No more calculating risks. No more doubts.

Go!

She pushed off hard, zipping through the portal. Verby’s one-fifth standard gravity abruptly tugged her down. She landed with a shoulder roll, springing up fast, which sent her rising off the floor. At the same time she held her left arm out and moved it in a smooth arc, firing armor-piercing rounds as she went. The munitions blasted through the feed chamber’s walls on either side and above her, exploding inside the harvester. Her feet were pushed down by the rifle’s impulse. She could feel the harvester juddering beneath her soles as it ground to a halt.

“Do you know how much those cost?” Tyle asked dryly.

“I thought you guys didn’t lower yourself to talk money?”

“In terms of resources, and time to replace it.”

“You wanted an accountant to do this job? Should’ve hired one.” The ruined feed chamber began to split asunder; she stood directly under the slowly widening gap and jumped. In the low gravity, her gened-up muscles pushed her an easy five meters upward, landing precariously on a warped and splintered section of the upper bodywork toward the rear of the machine. “Now close down the last portals on Verby. Nothing apart from the data links, and if they’re above ten centimeters in diameter, cut them too.”

“Already done,” Jessika said. “There’s no way off that moon.” She paused. “For either of you.”

“You hear that?” Kandara asked, raising her voice despite how foolish that felt.

No answer. But then she hadn’t expected one. She started to pick her way along the twisted bodywork as the broken harvester swayed about, settling ponderously.

It was a huge vehicle. The blade scoop at the front was thirty meters wide, cutting a five-meter-deep channel through the frozen ocean as it rolled forward. Power blades along the lower edge could chop through granite if they ever encountered any—not that this moon had any rock even approaching that level of toughness. The harvester fleet operated on the bottom of a pit the size of a small sea they’d gouged out over the last twenty years. In the distance, she could see vertical cliffs an easy three kilometers high.

When she looked up, Lanivet formed a vast crescent that filled a third of the sky. Its seething cloud bands were pale pink, streaked with white, with occasional slashes of cobalt blue squirting up from the unknown depths. A myriad of cyclones churned arrogantly through them, though nothing the world-swallowing size of Jupiter’s Great Red Spot. The waning gas giant radiated a pastel light that shaded the sparkling ice a gentle damask.

Kandara clambered up the harvester’s twisted metal and composite bodywork to the highest point and scanned around. “She’s either got the greatest stealth technology ever built, or she’s still here.”

“Can you see any footprint tracks leading away?” Tyle asked. “There’s no stealth that can cover that up.”