"It won't be the first time, will it?" Gerhardt asked, his voice strained and harsh.

"On the ground, yes." Modes of behavior. No rest, no end, even after doomsday. "Where's my weapon?"

They had made it through the second bore hole, despite sporadic fire from troops stationed there. More had died, but not many. . . .

Would he ever stop falling?

Mirsky spun in his path to survey the city—

He had never seen such a city!

—as his thrusters pushed him a hundred meters away from the bore hole, then two hundred, then three. He spotted the landmark he was after—the zero bridge spanning the chamber-circling river—and pushed himself away from the Potato's axis, toward the thin glow of the plasma tube.

Other soldiers had already fallen free through the atmosphere barrier and the plasma tube. Their informant had assured them passage was safe, as long as they did not linger—but Mirsky trusted only experience and survival. He could not see whether his comrades were alive or dead—when he saw them at all, they were too tiny to make out details. They were dwarfed—how could a few hundred soldiers command an object as big as a republic?

The perspective changed very slowly as he fell away from the axis.

He felt no wonder whatsoever at how selfish his emotions were now, and how much hate filled him. Mirsky had felt these emotions many times before, during training or the horrid endurance tests. These were the emotions of soldiers in battle, hard and bitter, touched with fear but mostly with overwhelming self-interest.

He could not have cared less about the state, the Motherland, the revolution. There was no shame in him.

Only falling. Spiraling outward as the great cylinder turned around him. He kept pace with the landmarks using his thrusters. Silence, not even the sound of wind yet. He prepared his air-sled, fanning out and locking its segments.

Then he noticed he was drifting some degrees away from the bridge. He corrected with another thruster burst. There was so little sensation he might go mad. . . and yet he had been falling for only a minute or so, very slowly. . . .

He felt—perhaps only in his mind—a tingle and knew he was passing through the plasma tube. Below that, but only by a few hundred meters, lay the upper limits of the atmosphere, beyond the restraining barrier. He braced himself behind the sled and strapped his arms and legs to the concave inner surface. Whatever angle he first brushed the atmosphere, the sled would flip him around to the shape of least resistance. He would plummet through the upper air until he could hear the whistle of its passage, then he would kick free of the sled and begin his fifteen- or sixteen-kilometer dive, releasing the chute only two or three kilometers from the floor of the chamber. He would be lighter, falling; the impact would not be very hard at all.