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“Copy,” said Stopa, who was at the controls. “I’m going from glide to hover mode now.”

“Seven hundred. Six hundred. Five fifty—”

Several small shield doors on the rover’s fuselage and delta wings slid open, revealing vector nozzles for the thrustjets. With the rover’s nose stall-high and the nozzles perpendicular to the wings, the little ship quickly lost its forward velocity and began to settle.

Josala was peering out the starboard cockpit viewpane, studying the ground below them. The steep inner slope of the southwest range wore a smooth blanket of snow, but the surface of the glacier itself was a field of jagged ice blocks, some as large as the rover itself.

“It looked a lot smoother on the SSR display,” Josala said.

“The rover can cope with a forty-degree terrain tilt. We’ll be all right.”

“It’s going to be like drilling through rock.”

“But ice won’t wear the bits like rock does,” said Stopa. “We’ll get through.”

“Two hundred twenty,” the pilot was saying into Stopa’s headset. “Ease her a hair to port.”

“Copy,” Stopa said. “Krenn, we have to at least give it a try—”

Just then a cloud of swirling white particles billowed up around the rover from below, closing in around the cockpit viewpanes and cutting visibility nearly to zero.

“It’s our downblast,” Stopa said quickly. He raised the control handle, and the rover climbed nimbly out of the cloud, which immediately began to dissipate beneath them. “Not a problem.”

“One fifty.”

“You can’t land us in a whiteout,” said Josala. “If you set us down on the edge of one of those ice boulders, we’ll flip over before the strut levelers can do anything.”

“Ninety-five.”

“I’ll just hover at ten meters until the thrusters blow the site clear of loose material,” Stopa said confidently. “If I can’t get definition on the undercarriage holo, I won’t try to land. All right?”

“All right,” Josala said with a sigh.

“Sixty,” the pilot said. “Ease off, or you’re going to overrun the site.”

Stopa tapped the air brakes lightly and pulled back on the control handle slightly. As the rover settled toward the glacier, it was once again engulfed in a billow of jet-driven snow. But before long, the swirling cloud began to thin, and the horizon returned.

“Twenty-five.”

Josala peered forward. “I can’t judge distances without a referent. That big slab of ice—”

He patted her arm. “It’s bigger and farther away than you think.”

“Ten. Eight. Five. Easy—”

“Take me to plus-sixteen. I want to put the rover’s tail right down on top of it.”

“It’s under you now. Plus-six. Plus-nine. Plus-fourteen—”

Stopa pushed the control handle sharply down, and the rover dropped hard and shook from the impact, nose tilted down and sliding sideways. It came to a stop with another small jolt, then slowly came to level.

“There,” he said, switching quickly among the undercarriage scanners and studying the display.

Those closest to the thrusters were frozen over with steam ice, but the forward and aft scanners were clear. The front landing strut seemed to be wedged in a small crevasse, though no damage was evident. Aft, the body of the rover was sitting comfortably above the ice.

“That wasn’t half bad,” he said with a grin, setting the systems to STANDBY.

“Let’s just get it done,” Josala said crossly.

One behind the other, they made their way through the crawlspace over the orbital engine compartment to the crowded gear bay. There they helped each other into their improvised snow gear—the ferret’s sole emergency spacesuit for her, a standard digger’s isolation suit for him, augmented by the ferret pilot’s spacesuit glove liners.

Neither of them was prepared for the blinding dazzle of the glacier when the gear bay doors swung open. The sky was clear, and the blue-white sun lit the landscape with cold crystal fire as hard to look at as the sun itself. Josala’s viewplate adjusted for it, but Stopa had to avert his eyes and squint to keep from being overwhelmed.

“Spectacular!” Stopa exulted.

“Sightsee when we’re finished,” Josala chided.

Everything took longer than it should have.