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eager, too, yet meticulously rebuilt the locks behind them.  Then she moved in front again, her exhilaration like a shout. 
    Another eighty meters on, though, the slanting tunnel dropped away completely.  A sink.  It was encrusted with old melt and across the way was a hollow of uncertain depth, thick with stalactites.  There had been a catastrophe here, a belch of heat, probably, but she couldn't feel sad.  She walked to the edge.  Her sonar raced down the gaping channel like a fantastic halo but did not reach bottom.
    Somewhere down there was the dark heart of this world.  
    "Perfect," Lam said, uploading a sim to her to complete the thought.  This shaft was a cross-section through the ice, maybe rich, maybe not.  A mecha descending—
    "Sure.  Give me fifteen minutes.”  It would be easy to sink a few bolts, play out a molecular wire and send a bot down like a spider.  Vonnie rifled through her kit.
    "Huh," he said then, and one of the mecha near Vonnie's feet reared back and shot a marker into the ice.  
    It was dirty ice, like most of the patches that Lam had already targeted, some dark with lava dust, others discolored like milk or glass.
    There was a shell.  A small spiral shell.  It wouldn't have looked unusual on any beach on Earth, but here it was a treasure. Even so, Lam was careful.  He merely stuck a radio pin into the wall of the tunnel.
    The wall exploded, white ice, black rock.  Vonnie was nearly in front of it and that saved her.  The blast knocked her out and up, snarled in her wire.
    Bauman yelled once, "Lam, get back!" 
    There was probably no more than a quarter ton of debris stopped up behind the dust pack — a mass of gravel and larger stones that had gradually absorbed just enough warmth to slump forward into a loose, dangerous bulge — and it weighed only a tenth as much as it would have on Earth.  But in this gravity,  it splashed, and it still had all of its inertia and mass. 
    It tore the vent.  It hit other nodes of rock.
    There were three upward shockwaves: the first ricochets, a vicious swell and then a smaller, settling riffle.  Vonnie escaped the worst of it, half-conscious and confused, her body slammed into the safe pockets at the top of the vent as her friends disappeared, their sharecasts bursting with alarms and then one massive injury report before cutting off.
    But she was still tied to the wire, and it would not break. One end caught in the heaving ice and the swell took her too.

15.
    Vonnie lurched sideways across the cavern and pushed against another slab of rock.  The torn fragments of the wall had shifted as water and ice intruded, retreated, came again, and some wild feeling in her was able to guess which pieces were only debris and which held hieroglyphs on one side or another.
    It made the hair stand up on her arms and neck, uneven and mute.  It felt exactly like...  "Wait."
      — Sonar .   
    Somehow she’d sensed it first, even before his machine ears, but there was no time to wonder at the weird creeping changes in herself.  "How close are they?  We're almost done."
    — At least a thousand meters.  It's only echoes.  My estimate could be off but I'd say they're still deep in the tunnels.  Possibly they don't even know we're here .
    "No.  They know."
    — Their voices aren't directed this way .
    "Let's move.  Can you pull up that block over there?  I think it came out of that corner.  If we can scan whatever's left on it we'll have most of this end of the wall."  
    The suit limped forward.
    Vonnie wondered how it would hold up in a fight and knew she didn't want to be out in the open like this.  Better to find a hole, place the explosives...  "It's not amphibians, is it?"
    — No.  The others .
    She shoved at the rock, moving feverishly now, but it felt good and right to stay — to have purpose again.  She would kill as many as she had to, but she was not just a rat in a trap, running mindlessly.  She had worn down to