She handed out the cutters and talked about how they would be used and where things could go wrong. She watched while they practiced, and required each to demonstrate proficiency. "Be careful in close quarters, if it comes to it. The cutter is almost certainly more dangerous than anything we're going to meet."

Nightingale met that remark with a frown. But he said nothing.

She dismissed the rest of the team and ran a short course for Chiang in wearing the e-suit. The others were experienced with working inside a Flickinger field.

They joined Scolari and Embry for dinner. Whatever tension might have existed seemed to have dissolved. Embry even made a point of taking Hutch aside and apologizing. "I hope you don't think this is personal," she said. "My objection is to management. If they hadn't had a chance to do this earlier and get it right-"

"I understand," Hutch said.

The lander was loaded and ready to go. Hutch opened the cargo hatch and turned to face her four passengers. "We've stowed rations for ten days," she said. "That's more than we'll need. Temperature is a few degrees below zero Celsius at noon near the tower. Atmosphere is breathable, but the mix has a little more nitrogen than you're used to. Breathe enough of it and you'll start feeling detached and lazy. So we'll leave the e-suits on when we're outside. There's no known problem with biohazards.

"I want to reemphasize that nobody wanders off on his or her own." She looked around, made eye contact with each of them to make sure her meaning was clear, and to assure herself they would comply. She was prepared to refuse passage to anyone who looked amused. But they all nodded.

"A day on Deepsix is a bit over nineteen hours long. We'll be landing near the tower in the middle of the night, and we'll stay with the lander until sunrise. After that we'll play it by ear.

"Incidentally, we'll be going down on snow. We don't think it's very deep because it's close to the equator, but there's no way to know for sure." She looked at Nightingale. "Randy, anything to add?"

He stood up. "I just want to underline what Hutch said. Be careful. Protect one another's backs. We don't want to leave anybody down there." His voice sounded a bit strained.

"I tend to ask people to do things," Hutch continued, "rather than tell them. Habits are hard to break. But I'll expect immediate compliance with any request.

"You'll have a vest that you should put on after you activate the e-suit. You can put tools, sandwiches, anything you like, in the vest. Keep the cutter in the vest and never put it in a trouser or shirt pocket. The reason is simple: If you need it and it's inside the suit, you won't be able to get to it. Furthermore, if you figure out a way to get your fingers around it, and you activate it inside the suit, you'll be limping for a long time to come.

"Any questions?"

There were none.

Hutch checked the time. "We're going to launch in eight minutes. In case anybody wants to use the washroom."

If the experts were right, they had twelve standard days before breakup would begin, which meant they really had about a week before conditions would become unduly dangerous on the surface. So her intention was to move with dispatch.

Kellie's enthusiasm caught hold of the others, and they carried it into the lander. Everyone was excited, and even Nightingale seemed to have shed his dark mood.

Somebody applauded when she launched. A half hour later they dropped into a blizzard, and emerged finally into gloomy, overcast skies at an altitude of four thousand meters. The landscape below was utterly dark. The sensors provided glimpses of rolling hills and broad plains marked by occasional forest. Several large clearings might have

been frozen lakes. The ocean, the Coraggio, lay a couple of hundred kilometers north, behind a wall of mountains.

The lander possessed dual-purpose jet/rocket engines, to enable it to maneuver in space, or to function as an aircraft. It was an exceedingly flexible vehicle, owing largely to its spike technology, which was the heart of its lift capability, allowing it to hover, to land in any reasonably flat space, and to leave the atmosphere without the necessity of hauling along vast amounts of its hydrogen fuel.

Power for all systems was supplied by a Bussard-Ligon direct-conversion reactor.

Hutch listened to her volunteers talking about how anxious they were to get into the tower, and she wondered about her own responsibility bringing them down. She couldn't do the work alone, yet she had the sense that only Nightingale understood the dangers. She had never before led people into a hazardous situation. She had seen what Nightingale's errors had cost, what they'd done to him personally, and she wondered why she was taking so large a risk. What the hell did she know about keeping people alive in what Kellie had accurately described as a lethal environment? She thought seriously about calling the whole thing off, returning to Wildside, and sending her resignation to Gomez.

But if she did that no one would ever know who had built the tower.

Hutch picked the structure up on her sensors and put it onscreen. It was a night-light image, brighter than it would be in normal optics. Nevertheless it looked old, dark, abandoned. Haunted.

She was descending almost vertically, using the spike and guide jets, coming in cautiously. Her instruments did not reveal whether the snow-covered surface would be firm enough to support the spacecraft.

She'd left the storm behind, but there were still a few flakes blowing past the windscreen. Otherwise, the night was calm, with only a breath of wind. Outside air temperature read -31 C. Here and there stars were visible through the partly cloudy skies.

Hutch turned on the landing lights.

Kellie was seated beside her, her dark features illuminated in the glow of the instrument panel. Watching her, Hutch became aware of a precaution left untaken. "Kellie's our alternate pilot," she said. "In the event something unexpected happens and I become…" She hesitated."… kaput, Kellie will take over. Will succeed to command."

Kellie glanced in her direction, but said nothing.

"I'm sure nothing'll happen," Hutch added.

The ground surrounding the tower was flat, bleak, and empty. There was a scattering of hills on the western horizon, a patch of woods, and a couple of solitary trees.

"I'll set down as close to it as I can," she said.

The snow seemed to run on forever, losing itself finally in the dark. There was, she thought, a lot to be said for having a moon.

The lander rocked gently, and the tower, cold and dark, reached up toward them.

Hutch might have used the AI to make the landing, but she preferred to fly on her own in this type of circumstance. If something unexpected happened, she didn't want to be at risk while the AI thought about an appropriate course of action.

She lowered the treads. The snow cover looked undisturbed.

It was hard to believe an entire city lay below that smooth white surface.

She took a moment to visualize its dimensions. The wall to which the tower might or might not be attached went off that way under the snow for a kilometer and a half, then turned north, angled back and forth a bit, and eventually returned to the tower, which was at the southwest corner of the fortification.

The city had apparently lain at the top of a low hill.

The lander sank through the night.

"Easy," said Kellie, her voice so low that Hutch suspected she wasn't supposed to hear it.

Hutch kept the nose up, cut back on the spike, and reached for the ground the way a person might descend into a dark room.

Wind blew up around them, and she could almost feel a draft come through the hull. She phased back the power, allowing the land-er's weight to ease down. The cabin was silent.