Ten minutes of flight and the sonie began losing altitude. They had passed beyond the ice and now were flying over black water scattered with icebergs.

“What’s happening?” said Ada. She hated the quaver in her own voice. “Is this thing out of energy . . . fuel . . . whatever it uses?”

“I don’t know,” said Harman.

The sonie leveled off a mere hundred feet above the water. “Look,” called Hannah. She raised a hand from its grip to point ahead of them.

Suddenly the back of something huge, alive, barnacled with age, flesh corrugated-tough, broke the cold sea, its mammal heat radiating like throbbing blood in their night-vision-enhanced sight. A spout of water shot high toward them and Harman smelled fish on the fresh air that the forcefield allowed through.

“What . . .” began Daeman.

“I think it’s called . . . a whale, I think that’s how to pronounce it . . . but I thought it was extinct millennia ago,” said Harman.

“Maybe the post-humans brought it back,” Ada said over their suit intercoms.

“Maybe.”

They hurtled farther out to sea, always east-northeast, and after a few more minutes of the sonie holding its altitude, the four passengers began relaxing a bit, adapting, as humans have done since time immemorial, to a strange new situation. Harman had rolled on his side and was looking up at the brilliant stars becoming visible between scattered clouds when Ada startled him by shouting, “Look! Ahead!”

A large iceberg had become visible over the dark horizon and the sonie was hurtling straight toward it. The machine had flown over or past other icebergs, but none this broad—it stretched sideways for miles like a gleaming blue-white wall in their night vision—and none this tall—it was apparent that the top of the monstrous thing was higher than their current altitude.

“What can we do?” asked Ada.

Harman shook his head. He had no idea how fast the sonie was going—none of them had ever traveled faster than a voynix-pulled droshky—but it was fast enough, he knew, that the impact would destroy them.

“Do you have other controls on your handgrip?” asked Hannah. Her voice was strangely calm.

“No,” said Harman.

“We could jump,” said Daeman from behind and to the left of Harman. The sonie tilted a bit as Daeman got to his knees and elbows, his head just within the forcefield bubble.

“No,” said Harman, putting the force of command in the syllable. “You wouldn’t last thirty seconds in that sea, even if you survived the fall . . . which you wouldn’t. Get down.”

Daeman dropped to his belly again.

The sonie did not slow or change course. The face of the iceberg—Harman guessed that the thing was at least two miles across—rushed at them and grew taller. Harman estimated that it rose at least three hundred feet above the water. They would strike it two-thirds of the way down its cold face.

“There’s nothing we can do?” said Ada, making it more a statement than a question.

Harman pulled his hood off and looked at her. The cold air was not so bad within their forcefield cockpit. “I don’t think so,” he said. “I’m sorry.” He reached across with his right hand to take her left hand. She swept her thermskin hood off to show him her eyes. She and Harman interlaced fingers for a few seconds.

A few hundred yards before fiery collision, the sonie slowed again and gained altitude. It whisked over the top edge of the iceberg with ten feet to spare and banked to the right until it was flying south above the icy surface. It slowed more, hovered, and settled onto the surface, snow hissing under its heated underside.

Harman and the others lay where they were for a silent moment, hanging on to the handgrips, not sharing their thoughts.

The forcefield bubble disappeared and suddenly the terrible cold and wind burned at Harman’s face. He pulled his hood down in a hurry, glancing at Ada as she did the same.

“We should get off this thing before it decides to take us somewhere else,” Hannah said softly on the comm.

They scrambled off. The wind shoved them off balance, relented, shoved at them again. Spindrift pelted their outer clothing and hoods.

“What now?” whispered Ada.

As if in answer, a double row of red infrared beacons winked on, outlining a ten-foot-wide path from the sonie for a hundred yards to . . . nothing.

They walked together, holding each other upright in the wind. If the beacon lights had not burned so brightly in their night vision, they would have turned their backs to the wind and been lost in seconds—lost until they stepped off the edge of the iceberg somewhere to their right.

The path ended in a hole in the iceberg’s surface. Steps had been hacked out of the ice and disappeared toward another red glow far below.

“Shall we?” said Hannah.

“What choice do we have?” asked Daeman.

The steps were slippery under their street boots, but some sort of climbing rope had been attached to the right wall with metal spikes and loops, and the four clung to the line while descending. Harman had counted forty steps when the stairway ended in a wall of ice. No, the steps continued to their right and down—fifty steps this time—then left and down again for fifty more, the whole descent illuminated by spaced infrared cold-flares set into the ice.

At the bottom of the steps, a corridor led deep into the iceberg, the way illuminated now by green and blue cold-flares as well as red. At places they came to junctions, but one choice was always dark, the other illuminated. Once they climbed along a slowly ascending corridor; another time they descended for a hundred feet or more. The bends and junctions and choices became too labyrinthine to keep track.

“Someone’s expecting us,” whispered Hannah.

“I’m counting on it,” said Ada.

They emerged into a broad hall, perhaps a hundred feet across at the widest, the ice ceiling thirty feet above, various other entrances dotting the walls and connected by ice stairways, the floor graded to different levels. Heaters on pedestals glowed orange and there were a variety of light sources spiked into the walls, floors, and ceilings. On one of the low platforms lay what looked to be furry animal hides, cushions, and a low table with bowls of food and pitchers and goblets of drink. The four gathered around the table but looked dubiously at its contents.

“It’s all right,” said a woman’s voice behind them. “It’s not poisoned.”

She had emerged from a high ice door near the platform and now she descended a zigzag of stairs toward them. Harman had time to notice the woman’s hair—gray-white, an almost unheard-of choice except for a few eccentrics—and her face: lined with wrinkles just as Daeman had said. This woman was old in a way none of them—except for Daeman at the last Burning Man—had ever seen, and the effect unsettled even Harman with his ninety and nine years.

Other than the obvious age, the woman was attractive enough. Her stride was strong and she wore a commonplace blue tunic top, cord trousers, and solid boots, the one dash of eccentricity being the red wool cape over her shoulders. The cape’s cut was complicated, never quite resolving itself into simple folds. As she stepped onto the platform a few feet from them, Harman noticed the dark metal object in her right hand.

As if noticing the device for the first time herself, she raised it toward them. “Do any of you know what this is?”

“No,” said Daeman, Ada, and Hannah in a soft chorus.

“Yes,” said Harman. “It’s some sort of Lost Age weapon.”

The other three looked at him. They had seen weapons in the turin-cloth drama—swords, spears, shields, bows and arrows—but nothing so machinelike as this blunt black thing.

“Correct,” said the woman. “This is called a gun and it only does one thing—it kills.”

Daeman took a step toward the old woman. “Are you going to kill us? Did you bring us all this way to kill us?”