“Everything going all right?” asked Orphu.

Mahnmut jumped at the sound of the radio voice in his ears. “Yes,” he said. “Doing a little rudder repairs.” There they were! The twin cables had snapped, the aft segments were about six meters away in the narrow guide box, the forward segments just visible ten meters forward. He ran back and forth, smashing through the hardwood planking and pulling each section of thigh-thick cable out of its box and dragging them toward the center using every erg of energy in his system.

“You sure everything’s all right?” asked Orphu.

He retracted his cutting edges and extended all his manipulatives, setting his fine motor control to Extra Fine. He began splicing the strands of thick hemp so rapidly that his metallic fingers became a blur in the shafts of his halogen lights cutting through the third-deck darkness. Water sloshed back and forth past him and over him as the ship rolled backward up each terrible wave and then slid down the wave’s rear side, slewing into the trough. Then Mahnmut would brace himself for the next wave crashing into the stern again with the sound and impact of a cannon being fired. And he knew that every wave meant the ship was that much closer to the waiting rocks and cliffs.

“Everything’s good,” said Mahnmut, fingers flying, weaving strands, using the low-wattage lasers at his wrist to spotweld the metallic fibers that ran through the ragged hemp. “I’m busy right now.”

“I’ll check back in a few minutes,” suggested Orphu.

“Yes,” said Mahnmut, thinking, If I can’t regain the steerage, we’ll be on the rocks in thirty minutes or so. I’ll tell him fifteen minutes before the fact. “Yes,” answered Mahnmut, “do that. Check back in a few minutes.”

She wasn’t The Dark Lady—the crude felucca had no name—but she was sailable and steerable again. Up on the rear deck, his legs and feet braced against the pitch and roll, the storm-lashed cliffs clearly visible less than a kilometer dead ahead, the tatters of canvas he’d sewn into crude sails raised on both masts, Mahnmut grabbed the wheel. The tiller cable held and the rudder responded. He wrestled the ship around into the wind and called Orphu to inform him of the situation. He told the Ionian the truth—they probably had less than fifteen minutes before the ship would be dashed on those rocks, but he was sailing this pig of a ship for all she was worth.

“Well, I appreciate your honesty,” said Orphu. “Is there anything that I can do to help?”

Mahnmut, leaning all his weight on the large wheel, turning the ship up the coming wave so as not to capsize her, said, “Any suggestions would be appreciated.”

The dust cloud showed no signs of lifting nor the wind of abating. Lines hummed, torn polycanvas flapped, and the bow disappeared in a wall of white foam that struck Mahnmut twenty meters back. Orphu said, “Yet again? What do you here? Shall we give o’er and drown? Have you a mind to sink?”

It took Mahnmut a few seconds to place this. Riding over the next wave in near zero-g, looking back over his shoulder and seeing the thousand-meter cliffs closer, the moravec brought up The Tempest in his secondary memory and cried, “A pox o’your throat, you bawling, blasphemous incharitable dog!”

“Work you, then.”

“Hang, cur, hang, you whoreson insolent noisemaker,” said Mahnmut, shouting over the wind and crash of wave even though the radio comm needed no shouts to carry. “We are less afraid to be drowned than thou art.”

“I’ll warrant him for drowning,” rumbled Orphu, “though the ship were no stronger than a nutshell and as leaky as an unstanched wench . . . Mahnmut? What exactly is an ‘unstanched wench’?”

“A menstruating woman,” said Mahnmut, fighting the wheel to port now, leaning into it. Tons of water washed across him. He could no longer see the cliffs over his shoulder because of the swirling red mist and higher waves, but he could feel the rocks behind him.

“Oh,” said Orphu. “How embarrassing. Where was I?”

“Lay her a-hold,” prompted Mahnmut.

“Lay her a-hold, a-hold! Set her two courses, two courses! Off to sea again! Lay her off!”

“All lost!” recited Mahnmut. “To prayers, to prayers! All lost! . . . Wait a minute!”

“I don’t remember ‘Wait a minute!’ “ said Orphu.

“No, wait a minute. There’s a break in the cliffs ahead—an opening in the coastline.”

“Big enough to sail into?” asked Orphu.

“If it’s the opening to Candor Chasma,” said Mahnmut, “it’s a body of water bigger than Conamara Chaos on Europa!”

“I don’t remember how large Conamara Chaos was,” admitted Orphu.

“Larger than all three of the North American Great Lakes with Hudson Bay thrown in,” said Mahnmut. “Candor Chasma is essentially another huge inland sea opening to the north . . . there should be thousands of square kilometers in which to maneuver. No lee shore!”

“Is that good?” asked Orphu, obviously unwilling to get his hopes up.

“It’s a chance for survival,” said Mahnmut, pulling on lines to fill what was left of the mainsail with wind. He waited until they’d crested the next wave and swung the wheel, turning the heavy ship ponderously to starboard, swinging the bow toward that ever-widening gap in the coastal cliffs. “It’s a chance for survival,” he said again.

It ended on the afternoon of the eighth day. One hour the dust clouds were still low and scudding, the wind was still raging, and the seas within the great Candor Chasma basin remained white and wild; the next hour, after a final bloody rain, the skies were blue, the seas grew placid, and the little green men stirred from their niches and came up on deck like children rising from a restful nap.

Mahnmut was spent. Even with a recharge trickle from the portable solar cells and occasional jolts from their draining energy cubes, he was worn out organically, mentally, cybernetically, and emotionally.

The LGM seemed to marvel at what remained of the mended sails, at the spliced tiller cables, and at other repairs Mahnmut had carried out in the past three days. Then they got to work crewing the bilge pumps, hosing down the blood-red decks, mending more canvas, caulking the warped hull and bulkhead planks, repairing splintered masts, untangling lines, and sailing the ship. Mahnmut went to the mid-deck and supervised the lifting of Orphu from the soggy lower deck, helped secure his friend to the deck and rig the sun-tarp over him, and then Mahnmut found a warm, sunny place on the mid-deck, out of the way, with a wooden wall behind him and a coil of rope in front ameliorating the agoraphobia a bit, and there he allowed himself to float into a half-stupor. When he shut down his eyes, he could still see the high waves approaching, feel the pitching deck beneath, and hear the howl of wind, despite the calm seas around them now. He peeked. The ship was sailing south again, tacking into the mild southwestern wind, heading back toward the broad opening where Candor Chasma opened into the Valles Marineris at the place called Meles Chasma. Mahnmut shut down his vision again and allowed himself to doze off.

Something touched Mahnmut’s shoulder and he started awake. One by one, the forty LGM were filing past him, each green figure touching him on the shoulder as it passed. He reported this to Orphu, using the subvocal channel.

“Perhaps they’re expressing their gratitude for your saving them,” said the Ionian. “I know I would if I had arms or legs left to pat you with.”

Mahnmut said nothing, but he could hardly believe that this was the reason for the contact. He hadn’t seen any emotions from the LGM—not even when their translators had withered and died after communicating with him—and he found it hard to believe they were all grateful, even though the LGM were good enough sailors to realize that the ship would have sunk had it not been for Mahnmut’s intervention.