“Use your thrusters now—full vertical.”
“Full vertical,” Lando echoed.
With one smooth, powerful motion, Lobot pulled Lando up between his widely spaced knees, lying straight back to drag Lando’s legs clear and hurl him free down the passage.
Quickly sitting back up, Lobot pulled out the cutting blaster and slashed the frame in two places. There was a shower of sparks each time, then a puff of D20 propellant from the broken lines as he kicked out the section between the cuts. It spun free and tumbled out through the airlock on the breeze.
The bulkhead groaned under Lobot, and the rest of the frame began to collapse, twisting sideways as it did, until it, too, was carried away.
Seconds later the hole had closed under them, the pitch of the roaring air rising to a shrill note before it cut off entirely, leaving them in silence.
“I guess we only get to use that doorway trick once,” Lando said. The inside of his faceplate was fogged with sweat. “Where’d you learn that?”
“I learned it wild-water rafting on Oko E,” Lobot said. “It is the preferred method for getting a raftmate out of the river before the sulfur ice pulls him under.
That was my last vacation,” he added.
“You have unexpected depth, Lobot,” said Lando.
“Is everyone all right?”
“I am certain that several of my circuits are overheated,” Threepio pronounced. “With your permission, Master Lando, I would like to perform a self-diagnos-tic.”
“Go ahead,” Lando said. “While you’re doing that, we’ll get Artoo free. And then we can start figuring out what to do next.”
“That should not prove too taxing,” said Lobot.
“The choices appear to be to go that way”—he crossed his arms over his chest, pointing a finger in each direction”or that way.”
“Shhh,” Lando said, craning his head. “Wait. Listen.”
They listened in silence, with sinking hearts. In the mysterious hollow spaces of the vagabond, the fading rumble of the entry growl echoed for a long time.
“Blast.” Lando sighed. “She’s jumped again.”
“Something interesting here,” said Josala Krenn.
ner. The false-color image mapped the undulations of a great glacier as it crawled its way along a widening, steep-sided valley toward a frozen sea. “Where?”
“Here,” said Josala, pointing out a string of small blue blotches scattered along the northeast edge of the glacier. “The side-scanning radar pulled these up—they’re sitting anywhere from eleven to nineteen meters down in the ice.”
“Rock from the lateral moraine?”
“No, for two reasons. First, they’re awfully regular in size, oblong, between one-point-five and two meters in the long axis. And second—do you know anything about the flow lines in the accumulation zone of a glacier?”
“Not a thing.”
“Something that falls on the surface of a glacier moves down-valley with the ice and down into the body of the glacier as more snow falls on top of it, ” Josala said. “The lateral moraine running through that part of the glacier is made up of rock coming off this cliff face.”
She pointed at a side valley well back along the path of the glacier.
“So by the time that rock gets to here—” “It’s fifty meters down.
These other objects, they haven’t been in the ice as long as that rock underneath them. And they would have had to come onto the ice somewhere in here.” Josala traced a circle with her finger over a flat area up-valley.
“That’s out in the middle of nothing,” said Stopa.
“Right.” She wrinkled her face in thought. “It’s hard to be sure of the timetables with cataclysmic climatic change, but I’d guess that whatever these are, they’ve only been in the ice for fifty to a hundred years.”
His eyes widened. “Bodies. Burials on the ice.”
“That was my thought.”
“It makes sense. Nomadic groups, or perhaps caves somewhere nearby—ice caves, possibly—” “It doesn’t matter where they lived, so long as we’ve found where they died.”
“How deep is the shallowest of those bodies? Eleven meters?” When Josala nodded, Stopa turned to the pilot.
“We’re going to want our rover.”
“Kroddok—” “I know, I know. But hear me out—we’ll wait until the weather’s good there,” Stopa said, his eyes animated by anticipation.
“We’ll set the rover down right on top of the site. We leave the engine running at idle so there’s no chance for anything to freeze up.