They were moving uphill before his voice came over comm again, tight with alarm. “Where is Fraq?”

She looked around. The alien was gone.

And big elephant-ear formations on the uphill side of the chamber had closed, sealing them in.

PART 12 THE GRACE OF TRAGEDY

What we observe is not nature itself but nature exposed to our method of questioning.

—WERNER HEISENBERG

1.

It felt good to yell. Good and loud. Rachel pounded hard on one of the pale elephant-ear formations. With her comm set off, she shouted full force. Her ears hummed with dumb rage. That at least helped her frustration. She slammed gloved fists into the meaty folds. A two-handed smack. The huge mass didn’t budge. All the big, leafy sheets of the Marsmat on the uphill side of the chamber had closed, sealing them in. And Fraq… Fraq was gone.

A kilometer below the Martian soil, they had managed to lose the alien. He had vanished in the sudden pulse of ivory light that had streamed from the Mat itself.

Zuminski knocked on her helmet, touched his helmet to hers, and said, “Over this tantrum?”

“Uh, yeah.”

“Alien is gone. Let us get out of here.”

The comm buzzed with speculations, complaints, cursing.

She grinned. “I can do better than that. Let’s find him.”

He frowned, grimaced skeptically. “Mat is blocking us. He must have gotten out with some trick.”

“I have another trick. I put a tracker in his suit.”

Zuminski blinked. “How?”

“Stuck it with an adhesive below his oxy tanks.”

“Ah. Hard to see there.”

Rachel nodded and popped up a virtual screen on the left side of her helmet visor. “I’ll activate it.”

The software pinged up quickly. She got a flashing signature dot, moving slowly in the coordinate space. “I’ve got him.” She pointed.

“How distant?”

“Can’t tell.”

“Move down this corridor,” Zuminski said, gesturing. “Get triangle.”

She saw his point. The rest of the team was sputtering on comm, splashing around in the usual underfoot trickles—not her problem, though. She shut it off. Time to keep her head clear of mere muttering. Zuminski barked orders to the others to use the new electroshock methods on one of the big elephant-ears, then turned to follow her.

She made her way over rocky footing, careful to avoid the Marsmat where it clung, still rippling with colors—and got about a hundred meters away from the rest of them. Rachel stopped and sent a ping to the tracker. It answered with a flashing icon on her visor screen. She punched in commands, and the software triangulated with the previous signal.

“There!” She pointed at her own helmet display. “He’s about two hundred meters away, to the right.”

Zuminski sloshed over and squinted from near her right ear, trying to make out the display. “Don’t bother send to me. We got go after him.”

A shout from the team. An image on her display: They had sprung open one of the big Marsmat iris-valves. It had jerked open, startled by the jolt of high-voltage current.