The Mercia lowering into Mars orbit; Burch floating above a world. He was always brought to mind of a giant horseman, or a lord appraising his demesnes. All your freedoms laid out before you. Made him faintly dread the landing. Back walking in the crumbs.

He remembered that Long Reach had been put together in a region called Promethei Terra -- chroniclers and headline-writers of the time had made the most of that, along with Red Planet both before and after the tragedy -- but there were no maps, so it was just more junk he couldn't cast off. Mucel had the idea of putting the sun behind them and looking for flashes of reflection, and there it was. Polygons, part-circles and connecting bands. A hieroglyph in the slope of a hill, or as might have been paced out in an old hayfield. Behold: evidence of man. Burch labored to make sense of it. "Why on Earth would they design it that way?" Why on Earth. Funny.

Mucel: "They were going to build it in phases."

Burch made a drawing of it in his head, put on his walking kit, boarded a wyvern and settled in. Thin air made the flight undramatic.

Now Burch standing on Mars. He felt nothing, and walked to try again. He crossed a bed of small rubble, uniform and unweathered, like a shattered plinth. Made him think of a poem by Shelley. I must get around to rewriting that. In the distance, on his left and right, old water had cut square-jawed profiles of the locals into the cliffs. Fled and left the rust behind. He looked up. A sky of cloudless color. Mars was more like home than home.

The complex. There'd been a sandstorm at some point. Heavy pitting, a tile dislodged, weather station down ... and he suddenly recalled that there had been young life on this planet once. Corrected by a single stone, according to those who claimed to know. Faring no better than any other life, then. He thought of Brownlee: Man loves Nature, and no love was less requited.

He circled until he found the cove that held the airlock ... he stopped, then slowed to judicious steps: the outer door was open. Bootprints trailing away from the vestibule in a tread he didn't know. A little scurf and clutter through the opening. He kept a cautious pace until Cee took notice. "The rescue team."

Oh that. Come to save the dead. In the airlock there were handles for manual override but also a panel that indicated power. Long Reach idling along. He cycled through with one touch. A well-lighted mud-room. Color-sorted articles of outerwear in crisp order. Gave off a despairing patience. He touched an edge, and no dust. Dust comes in on the fresh air. About that: all meters allowed it, so Burch snapped off his helmet. The fetor was new to him but he could imagine what, and he blew hard and put the suit back together.

Now toward a doorway and a narrow corridor. There was an eye on the brow of his faceplate for Cee, and Burch walked with a slow sweep like a scanning tool. Empty canister of gas, wandering zori. A sensor found him and he lit up a creme common-room. Designed by a committee of scientists. Signs of trouble: half-eaten repasts, red blotting tissues, or yellow with rheum. Two passages led away; one was closed by a curtain. Now there's a sensible thing out here. Lightweight, save space, ease of egress. Something for a bedroom, plaited beads, quiet colors, pretty, a pastoral. He pulled it away and found the switch just inside. A dead body. He became very still. "Say something."

"I'm surprised too. Move closer."

Cripes. On a bunk beneath an empty one. A bedsheet had softened over time and settled into the body like vapor. Photographs and personal items beside. In an open wardrobe, a suit with a nameplate. "Cee."

"Dr. Xia Chang."

"Male, female."

"Female."

Slain in her bed. Burch considered her face and found that he'd looked away as if after an awkward introduction. I'm a scientist. He looked again. Drawn, compelling despite. Canker or bright burn, missing hair. Would she have wanted to die in the dark? Protecting one of her senses from the horror.

Cee: "Desiccated, but no decomp. What killed her also killed whatever would've gone about that."

Oh. "I don't get it."

"Then let's keep moving." Now he stared. McKelvey had left nothing to look at. With Brownlee it was always about the guess. And now there's this one. Normally the dead are allowed to age into their parts; the old woman would not hide her end so easily. An impression at the outer corner of the eye. And all along the zygomatic. One lip was pressed past the other, as with something almost said. Xia Chang: bright student, played the viola, loved her parents, advanced the Project too little and to no avail.

It was decided that if they were to make sense of the Earth there must be sacrifices all around. And so the Mercia. Three steel splines, excised with care midship; endless cable, spliced from the coils essential to Lift One; a pulley from Lift One, now a new dead space. And then tools and a good laying-in of supplies.

Wigmund and Scrope somewhere along the lines of Barcaldine and Winton, Queensland. Wigmund said he recognized it from the big sky, lack of detail. Room to begin again. They walked in an informal way, to find a bottom to this shapeless plane, or really to bluff a bit more planning into the mad try before them. "Here." They'd press-ganged a loader along, and now it brought the parts. They put the splines into a tripod and hung the pulley from its point, ran the cable through the pulley and then to the punch, a plasma auger made to cut footing holes from rock or what-have-you. They took its feet off and tied a second cable to its side, by which they would tilt it up a bit as they sent it down, having it cut a hole wider than itself.

If he held his breath he thought he could hear ash smothering sound. Ash in the air as if after a fire, frustrating the light. The sun, now about mid-morning, could not quite animate what it saw. To Scrope it seemed as if after a seizure, a little dazed and muddling on.

Scrope began to cut the Earth, and in his heart he called it a necessary crime.

The next was lying dead in the radio room, naked with half a ribbon around his neck. The other half hung just overhead like a diacritical mark. People always cut down a hanging. An act of kindness toward themselves. His liquids had pooled in him and spread him into the floor a little. Fair enough, died at his post. Odd paper on the counter. Burch: "He left a note." He held it up. "Care to read this?"

"Not really."

Burch had an idea, and he guessed his way around the radio until he had it running. "What was it?"

"Twenty-three point three nine kilohertz."

There it was. As he listened he could see it, carried in on a long tide. Constant as a plea, as maddening as any promise from a stranger. He let it hypnotize him for a time. Why would they use radio? Because they know we use radio. "But why the bloody code?"

"It's not a code, it's self-explanatory. Anyone -- you know, anyone like me -- could sort it out, and they would know that."

"Good. So what's taking them so long?"

"I see. How long does it take, then? In your experience."

Another bedroom. Rumpled coverlet, open diary in a blue linen binding. Now I'll skip the bedrooms. He entered a broad connecting tube, setting off delicate light that led him to the largest and central pod. An atrium, with adjoining rooms in a radial plan. In the middle, where there might have been a roundtable or decorative display, there was nothing, or the creases and marks of something missing. Cee: "Look left again? Go there."

A pocket closet. No, it was a nook with a wall of electricals. Room for an expert and little more. "What." One display, a bit uncertain, was probably temperature ... down the far column, three heavy empty slots. Cee: "Was hoping as much: relief team took the AI with them. It can't have been easy the last few months."

Can't have been easy. A washingroom with laundry. A pantry. The medical. A door blocked by a tall plastic tub of preserves on a dolly, which he moved away to reveal an abattoir. He came to a soft balance and kept his hands quiet at his sides, careful not to intrude. Very old and dead blood. An arrangement of burned and broken flesh at his feet, in the way of interlocking floor tiles. The very end of the dull and long-spun catastrophe, held here for him, tableau vivant, whose narrative he would try to elicit. This would have been the gymnasium, and they had settled on a mix-up of tumbling mats. The beginnings of a midden in the corner by the free weights. Half the bulbs removed from above: too much light. Behind him and to either side of the entryway they had heaped matching uprooted sofas and chaise longue, duffel and smashed wallboard, sacks of sand from outside. "Is that the north wall?"

"Yes."

Sun side. They had built a barricade against it -- barbarian, plague, destroyer of worlds. Burch: "The relief team. They said they took the bodies and buried them."

"Right. Well, they came and made the place a mausoleum. They left the bodies and buried them."

"Okay. But why lie about it?"

Any number of reasons. "Don't know." Why would they not.

He stood up a little and saw a subtle pregnancy. I add you now to the register of the dead. In the middle of them, a communal bowl, as for soup. A remainder of pills in it. Pain-killers, soporifics. He wondered if they had prayed. They wore nothing. A cotton underthing would've been torture ... yet enfolding arms. How terribly serene. When the very air is hyperviolence, perhaps the way to fight is the way a sponge fights water.

"Burch. You can avert your eyes. I can't."

Continuing on. A laboratory, with a lapidary's tools and a tray of priceless stones. An empty wine-sac, cut open and scraped clean. Theater. Next I'll find a fucking bakery. Little wall of books, silent and brave. Stub end of a corridor that might've led to a daycare or sauna someday. Weapons locker, with grenades. What. The bloody hell. And suddenly he didn't have the mind left to force a narrative. Problem leg beginning to warm. Nothing but glances now. Another connecting structure. Room. Room. Emergency airlock. Boxes of stores. Another dead end. He was feeling vaguely hypoxic. Three rooms off a gallery.

Cee: "Stop. Left. Left again. I can smell it." His eye missed nothing. Now a different room, dirty, dust on the manifolds, louvered ceiling and what looked to be ducts up and to the outer air, flat boxes stacked like printing plates, numbered in a meaningless way. Cee: "Take that knife and open the top one."

There was a knife far to the side in a bin of tools, straight blade, half serrated. "No sharps, my suit."

"Do it, I can't do it for you, do it now."

It was a pressure-seal, which popped when he nicked it. He pulled it away. About sixty square jars, each the size of a small fist, and labeled. Cee: "Hold still. Listen. Lùdòu. Juānxīncài. Hóngshŭ. Dōngguā. Wāndòu. Beans. Cabbage. Sweet potatoes. Melons. Peas."

On Earth, the old fight for primacy, Scrope and Wigmund champions of the living; immediately they were reminded of life's unrivaled power to immiserate. The scream of the cutter came at them like a long shock wave. It was a tool for outer space, and it tore at its tethers, shattering the air. It tried to climb, kicked the ground, spinning, bathed them in boiling ash.

They went to the wyvern and sat under a wing, painting each other in liniment, and thought it over. Wigmund said that the engines behind them each had a blower, a fan basically, that kept the coolant circling. He pulled one out, the spaceship now down a third of its worth. They spent the rest of the day clipping it to the top of the punch along with a power cell. Scrope slept under a cowling and stretch of plastic because of tight quarters. Strange night. He would open his eyes and it was darker than when they were closed, but a darkness that never stirred the primitive reactions, and by staring with soft focus he could draw from it a concession of rest.

They pulled wadding from the pads of the pilot seats and filled their ears with it. They spun up the punch and it was stable: the rocket would launch backwards into the soil. New life, and they began again to cut away the raw sandstone. Immediately the reek of a foundry. The rock was discomposed into fine sediment, flecks of quartz magma; the blower on the punch pulled all this into a cloud above them until they stood in a shower of these seething remains. They fled, covered in sudden burns; a cinder tried to make a start in Wigmund's weak beard. More salve for the hands and arms, glistening in the bad light, then black with ash.

And more time spent contemplating the manner of their carrying on. Helmets would protect them above the shoulders, and they had chest and back plates, but the bulk of the skin of their walking suits was rubber mylar or nylon, which would kindle nicely. Wigmund dug up a crash knife and used it to cut the leather of their chairs into broad strips, which they dampened and bound around their blistered arms. Absurd pain, beyond all reason, imbuing nothing. They went back to work. Occasionally a needle would find a seam and remind them to question their labors.

The cutter creeping into its hole. Progress was poor at first and did not improve. Hot enough to warp their visors. Delicate circling steps, quite dangerous. The loader's offer of help lacked conviction. Backs, legs, swollen hands, pivot points, anchor points, running with electric pain -- pain, predicate of life, which did not occur to or ease them. In the diminishing light they would pull the costumes off and the water washed out of them and into the emaciated air. Some days it would stream down their faces. They might cough clods of black phlegm or a little blood; they might stagger and sleep where they found themselves, the ash falling on them like weary breath. A week of this.

Cee had left something of himself in the wyvern, just enough to fly -- a stunted clone, little more than an ancilla -- and every day he would ask them how they fared, but mainly to be polite, he didn't really get what they were doing.

The punch died and would not be revived. Bad design, or perhaps they'd asked too much of it. So now the second punch, second and last of its kind, out of its housing and packed in grease, ready to greet the world. Some modifications, then into the pit it went screaming. They would work it like the first, and if it died, sacrifices all around.

Their future, always adapting, found new ways to fight them. Wigmund lowering the punch at the start of a day. The cable was laid out as a convolvulus at his feet, and a loop of it took him up at the calf and threw him down, breaking his jaw. He lost the vision in his left eye, and when it returned the eyes would not agree. They'd lived with headache from the start, blamed on the bad or meager air, and now Wigmund had a new one, differing from the first in temper, the two in constant communication.

The effluent from the pit slowed and stopped, the punch faltering: the digging was deep enough now that the blower lacked the strength to lift the ash away, the cutter rooting around in its own filth. Scrope would mine like an ancient, then, albeit with inferior tools: they didn't have a shovel. There no longer was such a thing. When the hole cooled he was lowered in. Bottle of air, goggles, spotlamp. He filled a helmet with his hands and Wigmund hauled it away, sent it down for more. Ash floated in his light like phytoplankton. Disorienting darkness because he could see its parts. He came up, and then it was the punch for a minute, Scrope for an hour, until day's end. He wore a black impasto of sweat and soot. He scraped it off and discovered skin weeping with boils.

Life is a killing game. The imperative punished them when they complied, and when they rested it waited, not needing rest. At night they would ask what more they could do.

Scrope clearing the pit. Not quite wide enough to kneel. He would drop the helmet into the powder at his feet and kick it full. Scuffle above him. Continuous tone, nausea, white static. Perhaps a period of time or waiting. Can't move my hands. Where am I. One sensation, and another, or another, a blurring of sources. Can't breathe. Nausea in a long swell beneath him. He opened his eyes. A pant leg oh help me. He found the cable. He found himself on the surface with his face in the trampled ash, puddle of blood and two small candies. Into the wyvern and take a fresh bottle, then the hole, unhook the helmet and tie a loop around Wigmund at the ankle, climb again and make the rescue. Pushed empty breaths from his chest, plied him with oxygen. Several procedures desperately recalled. Come on come on but the boy was done.

He removed Wigmund to a pilot's chair, the young head laying over in a perilous way. He pinned a scrap of cloth around it. Cee offered a word of consolement, and briefly tried to eulogize. Scrope gave himself a long hour. He taught the loader how to manage the cable, pull at an angle, how to grab, unload and return. He made a new arrangement for the cables, and used the last of the light.

Not the next day but the day thereafter. Scrope clearing the pit, humoring scenarios as they arrived, a bit of a game. He imagined sending the helmet up and it slips somewhere along the way, coming down to crack his skull open. Death by safety gear. Or I tug on the cable and it falls loose on me. I yell myself hoarse but I never find out why. Leave a note of apology for the others, scratched into the skin ... something didn't feel right, and he hurried to the surface. He stared at the hole for nearly half an hour, standing somewhat back. He bent and waited. His hands were a bloody mix of leather rags and skin and left marks where he rested them. The loader had a question and was silenced by a gesture.

Scrope lit up the punch and sent it down. He was driven back by calamitous sound, failing metal, an onrush and tremor, as with falling land or ice. A pillar of water, cataract straight into the sky. Splines disappeared, cables whipsawing past him. The pillar became rain which began to pool, and he carefully got his things. The rain hanging in the air like glass beads. He had Cee move the wyvern, and told the loader to back away from the water.

He walked for hours until the flood was an inland sea. Warm. Both cloudy and clear. Tasted like real water. He folded into it like dried seeds.