Daeman had selected nine other people at Ardis—five men and four women—to help him with the warning trip, faxing to all three hundred known faxnode portals to see if Setebos had been there and to warn the inhabitants there if Setebos had not—but he decided to wait until Harman, Hannah, and Petyr returned with the sonie. Harman had told Ada that they’d be back by the lunch hour or shortly after.

The sonie wasn’t back by lunchtime or by an hour after that.

Daeman waited. He knew that Ada and the others were nervous—scouts and firewood teams had noted shadowy movement of many voynix in the forests north, east, and south of Ardis, as if they were gathering for a major attack—and he didn’t want to pull ten people off their duties before Harman and the other two returned.

They didn’t return by midafternoon. Lookouts on the guard towers and palisades kept glancing toward the low, gray clouds, obviously hoping to see the sonie.

Daeman knew that he should leave—that Harman had been right, that the fax reconaissance and warning trip had to be done quickly—but he waited another hour. Then two. However illogical it might be, he felt that he would be abandoning Ada if he left before Harman and the sonie returned. If something had happened to Harman, Ada would be devastated but the community at Ardis might survive. Without the sonie, the fate of everyone might well be sealed during the next voynix attack.

Ada had been busy all afternoon, only coming outside occasionally to stand alone on Hannah’s cupola tower to watch the skies. Daeman, Tom, Siris, Loes, and a few others stood nearby but did not speak to her. The clouds grew grayer and it began to snow again. All of the short afternoon felt more and more like some terrible twilight.

“Well, I have to go in to work in the kitchen,” said Ada at last, pulling her shawl higher around her shoulders. Daeman and the others watched her go. Finally he went into the house, up to his small third-floor cubby under the eaves, and dug through his clothing chest until he found what he needed—the green thermskin suit and osmosis mask given to him by Savi more than ten months earlier.

The suit had been ripped and soiled—rent by Caliban’s claws and teeth, smeared by his blood and Caliban’s, then by the mud of their forced sonie landing the previous spring—and while cleaning had removed the stains, the suit had tried to heal all of its own rips and tears. It had almost succeeded. Here and there the green insulating overfabric was all but invisible, revealing the silver sheen of the molecular layer itself, but its heating and pressure-sealing faculties were almost intact—Daeman had faxed to an empty node at fourteen thousand feet above sea level, an uninhabited, wind-ravaged, snow-pelted node known only as Pikespik, to test it. The thermskin had kept him alive and warm and the osmosis mask had also worked, providing him with enough enhanced atmosphere to breathe easily.

Now, in his room under the eaves, he laid the almost weightless thermskin and mask in his pack next to the extra crossbow bolts and water bottles and went downstairs to assemble his waiting team.

A cry went up from outside. Daeman ran outdoors at the same time Ada and half the household did.

The sonie was visible about a mile away. It had come out through the clouds smoothly enough, circling around from the southwest, but suddenly it wobbled, dived, righted itself, then wobbled again, suddenly diving steeply toward earth just beyond the stockade on the south lawn. The silvery disk pulled up at the last minute, actually struck the top of the wooden palisade—making three guards there throw themselves to the ground to avoid the machine—and then it plowed into the frozen ground, bounced thirty feet, hit again, threw sod high into the air, bounced once more, and slid to a halt, plowing a shallow furrow into the rising lawn.

Ada led the rush from the front porch as everyone ran to the downed machine. Daeman reached it just seconds after Ada.

Petyr was the only person in the machine. He lay stunned and bleeding in the forward-center position. The other five cushioned passenger niches were filled with… guns. Daeman recognized variations on the flechette rifles that Odysseus had brought back, but also handguns and other weapons he’d never seen before.

They helped Petyr out of the sonie. Ada tore a clean strip of cloth from her tunic and pressed it against the young man’s bleeding forehead.

“I hit my head when the forcefield went off …” said Petyr. “Stupid. I should have let it land itself… I said ‘manual’ when it came off autopilot just after it came out of the clouds… thought I knew how to fly it… didn’t.”

“Hush,” said Ada. Tom, Siris, and others helped support the wobbly man. “Tell us about it when we get you in the house, Petyr. You guards… back to your posts, please. The rest of you, back to whatever you were doing. Loes, perhaps you and some of the men could bring in those weapons and ammunition magazines. There may be more in the sonie’s storage compartments. Put everything in the main hall. Thank you.”

In the parlor of Ardis Hall, Siris and Tom brought disinfectant and bandages while Petyr told his story to at least thirty people.

He described the Golden Gate under voynix siege and the meeting with Ariel. “Then the bubble went dark for several minutes, the glass gone opaque to sunlight, and when the buckyglas became transparent again, Harman was gone.”

“Gone where, Petyr?” Ada’s voice was steady.

“We don’t know. We spent three hours searching the whole complex—Hannah and I—and we found the weapons in a sort of museum room in a bubble she’d never been in before—but there was no sign of Harman or this green thing, Ariel.”

“Where is Hannah?” asked Daeman.

“She stayed behind,” said Petyr. He was bent over, holding his bandaged head. “We knew we had to get the sonie and as many of the weapons back to Ardis as quickly as possible—Ariel had said that he, she, had reprogrammed the sonie to return more slowly than we’d gone—it took about four hours on the return trip. Ariel had said that Odysseus would be out of his crèche in seventy-two hours if the machine could save his life, and Hannah said she was going to stay there until she knew… knew whether he’d made it or not. Besides, we found scores more weapons—we’ll have to go back with the sonie—and Hannah said we could pick her up then.”

“Were the voynix on the verge of getting into the bubbles?” asked Loes.

Petyr shook his head and then grimaced at the pain. “We didn’t think so. They slid right off the buckyglas and there were no exits or entrances functioning except the semipermeable garage door that sealed behind me when I flew out.”

Daeman nodded thoughtfully. He remembered both the friction-free buckyglas of the crawler canopy during their drive into the Mediterranean Basin with Savi and the semipermeable membrane doors up on Prospero’s orbital isle.

“Anyway, Hannah has about fifty flechette weapons,” said Petyr with a wry grin, “we carried them out of the museum in chests and blankets. She could kill a lot of voynix if they do get in. Plus, the room that Odysseus’ crèche is in is sort of hidden from the rest of the complex.”

“We’re not sending the sonie back tonight, are we?” asked the woman named Salas. “I mean …” She glanced out the windows at the dimming afternoon.

“No, we’re not sending the sonie back today,” said Ada. “Thank you, Petyr. Go on to the infirmary and get some rest. We’ll bring the sonie up to the house and inventory the weapons and ammunition you brought back. You may have saved Ardis.”

People went about their business. Even out on the far lawn, there was the buzz of excited conversation. Loes and others who had fired the flechette guns originally brought back by Odysseus, tested the new weapons—all those flechette guns they tried worked—and set up an ad hoc firing range behind Ardis where they could begin training others. Daeman himself oversaw the brushing off of the sonie. It hummed back to life when the controls were reactivated and resumed its hover three feet off the ground. Half a dozen men walked it back to the house. The storage compartments at the rear and sides of the machine—where Odysseus had once stored his spears while going on a hunt for Terror Birds—had indeed been filled with more guns.