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several.  But the mortality rate, while high, didn’t seem enough to keep the bugs from outgrowing their food source.  This pocket ecology was more than incomplete; it was unworkable; it was temporary. 
    She was frustrated when she built the ghostling to help her, angry at him, afraid of dying in this impossible place.  Bauman would have been a better companion.  Vonnie wouldn't have tried so hard to control her and the mess she made of Lam was erratic, missing too much.  She'd held back more than half of his mem files, but included the last.  She wanted him to know why he died.  She wanted him to be cautious, even timid.
    She didn't trust the result.  
    Vonnie dug her way out of the bugs' small world when her mecha reported a faint current of atmosphere, half a kilometer away.  She knew there were more vents nearby. 
    The tremor was probably another aftershock.  The bulk of the fallen vent was pressing out against the surrounding area, and as other networks collapsed they also pushed down or sideways.  She felt a long, low creaking sound and suddenly the ice lurched, slamming at her.  Then some larger section gave way and Vonnie fell tumbling into the white.
    A queer thought struck her as she labored to free herself, sinking ever deeper through the loose hunks and powder, certain after the third hour that she was in her grave.  
    This was no ocean into which she was descending — it was this moon's sky.  Caught here, native species had no concept of anything further up.  They would always look for the mountains or the liquid seas below.
    She began to dig down instead of sideways, not fighting the avalanche but using it to her advantage, sifting, swimming. Finally she fell into a world of rock, a honeycomb of soft lava worn open at one time by running water.  Whether it was an island suspended in the ice or a true mountain she couldn't say yet, but she had at last come down out of the frozen sky.

17.
    The cavern seemed to stretch as her fear grew and Vonnie stayed near the wall of hieroglyphs, trying to anchor herself.  Deep radar let her track the new creatures while they were still out of sight and there were twelve bodies in the swarm, banging off the walls and ceiling of a gap.  
    — Sixty meters.  Fifty .
    Vonnie held her explosives.  There were too many entrances and she had only four half-sticks.  She couldn't throw one until they were almost on her, until there was no chance they'd bounce back out of whichever opening they chose. 
    — Forty .
    They would catch her if she ran, she knew that, but the adrenaline was like a hundred blades inside her.  It was like them, savage and quick.
    — They're in the second tunnel .
    Suddenly there was less rock in the way and Lam drew each body into clear resolution.  They were no longer just overlapping blobs.  They were amphibians.
    "Christ, you said..."
    They were bigger, with longer arms and different skin, cousins of the ones she'd fought but their own breed.  There was no question about it.  To creatures that saw and spoke in sonar, this breed would stand apart from the others, if for no other reason than the pitch of their voices — and it wasn't this race that had written on this wall.  The size of the carvings was wrong.  The surface texture.     
    These hieroglyphs belonged to the smaller species.
    War.  It explained so much.  Even when the environment was calm they had been tearing at each other, fighting for ground and for resources, and that competition had been more than either side was able to withstand.
    — Here they come .
    In an instant her chance to kill them cleanly would be gone, and Vonnie had learned not to hesitate.  But she had also remembered who she was and why she'd ever come here.  
    "Lam, talk to them!  You have to try to talk to them!” she yelled, and the suit bent down even as the amphibians swept into the cavern, a crisscrossing wave of bodies high and low.  At the same time Lam emitted sonar bursts in