“Shall we join the next group?”

He nodded gratefully. There were going to be only a few more groups departing from this room. He was ready.

She pulled him into the lock. The twenty people inside looked at the outer doors. It was like being in an industrial-sized elevator. Some embraced. Hand found hand, until the group was a joined circle. She squeezed Wahram’s hand hard.

The air hissed out of the room. They braced themselves. The outer doors pulled back in both directions into the hull; black space yawned before them, the stars like spilled salt. Only a faceplate between you and the stars. There were so many stars that the patterns as seen on Earth were overwhelmed; it was simply space itself, star-blasted, nameless and huge—more than the human mind was meant to confront. Or simply the night sky, a primal experience, half of life. Part of themselves. Time to sleep, perchance to dream. They gathered their strength and out they went with a Shackleton leap.

They floated in the black, and some puffed out a bit of propellant, so that they pinwheeled away from their rapidly receding ship. It was very quickly a distant white chip, lit within its whiteness by a string of diamonds firecracking in its stern. Look away, don’t burn your retinas; glance back; the ETH Mobilewas maybe one of the stars there. They were on their own.

There was no sign of the other groups. Suddenly the idea that they could be found and rescued seemed impossible, a dream or hope that could not come true. They had jumped to their deaths.

But she had been out here before; she knew it could be done. Their suit transponders meant they were each beaconing like a fierce little lighthouse.

They established a group comms band on the helmet radios at 555, but as time wore on, few people spoke. There was little to say. Swan wanted to let go of the hand that was not Wahram’s, but didn’t. She clutched his right hand with her left; she held it tight. He squeezed back. She switched to band 345, heard only the sound of his breathing, steady and slow. He looked at her as he heard her too, breathing in his ear. His face was round behind his faceplate, his expression grave but fearless.

“When you do you think it will happen?” Swan said, looking at the white dot she thought was the ETH Mobile.

“Soon, I should think,” he replied.

And almost as he said it there was a flash of light in the area where Swan had been looking. “That was it!”

“Maybe so.”

After that a long time passed. An hour… two hours… then three.

Then Wahram said, “Look; here comes our rescue ship.”

Swan twisted to get a look over her shoulder, and saw a little space yacht approaching them at an angle, slowly.

“Well,” she said. “Good.”

And Venus was still shaded; it seemed the shield must have been saved. And they were rescued.

But then the little space yacht exploded right next to them. Swan, blinded by this flash, had just registered what it was, and almost as quickly concluded that some shrapnel from the collision of the ETH Mobileand the pebble mob must have flown their way and hit the yacht—bad luck, it seemed to her as their little ring of twenty was pulled apart by something, probably gas or debris from the yacht, meaning people were probably hurt—anyway in the same second as the explosion she found herself yanked free of both Wahram and the person on the other side of her. Crying out at the realization, she tucked and somersaulted to keep Wahram in her view—saw him pinwheeling with arms and legs extended, a spray of red crystal shooting out of one of his legs. “Pauline clear my faceplate,” she said, and fingered the jet controls in her gloves, stabilizing herself relative to Wahram and then jetting off at full power after him. Briefly she passed through a little field of detritus from the wrecked yacht, there was a big spinning fragment of it even, perhaps a quarter or a third of it, sheared open so that rooms and bulkheads were revealed, as in a cutaway drawing or a doll’s house. She had to change course to zip by the stern of it, then steer her suit for all it was worth to get back on Wahram’s track. He was still spinning, and much smaller already; she hit her suit’s maximum burn, aimed herself toward him. It was almost a task for Pauline, but there was flotsam and jetsam to be dodged, so she kept the controls and chased him while dodging these fragments of the yacht. Clear of them, she accelerated yet again, flying hard, bringing to bear everything she had ever done as a flier, heedless of anything but the chase. Wahram grew bigger. Now she cried out, “Pauline, help!”

“Let me fly the suit.”

“All right but go! Go!”

“You’re at full burn already. I have to slow down if you want to rendezvous with him.”

“Do it!”

They shot through the stars. Wahram grew bigger still. Swan took over the controls again, over Pauline’s objection, and kept closing on him as fast as possible, until the last second, when she flung herself around and flared the jets of the suit, almost running into him; she had to dodge him with a thrust, pass by him with centimeters to spare, see in a passing flash his unconscious face, mouth open; she cried out as she jetted hard and hard again, swinging the suit around in a tight curve and coming back to him. Pauline couldn’t have done it any better.

His suit had been punctured below the left knee; there was frozen blood like a crust of coagulation, a giant scab. She grabbed him there and held the little tear shut.

“Give me a hose, let’s air out the leg.”

His own suit would have cut off the break with bulkheads like tourniquets. Possibly his lower leg was already frozen and a goner, but the suits were good at isolating leaks, and managing shock too. She took the hose extruding from her belt and stuck the end of it into the little hole in his suit; it was less than a centimeter across, barely enough to admit the hose end. She stuck her finger in the hole on the other side of his leg, jetted warm air into the leg of his suit, held everything in place. All the while she was exclaiming, “Wahram, I’m here, wake up!”

Only Pauline replied: “Please be quiet. I can’t hear his vitals when you talk like that.”

“What do you mean?”

“He’s breathing. His heart is beating.”

“What about the lower leg here?”

“The skin is frostbitten, probably the flesh too. His blood pressure is ninety over fifty, so he’s lost a lot of blood. He’s in shock.”

“Stabilize him, warm him up! Take over his suit!”

“Please be reassured. I am in communication with his suit. Be quiet, please.”

She shut up and let the qube work. Emergency medical treatment was an ancient AI algorithm, honed for centuries and long since proved to be better than a human response. And Pauline was saying there was every reason to believe he could be stabilized.

But now Pauline said, “His suit is somewhat damaged. I want to take over its control functions.”

“Can you do it?”

“Yes. It is easiest to do plugged into him, so at that point you’ll have to stick together.”

“Even better, just do it.”

Swan went to work on the hole in the leg of his suit. The suit could be repaired with the patch kit in her belt, and she set to prepping the patch, tethered to him waist to waist by her power-and-information cord. They were spinning slowly through the stars but she did not look at them. The patch kit’s patches were mostly squares with rounded edges; you had to pull off a backing and then apply smoothly and press during the time of the chemical reaction.

When his suit was sealed she asked Pauline if she should do anything for his leg at the point of the wound. This was perhaps backward, but she was rattled, she saw. Besides Pauline said no. “His suit has applied air compression and coagulants,” Pauline said. “The bleeding has substantially stopped.”