“I’ll nip across,” Nigel said. He slipped into the darkness of the shuttle’s hold. Nikka drew a deep breath and went in search of the crew.

Pocks was gunmetal gray. Long white filaments stretched across it, rays of debris from ancient meteors. Crusts of rock blotched the dirty purple ice fields.

Nigel could feel the chill through his servo’d suit. He moved carefully across the crumpled plain. Nikka pointed to the spherical submarine berthed at the edge of an orange-green lake. “That’s where the log says Carlos is on duty.”

Nigel picked up the pace. Between them they carried the portable medfilter.

They began to puff with the effort. Boots crunched on the purple ice. Nigel stepped up his opticals to see what the surface looked like unaugmented. It was barren, lit by an angry red dot. High up he caught the gliding gray smudge of the Watcher. The Lancer analysis net had stopped calling the moonlet by that name, but he refused to. Was there a shifting glimmer where the weak sun struck the ancient hull? He blinked. Perhaps a facet catching the light. Or more probably, he reminded himself, a trick of his eyes. He was catching, seeing better, but there were still illusions, distortions.

They were five hundred meters from the descent craft. As yet no one had tried to stop them. There had been questioning looks from the shuttle crew, but Nikka had made up some apparently plausible story. They had counted on the fact that aboard Lancer there were no security measures, any more than there were guards on an ordinary naval vessel. But once Landon and that lot worked out where they must have gone—

“Hey!” Nigel stopped dead still, startled by the shout. He turned. No one behind them. It came from a figure trotting toward them from the submersible. His helmet overlay winked a color-coded ID: Carlos.

“What’s this about you coming down? Nigel shouldn’t be out—”

“Explain inside,” Nikka said roughly, and pushed Carlos back toward the submersible. “Quick!”

Nigel panted hard beneath the black sky. It was difficult going and something about it satisfied him. He did not ask Carlos to help.

Bubbles bulged and popped on the lake and then it went glassy and smooth again beneath the ember glow of Ross 128. Near the lake a sulfurous yellow muck sucked at their boots. “Outflow,” Carlos said. “Like a tidal flat, only worse. The lake’s all liquid ammonia, but every few days it belches. Potassium salts, sulfur, have to wash it off at the lock—”

Nikka waved him to be silent. She glanced behind them; no one following. Nigel felt secure; she looked as though she could handle anyone.

It took over ten minutes to shuck their suits and get to the cranny where Carlos slept. He turned on them, blocking the doorway, and said, “Now let’s hear it. After I got your message I checked the shuttle manifest. You two weren’t on it.”

“Last-minute holiday,” Nigel said. “Simply caught the first thing out of town.”

Nikka smiled tolerantly. “You can tell when things are desperate,” she said. “He always makes a joke.”

“That’s what jokes are for,” Nigel said, stretching out on Carlos’ bunk. He rested while Nikka sketched in the jumble of events. He enjoyed hearing it all played back from another perspective. It was particularly pleasant to relax utterly and let someone else take charge, as Nikka had been doing ever since they nonchalantly walked aboard the shuttle. She had done marvelously well at persuading the pilot. However this might come out— and he had few delusions on that score—it was delicious to be moving and acting again. The worst part of age was the feeling of helplessness, of being disengaged from life. The middle-aged treated the old with the same serenely contemptuous condescension they used for children. That unthinking attitude was what lay behind Ted’s actions.

“You’re stupid,” Carlos said bluntly. “Stupid. Whatever you think Landon was doing, you’re building a great case for him by—”

“Shove off that, eh? If we’d stayed on Lancer we’d be swimming in a slot by now.” Nigel stretched lazily, though he did not feel tired.

“You, maybe. Not her.”

“We’re together,” Nikka said simply.

“Not necessarily,” Carlos said carefully.

“I would protest Nigel going into the Slots. If I failed to get him revived, I would follow. So that we will lose no time together.”

“I don’t think you mean that,” Carlos said. “You still have work to do here. And you and I, we need each other too, you have to—”

“We’ll get bugger-all done if we recycle our stale statements while the clock runs,” Nigel said forcefully. “I need shelter, Carlos. That’s the nub of it. Either you give it to me or you don’t.”

Nigel watched conflicting emotions in the man’s face. He’d done the classic male-challenge thing, of course—interrupt Carlos, and abruptly shift the subject, to boot. Not wise, generally. But Carlos was a deeply conflicted person, uncertain how to respond to those signals. This was precisely what Nigel had hoped: that the deeply embedded responses of each sex would get tangled, and in his confusion Carlos would yield. Nigel recalled Blake’s notion of the ideal human: Male and female somehow blended in the same body, anima and animus united, entwined. He wished the poet could be here to see the result. Dreams were best when not made concrete.

Carlos dodged. “I can’t do anything. In a few minutes somebody’ll—”

“I’ve filed a formal complaint. Put it into shipcomm from our apartment. That has to be heard—even Ted can’t block that.”

“By the rules,” Nikka added, “it must go on open net for twelve hours. He requested a mandatory vote, so people can’t ignore it.”

Carlos nodded. “Then you have nothing to worry about.”

“Don’t be thick. If Ted can pop me back in the soup before the vote’s resolved, nobody’ll take the small risk of reviving me unnecessarily. Possession’s nine-tenths of the game here.”

Nikka asked thoughtfully, “You truly think he would?”

“More’s the fool he, if he doesn’t. Ted sees me as a kernel for opposition forces. Why not eliminate me? This expedition’s turning out stale as old beer. He wants something dramatic to pin his name on, is my guess.”

Carlos frowned. “Like what?”

“It may’ve occurred to him that Lancer’s a damn ferocious weapon.”

“How?” Carlos seemed to be regaining his equilibrium. He stood up, clearly feeling his heft and strength in comparison with these other two. “Look, you’re sounding more and more—”

Carlos! They with you?

The voice came over general audio, filling the small cabin. “Well, it didn’t take them long,” Nikka said.

“He’s got you,” Carlos said.

“Depends,” Nigel said. “Everybody’s fretting about Earthside, granted—that gives him freedom of maneuver with us. No one’ll give a frap if we—”

Carlos! Then, fainter, Where in hell is he? I thought you saw him go in there with the two of them.

“I’ve got to answer him,” Carlos said.

Nigel nodded. He went to a spot mike and tuned it in. “We hear you.”

Nigel? Just what the hell you think you’re—

“Fairly obvious, I should think.”

Don’t give me that arched-eyebrow shit. You left medical without a release, you ignored the directive approved by shipwide congress, then you—

“Please, no boring list of sins.”

The council orders you to march over to HQ there and—

“Give it a rest,” Nigel said sourly.

You sneaky bastard! You slipped by once but damned if we’ll let you take up any more of our time now, when—

“Stop playing to the gallery, can’t you?”

Stop playing! Yeah, that’s what we’re going to do. I’ve got men all around that submersible. They’re coming in after you unless you pop that hatch and walk out. You’re just a sick old man, and we don’t want to be rough. But this is a crisis. You’ve got three minutes.