So he did that, and in the timeslip Nirgal and Art took off with empty backpacks draped over their air tanks, running along easily over the smooth canyon floor, north to Senzeni Na. It seemed to Nirgal that it was going to be a simple operation. They came up on the mohole complex without a problem, the starlight now augmented by the diffuse light of the town shining out of the glass, and reflecting off the far wall. Coyote’s program got them through a garage lock and into the warehouse area as quickly as if they had every right to be there, with no sign that they had tripped any alarms. But then when they were in the warehouse itself, stuffing small hydrogen peroxide containers in their backpacks, all the lights in the place went on at once, and emergency doors slid shut.

Art ran immediately to the wall away from the door, and set a charge and moved aside. The charge exploded with a loud bang, blowing a sizable hole in the thin warehouse wall, and then the two of them were outside and skulking between gigantic draglines to the perimeter wall. Suited figures came racing out of the walk-tube lock from the town, and the two intruders had to dive behind one of the draglines, a structure so big that they could stand in the crack between individual tractor treads. Nirgal felt his heart pounding against the metal. The suited figures went into the warehouse, and Art ran out and set another charge; the flash of light from this one blinded Nirgal, and he ducked through the gap in the fence and ran for it without seeing a thing, without feeling the thirty kilograms of fuel packets bouncing on his back and crushing the air tanks into his spine. Art was ahead of him again, badly out of control in the Martian g but nonetheless bounding along with those great surging strides. Nirgal almost laughed as he worked to catch up with him, hitting his rhythm and then, as he drew abreast of him, trying to show him by example how to use his arms properly, in a sort of swimming motion, rather than the rapid pumping that was throwing Art off balance so often. Despite the dark and their speed it seemed to Nirgal that Art’s arms began to slow down.