Dolphiam Sector, Agua System, Azura

  The structural plate resting on the crumpled buildings made a large cave. The disc, thrown there by the mass-impacts of the orbital bombardment that ended Azura’s Cataclysm, was made from a slick, artificial material. Nothing stuck to it. When it had been part of the colony’s docks, that would have kept barnacles and other sea life from sticking to it, but now it just looked alarmingly clean compared to the jagged faces of the buildings below it, darkened with oxidation and algae growth.

  At the edge of the artificial cave, water cascaded down from the disc in a curtain, all the rain from above running down to the edge. It washed over the team’s suits with a gentle pressure as they stepped through one by one. On bare skin, the atmospheric temperature would have been chilly and the water borderline cold – though safely above freezing – but the insulation of the environmental suits kept their wearers at a comfortable temperature. The Hydra was not so lucky. The Singularity had not possessed a suit that would fit its body, so it hissed in discomfort at contact with the water, the lack of heat stiffening its limbs.

  Johnston didn’t give the biological drone a chance to stall. He shoved it through the water wall, and beyond, they all stopped to take in their surroundings.

  The degree of ruin they had seen from above did not compare to standing amidst it. It had been a beautiful city once, elegant white spires and round floating docks, home to a healthy population of four million. Azura’s seas would have been calmer then, a deep cerulean blue, rather than the viciously churning gray-green they were now. The colony had been surrounded by artificial wave barriers, helping to calm the nearby waters, but those were gone, destroyed in the orbital bombardment that had obliterated everything else.

  The fa?ade of the surviving structures greeted them with open wounds: crumbling corners, shattered windows and cracks that ran diagonally across the wall from each sinking corner. The buildings weren’t white any longer. No one had cleaned or maintained them in fifty years. Black, green and red algae had taken root on the uneven surfaces, thriving in Azura’s constant rains as they grew off the windowsills and cracks and ran downward like ink stains on a wet page.

  The street lamps that lined the boulevard had been snapped like twigs. They littered the street in piles, carried in by the floods until they tangled together and locked in place like the sticks of a beaver dam. The bulbs on the top had shattered, and the glass shards long since washed away.

  The rusty remains of a train lay against the foundation of one of the nearby buildings, detached from the crumbling suspension rail that should have held it. The train cars were crunched up against one another, each a hollowed-out skeleton with molding seats.

  The Hydra flicked its tongues, tasting the humid air, and the smell of the decaying colony. It hissed, low and non-threatening. Johnston turned to the Admiral, looking for a translation, but the Admiral just signaled a negative. The Hydra’s comment had not been meaningful, just an expression of discomfort upon seeing the remains of the city.

  Over the helmet-to-helmet radio, Frenchie released his distinctive, unhinged chuckle. “You take us to the nicest places, Stonewall.”

  Admiral Gives did not justify that with a response as Johnston signed for Valentina to push onward.

  They moved carefully, following the grid-layout of the roads, as they headed toward the rendezvous. Underneath a dark sky, the rain fell in big, heavy drops, the pitter-patter audible within the rigid helmets of their environmental suits.

  The first few blocks were easy. They walked on solid, mostly intact boulevards, through only the few inches of water gathered on the streets, but the damage quickly became worse. Buildings went from cracked and missing roofs to completely demolished. Others were missing entirely when the piers held them had collapsed into the sea. The ground became an uneven mess of material melded together by the impact forces. Only half of any standing structure remained. Their tops had been ripped off by the impact forces of the orbital bombardment, leaving rain to pool within and flow out of entryways long since missing their doors.

  The Marines remained tense, sweeping their rifles across any open entrances or approach points, but beyond the beat of the rain and the distant crashing of the ocean waves below, the city was simply silent.

  “Freaky,” Valentina commented, leading the party. “I knew it would be abandoned, but… It’s just… freaky.” There were so many signs of human life. The buildings she peered into were empty offices, apartments and waterlogged shops. There were vehicles, a city transport train there, the hull of a fishing boat elsewhere, but amongst it all, there were no people. “Where are all the bodies?” They couldn’t all have been swept away by the rain. The flesh may have decayed, but there should be skeletons, or clothing articles laying around. But there was nothing.

  “The Cataclysm took them,” the Admiral answered. “Just like it took everything else.” Biologics, raw materials, machinery components, Azura’s Cataclysm had harvested everything from this world and several others within the Quarantine Zone. Here, the rain washed away the bloodstains, but they had been found in mass number elsewhere within the Quarantine Zone, though most of the bodies had not been found there, either.

  “Fuck,” Valentina said. “How many people did Galhino say lived here? A few million?” It wasn’t really a question. Valentina had heard the briefing and known to pay attention, it was simply disbelief. Four million dead inhabitants, and not a single body in sight. “Where did they go?”

  They moved over one final ridge, where a building had been swept off of its foundation, and found themselves on the edge of the colony’s still-standing structure. Before them, the frothing seas stretched out, creating a basin, where on the other side, miles away, more of the structure still stood, merely a gray smudge on the waterlogged horizon.

  “Down there,” the Admiral indicated. “We landed on the edge of the city.” That was all that was left. “The orbital bombardment targeted the city center where the core of the AI that caused the cataclysm was located.” The ensuing bombardment had destroyed the center of the city, throwing wreckage outward. The colony’s outermost structures had survived to varying degrees, having been built to withstand earthquakes and tsunamis, but any living thing in the surrounding twenty-mile radius would have died in the pressure wave, assuming, of course, that anything had still been alive at the time.

  Havermeyer studied the empty void where the majority of the colony should have stood, “You seem to know a lot about this.”

  “You did not do your homework,” the Admiral countered, withholding the addition of, again.

  “Homework?” Havermeyer questioned. “I studied previous cataclysms. There’s not much to know about this one. No one returned to Azura to investigate the effects.” Truthfully, the cause wasn’t even known, simply that a Hydrian AI had gone mad. No documents ever specified why the AI had gone mad.

  “The Old Lady did the bombardment,” Johnston rumbled. “Galhino mentioned it.” He too, had been paying attention, and latched onto the one part of that discussion he recognized. “Five straight days.” He craned his neck, trying to catch a glimpse of any wreckage that had survived in the core of the city. There was nothing, not even a hint of anything disturbing the water flow. There was only the swell and crash of angry seas. “Hell of a crater.” Orbital bombardments were banned now – had been after the Frontier Rebellion ruined a few too many habitable worlds. Each shot in a bombardment held all the power of a large nuclear detonation, with none of the messy radiation. The AI core had probably been atomized. “You pull the records, suh?” he asked Gives.

  “Yes,” the Admiral confirmed. It would have been irresponsible not to study firsthand data from a trustworthy source, but the ship’s records hadn’t detailed much. The Singularity had been relatively late to the party as it were, only arriving once the AI core had been grounded to initiate the bombardment that had, by all apparent rights, erased the AI and most of Azura’s colony from existence. But, the records of the bombardment had told him where it was centered, and where to avoid, in case anything had been left behind, which, looking at the crater where the city had been, seemed unlikely. “Unless the Ensign disagrees, I will recommend we follow the inner rim. It is less likely anything survived along it.” While the trek would be easier on the more complete streets, it would make a longer distance and there were more places for things to hide. Here, on the inner rim, the landscape was mostly debris, crushed together so completely by the pressure wave that it was mostly solid. It was difficult terrain, but it would shorten their hike.

  “Do you think anything has survived, suh?” Johnston asked, his big hands never leaving the Hydra’s shoulder. Surely, the biological drone would have been more comfortable walking quadrupedally, but that would have made it faster and more nimble than any human on this terrain, so Johnston forcibly kept it upright.

  “The bombardment was extremely localized,” the Admiral answered. Its primary objective had been the destruction of the AI core, ending the cataclysm at its source. It had been known at the time that Azura was a lost world and would never be resettled. As the ghost had put it, “The cataclysm was never cleansed. Physical aberrations,” creations of the mad AI, “could still be functioning, and if any are, they will most likely be in the more intact parts of the colony.” That included the outermost rim, and the depths – catacombs of utility structures that had existed beneath the city: sewers, water lines, power and communications conduits. This inner rim, closer to the bombardment, may have had aberrations as well, but they would have been melted and crushed together with everything else.

  “I’d agree with that assessment,” Havermeyer said. “Though I am questioning why we needed an engineer on this team.” It seemed like the Admiral’s technical knowledge was plenty sufficient.

  “You’re not enjoying this field trip?” Valentina asked, beginning to pick her way forward with the crater of the missing city on her right, and the rim of still-standing ruins on her left.

  “It’s fascinating, but I am drawn to staying with my patron saint.”

  “Something tells me the Lady will be just fine without you,” Valentina retorted. “I’m just starting to enjoy your riveting company.”

  Johnston made a noise, but didn’t try to silence Valentina. He knew that would just make it worse. Besides, commentary was a way of easing the tension and their voices wouldn’t carry outside their helmets. “Frenchie,” he turned to check on their tail. “You doing alright?” The small Marine been strangely quiet.

  “Just enraptured by the Lady’s handiwork,” Frenchie said, sweeping a quick hand out to the crater before returning it to his rifle. “Five days… No question she got through the planetary crust.” Talk about fascinating. By the end of that bombardment, the shells would have been impacting Azura’s molten mantle. A non-negligible portion of the seas had probably been vaporized, still falling back down as rain, half a century later. “Stonewall, you ever do anything like that to the pesky separatist worlds in the Rebellion?”

  Admiral Gives kept his attention on the path ahead of him, ensuring his magboots found solid grip for every step. Frenchie’s question was mostly curiosity. The mad Marine loved destruction of any kind, but Johnston’s gaze was more weighted. After all, Johnston had been born on Marsed, a notorious one of those ‘pesky separatist worlds’, and knew the Admiral was a veteran of that conflict who had fought against Marseddai forces. It wasn’t some secret, but it wasn’t something they discussed either. There was enough history between them now that being from opposite sides of the Rebellion’s divide meant little, and Johnston probably wouldn’t react to whatever the Admiral said. In the end, Admiral Gives simply stated the truth. “I did not command the Singularity in the Frontier Rebellion.” He’d been young, a mere lieutenant a few years out of the officers’ academy, flying engine defense.

  “But, New Orpheus, that was her, wasn’t it?” Frenchie asked.

  The Admiral was quiet for a moment, but knew if he didn’t answer, Havermeyer would. The unfortunate part of having a tech-monk worshipping the ship was that he knew all the history too. “It was.” New Orpheus had been subjected to a brutal series of orbital bombardments by the Singularity under Admiral Brent’s command. It had not been a concentrated bombardment, but a series of large-area attacks over months. Brent had drawn the conflict out on purpose, taking great pride in cratering New Orpheus’ cities. Arguably, by the standards of orbital bombardment alone, New Orpheus had suffered worse than Azura.

  Azura, minus the cataclysm, and disregarding the constant rains, was habitable. New Orpheus was an apocalyptic wasteland. Firing into Azura’s seas had consumed a lot of the impact energy, and blowing water vapor into the atmosphere had changed the weather patterns, but New Orpheus was worse. The crust of New Orpheus had been pierced by railgun fire, new volcanoes and fault lines created. The planet, already subjected to multiple nuclear strikes, had been irradiated, and the orbital bombardment had tossed the contaminated dust and water high into the atmosphere, initiating a nuclear winter rife with fatal dust storms and radioactive rain. New Orpheus still had a seat on the republic council, but it was kept vacant, as a memorial. Given that, maybe New Orpheus hadn’t been so bad, because there was so little left of New Terra that the council hadn’t bothered with a memorial seat.

  Unauthorized duplication: this tale has been taken without consent. Report sightings.

  So really, in terms of the places the Admiral had been, Azura wasn’t that bad. This didn’t even crack the list of the five worst planets he’d visited. It wasn’t Ariea, the weather was better than New Orpheus, and anything was better than New Terra. Azura was quiet too, exempting present company, but they didn’t bother him so much. They weren’t reporters badgering him with accusations, or politicians trying to strike a deal. Minus the Hydra, they were crew, and crew was fine.

  “Stonewall, suh,” Johnston said lowly, once the other chatter had died out.

  “Just Stonewall is fine, Corporal.” They’d been through this before. On a mission like this, it didn’t always pay to be identified as a flag officer. The Admiral had, in fact, removed any indication of rank from the outside of his suit. The only identifying detail left was the Singularity’s ship patch. The Marines were supposed to be calling him by his callsign for this trip, since he was acting as their pilot and not advertising his rank. Frenchie and Valentina had no issue with that, since that was how they’d first come to know him, but Johnston was a little more rigid, which from a Marine, was a sign of respect.

  “Just wonderin’ what you’ll need from us at the rendezvous.”

  “I will need your eyes,” the Admiral told him. “Do not bother keeping track of the negotiations.” Likely, the negotiations would be split the same way his interrogation with Rowin had been. The Hydra would speak Hydrian, and he would reply in human standard. He and the Ambassador would understand each other just fine, but the Marines would only catch the half of the conversation that was in standard. “Study the Hydra for any sign of a threat,” with his focus on the negotiation, the Admiral might miss something. At their core, the Hydra were predators. Like a cat raising its hackles or a wolf baring its teeth, the Hydra had visible tells that would preempt an attack. It would be the Marines’ job to catch those tells while the Admiral kept his attention on the negotiation.

  “Aye, we can do that,” Johnston confirmed, stepping over a piece of wreckage protruding from the ground of mashed-together rubble.

  They kept going for a while in silence, allowing the pitter-patter of the rain to dominate. It was a novel sound for anyone who had been in space for any duration. In space, the plink-plink of fluid hitting a surface was indicative of a leak. It was strange how different environments determined if a noise was natural or unnatural. In all though, the Admiral did not mind the rain. He didn’t particularly enjoy feeling the dull impacts of the largest drops on his shoulders, but he was grateful to not have complete silence as they walked. He liked the quiet, just didn’t like silence, and without the rain, he suspected Azura would have been far too silent. No people. No traffic. No machinery. Only silence, except for the rain, where the drops streamed down his helmet visor like tears.

  And perhaps they were Azura’s tears.

  The tears of a world scarred by an irreparable cataclysm.

  Little left on this world would have been familiar to its inhabitants, save the universal constant. When trouble took hold, it happened in the blink of an eye. Valentina, leading the party, and sweeping the horizon with her rifle passed onto a section of material that looked rusty – a rarity on a water world where everything had been treated for contact with seawater. She tested it cautious step by cautious step, looking for flexing, but the material did not so much as creak. She moved on, and Havermeyer followed, testing it for his weight. He moved gently, quietly, as they had done for everything in this wasteland, not wanting to disrupt more than they had to. He took one step, another, and then he was gone.

  The ground beneath Havermeyer caved with the screech of a tin can being sheared open, and he plummeted. Everyone else hit the ground as if on thin ice, trying to distribute their weight, but the hole widened, at first only a few feet across, then tore into a crevasse, and there, on its second layer, the Admiral caught a glimpse of a rubbery gray suit with a slight oily sheen. It was Havermeyer, sprawled across the round white surface of a floating pylon. Caught and crushed up into the rim of compressed wreckage created by the orbital bombardment, the pylon lay twenty feet below them, now tearing free and tilting to dump everything upon it, including Havermeyer, into the frothing waves below. “Ensign,” the Admiral called, “mag-anchor!” All their environmental suits still had them on the belt, and it could keep them from falling here just as much as it kept them from drifting off into the void.

  But Havermeyer was slow, dazed from the fall. He stirred as he felt himself began to slide, trying to shove his boots into the ground below him. But that wouldn’t work, it could never work, because the engineered plastic of the buoy was not magnetic.

  So the Admiral flung his mag anchor down and dove. He flung himself down into the abyss before he could have the realization that catching a panicked comrade in gravity was going to be a lot harder than doing it in zero-G. But it was too late by then. He hit the upper surface of the buoy a moment later and began to tumble down its steep surface as Havermeyer reached its bottom, clawing for traction.

  The Admiral crashed him a moment later, taking them both over the edge as he wrapped his arms around Havermeyer’s torso and grabbed onto the monk’s utility belt. They fell for what felt like an eternity, and then the line on the Admiral’s mag-anchor ran out jerked his fall to an abrupt end. He tried to hold on to Havermeyer, but Havermeyer was bigger and heavier, and the smooth rubbery skin of his suit was slicked with rainwater. It slipped from his grasp like a bar of soap in the shower, just jumping free no matter how tight he tried to grip it, and then all that was left was the hold he had on Havermeyer’s belt, and he clenched down with all his might, unable to silence his cry as Havermeyer’s entire body weight yanked down on to his left hand, crushing it in the loop of the belt he’d managed to wrap around.

  But Havermeyer’s fall stopped. It jerked him to a halt just long enough for him to realize he’d been caught, and for him to wrap his own hands up around that lifeline in any form it took. He clamped down onto the Admiral’s arm like a vice, and Admiral Gives bit back another cry of pain as his wounded arm and hand were crushed, the still-healing burns cracking open once more. Each split on the scabs became a molten river of fiery pain, but he couldn’t hold Havermeyer like that. Not long enough to give instructions, so he clenched his left hand and its fistful of Havermeyer’s belt with everything he had, and grabbed the mag-anchor off Havermeyer’s belt with his right hand. He fumbled to attach it to his line, and managed just an instant before his injured hand gave out. Havermeyer’s belt tore free of his grip, and Havermeyer himself tried to hang on, but fell, finding no purchase on the slick rubber of the Admiral’s suit sleeve.

  Havermeyer fell another forty feet, screaming, as the Admiral focused again on the sounds of his helmet radio. But then, forty feet below, the line of Havermeyer’s mag-anchor ran out and jolted him to a stop, jerking the Admiral around where he sat, further up on the line, Havermeyer’s cable digging into his hip. But slowly, the bouncing stopped, and they both came to hang there, swaying gently in the breeze.

  A moment later, the massive bulk of Corporal Johnston peered over the edge of the crevasse, the short form of Cadet Frenchie at his side. “Suh?”

  The sound of Johnston’s slow drawl brought the Admiral’s attention to how heavily he was breathing. Exertion, residual nerves and the burning pain for his injured hand mushed together into a heavy pant. Rather than speak through it, the Admiral waved his still good hand.

  Frenchie spotted him, then spotted the bulk of another suit swinging pendulously below. “Holy shit, Stonewall. You actually caught him. Monkie, you alive?”

  “Yes, I think so,” came the breathless response. In the helmet radio, it sounded nearby, but it truly came from far below.

  Frenchie pointed out the Admiral’s location to Johnston, and the big Marine focused. “How can we help, suh?”

  The Admiral purposefully steadied his voice, “A hand getting back up would not be amiss, Corporal.” With his injured hand, climbing up would be difficult, now impossible with Havermeyer’s weight also on the line.

  “Yes, suh,” Johnston said, then stepped back out of sight. A moment later he began to pull on the line, hand over hand. He was more than strong enough to lift the Admiral and Havermeyer. Hailing from a world with gravity much heavier than Azura’s, Johnston possessed incredible strength when compared with other humans.

  As the line bounced and bobbed, unevenly pulled up and secured by Johnston, Admiral Gives had no choice but to sit there. The utility belt of his suit dug unevenly into his back. It was perfectly capable of suspending his weight, but not meant to be comfortable. Mag-anchors were rated for far more than his and Havermeyer’s weight under this gravity. They were designed to hold large cargo containers under heavy acceleration.

  Though uncomfortable, being hauled upward was good for one thing. It allowed the Admiral time to study his surroundings. There were layers of the colonial city that were not visible from above. It extended much further than he realized. He had expected sewers, drainage, maybe utility lines and junctions. Those were surely present, but there were entire buildings here, built below the surface of the city streets. It made sense. On a water world like Azura, the area where the colony could build was limited by the footprint of the piers and floating discs. In place of building outward, they would need to build up, or down. As he limply hung, with little choice but to be pulled upward, Admiral Gives could see into the structures that had been here. There were abandoned cubicles, with lamps, desks, and computers, and then there were apartments furnished by what had been in style half a century ago. The crevasse carved through all of it, sectioning it for view like the sample of an ant hill, but yet, through all of it, there were no people. Not even bodies. Evidence of them was everywhere, but there were bodies, no remains, and perhaps that was the most disturbing of all.

  As Johnston hauled him up over the rusty lip of the surface, the Admiral was careful to mind his suit, presenting the jagged edge with the hard material of the armor he’d layered over the suit’s rubbery exterior. Though it looked sharp, the edge of the of the hole simply flaked away a bit more on contact. Once up, over and onto solid ground, the Admiral pulled himself a safe distance from the hole and sat to continue catching his breath as he cradled his injured hand.

  Corporal Johnston stood near the mag-anchor Admiral Gives had thrown down, continuing to haul in the line, faster now that Havermeyer was the only weight upon it. Frenchie had taken over the watch on the Hydra, not yet up to his usual antics, and Valentina was keeping a close eye on their surroundings. Here, on the inner rim, formed of compressed rubble, they had good visibility. Any standing structures had been blown away, leaving the area flat.

  Johnston pulled Havermeyer up like it was the easiest thing in the world and a minute later Havermeyer clambered up and crawled safely away from the edge and then collapsed to his knees. Wordlessly, Johnston reached down and disengaged the mag-anchor, then rewound the line. He disconnected it from Havermeyer’s belt, and brought it back to the Admiral.

  “Hell of a job, Stonewall.”

  By that you mean, complete lunacy. Jumping after Havermeyer had been idiocy. Admiral Gives hadn’t considered it in the moment, but leaping off the edge with only Azura’s churning seas below had been reckless. No one would outwardly call it stupid since he’d saved Havermeyer in doing so, but it had been stupid. And his hand, by the stars, it hurt. Admiral Gives clamped his other hand onto his left wrist, just trying to stop the painful convulses.

  Johnston noticed. “You alright, suh?” he asked.

  Peachy. The Admiral withheld a pained grunt, keeping his voice very carefully steady. “It’s useable.” His left hand hurt, twitching with violent tremors, but he could still clench and unclench his fist, and reliably move all his fingers. It functioned, though it was far from ideal.

  Johnston made no further comment. There was nothing to say. As long as the hand worked well enough to fly them out, that was all that mattered. They could offer no treatment on Azura.

  Havermeyer arranged himself to bow low and long to the crater in the center of colony, to the hold that had nearly plunged him to his death. He held his faceplate to the ground for a long moment, uttering solemn ritual words his helmet mic only caught part of. Then he pulled himself to his feet and laid a heavy, meaningful hand on the Admiral’s shoulder. “Thank you.”

  Admiral Gives shrugged the hand off and leaned away, discouraging Havermeyer from replacing it. The monk still tried, not finished with whatever blessings his faith required in such a situation, but Johnston gently swatted the monk’s hand away, subtly shaking his head.

  Havermeyer recognized his mistake after a moment, and bowed deeply instead, a gesture of gratitude that didn’t require physical contact. “You saved my life.”

  “And you lost your rifle,” the Admiral replied stoically.

  Havermeyer reached down to pat his sides, then up to his shoulder to look for the rifle strap. Each of the away team had been carrying one, except Johnston, who favored a fortification turret as his primary weapon. The rifles, standard issue for the Marines, were a long, heavy weapon that could be set to fire in automatic or semi-automatic. On other assignments, only the Marines might have carried them, but with the Hydra on Azura, everyone had been carrying one. The Admiral’s lay somewhat haphazardly at his side, the safety on.

  After a moment of checking himself over, the monk turned to look back at the hole that had nearly swallowed him. “The strap must have slipped off when I fell.”

  Not soon enough. The Admiral could still feel a bruise from its metal frame getting crushed between them. It ached, but his hand hurt worse than anything. “Here,” he said, slipping the strap of his rifle up over his helmet. “Try not to lose this one.”

  “Sir,” Havermeyer started to protest. If anyone should be going without a rifle, it should be him, having lost his.

  Admiral Gives forced himself back to his feet, and shoved the rifle into Havermeyer’s hands with finality. “I am a better shot with a sidearm.” That was true on a normal day. He was much more practiced with a pistol than a rifle, and it that was doubly true today. With his left hand seizing up at random intervals, he’d have better control with a pistol, since it could be wielded effectively with his one good hand. “We need to keep moving.” They were on the clock. Pointedly, he moved back into position beside Johnston as the big Marine took custody of the prisoner once again.

  The Hydra had been quiet since landing here, the rain helping renew the waxy finish of its hide. But now it watched the Admiral with measured interest, slitted eyes blinking slowly. “You are a strange Shipmaster, nearly sacrificing yourself for a drone.”

  There was a not-so-brief moment in which the Admiral contemplated shoving the Hydra down the crevasse. Its kin could find it splattered onto the ruin below, a convenient little accident, and he could turn around and go home. Instead, he muted his radio and spoke to the Hydra directly through the speakers on his helmet, “It is only a sacrifice if you lose something.” He hadn’t died, wasn’t injured in any new or meaningful way, and unlike Havermeyer, hadn’t even lost a piece of his kit.

  Admiral Gives offered nothing more to the Hydra, and focused again on the path ahead of them. The rendezvous was less than a mile out now.