A Deepness in the Sky

The four rested a while longer, monitoring the airflow, exercising Sherkaner's scheme for controlling the exotherms. Unnerby and Amberdon Nizhnimor went through the detailed checklist, passing suspicious and broken items across to Sherkaner. Nizhnimor, Haven, and Unnerby were very bright people, a chemist and two engineers. But they were also combat professionals. Sherkaner found fascinating the change that came over them when they moved out of the lab and into the field. Unnerby especially was such a layering: hardbitten soldier atop imaginative engineer, hiding a traditional, straitlaced morality. Sherkaner had known the sergeant for seven years now. The fellow's initial contempt for Underhill schemes was long past; they had been close friends. But when their Team finally moved to the Eastern Front, his manner had become distant. He had begun to address Underhill as "sir," and sometimes his respectfulness was edged with impatience.

He'd asked Victory about that. It had been the last time they were alone together, in a cold burrow-barracks beneath the last operating aerodrome on the Eastern Front. She had laughed at the question. "Ah, dear soft one, what do you expect? Hrunk will have operational command once the Team leaves friendly territory.You are the civilian advisor with no military training, who must somehow be tucked into the chain of command. He needs your instant obedience, but also your imagination and flexibility." She laughed softly; only a curtain separated their conversation from the main hall of the narrow barracks. "If you were an ordinary recruit, Unnerby would have fried your shell half a dozen times by now. The poor cobber is so afraid that when seconds count, your genius will be caught on something completely irrelevant—astronomy, whatever."

"Um." Actually, he had wondered how the stars might look without the atmosphere to dim their colors. "I see what you mean. Put that way, I'm surprised he let Greenval put me on the Team."

"Are you kidding? Hrunk demanded you be on it. He knows there'll be surprises that only you can figure out. As I said; he's a cobber with a problem."

It wasn't often that Sherkaner Underhill felt taken aback, but this was one of those times. "Well, I'll be good."

"Yes, I know you will. I just wanted you to know what Hrunk is up against....Hey, you can look on it as a behavioral mystery: How can such radically crazy people cooperate and survive where no one has ever lived before?" Maybe she meant it as a joke, but itwas an interesting question.

• • •

Without doubt, their vehicle was the strangest in all history: part submarine, part portable deepness, part sludge bucket. Now the fifteen-foot shell rested in a shallow pool of glowing green and tepid-red. The water was in a vacuum boil, gases swirling up from it, chilling into tiny crystals, and falling back. Unnerby pushed open the hatch, and the team formed a chain, handing equipment and exotherm tanks from one to the next to the next, until the ground just beyond the pool was piled with the gear they would carry.

They strung audio cable between themselves, Underhill to Unnerby to Haven to Nizhnimor. Sherkaner had been hoping for portable radios almost until the end, but such gear was still too bulky and no one was sure how it would operate under these conditions. So they each could talk to just one other team member. Still, they needed safety lines in any case, so the cable was no extra inconvenience.

Sherkaner led the way back to the lakeshore, with Unnerby behind him, and Nizhnimor and Haven pulling the sled. Away from their submarine, the darkness closed in. There were still glimmers of heat-red light, where exotherms had sprayed across the ground; the sub had burned tons of fuel in melting its way to the surface. The rest of the mission must be powered by just the exotherms they could carry and what fuels they could find beneath the snow.