The ceiling gave Vinh a solid whack on the butt, and he started to slide toward the back of the cabin. The lander was turning, some kind of emergency override—the autopilot had given no warning. Most likely, fleet command was prepping them for another burn. He tied down behind Diem, just as the lander's main torch lit off at about a tenth of a gee. "They're moving us to a lower orbit...but I don't see anything coming to rendezvous," said Diem. He poked awkwardly at the password field beneath the display. "Okay, I'm doing my own snooping....I hope Park isn't too pissed... ."

Behind them, there was the sound of more vomiting. Diem started to turn his head, winced. "You're the mobile one, Vinh. Take care of that."

Ezr slid down the aisle's ladderline, letting the one-tenth-gee load do the moving for him. Qeng Ho lived their lives under varying accelerations. Medicine and good breeding made orientation sickness a rare thing among them. But Tsufe Do and Pham Patil had both upchucked, and Benny Wen was curled up as far as his ties would permit. He held the sides of his head and swayed in apparent agony. "The pressure, the pressure..."

Vinh eased next to Patil and Do, gently vac'd the goo that was dribbling down their coveralls. Tsufe looked up at him, embarrassment in her eyes. "Never barfed in my life."

"It's not you," said Vinh, and tried to think past the pain that squeezed harder and harder.Stupid, stupid, stupid. How could it take so long tounderstand? It was not the Qeng Ho that was attacking the Emergents; somehow it was quite the reverse.

Suddenly he could see outside again. "I got local consensus," Diem's voice came in his earphones. The crewleader's words came in short, tortured bursts. "Five high-gee bombs from Emergent positions....Target: Park's flag... ."

Vinh leaned across the row of couches and looked out. The missiles' jets were pointing away from the lander's viewpoint; the five were faint stars moving faster and faster across the sky, closing on the QHSPham Nuwen. Yet their paths were not smooth arcs. There were sharp bends and wobbles.

"We must be lasing at them. They're jinking."

One of the tiny lights vanished. "We got one! We—"

Four points of light blazed in the sky. The brightness grew and grew, a thousand times brighter than the faded disk of the sun.

Then the view was gone again. The cabin lights died, winked back on, died again. The bottommost emergency system came online. There was a faint network of reddish lines, outlining equipment bays, airlock, the emergency console. The system was rad-hardened but very simpleminded and low-powered. There wasn't even backup video.

"What about Park's flagship, Crewleader?" asked Vinh. Four close-set detonations, so terribly bright—the corners of a regular tetrahedron, clasping its victim. The view was gone but it would burn in his memory forever."Jimmy!" Vinh screamed at the front of the cabin. "What about thePhamNuwen?" The red emergency lights seemed to sway around him; the shouting brought him close to blacking out.

Then Diem's voice came hoarse and loud. "I...I think it's g-gone." Fried, vaped, none of the masking words were easy anymore. "I don't have anything now, but the four nukes...Lord, they were right on top of him!"

Several other voices interrupted, but they were even weaker than Jimmy Diem's. As Vinh started back up the line toward him, the one-tenth-gee burn ended. Without light or brains, what was the lander but a dark coffin? For the first time in his life, Ezr Vinh felt the groundsider's disorienting terror: zero gee could mean they had reached designated orbit, or that they were falling in a ballistic arc that intersected the planet's surface... .

Vinh clamped down on his terror and coasted forward. They could use the emergency console. They could listen for word. They could use the local autopilot to fly to the surviving Qeng Ho forces. The pain in his head grew beyond anything Ezr Vinh had ever known. The little red emergency lights seemed to get dimmer and dimmer. He felt his consciousness squeezing down, and the panic rose and choked him. There was nothing he could do.

And just before things all went away, fate showed him one kindness, a memory: Trixia Bonsol had not been aboard thePham Nuwen.

EIGHT

For more than two hundred years, the clock mechanism beneath the frozen lake had faithfully advanced itself, exhausting the tension of spring coil after spring coil. The mechanism ticked reliably down through the last spring...and jammed on a fleck of airsnow in the final trigger. There it might have hung until the coming of the new sun, if not for certain other unforeseen events: On the seventh day of the two-hundred-and-ninth year, a series of sharp earthquakes spread outward from the frozen sea, jolting loose the final trigger. A piston slid a froth of organic sludge into a tank of frozen air. Nothing happened for several minutes. Then a glow spread through the organics, temperatures rose past the vapor points of oxygen and nitrogen, and even carbon dioxide. The exhalation of a trillion budding exotherms melted the ice above the little vehicle. The ascent to the surface had begun.

Coming awake from the Dark was not like waking from an ordinary sleep. A thousand poets had written about the moment and—in recent eras—ten thousand academics had studied it. This was the second time that Sherkaner Underhill had experienced it (but the first time didn't really count, since that memory was mixed with the vague memories of babyhood, of clinging to his father's back in the pools of the Mountroyal Deepness).

Coming awake from the Dark was done in pieces. Vision, touch, hearing. Memory, recognition, thought. Did they happen first one and then another and another? Or did they happen all at once, but with the parts not communicating? Where did "mind" begin from all the pieces? The questions would rattle around in Sherkaner's imagination for all of his life, the basis for his ultimate quest....But in those moments of fragmented consciousness, they coexisted with things that seemed much more important: bringing self together; remembering who he was, why he was here, and what had to be done right now to survive. The instincts of a million years were in the driver's perch.

Time passed and thought coalesced and Sherkaner Underhill looked out his vessel's cracked window into the darkness. There was motion—roiling steam? No, more like a veil of crystals swirling in the dim light they floated on.

Someone was bumping his right shoulders, calling his name again and again. Sherkaner pieced together memories. "Yes, Sergeant, I'm away... I mean, awake."

"Excellent." Unnerby's voice was tinny. "Are you injured? You know the drill."

Sherkaner dutifully wiggled his legs. They all hurt; that was a good start. Midhands, forehands, eating hands. "Not sure I can feel my right mid and fore. Maybe they're stuck together."

"Yeah. Probably still frozen."

"How are Gil and Amber?"

"I'm talking to them on the other cables. You're the last one to get his head together, but they've got bigger hunks of body still frozen."

"Gimme the cable head." Unnerby passed him the sound-conducting gear, and Sherkaner talked directly to the other Team members. The body can tolerate a lot of differential thawing, but if the process doesn't complete, rot sets in. The problem here was that the bags of exotherm and fuel had shifted around as the boat melted its way to the surface. Sherkaner reset the bags and started sludge and air flowing through them. The green glow within their tiny hull brightened, and Sherkaner took advantage of the light to check for punctures in their breathing tubes. The exotherms were essential for heat, but if the Team had to compete with them for oxygen the Team would be the dead loser.

A half hour passed, the warmth enveloping them, freeing their limbs. The only frost damage was at the tips of Gil Haven's midhands. That was a better safety record than most deepnesses. A broad smile spread across Sherkaner's aspect. They had made it, wakenedthemselves in the Deep of the Dark.