Two Falls Gap. The place was even more beautiful than Talina remembered. She circled her battered aircar above the isolated dome and admired the location where it nestled on the south side of the low forested gap between two blocks of uplifted gabbro. A couple of kilometers to the west, beyond the ascending ranks of broken foothills, the high Wind Mountains shot up like an impenetrable wall. Atop the near-vertical slopes, ragged peaks towered a thousand meters above the basin and seemed to be combing clouds out of thin air.

The sheer mountain wall was composed of upthrust formations of granite, gneiss, and schist lined with veins of quartz and crisscrossed by transected dikes. The strata made patterns of gray, pink, black, and white in contrast with the rumpled basalt and gabbro foothills below. Since the escarpment provided such an orographic barrier to the moisture-thick winds blowing in off the Gulf, rainfall was a near constant in the heights.

That precipitation cascaded down the steep slopes in a remarkable series of waterfalls that ultimately fed a trellis-pattern of rivers where gabbro and overlaying basalt foothills had welled up from the broken crust in the wake of the asteroid’s impact.

Talina set her course toward the low gap. There, tumbling over uplifted blocks of broken crust, two rivers—one draining down from the north, the other up from the south—sluiced through low spots on either side of the gap. Separated by a resistant block of basalt, each river fell thirty meters to their confluence in a deep pool. The Two Falls River then followed a tortured course through a narrow and deeply cut gorge that twisted and turned its way down to the clay-rich coastal plain with its thick forests. There it slowed, meandering through the lowlands in sinuous loops and finally emptied into the Gulf one hundred and eight kilometers to the east.

Situated just up from the falls, on the rocky bank of the southern fork, Two Falls Gap Research Station had been constructed on an outcrop of gabbro where erosion and weathering had exposed bare stone. Surrounding it, the shallow, volcanically derived soils allowed a fertile garden filled with terrestrial plants to flourish. The dome, placed as it was on bedrock, was twenty-five years old now. The original white had grayed as a result of fungus and weathering, battered by the afternoon showers as warm air from the lowlands compressed against the sheer uplift.

That same rain, collected in cisterns, provided heavy-metal-free drinking water for the small research station.

The single solar collector atop its mast appeared to be aligned with Capella as the primary tracked across the sky. Talina had to hope the batteries still held a charge and that the electrical system remained functional. At least the power had worked the last time she was out here, which was what? Five years? Maybe six? Had it been that long?