“High gate” was the point in the trajectory where Gershon should be able to see his landing site for the first time. He peered ahead.

The designated landing site was just to the north of an escarpment at the mouth of an outflow valley. The valley, according to York’s descriptions, would look like a dry riverbed. Gershon had studied the site from orbiter photographs and plaster-of-paris models until he knew it like he knew his own apartment.

But coming in now, with the sun low, and the ship still tipped up at more than fifty degrees, and the light glinting off his little triangle of a porthole…

Nothing looked like it was supposed to. The land was complex, tortured, its nature changing rapidly. Every shadow was deep and black, and the ocher-colored surface features seemed to leap out toward him, the vertical scale magnified by the contrast.

“Fifteen thousand,” Stone said. “Still no lock.”

Shit.

“Okay, Ralph, let’s go over the abort procedure.” Stone sounded resigned.

Goddamn it to hell, he’s given up.

“We pitch over, activate the ascent program… countdown to mission abort starts at eight thousand feet—”

“No. Don’t abort,” Natalie York said suddenly.

Stone looked at her. “Huh?”

“Don’t abort. We may be flying over a radar-dark area.”

“And what,” asked Stone drily, “is a radar-dark area?”

“Volcanic ash,” she said. “Pumice.” She was straining in her harness, trying to see the battered landscape out of their pilots’ windows. “Low-density stuff; not many rocks. It reflects radar badly. There’s nothing for the landing radar to lock on to.”

“Or maybe,” Stone said, “the landing radar is screwed.”

“Don’t abort.”

Stone and Gershon exchanged looks.

“Nine thousand,” Stone said. “Still no lock.”

They’d already busted the mission rules, Gershon realized.

Stone said, “Ralph—”

And then the warning lights went out. The radar lock had come in.

York gasped, an explosion of relief.

“Jesus.” Gershon slammed his fist into his control station. “We is fucking go.”

“We is indeed,” Stone said tightly.

Gershon twisted over his shoulder to look at York. “I guess we flew right on over all that pumice stone, huh.”

She stared back at him. “I guess.”

He had no idea if she’d just been bullshitting, he realized, about the pumice stone. He didn’t think York was the type to do that, but it was possible. And he also didn’t know if Stone would really have pulled the plug, or let him go on and try to land without the radar.

He didn’t, he realized, know his crewmates as well as he thought he did.

“Eight thousand,” Stone rattled off. “Down velocity one hundred feet per second. We’re go for the landing.”

“Rager.”