“He has business to attend to elsewhere.”

“Yes, I’m sure. But I wanted to ask him one last time why he’s sending me across the Atlantic Breach. It doesn’t make any sense. I’m going to die out there. I mean, there’s no food….”

“I’ve packed a dozen food bars for you,” said Moira.

Harman had to laugh. “All right… after a dozen days, then there’s no food. And no water…”

Moira pulled a soft, curved, almost flat shape from the rucksack. The thing looked almost like one of the wineskins from the turin drama—but one that was all but empty. A thin tube ran from it. She handed it to Harman and he noticed how cool to the touch it was.

“A hydrator,” said Moira. “If there’s any humidity in the air at all, this collects it and filters it. If you’re in your thermskin, it collects your sweat and exhalations, scrubs them, and provides drinking water that way. You will not die of thirst out there.”

“I didn’t bring my thermskin,” said Harman.

“I packed it for you. You will need it for hunting.”

“Hunting?”

“Fishing might be a better term,” said Moira. “You can press through the restraining forcefields any time and kill fish underwater. You’ve been underwater in your thermskin before—up on Prospero’s Isle ten months ago—so you know that the skin protects you from pressure and the osmosis mask allows you to breathe.”

“What am I supposed to use for bait to get these fish?”

Moira flashed Savi’s quick smile. “For sharks, killer whales, and many other denizens of the deep out there, your own body will do quite nicely, my Prometheus.”

Harman was not amused. “And what do I use to kill the sharks, killer whales, and other denizens of the deep that I might want to eat… harsh language?”

Moira pulled a handgun from the rucksack and handed it to him.

It was black—darker and stubbier and much less graceful in design than the flechette weapons he was used to—and heavier. But the hand grip, barrel, and trigger were similar enough.

“This fires bullets, not crystal darts,” said Moira. “It’s an explosive device rather than gas-charged as with the weapons you’ve used before… but the principle is obviously the same. There are three boxes of ammunition in your rucksack… six hundred rounds of self-cavitating ammunition. That means that each bullet creates its own vacuum ahead of itself underwater… water does not slow it down. This is the safety—it’s on now—press down on the red dot with your thumb to release the safety. It has more recoil than flechette weapons and is much louder, but you’ll grow used to that.”

Harman hefted the killing device a few times, pointed it at the distant sea, made sure the safety was still on, and set it back in his pack. He’d test it later—once he was out in the Breach. “I wish we could get a few dozen of these weapons to Ardis,” he said softly.

“You can deliver this one to them,” said Moira.

Harman balled his right hand into a fist. He wheeled on Moira. “More than two thousand miles across here,” he said fiercely. “I don’t know how many miles I can hike a day, even if I do catch these goddamned fish and if your hydrator thing keeps working. Twenty miles a day? Thirty? That could be two hundred days of hiking just to get to the east coast of North America. But that kind of progress is only if the land in the Breach is flat … and I’m looking at proxnet and farnet mapping right now. There are fucking mountain ranges out there! And canyons deeper than the Grand Canyon! Boulders, rock crevasses, great furrows where continental drift dragged entire landmasses over the ocean floor, larger gaps where tectonic-plate activity opened up the bottom of the ocean and spewed forth lava. This ocean floor’s always re-creating itself—it’s bigger, rougher, and rockier than it used to be. It’ll take me a year to get across, and once I get there I’ll have almost another thousand miles to cover to get back to Ardis—and that’s through forests and mountains infested with dinosaurs, saber-toothed cats, and voynix. You and that mutant cyberspace personality can quantum teleport anywhere you want to go—and take me with you. Or you could command a sonie to fly here from any of your post-human hidey holes where you’ve stashed your toys, and I could be home at Ardis helping Ada in a few hours… less. Instead, you’re sending me to my death out there. And even if I survive, it’ll be many months before I can get back to Ardis and odds are that Ada and everyone I know will be dead—from that Setebos spawn, or the voynix, or the winter, or starvation. Why are you doing this to me?”

Moira did not flinch from his fierce gaze. “Has Prospero ever spoken to you of the logosphere’s predicators?” she asked softly.

“Predicators?” Harman repeated stupidly. He could feel the adrenaline filling his system beginning to drain away toward despair. In a minute, his hands would be shaking. “You mean predictors? No.”

“Predicators,” said Moira. “They are as unique—and often as dangerous—as Prospero himself. Sometimes he trusts them. Sometimes he does not. In this case, he has entrusted your life and perhaps the future of your race to them.”

Moira pulled her hydrator from the rucksack and slung it over her back, shifting the flexible drinking tube so it lay along the side of her cheek. She started down the steep path toward the beach.

Harman remained at the top of the cliff for a minute. Shouldering the rucksack, he shielded his eyes and stared back through the morning glare at the black eiffelbahn tower rising high against the blue sky. The cablecar cables ran off to the east. He could not see the next tower from this vantage point.

Swiveling, he looked out to the west. Large white birds and smaller white birds—gulls and terns, his protein DNA memory storage told him—wheeled and screeched over the lazy blue sea. The Atlantic Breach remained a startling impossibility, its eighty-foot-wide cleft taking on scale now that Moira was halfway down the cliff face.

Harman sighed, tugged the rucksack straps tighter—already feeling the sweat soaking through his tunic where it met the cotton of the small backpack—and began following Moira down the trail toward the beach and the sea.

A lot was happening at once.

The Queen Mab—all one thousand one hundred and eighteen feet of her—began her close-encounter aerobraking maneuver, the ship’s curved pusher plate draped across its derriere, both ship and saucer surrounded by flame and streaking plasma.

At the height of the ion-storm around the aerobraking spaceship, Suma IV cut loose the dropship.

Just as with the spacecraft that had first brought Mahnmut and Orphu to Mars, no one had gotten around to naming this dropship—it remained just “the dropship” in their maser and tightbeam conversations. But The Dark Lady was secure in the dropship’s hold, and in his environmental control cubby, Mahnmut kept up a running description of video feeds—both from the dropship’s camera and from the Queen Mab—as the stealth-shielded ovoid of the dropship thrust away from the flame-wreathed larger ship, spun through the upper atmosphere at five times the speed of sound, and finally deployed its stubby high-speed wings when their velocity dropped to a mere Mach 3.

Originally, General Beh bin Adee had planned to drop Earthward with the reconnaissance dropship, but the more imminent threat of the Voice’s asteroid rendezvous made all the Prime Integrators vote that the general remain aboard the Mab. Centurion Leader Mep Ahoo was in the jumpseat of the passenger/cargo compartment behind the main control blister on the upper part of the ship, and behind him—strapped into their web seating, heavy energy weapons locked upright between their black-barbed knees—rode his command: twenty-five rockvec Belt troopers recently defrosted and briefed on the Queen Mab.