Isoroku's grimace did not waver, but the bull-headed man looked sideways at Fitzsimmons again. The Marine pursed his lips, tucked a wad of gum into his cheek and said: "Looks bad on the record, Thai-i, if you lose a judge by accident. There're not so many of them, you know."

The engineer's color deepened and he gave Parker and Magdalena a tight, angry stare. "I have no desire to see the tlamatinime or Anderssen-tzin die," he said, biting out each word with a click of his teeth. "Yet these orders were given for a reason. You are putting the lives of everyone on this ship at risk. You should consider what will happen if they die, if we die, or if something worse happens because of this course of action."

Magdalena stared back at him, a dangerous glitter in her eyes. "I will not be foresworn in my duty to the pack-leader, carver-of-stone."

Nodding sharply, Isoroku pushed away and sped off down the accessway. Fitzsimmons looked after him with a troubled expression, but then followed. He did not look back. Magdalena turned around in the circle of her nest once, then twice. Parker started to say something, but she hissed at him and he slunk off, avoiding her eyes.

Males, she grumbled to herself, feeling sulky. Her claws shredded the blanket. Useless copper-stinking males. Bah!

Later, when she had verified the locations of Isoroku, the Marines, Parker and Bandao on the surveillance cameras, Magdalena restored the v-panes showing the communications stream from Russovsky's Midge. Unfortunately, several of the peapod satellites had burned up in the atmosphere, reducing her 'eye' to a bare three orbital cameras. With such a reduced capacity to track and interpret the transmissions from the aircraft, she'd downgraded the feed to burst traffic, sending only compressed voice logs from the aircraft comm. She fretted about losing the video, but there was nothing to be done.

"In flight again," she muttered, watching a plot of the aircraft creeping across the vast curve of the planetary surface. A projected vector arced south-southwest. "Toward the observatory base. Hrrrr… three days at this rate, maybe four."

Checking again to make sure she wouldn't be disturbed, Maggie began listening to the latest set of voice recordings. After an hour, she gave up, rubbing sore ears. Philosophy…kittens complaining about the food! They must be bored down there, just flying all night.

The Hesht flipped quickly through some secondary data which had come up with the burst transmission, just making sure both aircraft were in good shape. As she did, a log section highlighted itself and chimed for attention. What's this? A leak?

"Parker," Maggie growled into her throat mike, "I need you to look at something."

"On my way," the pilot replied, sounding groggy and irritated. Maggie glanced over at the surveillance camera and her whiskers twitched to see the human male shuffling out of one of the cabins used by the scientists. His patterned shirt was on backwards. Turning her nose politely in the air, Maggie routed the log information to his navigation console and sat back, staring at the huge red disc of the planet filling the main v-pane.

A moment later, her head tilted to one side in confusion. "Where did that come from? What an odd color. Ah…" She opened another private channel to the crew's quarters. "Mister Smalls," she asked in a very polite voice. "Could you join us on the bridge?"

In the Wasteland

A pair of glittering white contrails made two rule-straight lines against the velvety darkness of the Ephesian sky. Both Midge s hummed along, wing surfaces finely tuned to squeeze as much lift as possible from the thin atmosphere, ice crystals spiraling out behind them. In the Gagarin, Gretchen was letting the comp fly, her attention turned to the geologist's travel logs. Their flight path had carried them out over a truly vast desolation, leaving the uplands of the Escarpment far behind.

Gretchen looked over the maps one more time. Russovsky had marked them up with a variety of notes and scribbled amendments. Not all of them were in Nбhuatl or even in Norman. Anderssen scowled, trying to make out a note marking an area they would fly over near dawn if they held their current course. What is this? Old Russian, maybe. She scratched her jaw thoughtfully, trying to remember how to read the blocky letters. Her grandmother had some books…thoughts of childhood yielded nothing but a memory of pine-smoke, nutmeg and pumpkin. Checking her comp found at least a phonetic alphabet.

"B-r-i-l-l-e-a-n-t," she spelled out, rather laboriously. Russovsky's handwriting was not the clearest in the world. "Or…brilliant. Hmm." What does that mean? Well, something she saw from the air. Something very bright – perhaps even visible at night. "Hummingbird? Are you awake?"

"Yes," came the answer – and the nauallis, for once, did not sound half-asleep.

"I'm looking at Russovsky's maps," Gretchen said, taking a moment to eyeball the horizon and the ground below. Sand. A barren flat covered with faint linear shadows. Anderssen grimaced, looking ahead. The field of pipeflowers disappeared rather abruptly into darkness. "And we've two options to reach the base camp. We can keep on this heading and enter an area she has marked 'brilliant' or swing north to follow a section of uplift."

"An odd thing to mark," Hummingbird replied. "Can I see the map?"

"It's on your comp…now," Gretchen said, tapping a glyph to send the file to his console.

There was momentary silence and then she heard the nauallis make a curious hmm-hmm sound. "This is in old script – Kievian Rus, I believe – and among those savages, the word 'brilliant' refers to 'almaz' or what we would term 'diamond in the rough.'"

"Diamond?" Gretchen shook her head. "So a geometric figure on the ground? That would explain why she could see it from the air."

"Not the shape," Hummingbird said, sounding a little puzzled himself. "Almaz is a cheap, colorless gemstone. There are Mixtec mining colonies on Anбhuac which mine the mineral for industrial purposes. It makes a particularly fine abrasive for certain processes."

"Hmm. If it's a mineral, perhaps Russovsky could see an open drift of the material as she flew overhead. Or…or her geodetic sensors revealed a vein of the stuff in the earth. She'd be sure to note something like that."

"Indeed." Hummingbird sounded satisfied. "So, do we swing north or not?"

"I think we should be careful," Gretchen said, checking her fuel gauges. "A day won't make an enormous difference one way or another and there's no sense risking -"

Out of the corner of her eye, Anderssen caught sight of Hummingbird's Midge suddenly lurch in the air and lose a hundred meters of altitude. At the same moment, her comp squawked in alarm and she heard the nauallis shout in surprise.

"I've lost an engine," he barked, the ultralight falling away toward the desert floor in an ungainly spiral. "Number one has shut down completely. I'm losing fuel on tanks four and five."

"Set down," Gretchen snapped, the Gagarin banking sharply to the right as she reacted. "I'm right behind you. Shut all your fuel feeds and go to an unpowered glide."

"Understood." Hummingbird's voice was calm and precise, though Anderssen immediately lost visual sight of the plunging aircraft. The contrail ended abruptly in a slowly falling cloud of ice. The Gagarin nosed over into a steep dive, wind shrieking under her wings, and Gretchen felt the pit of her stomach squeeze tight.

Her radar showed Hummingbird's Midge lose nearly a thousand meters of altitude before staggering into a kind of glide. By that time, Gretchen was swooping down out of the night sky, the falling ultralight in sight again. The upper wing of a Midge made a good reflector and by starlight her goggles could pick him out. Below them both, however, the land was dark and featureless, though Gretchen doubted the ground was soft as a pillow. At least we're past the pipeflowers!