“Do you know what a weapon is?” Ferry asked, looking directly at Hali.

She thought of her history holos, and the soldiers at the Hill of Skulls. “Oh, yes. I know about weapons.”

“This laser scalpel.” Ferry touched the stylus shape at his breast. “Acid concentrates, plasteel cutters for construction teams, knives, axes . . .”

Hali swallowed past a lump in her throat. Every bit of her med-tech training cried out against this. “If we prepare to . . . kill,” the word was barely a sigh past her lips, “then we will kill.”

“Down here, it’s kill or be killed,” Ferry said. “That’s the way The Boss wants it.”

In that instant, the freighter skipped into the first thin surface of Pandora’s atmosphere. Vibration hummed all through the cabin, then smoothed.

“Can’t we run away?” Hali asked. Her voice was a low whisper.

“Nowhere to run,” Ferry said. “You must know that. All Shipmen learn enough about groundside to know that.”

Fight or flee, Hali thought, and nowhere to flee. And it occurred to her that Pandora was a place where people were made into primitives.

“Trust me,” Ferry said, and the quavering in his old voice made the statement pathetic.

“Yes, of course,” Hali said.

She felt the freighter’s braking thrust then as it pressed her against the restraining harness, and she glanced back to reassure herself that Waela remained secure.

“We will land in the cradle of the sea,” Hali said. “That’s what Waela said. Remember?”

“What does she know?” Ferry demanded, and it was his fearful, querulous tone, the one which had made her despise him.

Chapter 62

Chapter 62

This the true human knows:

the strings of all the ways

make up a cable of great strength

and great purpose.

—Kerro Panille, The Collected Poems

FOR A long time Panille sat in the shadows of the seaside cliff while he felt the approaching presence from space. The sea lay below him down a rugged path, the cliffs soared high behind. Avata had been the first to tell him about this problem and, for a few blinks, he had fallen back into Thomas’ ways of thinking.

The Redoubt will know about this freighter, will send its weapons against it.

But Avata soothed him, told him that Avata would transmit false images to the Redoubt’s systems, concealing the freighter’s passage. Avata would continue to mask the nest’s location with similar projections.

The rock was cold against Panille’s back. From time to time, he opened and closed his eyes. When his eyes were open he was vaguely aware of the amber glow from Double Dusk—the sky alight from two suns dodging just below Pandora’s horizon.