Sax was nodding. Spencer was looking at Nirgal. And then they all were, all but Coyote, who was looking down at the palms of his hands, as if reading them. And then he looked up, and he too was looking at Nirgal.

For Nirgal it was simple, and he regarded Coyote with some concern. “Art’s right. Hiroko will never forgive us if we start killing people for no reason.”

Coyote’s face twisted, as if in disgust for their softness. “We just killed a bunch of people in Kasei Vallis,” he said.

“But that was different!” Nirgal said.

“How so?”

Nirgal hesitated, unsure, and Art said quickly, “Those were a bunch of police torturers who had your buddy and were micro-waving his brain. They got what was coming to them. But these guys down this canyon are just digging up rocks.”

Sax nodded. He was staring at them all with the utmost intensity, and it seemed certain that he understood everything, and was deeply engaged in it; but mute as he was, it was hard to be sure.

Coyote stared hard at Art. “Is this a Praxis mine?”

“I don’t know. I don’t care, either.”

“Hmm. Well— ” Coyote looked at Sax; then at Spencer; then at Nirgal, who could feel his cheeks burning. “All right then. We’ll try it your way.”

And so at the end of the day Nirgal climbed out of the rover with Coyote and Art. The sky above was dark and starry, the western quadrant still purple, casting a florid light in which everything was quite visible but at the same time unfamiliar. Coyote led the way, and Art and Nirgal followed him closely. Through his faceplate Nirgal could see that Art’s eyes were pressing glass.

The floor of Tractus Catena was broken at one point by a transverse fault system called Tractus Traction, and the trellis fracturing in this zone had formed a system of crevasses impenetrable to vehicles. The Tractus miners reached their camp from the canyon wall above it, descending in elevators. But Coyote said it was possible to walk through Tractus Traction, following a path of connecting crevasses he had marked for himself. Many of his resistance actions involved crossing “impassable” terrain like this, making possible some of his more legendary impossible visitations, and sending him through badlands no one else had ever even approached. And with Nirgal to run some of the raids, they had performed some truly miraculous-seeming ventures — -just by getting out and traveling on foot.

So they jogged down the canyon floor, in the steady Martian lope that Nirgal had perfected, and had tried with partial success to teach to Coyote. Art was not graceful — his stride was too short, and he stumbled frequently — but he kept up. Nirgal began to feel the loose joy of running, the boulder ballet of it, the rapid crossing of long stretches of land under his own power. Also the rhythmic breathing, the bounce of his air tank on his back, the trancelike state that he had learned over the years, with help from the issei Nanao, who had been taught lung-gom on Earth by a Tibetan adept. Nanao claimed that some of the old lung-gom-pas had had to carry weights to keep from flying away, and on Mars it seemed entirely possible. The way he could fly over rocks was exhilarating, a kind of rapture.

He had to restrain himself. Neither Coyote nor Art knew lung-gom, and they couldn’t keep up, though they were both pretty good, Coyote for his age, Art for his recent arrival on Mars. Coyote knew the land, and ran in short mincing dance steps, efficient and clean. Art bombed over the landscape like a badly programmed robot, staggering often as he hit wrong in the starlight, but keeping up a pretty good head of steam nevertheless. Nirgal ranged in front of them like a dog. Twice Art went down in a cloud of dust and Nirgal ran over to check on him, but both times Art got up jogging, and in their intercom silence he only waved to Nirgal and ran on.

After half an hour’s run down the canyon, which was so straight that it seemed cut by design, cracks appeared on the ground, and quickly deepened and connected up with one another, until progress over the canyon floor proper would have been impossible, as it was now the plateau tops of a collection of islands. The deep slots separating these islands were in places only two or three meters wide, but thirty or forty meters deep.

Walking through these generally flat-floored alleys was a strange business, but Coyote led the way through the maze without delaying at any of the many forks, following a path only he knew, turning left and right a score of times. One slot was so narrow they could touch both walls at once, and they had to scrape through a turn.

When they came out the northern side of the crevasse maze, emerging from a draw in the riven steep escarpment which was the end of the plateau islands, a small tent stood before them against the western canyon wall. Its arc of fabric glowed like the bulb of a dusty lamp. Within the tent were mobile trailers, rovers, drills, earthmovers, and other mining equipment. It was a uranium mine, called Pitchblende Alley, because this lower section of the canyon was floored with a pegmatite extremely rich in uraninite. It was a very productive mine, and Coyote had heard that the processed uranium stockpiled at it during the years between elevators had not yet been shipped out.

Now Coyote ran over the canyon floor toward the tent, and Nirgal and Art followed. There was no one visible inside the tent; the only illumination was provided by a few night lights, and the lit windows of a big trailer set near the center of things.

Coyote walked right up to the tent’s nearest lock gate, and the other two followed him. He plugged his wristpad jack into the keyhole by the lock gate, and began to tap on his wristpad. The outer lock door opened. No alarms seemed to go off; no figures appeared out of the door of the trailer. They got in the lock, closed the outer door, waited for the lock to suck and pump, then opened the inner door. Coyote ran toward the settlement’s little physical plant, beside the trailer; Nirgal went for the living quarters, hopping up the steps to the trailer’s door. He held one of Coyote’s “locking bars” under the door handle, turned the dial that released the fixative, and pushed the bar against the door and wall of the trailer. The trailer was made of a magnesium-based alloy, and the polymer fixative would make what was in effect a ceramic bond between the locking bar and the trailer, so that the door would be stuck. He ran around the trailer and did the same to the other door, then dashed back toward the gate, feeling his blood fly through him as if it were pure adrenaline. It was so much like a prank that he had to consciously remember the explosive charges that Coyote and Art were distributing through the settlement, in warehouses, against the tent fabric, and in the parking lot for the mining behemoths. Nirgal joined them in running from vehicle to vehicle, climbing the stairs on their sides, opening doors manually or electronically, tossing small boxes Coyote had provided into the cabs or cabins.

But there were also hundreds of tons of processed uranium that Coyote wanted to haul away. This was impossible, unfortunately. They did run over to a warehouse, however, where they filled a number of the mine’s own robot trucks with loads, and programmed them with instructions to head off into the canyonlands to the north, burying loads in regions where the apatite concentrations might be high enough to disguise the boxed uranium’s radioactivity, and make the loads hard to relocate. Spencer had doubted this strategy would work, but Coyote said it beat leaving the uranium at the mine, and all of them were happy to help in any plan that would keep him from putting tons of uranium in the storage hold of their boulder car, radproof containers or not.

When that was done they ran back to the gate, and got back outside, and ran hard. Halfway to the escarpment they heard a series of pops and booms from the tent, and Nirgal glanced over his shoulder, but saw nothing different — the tent was still mostly d ^.rk, the trailer windows lit.