She kept going, steadfastly refusing to look down again no matter how many obscene noises the lifter made. She counted rungs. She counted girders and crossbeams and rivets as the wind howled in her ears and tugged at her limbs. She counted bare steely patches where the red and yellow paint had sloughed away—until it reminded her that she was climbing a structure so ancient that its color wasn't even intrinsic to the material, but had been layered on as an afterthought.

After a year or two she was at Lubin's side, somewhere in the jet stream. Lubin was studying the lifter, the ubiquitous binocs clamped around his head. Clarke did not follow his gaze.

One end of the rope was still tied firmly down. From that terminus it led out and up to the apex of the next crane, looped through whatever needle's eye Lubin had found up there, and stretched back to the final half-meter of polyprope now wrapped around his diveskinned hand. A satcam, looking down on the tableau, would have seen two thin white lines pointing towards the lifter from their current roost.

It would also have seen an ominously large, empty space between the point where the line ended and the point where the lifter began.

"Are you sure it's long enough?" Clarke shouted. Lubin didn't answer. He probably hadn't heard the question through the wind and the 'skin of his hood. Clarke had barely heard herself.

His tubular eyes stayed fixed on the target for a few more moments. Then he flipped the binocs up against his forehead. "They just deployed the teleop!" he called. The wind blew most of his decibels sideways and pitched in fifty of its own, but she got the gist. All according to plan, so far. The usual firestorm from on high wouldn't do the trick this time around: the hot zone Lubin had reported was too deep in the warehouse, too close to the waterline. It would take a free-moving teleop to scope the situation and personally deliver the flames—and local architecture hashed radio so badly that the little robot would have to stay virtually line-of-sight just to maintain contact with the mothership. Which meant bringing the lifter down low.

So low that a sufficiently motivated person might be able to drop onto it from above...

Lubin had one arm hooked around a cable as thick as his wrist—one of the fraying metal tendons that kept the necks of the cranes upright. Now he unhooked his legs from their purchase and ducked under that cable, coming up on the other side. The out side. He was now hanging off the edge of the crane, not rattling about within it. He had one arm wrapped in polypropylene and the other hooked around the cable, his feet braced against a girder by nothing beyond his own weight.

Suddenly Ken Lubin looked very fragile indeed.

His mouth moved. Clarke heard nothing but wind. "What!"