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known as adepts of the Free Spirit, the prophetae –but whatever name they’ve used, they’ve never been eradicated. Their goal has always been godhood. Perfection in this life. Superman.”
    But when Sparta asked him why they’d tried to kill her, Blake could only surmise that she had learned more than she was supposed to. “I think you learned that SPARTA was more than your father and mother claimed. . . .”
“My parents were psychologists, scientists,” she’d protested.
     
“There has always been a dark side and a light side, a black side and a white side,” he’d replied.
     
When Blake was forced to leave Sparta on Port Hesperus to return to Earth, he went with renewed determination to infiltrate the “dark side” of the Free Spirit as soon as possible . . .
     
That was four months ago. Sparta had not heard from him since–until she received that brief, enigmatic message at a moment when she was much too busy to deal with it.
III
The shell that contained her split open. She stumbled forward on six shaky legs, into a wall of stone.
    Her hind legs supported her while she stretched her barbed forelegs to grasp the top of the ledge. The soft stone crumbled in her pincer grip. Momentarily scrabbling for purchase, she hefted herself upward, her wobbly joints creaking. She paused to spread her wings, to peer around and taste the air with waving antennas. It carried a tang of rotten eggs. Bracing.
    The atmosphere was like thick glass, clear, suffused with red light. She swung her armored head from side to side, but she couldn’t see far; the horizon vanished in the scattered light. Her antennas dipped, and she picked up sensations of the terrain in front of her. Somewhere ahead, these other senses informed her, great cliffs rose into the glowing sky.
    Her titanium claws rested lightly on the crusted ground, its baked surface cool to her touch. Liquid lithium pulsed through her vitals and flowed through the veins of her delicate molybdenum-doped stainless-steel wings, carrying away her body heat as gently as mild perspiration in an April breeze. She had stepped dewily from her chrysalis into the morning of a long Venusian day.
Spindly legs, antennas, and radiant wings notwithstanding, she was not a sixteen-tonne metal insect, she was a woman.
     
“Azure Dragon, do you read me?”
     
There was a half-second delay in the link while the signal was relayed to Port Hesperus and back. “Go ahead, Inspector.”
     
“I’m moving toward the site now.”
    “We have you,” said the voice of Azure Dragon’s shuttle controller. “Your shuttle came down ninety meters west of the targeted landing site. Sorry about that. Bear four degrees right of your present heading and continue for approximately three point five kilometers until you reach the base of the cliffs.”
“All right. Any change in their situation?”
     
“Nothing since the oh-five-hundred signal–from either the rover or the HDVM. We have additional HDVMs on the way from Dragon Base, ETA about forty minutes.”
     
“I’ll check in when I make contact. Over for now.”
    It had been almost two hours since the last signal from the grounded expedition. Twenty-four hours ago they had landed at Dragon Base and made their way to their goal in a rover like Sparta’s. Soon they had made the first of what promised to be many triumphant discoveries. Now triumph was forgotten. The challenge was to bring them out alive.
    Sparta picked her way carefully along a shallow channel. Long ago this plain had glistened with a film of water; over it, almost imperceptible tides had gently advanced and receded. Now it was a sheet of orange sandstone, its surface furry with corrosion. She thought it a curious sensation to put her feet through the rotted rind of the rock, kicking up lazy clouds of dust as she moved ahead.
    Nothing apparent came between Sparta’s natural senses and the world through which she moved. The eyes of the seven-meter-long rover were her