“Farewell, my enemy,” Bradley Johansson said contentedly.

***

The two frigates hung side by side in space, completely invisible. One and a half million kilometers away, the Dark Fortress glimmered like a wan Halloween lantern. It suddenly flared blue-white, rivaling the nearby Dyson Alpha star in magnitude. The light faded as swiftly as it had risen.

“So there was some kind of matter at the core of the flare bomb to convert,” Mark said.

“Looks that way,” Ozzie agreed.

“Can’t see the barrier.”

“Mark, give it a minute, okay. In fact, give it a month. We’ve all been beating up on the Dark Fortress rather badly.”

“The lattice spheres are still there,” Nigel said with quiet admiration. “The damn thing survived two quantumbusters. The Anomines knew how to build to last.”

“No sign of the flare bomb’s quantum signature,” Otis reported. “Looks like you killed it, Ozzie.”

For five hours they waited as the plasma inside the lattice spheres cooled and dimmed. Then it vanished without warning.

“Hey, some kind of shell just appeared around the outer lattice sphere,” Otis said.

“Aren’t you going to say I told you so?” Nigel asked.

“Nah,” Ozzie said. “I figure I owe you one.”

“Something very weird is happening to space out there,” Mark said. “I don’t understand any of these readings.”

“Me neither,” Ozzie said. “How about you, Nige?”

“Not a clue.”

The light from Dyson Alpha faded away to nothing; with it went the radio cacophony of MorningLightMountain’s signals.

“Mission accomplished,” Nigel said. “Let’s go home.”

“Come on, dude, this isn’t the end of it. Nothing like. MorningLightMountain is still out there; it’ll be starting over fresh in a hundred star systems.”

“Ozzie, please, you’re spoiling the moment.”

“But—”

“Home. With one slight detour.”

CHAPTER NINETEEN

Morton’s virtual vision gave him the illusion of light and space. Without that he knew he would have fallen for the Siren call of insanity echoing enticingly at the center of his mind. As it was, spending hours immobile in the armor suit with no external sensor input at all was pushing him closer and closer to all-out claustrophobia. Actually, there had been one thing from outside that still managed to get through to him: the noise of the storm had been reduced to a hefty vibration by the meters of soil on top of him, one he could feel through the suit’s adaptive foam padding. The timer in his grid told him it lasted for three and a half hours before finally fading away.

“We’ve got to get out of here,” he said to Alic.

“Damn right,” the navy commander agreed.

The two of them had lain there in the darkness with hands clasped together like a pair of scared children. That touch allowed them to communicate. Morton wasn’t sure he could have held out without the contact of another human being. He didn’t even remember much of their conversation; giving each other potted histories, women, places they’d been. Anything to hold the isolation at bay and with it the knowledge that they were buried alive.

There had been no choice.

When the storm appeared from behind the mountains and swallowed the last pinnacles, they’d had four or five seconds at best before it hit them. Alic had fired his particle lances straight into the ground, blasting out a simple crater of smoldering earth. “Get in!” he yelled.

Morton had dived straight into the hole, cramming his suit up against Alic’s. The Cat hadn’t moved.

“Cat!” he implored.

“That’s not how I die, Morty,” she’d said simply.

He didn’t even manage an answer. Alic fired the particle lances again, collapsing the soil around them. The Cat had sounded sorry for him; out of all the weeks they’d spent together, that was the strongest memory he had of her now.

Once they started digging their way out, he began to appreciate her reasoning. His suit power cells were down to five percent, and the soil was packed solid. He vaguely remembered that if you were caught in a snow avalanche you were supposed to curl up, to create a space. There had been time for nothing other than the most basic survival instinct. The hole in the ground offered a chance at survival. The impossible wall hurtling down on him didn’t.

It took a couple of minutes to wiggle his gauntlet about and compact the earth around it. Electromuscles strained on the limit of their strength just to achieve that. After the hand came the forearm, and finally he could move the whole arm in a little cavity. He began scrabbling. It took hours.

“There was never this much soil on top of us,” he kept saying.

“Inertial navigation is fully functional,” Alic would reply each time. “We’re heading straight up.”

The power cells were draining away at an alarming rate as they wriggled and grubbed their way along. Heat was a big problem; the suits kept pumping excess heat onto their external surfaces, but the soil wasn’t a good conductor. It began to build up around them. One more problem Morton could do absolutely nothing about.

Seven hours after the storm arrived, Morton’s gauntlet pushed through into open air. He sobbed with relief and shoved like a maniac, battering the suit forward, no longer caring if it was good technique. Claustrophobia was creeping up behind him, refusing to let go. Soil crumbled away around him and he finally flung himself out of the hole and into early evening sunlight crying out with incoherent relief. He slapped at the emergency locks, shedding sections of the suit as if it were on fire.

Alic came stumbling out on all fours. Morton helped him off with the legs and shoulders. They hugged for a long moment, slapping at each other’s backs like brothers who had been torn apart for a century.

“We fucking did it,” Morton said. “We’re invincible.”

Alic drew back, and finally took a long look around. His expression became troubled. “Where the hell are we?”

Morton finally paid attention to their surroundings. His first thought was that they’d tunneled away for kilometers to emerge in a different place altogether, possibly a different world. They were standing in a desert; it didn’t have sand and sun-blasted stones, but the expanse of raw soil and dark stone fragments that lay all around didn’t have a single blade of grass or tree growing anywhere. Nor was there any evidence that life had ever visited this place.

He looked up at the mountains that barricaded the western horizon, and called up a map file, integrating it with his insert’s inertial navigation function. The peaks corresponded to the eastern edge of the Dessault Mountains just outside the Institute valley. They were in the right places, but they weren’t the right shape at all. Every crag and cleft had been abraded away, reducing them to tall conical mounds of stone. They weren’t as high as they used to be, either. The snow had vanished completely.

“That really was one hell of a storm,” Morton muttered. “I never took Bradley seriously before.” He looked to the east, convinced there should be some sign of it. The horizon was a perfectly flat line between the newborn reddish brown desert and Far Away’s glorious sapphire sky. “Probably gonna go all the way around the world and bite us again.”

Alic was looking at the gentle saddle that used to hold the Institute. “No sign of the Marie Celeste. I guess the planet had its revenge.”

“Yeah.” Morton started scratching the back of his arms. Just about every part of him was itching now. The sweatshirt and thin cotton pants he wore didn’t exactly smell too good, either. “What now?”

“We survived. There’s got to be someone else around here.”

Wilson watched the tail end of the storm flow away into the east. The mountains around the High Desert were hard to see now; they’d become the same color as the land. It was a beautiful view, the air the storm had left in its wake was perfectly clear, there were no clouds anywhere. A doldrum calm had enveloped the whole Dessault range. If he had a regret it was the way the storm had stripped the snow off the eastern mountains. Real mountains deserved snowcaps to complete their majesty.