I grabbed the copilot's shoulder. "Tell her," I instructed.

The man gabbled quickly in Hawai'ian. I picked out a couple of words here and there-uhane, haole, and lolo among them-but that was it. When he was done, the bird-boned kahuna nodded.

"Nene signs of danger," she said to me. "Much power ahead."

Well, no drek, Sherlock, I managed not to say. "What about the spirits?" I demanded.

"I feel their presence." Her voice was calm, fragging near conversational.

"Well, bully for you!" I snapped. "Can you feel a way of getting rid of them?"

She shrugged her scrawny shoulders. "They stand guard," she pointed out

"I'd kinda guessed that," I said dryly. "Can you persuade them to go guard somewhere else?"

'They guard the fabric," the kahuna shot back, her voice suddenly sharp. "They guard the pattern."

I blinked at that. What the frag was she talking about? Unless… "They think we're part of that drek?" I pointed again at the ghostly plume of light on the FLIR display. "Is that it? Christ, then tell 'em we want to stop it, for frag's sake!"

Akaku'akanene shrugged again. "They don't believe me."

I ground my teeth together so hard that pain shot through my jaw muscle. "Then be more persuasive," I grated.

The Nene shaman nodded and closed her eyes. The Merlin still jolted and jostled, but somehow she kept her balance perfectly-almost as if she could anticipate every movement of the small craft and adapt to it.

I didn't know if it was my imagination, or whether the kahuna had somehow gotten her message through, but after a few moments it felt as though the buffeting had diminished. The airframe still vibrated, the engines still complained, but at least the carnival-ride whoop-de-doos seemed to be under control. "Better?" I asked the pilot.

He nodded. "Altitude thirty-one hundred. Airspeed, two-ten. Ground speed one hundred. Ten klicks out." He glanced back at me over his shoulder. "Any instructions for the approach?"

I gave him my best pirate's smile. "Whatever'll get us there in one piece."

"Echo that, bruddah. Nine klicks."

On the FLIR display the volcano was looming large. The periphery of the giant heat plume was still amorphous, fuzzy. But for the first time I thought I could make out some kind of internal structure to it. There seemed to be semicircular wave-fronts propagating through it, like ripples spreading across a smooth pond from a dropped stone. Something bizarre was going on down in the crater, that was for fragging sure.

I turned back to the door into the passenger compartment. "We're about eight klicks out," I told "my" fireteam. For an instant I felt like I was in the middle of some ancient flatfilm about Vietnam. "I think this is going to be what they call a 'hot LZ'," I added dryly.

The plane echoed with metallic castanet-clatter as the squad locked and loaded. I thought about my own weapon, that ever-so-wiz assault rifle, on the floor under my vacant seat. Having something lethal to cling to like a security blanket would have made me feel a touch better about the whole thing, but it would have meant sacrificing one of the two hand-holds that was keeping me from measuring my length on the cabin floor. All in all, on balance, I figured I'd pick up my playtoy later.

When I turned back to the control console, the pilot had killed the FLIR display to replace it with a complex hash-work of approach vectors, wind axes, and all that other pilot drek. I didn't begrudge it to him. On reflection, Fd much rather he knew what was going on than me.

Beside me Akaku'akanene was still doing her balancing act, maintaining her equilibrium better than I was despite me fact she wasn't holding onto anything. Her eyes were still closed, and in the instrument lights I could see a bead of sweat tracing its way down her temple. God, suddenly I wished I knew what she was doing… so I could understand, of course, but also so 1 could help. Judging by the motions of the Merlin, she'd persuaded at least some of the storm spirits-or whatever the frag they were-than we weren't a threat to the "fabric" or "pattern." If the addition of my concentration could help her convince the rest-or stop the ones she'd already convinced from changing their insubstantial minds-then I'd gladly give it my all.

The blackness was still unbroken outside the rain-blasted canopy. We were still in the middle of the stormclouds I'd seen gathering a few hours earlier. Mentally, I thanked whatever gods mere be that there wasn't any lightning.

I almost pitched backward as the Merlin took on a steep nose-up pitch. From behind and to both sides I heard the scream of the engines change pitch. A computer schematic on the control console confirmed what I'd already guessed: The wings were pivoting again, from forward flight to V/STOL mode. We were on our way in. I drew breath to yell word back to the troopers…

And fragging near swallowed my own tongue. Without warning the Merlin cleared the clouds, popping down out of a ceiling of roiling blackness. For the first time I could see the peak and crater of Haleakala volcano with my own eyes, without the need for FLIR intermediaries.

First impression: Spirits, what a blasted hellhole of a wasteland. Nothing grew; nothing lived-nothing seemed to ever have lived here. Just barren rock-rough, scattered scree slopes. Cinder cones. Outwellings of solidified magma. Precipitous slopes, vertical cliffs… klicks upon klicks of lunar landscape. For an instant I didn't know where the image of the lunar surface had come from, but then I remembered. Back almost a century ago, when NASA was trying out their Lunar Rover designs, they'd picked the Haleakala crater for the tests, because it was the closest to the rugged emptiness of the moon mat could be found on this planet.

Second impression: Holy fragging drek, I could see those klicks upon klicks of lunar landscape… and I shouldn't have been able to. We were on top of a fragging mountain, three thousand meters up, and the cloud deck was so solid mere was no chance for a single photon of moonlight to make it through. Yet the whole blasted prospect was illuminated-not as bright as day, by any means, but about like twilight.

It was a strange illumination, too: cold, sourceless, shifting, ebbing and flowing. I could see the source, roughly ahead of us-an area of what looked like absolute chaos. Light bubbled and roiled in the depths of the crater as though it were a physical fluid. Spreading up into the sky, in an ethereal fan-shape, the air itself seemed to glow with a pearly radiance. This had to be the visual equivalent of me heat-plume the FLIR had shown me, I realized instantly.

In the midst of the rolling, churning light were motionless points of brilliance, much brighter than the shifting illumination surrounding them… but somehow sterile, dead. It took me a moment to understand those points were artificial lights, arc lamps set out by the kahunas of Project Sunfire so they could prepare the process that now seemed well advanced.

Something flashed by the Merlin's canopy, going like a bat out of hell. A well-chosen simile, since it seemed to be a mass of pure liquid fire about the size of a man's head. It was past and gone before I could make out any details, leaving a blue-green streak of afterimage across my visual field. As if my vision had suddenly become attuned, I saw there were many… things… flitting and hurtling around the central mass of light. Balls of fire, sheets of heat lightning, unidentifiable shapes moving so fast my mind couldn't make sense of them. They seemed to be orbiting that central light, like chipped-up moths dancing around a porch light. And that, too, seemed to be a well-chosen simile. I couldn't be sure, but neither could I shake the feeling I was seeing a kind of approach-avoidance behavior going on. The things- whatever they were-were both repelled and attracted by the drek going down in the center of the crater.