I looked up and to my right. I saw a neat line of marines falling starfished through the air. One was a lot closer to me than the rest - Lian, I guessed. Past them I made out our Spline vessel, its hull charred from its hurried entry into the atmosphere. Our open drop blister was a glistening scar on its flank. The Spline looked immense, its pocked hull like an inverted landscape above me. It was a magnificent sight, an awe-inspiring display of human power and capability.

But beyond it I saw the hulking majesty of that mountain, dwarfing even the Spline. A dense cloud of smoke and ash lingered near its truncated summit, underlit by a fiery glow.

I looked down, searching for the valley I was aiming for.

I was able to pick out the target. The Commission’s maps, two centuries old, had shown a standard-issue Conurbation surrounded by broad, shining replicator fields, where the ground’s organic matter was processed seamlessly into food. But the view from the air was different. I could see the characteristic bubble-cluster shape of the domed Conurbation, but it looked dark, poorly maintained, while suburbs of blockier buildings had sprouted around it, as if the colonists had moved out of the buildings provided for them. Well, you expected a little drift from orthodoxy, out here on the edge of everything.

Still, that Conurbation was our target for the evacuation. Amid the domes I could see the squat cone shape of a heavy-lift shuttle, dropped here on the Spline’s last pass through the atmosphere, ready to lift the population.

But I had a problem, I saw now. My marines were heading straight for the nominal target, the Conurbation, just as they should. But there was another cluster of buildings and lights, much smaller, stranded halfway up the flank of the mountain. There was no sign of domed Conurbation architecture, but there seemed no doubt this was human. Another village? And then I saw a pale pink light blinking at me from the middle of that cluster of shacks.

I’m not sentimental, and I don’t go for heroic gestures. In a given situation, with given resources, you do what you can, what’s possible. Given a free hand I’d have concentrated my energies on evacuating the Conurbation which undoubtedly held the bulk of the population. I wouldn’t have gone after that isolated handful of people, wouldn’t have approached that village at all - if not for that pink light. It was Tilo’s beacon. Kard had made it clear enough that unless I came home with the Academician, or at least with his data, next time I made a drop it would be without a Yukawa suit.