ factions. Virginia mumbled command phrases until she was able to latch on to the frequency they were using. It was child’s play to break their coding.

—… tell you I think the thing is just too damn small! They may have made advances since we left, sure. But even that hot fusion torch can’t have pushed more than twenty tons at that kind of acceleration for so long.—

—Yeah? Well, even if it is just twenty tons, think of all that could include. Faster logic quips for better computers and mechs. Hybrid seeds to improve our hydro. And tritium fuses! Twenty tons of stuff like that could make all the difference.—

They were talking about the Care Package, obviously. As she approached, skirting a cracked area in the ice, she heard Carl’s voice cut in.

—You’re hoping the Christmas gifts will change the Arcists’ mind Andy?—

—Or give us something to use to wipe ’em out. I don’t really care which. Anything that’ll shake them out of the south pole so we could go back to the Jupiter maneuver and save the original mission. Th’ Mars fling’s all right, as a second choice. But Captain Cruz would’ve wanted us to…—

The words stopped as Andy Carroll noticed that Carl had turned to greet Virginia.

—Osborn, open channel to Herbert. Hello, Virginia.—

His stained spacesuit was a mixture of cannibalized parts. Over it was draped a dingy white cloth emblazoned with a picture of a red crustacean. His visor cleared and she saw his face. Gray at his temples and lines on his brow had not robbed Carl of his strong-jawed, boyish charm.

—It was good of you to come up, Virginia. There is something special we’d like to ask you to do for us.—