It was midday between Pleuron-conjunction and Leda-conjunction (eighteen hours of light) when Yuri stepped out of the hub on Esola Street in the middle of town. He exhaled sharply. Compared to this humidity, London had been practically arctic. The monotonous carbon and glass buildings stretched out along the street with geometrical precision. Palm trees provided some shade along the cracked concrete pavements, but not much; they were swaying about from the surprisingly fast gusts of wind sweeping along the street. Few people were walking in the sweltering daylight, and even fewer cycled; the road itself was mainly occupied with single-occupant cabez and larger taxez humming along the shimmering asphalt, along with commercial vehicles rumbling between them. It was like a scene from the mid-twenty-first century, Yuri thought.

Boris connected to the local net, and twenty seconds later a three-wheeled cabez pulled up in the broad strip of empty concrete to one side of the hub. Yuri climbed in and sat down on the narrow seat, thankful for the AC vents blasting cool air into the tiny transparent bubble. He always agreed with the saying that you wore a cabez rather than rode one.

It drove forward, taking him quickly through the town’s depressing grid of near-identical buildings, their panel walls mass-fabricated in an industrial estate on the outskirts. There was nothing else to see on the ground, no vista of the vast marshlands stretching out beyond the town’s docks. That didn’t bother him; on Althaea, the view was all about the sky.

Pleuron’s orbit had already dropped it below Althaea’s horizon, while Leda was now rising to the zenith—an airless cratered world with its vast silver-gray mares laced with glowing lava streams. Massive tectonic activity was constantly rearranging its geography, rendering mapping an irrelevance. And beyond that, dominating the apex of the bright azure sky, was the awesome globe of Thestias itself: a circle of darkness crowned by a blazing halo of golden light created by its perpetual eclipse of Pollux. The glowing edges illuminated fast-moving white and carmine clouds, their swirling kinesis producing the bizarre optical illusion that they were somehow spilling over the edge of a hole in space to flow down into its black heart. An optical illusion that made it seem as if Althaea was also falling toward the gas supergiant’s eternal nightside. Locals called it the Eye of God.

Yuri shivered, shaking off the giddiness the sight conjured up. The cabez took him to a commercial block on Nightingale Avenue. He walked into the reception, and Boris directed him along one wing to the office suite Jessika had rented forty minutes earlier. The rooms backed onto a small warehouse where the tactical team had parked their farm truck. The team’s captain, Lucius Soćko, had brought a thirty-centimeter portal inside a briefcase, which they’d threaded up in the warehouse. The rest of his team was coming through the two-meter portal door, along with equipment and specialist mission support operators.