“A lot closer than it did five seconds ago.”

He primed the braking thrusters. “Hold on to your ass.”

The engines boomed, and the rapid deceleration threw them forward. Bridy winced as her seat’s safety harness straps dug into her chest. Outside the cockpit the landscape spun, black rock and white ice melting into a gray blur.

Bridy pointed at a fleeting image of level ground. “There!”

“Too far!” Quinn fought with the ship’s controls to little apparent effect. “Main thruster’s gone! We got five seconds to set down before we falldown!”

“Starboard! Get the nose up!”

She grabbed the console white-knuckle tight.

Quinn pulled the ship through a hard turn that arrested most of its forward momentum. Dulcinea’s landing thrusters sputtered erratically as Quinn guided it to a mountainside ledge barely as wide as the ship itself. All at once the engines cut off, and the ship dropped the last half meter onto a deep bed of ice-crusted snow. The thud of impact reverberated and then stopped—enabling Bridy to hear a low, dangerous rumbling from high overhead. She and Quinn looked up in unison through the top of the cockpit’s canopy at the snow-capped peak looming over their precarious perch. They waited for several seconds, neither speaking nor breathing, while waiting to see whether the mountain would welcome the Dulcineaby burying it. Then the distant tremor faded, leaving only the faint creaking of the ship’s overtaxed hull as it settled into its new resting place.

Their wide-open eyes remained fixed on the mountaintop.

Bridy’s voice was barely a whisper. “So . . . thathappened.”

Quinn rose from his chair and trod cautiously aft. “If you’ll excuse me, I need to go have a short nervous breakdown.”

15

Bundled in cold-weather clothing and laden with arctic climbing equipment that had been stowed by SI in the Dulcinea’s hold (along with gadgets and gear for just about every other terrain and scenario Quinn could ever imagine), Quinn trudged away from the slope of the mountain in pursuit of Bridy. Screaming wind whipped grains of ice against the few bits of exposed flesh on his face, forcing him to dip his chin and watch his legs chop through knee-deep snow.

He clenched his jaw against the cold. “Are we there yet?”

“If you ask me that one more time, I’ll smash this tricorder over your head.” She led him across a level and nearly circular plain several kilometers in diameter and ringed by steep black peaks like the one they’d descended after leaving the Dulcinea. The mountains hid the sunset, which painted the sky in shades of violet.

Bridy pointed forward. “The signal’s coming from underground, inside some caves beyond the other side of this frozen lake. Another hour’s walk, tops.”

Quinn harrumphed from behind his air-warming face mask. “Remind me not to use you as my tour guide the next time I plan a vacation.”

“Do you ever stop complaining?”

“I was fine till you made me leave the ship.”

“I didn’t makeyou leave the ship. We decided to track the signal.”

“No, youdecided to track the signal. I wanted to fix the impulse coils.”

She sighed. “Get serious, they’re fried. We’ll need a starbase for that.”

“That’s what you said about the thrusters, but I got those working.”

“Yeah, and if you’d used them, you’d have triggered an avalanche and buried us—not to mention the caves where the signal’s coming from.”

“Which is why we’re walking instead of flying. Of course, if we’d fixed the transporter, we could’ve just beamed over there.”

“I don’t know how to fix a transporter, and neither do you.”

“No, but we have a manual. We could figure it out.” He scowled. “Why is it whenever we disagree we always end up doing things your way?”

She glanced back at him. “Because I’m in charge.”

“Then why even ask my opinion?”

“To make you feel better.”

“Well, it ain’t workin’.”

They didn’t speak to each other the rest of the way across the lake. Quinn tried to keep up with Bridy, but she outpaced him enough to open her lead by slow degrees. By the time they reached the far side of the crater-shaped basin, she was twenty meters ahead of him, and she showed no sign of slowing down as she pressed forward into the mouth of a cave. She was limned by the pale glow of her tricorder and partly silhouetted by the beam of her small flashlight as she forged ahead into the dark.

Quinn was about to shout her name when he remembered that a sudden loud noise echoing off the mountains above them might prove disastrous.

Dammit,he cursed her in his imagination, don’t do nothin’ stupid.

He quickened his pace until he reached the cave, and then he stopped to fish his own flashlight from his jacket pocket. His gloved hands fumbled first to find the device and then to activate it. Its narrow beam slashed through the darkness as he pivoted side to side, surveying the path ahead. It was a wide space populated by stalactites, stalagmites, and pillars of dark-blue ice. He glimpsed another, smaller passage on the cavern’s far side, but there was no obvious clear path to it—only routes of greater or lesser resistance.

To his dismay, he saw no sign of Bridy.

Then he heard a weak and distant echo of her voice: “Quinn!”

“Honey? Where are you?” She called his name again, but he wasn’t sure from what direction. “Keep talkin’, darlin’! I’m comin’!” Bridy repeated his name; it sounded as if it had come from beneath him. He prowled about the cavern, searching its floor with his flashlight beam.

He stumbled to a halt half a step shy of a narrow crevasse. Kneeling beside it, he aimed the flashlight into its depths and called, “Bridy?”

“Down here!”

Targeting her voice, he trained the flashlight beam on her. She was a dozen meters below him and wedged between two walls of rough, black ice.

“You okay?”

“I think my leg’s broken.”

“Yeah, that first step’s a doozy.” He removed his pack and retrieved the spare coil of climbing rope. “Hang on. I’ll have you up in a few minutes.” Fumbling to untie the simple knot on the coil, he silently cursed his bulky gloves for making his fingers so clumsy. As the synthetic-fiber rope unspooled onto the cavern floor, he called back to Bridy, “Try not to move.”

“Not much risk of that.”

Recalling his mercenary training from decades earlier, Quinn secured one end of the rope with a set of strong knots to the thickest ice pillar within a few meters of the crevasse, and ran the line behind another sturdy pillar to serve as a crude pulley. Then he paid out a few dozen meters of slack over the fissure’s edge, lowering it to Bridy. “Secure that around your torso in an X shape, and through your legs if you can reach.”

“Under the shoulders will have to do.”

“That’s fine. Let me know when you’re ready to come up.”

A minute later, Bridy tugged on the rope. “Let’s do this.”

Quinn leaned back and started pulling on the rope. Slack gathered in his hands, and he coiled it around his left arm while hoisting Bridy back to the top of the crevasse. Bridy was a slender woman, but the effort of lifting her as dead weight was exhausting. As she clambered over the edge onto the cavern’s floor, Quinn gave a few more heroic tugs on the rope to pull her to safety.

Then he fell on his ass and gasped for air. His exhaled breath gathered in a wispy cloud around his head while he waited for his limbs to stop shaking.

Bridy lay on her back a few meters away, clearly in no hurry to move, either. In a droll deadpan she said, “Don’t have a heart attack, okay?”

“Tryin’ not to, darlin’.” After a few more pained breaths, he sat up. “We should patch up your leg. Where’s the medkit?”

She nodded at her torn-up backpack. “At the bottom of the crevasse.”