"I may not be good for anything else, but, by God, you paint stripes on a brick and I can fly her."

"Then that's two things you do well."

He felt warmth spreading outward from his belly. Was Lonny still there? Would he understand that message? Alex almost hoped he could. Mary said something else but he was too busy with the ship to hear her. Airspeed had dropped to near Mach 2, and he tilted her nose down to keep the scramjet lit and tried to turn south. Ice. Ice all around and the cloud deck closing in again. Piranha was shaped like the bastard daughter of an airplane and a cement mixer. The slower she flew, the more she acted like a cement mixer.

Not on the ice, baby. Not on the ice. Hang in there…

"Do you really fly that well?" Gordon asked tightly.

"I landed on Earth once before, Gordon. Who else do you know who can say that?" Tom Corbett, Space Cadet. That's me. Disguised as a washed-up day-care gopher, he is in reality Alex MacLeod, Hot Pilot. Lord, just let me get us down in one piece.

Fifteen miles up and the air was thick. Mach 3.5. The clouds below were puffy with turbulence. Piranha was diving into a storm. He wondered whether North Dakota was flat or mountainous.

Naybe an ice landing would be all right. Ice was smooth, wasn't it? Or was that only true in free fall? Piranha was hot from friction. She'd melt her own runway across the glacier.

Sure, but step outside afterward. Your eyeballs will freeze so cold they'll shatter when you blink…

The clouds closed in and he was flying by radar. Dropping. Dropping. Lose velocity in the turns. Mach 2.5 and falling.

Gordon couldn't lift his head against the acceleration. "At least we'll have life support," he said suddenly. "Life support for four billion people, my teacher told me. And it doesn't get really cold, right? Cold enough to freeze water, but not carbon dioxide."

Alex grunted. Cold enough to freeze water. Gordo, what is the human body made of? Another turn. "Right," he said. Gordon wasn't a distraction. He was just a voice. The last thing Alex wanted during his last moments was dead silence. There would be enough of that afterward.

Think positive, Alex boy. You'll live through the landing, so you can freeze to death on the ice.

Piranha shuddered as she dropped below Mach 1. The missile must have left some holes, creating turbulence in the airstream. Then the scramjet quit and she was diving at the ground. Ice crystals impacting on the skin created a rustling sound. When radar read a thousand feet up, Alex lifted the nose and waited.

Piranha didn't have wheels.

Friends on Earth, Mary had said. He wondered who she had meant. Earth's four billion hated the Peace and Freedom space stations with a passion. A dozen nations had declared war when the nitrogen dipping started; but they had no space capabilities, so it never meant anything but noise. Now Piranha was diving into their hands.

Two hundred feet up and slowing. He dropped the nose, trading altitude for speed, and pretended that the scoopship had wheels. Wind battered the ship. She yawed and Alex fought with the stick. Once the ship dipped suddenly and Alex fought a moment of pure panic. Don't lose it now! Don't lose it now! The ground looked smooth on the radar. Gordon's hands were on the dash, his elbows locked. It won't be too cold, Gordo. Not cold enough to freeze carbon dioxide.

It was the second best landing he had ever made. Second by a long, long margin. Piranha hit the ice and skipped like a schoolgirl hit and skipped again. There was probably a third or fourth skip, too; but Alex never knew.

Soren Haroldsson had watched the flame from his steading. He was wrapped in his fur parka, heavy boots, mittens like bowling balls, but still he shivered. His breath was frosty steam in the evening air. He always took a turn around the house before they battened down for the night checking the gate, the wolf-traps, making sure none of the animals had been accidentally left outside.

It came just at dusk, a fiery stream low across the sky still large and burning as it touched the ice and sent up clouds of steam. Not a shooting star. Not a sky stone like he'd heard of. It had come in too shallow, too controlled. A ship of some sort.

Ah, surely it was Angels.

He shook his swaddled fist at the sky. "Be damned, you air thieves! We've got you now. Heh!" His breath froze on his graying blond mustache and beard. Tomorrow he would saddle up Ozzie and ride into Casselton to notify the authorities. They were probably hunting the Angels already; but only a fool went riding at night, and Ozzie, at least, was no fool.

Inside, bundled in the warmth of family and livestock, he told Lisbet what he had seen and guessed. Haughty, technomaniac Angels down on the Great Ice. Poetic justice, he said. Poetic, she replied and, smiling, quoted from memory:

"In pride, in reas'ning pride, our error lies;

All quit their sphere and rush into the skies!

Aspiring to be Gods if Angels fell,

Aspiring to be Angels men rebel."

CHAPTER TWO

"One Moment in Childhood… "

The phone warbled and Sherrine Hartley pulled a pillow over her head, even though she knew it would do no good. She'd been allocated a phone precisely because they might want to call her in the middle of the night. Neither rain nor sleet nor snow nor cold of night shall keep the programmers from being rousted out of bed to untangle every little glitch in operations. Didn't anyone know how to run programs anymore?

The phone warbled.

It was warm in bed, buried beneath the down comforter. The thermostat was turned down to 55, as the law required, and the last thing she wanted was to get out into the chilly air. Her arm snaked out from beneath the comforter, groped for the phone set and pulled it under the covers with her. The plastic was cold, but she was bundled in flannel and felt it only in her hands.

"Dr. Hartley here." She winced. It was like holding an ice cube to her ear.

"Sherrine?"

Not the University, after all. That really ticked her off. The 'danes who signed her paycheck bought the right to wake her up, sometimes and for some things; but ex-boyfriends did not. "Bob," she said, "do you know what time it is?"

"Certainly. Two-forty-three. Plus or minus three sigma."

She sighed. Never ask a physicist a question like that. "What do you want, Bob? And why can't it wait until morning?"

"I need you, Sherrine. Now."

"What? Look, Bob, that's all over." And why couldn't some men ever believe that?

"I'll be there in five minutes."

"Bob!" But she was talking into a dead phone.

She thought about staying put under the comforter. It wouldn't help. Bob Needleton was persistent. He was quite capable of standing on her doorstep all night, banging on the door until she opened. Sometimes that sort of persistence was invaluable. In the lab, for instance. Other times it was just a pain in the ass.

Damn him. She was wearing heavy flannel socks, and she kept a pair of wooly slippers under the sheets with her. She played contortionist for a while finding them and putting them on. Then she slipped out of bed, leaving the covers carefully in place so the bed would stay warm. A heavy housecoat hung over the back of the chair next to the bed. She snuggled into it and shivered her way to the bathroom.

When she flipped the switch on the bulb glowed at about quarter-strength. Sometimes a brownout could be convenient. Real light would have blinded her just then. She brushed her teeth to get the nighttime fuzzies out. The water in the basin wasn't quite frozen, but it shocked her teeth when she rinsed. She spat out into the commode, because there was no sense in wasting the rest of the water in the sink.