Afterward, Underhill drove through the little town, looking for an inn. At first glance this was a peaceful, timeless place to live. There was a traditionalist church of the Dark, as plain and weathered as it should be in these years. The newspapers on sale by the post office were three days old. The headlines might be large and red, shrieking of war and invasion, but even when a convoy for Lands Command rumbled through, it got no special attention.

It turned out Nigh't' Deepness was too small for inns. The owner of the post office gave him directions to a couple of bed-and-breakfast homes. As the sun slid down toward the ocean, Sherkaner tooled around the countryside, lost and exploring. The forest was beautiful, but it didn't leave much room for farming. The locals made some of their living by outside trade, but they worked hard on their mountain garden...and they had at most three years of good growing seasons before the frosts would become deadly. The local harvest yards looked full, and there was a steady stream of carts shuttling back and forth into the hills. The parish deepness was up that way about fifteen miles. It wasn't a large deepness, but it served most of the outback folk. If these people didn't save enough now, they would surely starve in the first, hard years of the Great Dark; even in a modern civilization, there was precious little charity for able-bodied persons who didn't provide for those years.

Sunset caught him on a promontory overlooking the ocean. The ground dipped away on three sides, on the south into a little, tree-covered valley. On the crest beyond the dell was a house that looked like the one the postmaster had described. But Sherk still wasn't in a hurry. This was the most beautiful view of the day. He watched the plaids shade into limited colors, the sun's trace fading from the far horizon.

Then he turned his automobile and started down the steep dirt road into the dell. The canopy of the forest closed in above him...and he was into the trickiest driving of the day, even though he was moving slower than a cobber could walk. The auto dipped and slid in foot-deep ruts. Gravity and luck were the main things that kept him from getting stuck. By the time he reached the creek bed at the bottom, Sherkaner was seriously wondering if he would be leaving his shining new machine down here. He stared ahead and to the sides. The road was not abandoned; those cart ruts were fresh.

The slow evening breeze brought the stench of offal and rotting garbage. A dump? Strange to think of such a thing in the wilderness. There were piles of indeterminate refuse. But there was also a ramshackle house half-hidden by the trees. Its walls were bent, as if the timbers had never been cured. Its roof sagged. Holes were stuffed with wattle-bush. The ground cover between the road and the house had been chewed down. Maybe that accounted for the offal: a couple of osprechs were hobbled near the creek, just upstream of the house.

Sherkaner stopped. The ruts of the road disappeared into the creek just twenty feet ahead. For a moment he just stared, overwhelmed. These must be genuine backwoods folk, as alien as anything city-bred Sherkaner Underhill had ever seen. He started to get out of the auto. The viewpoints they would have! The things he might learn. Then it occurred to him that if their viewpoint was alien enough, these strangers might be less than pleased by his presence.

Besides...Sherkaner eased back onto his perch and took careful hold of the steering wheel, throttle, and brakes. Not just the osprechs were watching him. He looked out in all directions, his eyes fully adapted to the twilight. There were two of them. They lurked in the shadows on either side of him. Not animals, not people. Children? Maybe five and ten years old. The smaller one still had its baby eyes. Yet their gaze was animal, predatory. They edged closer to the auto.

Sherkaner revved his engine and bolted forward. Just before he reached the little creek, he noticed a third form-a larger one-hiding in the trees above the water. Children they might be, but this was a serious game of lurk-and-pounce. Sherkaner twisted the wheel hard right, bouncing out of the ruts. He was off the road-or was he? There were faint, scraped-down grooves ahead: the real fording point!

He entered the stream, the water spraying high in both directions. The big one in the trees pounced. One long arm scratched down the side of the auto, but the creature landed to the side of Sherkaner's path. And then Underhill had reached the far bank, and was rocketing upslope. A real ambush would end in a cul-de-sac here. But the road continued on and somehow his hurtling progress did not carry him off to the side. There was a final scary moment as he emerged from the forest canopy. The road steepened and his Relmeitch tipped back for a second, rotating on its rear tires. Sherkaner threw himself forward from his perch, and the auto slammed down, and scooted up over the hillcrest.

He ended up under stars and twilit sky, parked beside the home he had seen from the far side of the dell.

He killed the engine and sat for a moment, catching his breath and listening to the blood pounding in his chest. It was that quiet. He watched behind him; no one pursued. And thinking back...it was strange. The last he had seen, the big one was climbing slowly out of the creek. The other two had turned away, as if uninterested.

He was by the house he had seen from the other side. Lights came on in the front. A door opened, and an old lady came out on the porch. "Who's there?" The voice was sturdy.

"Lady Enclearre?" Sherk's voice came out in kind of a squeak. "The postmaster gave me your address. He said you had an overnight room to rent."

She came round to the driver's side and looked him over. "That I do. But you're too late for dinner. You'll have to settle for cold sucks."

"Ah. That's all right, quite all right."

"Okay. Bring yourself on in." She chuckled and waved a little hand toward the valley Sherkaner had just escaped. "You sure did come the long way, sonny."

Despite her words, Lady Enclearre fed Sherkaner a good meal. Afterward they sat in her front parlor and chatted. The place was clean, but worn. The sagging floor was unrepaired, the paint peeling here and there. It was a house at the end of its time. But the pale glimmer lamps revealed a bookcase set between the screened windows. There were about a hundred titles, mostly children's primers. The old lady (and she was really old, born two generations earlier than Sherk) was a retired parish teacher. Her husband hadn't made it through the last Dark, but she had grown children-old cobbers themselves now-living all through these hills.

Lady Enclearre was like no city schoolteacher. "Oh, I've been around. When I was younger 'n you, I sailed the western sea." A sailor! Sherkaner listened with undisguised awe to her stories of hurricanes and grizzards and iceberg eruptions. Not many people were crazy enough to be sailors, even in the Waning Years. Lady Enclearre had been lucky to live long enough to have children. Maybe that was why, during the next generation, she settled down to schoolteaching and helping her husband raise the cobblies. Each year, she had studied the texts for the next grade, staying one year ahead of the parish children, all the way to adulthood.

In this Brightness, she had taught the new generation. When they were grown, she was truly getting on in years. A lot of cobbers make it into a third generation; few live the length of it. Lady Enclearre was much too frail to prepare for the coming Dark by herself. But she had her church and the help of her own children; she would have her chance to see a fourth Bright Time. Meanwhile she kept up with her gossip, and her reading. She was even interested in the war-but as an avid spectator. "Give those bleeding Tiefers a tunnel up their rear, I say. I have two grandnieces at the Front, and I'm very proud of them."

As Sherkaner listened, he stared out through Lady Enclearre's broad, fine-screened windows. The stars were so bright up here in the mountains, a thousand different colors, dimly lighting the forest's broad leaves and the hills beyond. Tiny woodsfairies ticked incessantly at the screens, and from the trees all around, he could hear their stridling song.

Abruptly a drum started beating. It was loud, the vibrations coming through the tips of his feet and chest as much as through his ears. A second banging started, drifting in and out of synch with the first.

Lady Enclearre stopped talking. She listened sourly to the racket. "This could go on for hours, I'm afraid."

"Your neighbors?" Sherkaner gestured toward the north, the little valley. It was interesting that, except for her one comment about his coming the "long way round," she hadn't said a thing about those strange people in the dell.

...And maybe she wouldn't now. Lady Enclearre scrunched down on her perch, silent for the first significant period since he'd arrived. Then: "You know the story of the Lazy Woodsfairies?"

"Sure."

"I made it a big part of the catechism, 'specially for the five- and six-year-olds. They relate to the attercops cuz they look like little people. We studied how they grow wings, and I'd tell them about the ones that do not prepare for the Dark, the ones who play on and on till it's too late. I could make it a scary story." She hissed angrily into her eating hands. "We're dirt poor hereabouts. That's why I left for the sea, and also why I eventually came back, to try and help out. Some years, all the pay I got for my teaching was in farmers' co-op notes. But I want you to know, young fellow, we're good people... Except, here and there, there are cobbers who choose to be vermin. Just a few, and mostly farther up in the hills."

Sherkaner described the ambush at the bottom of the dell.

Lady Enclearre nodded. "I figured it was something like that. You came up here like your rear end was on fire. You were lucky you got out with your auto, but you weren't in great danger. I mean, if you held still for them, they might kick you to death, but basically they're too lazy to be much of a threat."

Wow. Real perverts. Sherkaner tried not to look too interested. "So the noise is-?"

Enclearre waved dismissively. "Music, maybe. I figure they got a load of drugged fizzspit a while back. But that's just a symptom-even if it does keep me awake at night. No. You know what really makes them vermin? They don't plan for the Dark...and they damn their own children. That pair down in the dell, they're hill folk who couldn't stomach farming. Off and on they've done smithing, going from farm to farm and working only when they couldn't steal. Life is easy in the middle years of the sun. And all the time they're fornicating away, making a steady dribble of little ones...

"You're young, Mister Underhill, maybe a bit sheltered. I don't know if you realize how tedious it is to get a woman pregnant before the Waning Years. One or two little welts are all that ever come-and any decent lady will pinch them off. But the vermin down in the dell, they're whacking each other all the time. The guy is always carrying around one or two welts on his back. Thank goodness, those almost always die. But once in a while they grow into the baby stage. A few make it to childhood, but by then they've been treated like animals for years. Most are sullen cretins."

Sherkaner remembered the predatory stares. Those little ones were so different from what he remembered of childhood. "But surely some escape? Some grow into adults?"

"A few do. Those are the dangerous ones, the ones who see what they've missed. Off and on, things have been nasty here. I used to raise mini-tarants-you know, for companionship and to make a little money. Every one of them ended up stolen, or a sucked-out carcass on my front steps." She was silent for a time, remembering pain.

"Shiny things catch the cretins' fancy. For a while, there was a gang of them that figured out how to break into my place. They'd steal candysucks mostly. Then one day they stole all the pictures in the house, even in my books. I locked the indoors good after that. Somehow they broke in a third time-and took the rest of my books! I was still teaching then. I needed those books! The parish constable rousted the vermin over that, but of course she didn't find the books. I had to buy new teacher texts for the last two years of school." She waved at the top rows of her bookshelves, at worn copies of a dozen texts. The ones on the lower shelves looked like primers too, for all the way back to babyhood; but they were crisp and new and untouched. Strange.

The double drumbeat had lost its synchrony, dribbled slowly back into silence. "So yes, Mister Underhill, some of the out-of-phase cobblies live to be adults. They might almost pass for current-generation cobbers. In a sense, they are the next generation of vermin. Things will get ugly in a couple of years. Like the Lazy Woodsfairies, these people will begin to feel the cold. Very few will get into the parish deepness. The rest will be out in the hills. There are caves everywhere, little better than animal deepnesses. That's where our poorest farmers spend the Dark. That's where the out-of-phase vermin are really deadly."

The old lady noticed his look. She gave him a jagged little grin. "I doubt I'll see another Brightness of the sun. That's okay. My children will have this land. There's a view; they might build a little inn here. But if I survive the Dark, I'll build a little cabin here and put up a big sign proclaiming me the oldest cobber living in the parish... And I'll look down into the dell. I hope it's washed clean. If the vermin are back, most likely it'll be because they murdered some poor farmer family and took their deepness."

After that, Lady Enclearre turned the conversation to other things, asking about life in Princeton and Sherk's own childhood. She said that now she had revealed her parish's dark secrets, he should reveal what he was up to driving an automobile down to Lands Command.

"Well, I was thinking about enlisting." Actually, Sherkaner intended that the Command enlist in his schemes rather than the other way around. It was an attitude that had driven the University Professoriate nuts.

"Hmm-hmm. 'Tis a long way to come when you could enlist in a minute back in Princeton. I noticed the luggage end of your auto is almost as big as a farmer's cart." She waggled her eating hands in curiosity.

Sherkaner just smiled back. "My friends warned me to carry lots of spare parts if I wanted to tour the Pride of Accord by automobile."

"Shu, I'll bet." She stood up with some difficulty, supporting herself on both midhands and feet. "Well, this old lady needs her sleep, even on a nice summer's evening in such good company. Breakfast will be around sunup."

She took him to his room, insisting on climbing the stairs to show him how to open the windows and fold out the sleeping perch. It was an airy little room, its wallpaper peeling with age. At one time, it must have been for her children.

"...and the privy is on the outside rear of the house. No city luxury here, Mister Underhill."

"It will be fine, my lady."

"Good night then."

She was already starting down the stairs when he thought of one more question. There was always one more question. He stuck his head out the bedroom door. "You have so many books now, Lady Enclearre. Did the parish finally buy you the rest?"

She stopped her careful progress down the stairs, and gave a little laugh. "Yes, years later. And that's a story too. It was the new parish priest, even if the dear cobber won't admit it; he must have used his own money. But one day, there was this postal shipment on my doorstep, direct from the publishers in Princeton, new copies of the teachers' books for every grade." She waved a hand. "The silly fellow. But all the books will go to the deepness with me. I'll see they get to whoever teaches the next generation of parish children." And she continued down the stairs.

Sherkaner settled onto the sleeping perch, scrunched around until its knobby stuffing felt comfortable. He was very tired, but sleep did not come. The room's tiny windows overlooked the dell. Starlight reflected the color of burned wood from a tiny thread of smoke. The smoke had its own far-red light, but there were no flecks of living fire in it. I guess even perverts sleep.

From the trees all around came the sound of the woodsfairies, tiny critters mating and hoarding. Sherkaner wished he had some time for entomology. The critters' buzzing scaled up and down. When he was little there had been the story of the Lazy Woodsfairies, but he also remembered the silly poems they used to put to the fairies' music. "So high, so low, so many things to know." The funny little song seemed to hide behind the stridling sound.

The words and the endless song lulled him finally into sleep.

FIVE.

Sherkaner made it to Lands Command in two more days. It might have taken longer, except that his redesign of the auto's drive belt made it safer to run the downhill curves fast. It might have taken less time, except that three times he had mechanical failures, one a cracked cylinder. It had been an evasion rather than a lie to tell Lady Enclearre that his cargo was spare parts. In fact, he had taken a few, the things he figured he couldn't build himself at a backcountry smith's.

It was late afternoon when he came round the last bend and caught his first glimpse of the long valley that housed Lands Command. It cut for miles, straight back into the mountains, the valley walls so high that parts of the floor were already in twilight. The far end was blued with distance; Royal Falls descended in slow-motion majesty from the peaks above. This was about as close as tourists ever got. The Royal Family held tight to this land and the deepness beneath the mountain, had held it since they were nothing more than an upstart dukedom forty Darks ago.

Sherkaner ate a good meal at the last little inn, fueled up his auto, and headed into the Royal reservation. The letter from his cousin got him through the outer checkpoints. The swingpole barricades were raised, bored troopers in drab green uniforms waved him through. There were barracks, parade grounds, and-sunk behind massive berms-ammo dumps. But Lands Command had never been an ordinary military installation. During the early days of the Accord, it had been mostly a playground for the Royals. Then, generation after generation, the affairs of government had become more settled and rational and unromantic. Lands Command fulfilled its name, became the hidey-hole for the Accord's supreme headquarters. Finally, it became something more: the site of the Accord's most advanced military research.

That was what most interested Sherkaner Underhill. He didn't slow down to gawk; the police-soldiers had been very definite that he proceed directly to his official destination. But there was nothing to prevent him from looking in all directions, swaying slightly on his perch as he did so. The only identification on the buildings was discreet little numerical signs, but some were pretty obvious. Wireless telegraphy: a long barracks sprouting the weirdest radio masts. Heh, if things were orderly and efficient, the building beside it would be the crypto academy. On the other side of the road lay a field of asphalt wider and smoother than any road. It was no surprise that two low-wing monoplanes sat on the far end. Sherkaner would have given a lot to see what was behind them, under tarpaulins. Farther on, a huge digger snout stuck steeply out of the lawn in front of one building. The digger's impossible angle gave an impression of speed and violence to what was the slowest conceivable way of getting from here to there.

He was nearing the end of the valley. Royal Falls towered above. A rainbow of a thousand colors floated in its spray. He passed what was probably a library, drove around a parking circle featuring the royal colors and the usual Reaching-for-Accord thing. The stone buildings around the circle were a special part of the mystique of Lands Command. By some fluke of shade and shelter, they survived each New Sun with little damage; not even their contents burned.

BUILDING 5007, the sign said. Office of Materials Research, it said on the directions the sentry had handed him. A good omen that it was right at the center of everything. He parked between two other autos that were already pulled over at the side of the street. Better not be conspicuous.

As he climbed the steps, he could see that the sun was setting almost directly down the path he had come. It was already below the highest cliffs. At the center of the traffic circle, the statues Reaching for Accord cast long shadows across the lawn. Somehow he suspected that the average military base was not quite this beautiful.

The sergeant held Sherkaner's letter with obvious distaste. "So who is this Captain Underhill-"

"Oh, no relation, Sergeant. He-"

"-and why should his wishes count for squat with us?"

"Ah, if you will read on further, you'll see that he is adjutant to Colonel A. G. Castleworth, Royal Perch QM."

The sergeant mumbled something that sounded like "Dumb-ass gate security." He settled his considerable bulk into a resigned crouch. "Very well, Mr. Underhill, just what is your proposed contribution to the war effort?" Something about the fellow was skewed. Then Sherkaner noticed that the sergeant wore medical casts on all his left legs. He was talking to a veteran of real combat.

This was going to be a hard sell. Even with a sympathetic audience, Sherkaner knew he didn't cut a very imposing figure: young, too thin to be handsome, sort of a gawky know-it-all. He had been hoping to get to an engineering officer. "Well, Sergeant, for at least the last three generations, you military people have been trying to get some advantage by working longer into the Dark. First it was just for a few hundred days, long enough to lay unexpected mines or strengthen fortifications. Then it was a year, two, long enough to move large numbers of troops into position for attack at the next New Sun."

The sergeant-HRUNKNER UNNERBY, his name tag said-just stared.

"It's common knowledge that both sides on the Eastern Front have massive tunneling efforts going, that we may end up with huge battles fought up to ten years into the coming Dark."

Unnerby was struck by a happy thought and his scowl deepened. "If that's what you think, you should be talking to the Diggers. This is Materials Research here, Mr. Underhill."

"Oh, I know that. But without materials research we have no chance of penetrating through to the really cold times. And also...my plans don't have anything to do with digging." He said the last in a kind of rush.

"Then what?"

"I-I propose that we select appropriate Tiefstadt targets, wake ourselves in the Deepest Dark, walk overland to the targets, and destroy them." Now, that piled all the impossibilities into one concise statement. He held up forestalling hands. "I've thought about each of the difficulties, Sergeant. I have solutions, or a start on solutions-"

Unnerby's voice was almost soft as he interrupted. "In the Deepest Dark, you say? And you are a researcher at Kingschool in Princeton?" That's how Sherkaner's cousin had put it in the letter.

"Yes, in math and-"

"Shut up. Do you have any idea how many millions the Crown spends on military research at places like Kingschool? Do you have any idea how closely we watch the serious work that they do? God, how I hate you Westerling snots. The most you have to worry about is preparing for the Dark, and you're barely up to that. If you had any stiffness in your shell, you'd be enlisting. There are people dying now in the East, cobber. There are thousands more who will die unprepared for the Dark, more who will die in the tunnels, and many more who may die when the New Sun lights and there is nothing to eat. And here you sit, spouting fantasy what-ifs."

Unnerby paused, seemed to tuck his temper away. "Ah, but I'll tell you a funny story before I boot your ass back to Princeton. You see, I'm a bit unbalanced." He waggled his left legs. "An argument with a shredder. Until I get well, I help filter the crank notions that people like you keep sending our way. Fortunately, most of the crap comes in the mail. About once in ten days, some cobber warns us about the low-temperature allotrope of tin- Oops, maybe I am talking to an engineer!

"-and that we shouldn't ought to use it in solder. At least they have their facts right; they're just wasting our time. But then there are the ones who have just read about radium and figure we ought to make super digger heads out of the stuff. We have a little contest among ourselves about who gets the biggest idiots. Well, Mr. Underhill, I think you've made me a winner. You figure on waking yourself in the middle of the Dark, and then traveling overland in temperatures lower than you'll find in any commercial lab and in vacuum harder than even we can create." Unnerby paused, taken aback at having given away a morsel of classified information? Then Sherkaner realized that the sergeant was looking at something in Sherkaner's blind spot.

"Lieutenant Smith! Good afternoon, ma'am." The sergeant almost came to attention.

"Good afternoon, Hrunkner." The speaker moved into view. She was...beautiful. Her legs were slender, hard, curving, and every motion had an understated grace. Her uniform was a black that Sherkaner didn't recognize. The only insignia were her deep-red rank pips and name tag. Victory Smith. She looked impossibly young. Born out-of-phase? Maybe so, and the noncom's exaggerated show of respect was a kind of taunt.

Lieutenant Smith turned her attention on Sherkaner. Her aspect seemed friendly in a distant, almost amused way. "So, Mr. Underhill, you are a researcher in the Kingschool Mathematics Department."

"Well, more a graduate student actually..." Her silent gaze seemed to call for a more forthcoming answer. "Um, math is really just the specialization listed on my official program. I've done a lot of course work in the Medical School and in Mechanical Engineering." He half-expected Unnerby to make some rude comment, but the sergeant was suddenly very quiet.

"Then you understand the nature of the Deepest Dark, the ultralow temperatures, the hard vacuum."

"Yes, ma'am. And I've given these problems considerable thought." Almost half a year, but better not say that. "I have lots of ideas, some preliminary designs. Some of the solutions are biological and there's not much to show you yet. But I did bring prototypes for some of the mechanical aspects of the project. They're out in my automobile."

"Ah, yes. Parked between the cars of Generals Greenval and Downing. Perhaps we should take a look-and move your auto to a safer place."

The full realization was years away, but in that moment Sherkaner Underhill had his first glimmering. Of all the people at Lands Command-of all the people in the wide world-he could not have found a more appropriate listener than Lieutenant Victory Smith.

SIX.

In the last years of a Waning Sun there are storms, often fierce ones. But these are not the steaming, explosive agony of the storms of a New Sun. The winds and blizzards of the coming Dark are more as though the world is someone mortally stabbed, flailing weakly as life's blood leaks out. For the warmth of the world is its lifeblood, and as that soaks into the Dark, the dying world is less and less able to protest.

There comes a time when a hundred stars can be seen in the same sky as the noonday sun. And then a thousand stars, and finally the sun gets no dimmer...and the Dark has truly arrived. The larger plants have long since died, the powder of their spores is hidden deep beneath the snows. The lower animals have passed the same way. Scum mottles the lee of snowbanks, and an occasional glow flows around exposed carcasses: the spirits of the dead, classical observers wrote; a last bacterial scavenging, scientists of later eras discovered. Yet there are still living people on the surface. Some are the massacred, prevented by stronger tribes (or stronger nations) from entering deep sanctuary. Others are the victims of floods or earthquakes, whose ancestral deepnesses have been destroyed. In olden times, there was only one way to learn what the Dark might really be: stranded topside, you might attain tenuous immortality by writing what you saw and saving the story so securely that it survived the fires of the New Sun. And occasionally one of these topsiders survived more than a year or two into the Dark, either by extraordinary circumstance or by clever planning and the desire to see into the heart of the Dark. One philosopher survived so long that his last scrawl was taken for insanity or metaphor by those who found his words cut into stone above their deepness: "and the dry air is turning to frost."

On one thing the propagandists of both Crown and Tiefstadt agreed. This Dark would be different from all that had gone before. This Dark was the first to be directly assaulted by science in the service of war. While their millions of citizens retreated to the still pools of a thousand deepnesses, the armies of both sides continued to fight. Often the fighting was in open trenches, warmed by steamer fires. But the great differences were underground, in the digging of tunnels that swept deep beneath the front lines of either side. Where these intersected, fierce battles of machine guns and poison gas were fought. Where intersection did not occur, the tunnels continued through the chalky rock of the Eastern Front, yard by yard, days on days, long after all fighting on the surface had ended.

Five years after the Dark began, only a technical elite, perhaps ten thousand on the Crown side, still prosecuted the campaign below the East. Even at their depths, the temperatures were far below freezing. Fresh air was circulated through the occupied tunnels, by foram-burning fans. The last of the air holes would ice over soon.

"We haven't heard any Tiefstadter activity for nearly ten days. Digger Command hasn't stopped congratulating itself." General Greenval popped an aromatique into his maw and crunched loudly; the chief of Accord Intelligence had never been known for great diplomacy, and he had become perceptibly more crotchety over the last days. He was an old cobber, and though the conditions at Lands Command might be the most benign left anywhere in the world, even they were entering an extreme phase. In the bunkers next to the Royal Deepness, perhaps fifty people were still conscious. Every hour, the air seemed to become a little more stale. Greenval had given up his stately library more than a year ago. Now his office consisted of a twenty-by-ten-by-four-foot slot in the dead space above the dormitory. The walls of the little room were covered with maps, the table with reams of teletype reports from landlines. Wireless communication had reached final failure some seventy days earlier. During the year before that the Crown's radiomen had experimented with more and more powerful transmitters, and there had been some hope that they would have wireless right up to the end. But no, all that was left was telegraphy and line-of-sight radio. Greenval looked at his visitor, certainly the last to Lands Command for more than two hundred years. "So, Colonel Smith, you just got back from the East. Why don't I hear any huzzahs from yourself? We've outlasted the enemy."

Victory Smith's attention had been caught by the General's periscope. It was the reason Greenval had stuck his cubbyhole up here-a last view upon the world. Royal Falls had stilled more than two years ago. She could see all the way up the valley. A dark land, covered now with an eldritch frost that formed endlessly on rock and ice alike. Carbon dioxide, leaching out of the atmosphere. But Sherkaner will see a world far colder than this.

"Colonel?"

Smith stepped back from the periscope. "Sorry, sir... I admire the Diggers with all my heart." At least the troops who are actually doing the digging. She had been in their field deepnesses. "But it's been days since they could reach any enemy positions. Less than half will be in fighting form after the Dark. I'm afraid that Digger Command guessed the stand-down point wrong."