The Dark Lady was one of those tracer rounds. The stealth material around the stern and two-thirds of the hull burned off and joined the plasma trail streaming behind the hurtling submersible. External antennae and sensors burned away. Then the hull began to char and chip and flake.

“Ah . . . “ said Mahnmut from his acceleration couch, “shouldn’t we think about popping the parachutes?” He knew enough of Koros’s landing plan to know that the buckycarbon-fiber ‘chutes were supposed to deploy at around 15,000 meters, lowering them gently to the ocean’s surface. Mahnmut’s last glimpse of the ocean before the stern optics had burned away convinced him that they were lower than 15,000 meters and coming down very fast.

“Not yet,” grunted Orphu. The Ionian had no acceleration couches in the hold and it sounded as if the deceleration gravities were affecting him. “Use your radar to get our altitude.”

“Radar’s gone,” said Mahnmut.

“Will your sonar work?”

“I’ll try.” Amazingly, it did work, showing a return of solid—well, liquid water—surface coming at them at a distance of 8,200 meters—8,000 meters—7,800 meters. Mahnmut relayed the information to Orphu and added, “Shall we pop the parachutes now?”

“The rest of the debris isn’t deploying parachutes.”

“So?”

“So do you really want to drift down under a canopy, showing up on all their sensors?”

“Whose sensors?” snapped Mahnmut, but he understood Orphu’s point. Still . . . “Five thousand meters,” he said. “Velocity three thousand two hundred klicks per hour. Do we really want to hit the water at this speed?”

“Not really,” said Orphu. “Even if we survive the impact, we’d be buried under hundreds of meters of silt. Didn’t you say that this northern ocean is only a few hundred meters deep?”

“Yes.”

“I’m going to rotate your ship now,” said Orphu.

“What?” But then Mahnmut heard the heavy thruster pack firing—just some of its jets—and the gyros whirred, although the noise was more a grinding than a whirring.

The Dark Lady began a painful tumble, bringing its bow around from the back. Wind and friction tore at the hull, ripping away the last of the mid-ship sensors and breaching a dozen compartments. Mahnmut switched off screaming alarms.

Bow forward now, one of the last working video pickups showed splashes in the ocean—if one can call steam and plasma impact plumes 2,000 meters high “spashes”—and Mahnmut guessed it would be their turn in seconds. He described the impacts to Orphu and said, “Parachutes? Please?”

“No,” said Orphu and fired the main thrusters that should have been jettisoned in orbit.

The deceleration forces threw Mahnmut forward in his straps and made him wish for the acceleration gel they’d used in the Io Flux Tube slingshot maneuver. More columns of steam rose around the hurtling submersible like Corinthian columns flicking past and the ocean filled the viewscreen. The thrusters roared and swiveled, slowing their velocity. Mahnmut saw the pack ring jettison and fly off behind them the instant the firing stopped. They were only a thousand meters above the ocean and the surface looked as hard as Europan surface ice to Mahnmut’s eye.

“Para . . .” began Mahnmut, pleading now and not ashamed of it.

The two huge parachutes deployed. Mahnmut’s vision went red, then black.

They hit the Tethys Sea.

“Orphu? Orphu?” Mahnmut was in darkness and silence, trying to get his data feeds back on line. His enviro-niche was intact, O2 still flowing. That was amazing. His internal clocks said that three minutes had passed since impact. Their velocity was zero. “Orphu?”

“Arugghh,” came a noise over the hardline. “Every time I get to sleep, you wake me.”

“How are you?”

“Where am I might be the better question,” rumbled Orphu. “I ripped free of the niche. I’m not even sure if I’m still in The Dark Lady. If I am, the hull is breached here—I’m in water. Salt water. Wait, maybe I just pissed myself.”

“You’re still attached by hardline,” said Mahnmut, ignoring the Ionian’s last comment. “You’re probably still in the hold. I’m getting some sonar data. We’re in bottom silt, but just under a few meters of the stuff, about eighty meters beneath the surface.”

“I wonder how many pieces I’m in,” mused Orphu.

“Stay there,” said Mahnmut. “I’m going to unclip from the hardline and come below to get you. Don’t move.”

Orphu rumbled his laugh. “How can I move, old friend? All my manipulators and flagella have gone to that big moravec heaven in the sky. I’m a crab without claws. And I’m not too sure about my shell. Mahnmut . . . wait!”

“What?” Mahnmut had unstrapped himself and was removing umbilicals and virtual-control cables.

“If . . . somehow . . . you could get to me, assuming the internal corridor isn’t smashed flat and the hull doors aren’t completely buckled or welded shut by the entry heat . . . what are you going to do with me?”

“See if you’re all right,” said Mahnmut, pulling the optical leads free. It was all darkness on the monitors anyway.

“Think, old friend,” said Orphu. “You drag me out of here—if I don’t come apart in your hands—what next? I won’t fit in your internal access corridors. Even if you hauled me around the outside of the sub, I can’t fit into your enviro-niche and I sure as hell can’t cling to the hull. Do you walk across the ocean bottom for a thousand klicks or so, carrying me as you go?”

Mahnmut hesitated.

“I’m still functioning,” continued Orphu. “Or at least still communicating. I even have O2 flowing through the umbilical and some electrical energy coming in. I must be in the hold, even if it’s flooded. Why don’t you get The Dark Lady working and drive us somewhere more comfortable before we try to get together again?”

Mahnmut went on external air and took several deep breaths. “You’re right,” he said at last. “Let’s see what’s what.”

The Dark Lady was dying.

Mahnmut had worked in this submersible, through its various iterations and evolutions, for more than an Earth century, and he knew it was tough. Properly prepared, it could take many metric tons per square centimeter of pressure and the stresses of the 3,000-g flux-tube acceleration in stride, but the tough little sub was only as strong as its weakest part, and the energy stresses of the attack in Mars orbit had exceeded those weakest-part tolerances.

Her hull had stress fractures and unmendable flash burns. At the moment, they were buried bow-down with most of the sub in more than three meters of silt and harder seabed with only a few meters of the stern free of the mud, the hull and frame were warped, the hold-bay doors were warped shut and unreachable, and ten of the eighteen ballast tanks had been breached. The internal gangway between Mahnmut’s control room and the hold was flooded and partially collapsed. Outside, two-thirds of the stealth material had burned away, carrying all of the external sensors with it. Three of the four sonar arrays were out of action and the fourth could only ping forward. Only one of the four primary propulsion jets was operable and the maneuvering pulsers were a scrambled mess.

Of greater concern to Mahnmut was the damage to the ship’s energy systems: the primary reactor had been damaged by energy surge during the attack and was operating at 8 percent efficiency; the storage cells were on reserve power. This was enough to keep a minimum of life support running, but the nutrient converter was gone for good and they had only a few days’ worth of fresh water.

Finally, the O2 converter was offline. Fuel cells weren’t producing air. Long before they ran out of water or food, Mahnmut and Orphu would be out of oxygen. Mahnmut had internal air supplies, but only enough for an e-day or two without replenishing. All Mahnmut could hope was that since Orphu worked in space for months at a time, a little thing like no oxygen wouldn’t harm him now. He decided to ask the Ionian about it later.