I tried to look around. During the last three days, I’d fantasized that the view would be fantastic. Inspiring. I’d be able to see the other rockets going up: two hundred of them, all arcing up and east on roughly parallel courses. But the suit had more air bags inside of it than Jesry had let on, and all of them had been pumped up to maximal inflation (meaning: I was lying on a bed of rocks), locking my head and torso into the attitude deemed least likely to end in death, paralysis, or organ failure. My spleen could rest easy; my eyes could see nothing but a starfield, and a bit of Arbre’s glowing blue atmosphere down in the lower right. Those grew blurry as my eyes began to water, and the eyeballs themselves were mashed out of shape by their own weight, like Arsibalt sitting on a water balloon…

I was falling. I was hung over. I was not dead. My suit was talking to me. Had been for a bit. “Issue the ‘Restraint Depressurize’ command to deflate the restraint system and to commence the next stage of the operation,” suggested a voice in Orth, over and over: some suur with good enunciation who’d been drafted to read canned messages into a recording device. I wanted to meet her.

“Ruzzin duzzle,” I said, thinking that this would impress her.

The suit drew breath, then said, “Issue the ‘Restraint Depressurize’ command to—”

“Rustin Deplo!” I insisted. She was beginning to get on my nerves. Maybe I didn’t want to meet her after all.

“Issue the ‘Restraint—’”

“Restirraynt. Dee. Press. Your. Eyes.”

The bags deflated. “Welcome to Low Arbre Orbit!” said the voice, in an altogether different tone.

My head and torso were now free to move about the HTU, but my arms and legs were still taped and foamed. I got busy with that box cutter. It was slow going at first, but soon hunks of foam and snarls of tape were flying out of the monyafeek, drifting away, keeping station in my general vicinity. Eventually, because of their low mass and high drag, they’d re-enter and burn up. Until then, they’d make a lot of visual clutter to confuse the Geometers.

Speaking of clutter, I was beginning to see brilliant specks of light around me. There were two kinds: millions of tiny sparkles (strips of chaff sent up on other missiles) and dozens of large, steady beacons. Some of the latter were near enough that my eyeballs—gradually resuming their former shape—could resolve them as disks, or moons. Depending on where they, I, and the sun were situated, some looked like full moons, some like new ones, others somewhere in between.

There was a half moon off to my right, steadily getting larger as my orbit and it converged. It was a metallized poly balloon five hundred feet across, sent up in the same missile-barrage as I. By measuring its apparent size against the reticle on my face mask, I was able to estimate its distance: about two miles. This must be the one I was supposed to make for.

Feeling around inside the arm-stumps, I got my left hand on the trackball and my right on the stick. They were dead until I uttered another voice command, and confirmed it by flicking a switch. This brought the monyafeek’s thrusters under my control. Up to now, the built-in guidance system had been managing them. And, assuming that the nearby balloon was the one that I was supposed to be aiming for, it seemed to have done a respectable job. But it had no eyes, no brain by which it could home in on the balloon. And as long as the Geometers kept jamming our nav satellites, it could only get me so close. From here on, my eyes would have to be the sensors and my brain the guidance system. I gave the trackball the tiniest rotation, just to verify that the system was working, and the thrusters spat blue light and spun me around to a new attitude. I got my bearings, squared Arbre’s horizon below me, figured out which way was southeast (the direction of my orbital travel), made a mental calculation, thought about it one more time for good measure, and gave the joycetick a shot in two directions. The monyafeek hit me with a one-two punch. Other than that, nothing terrible happened, and I liked what the balloon was now doing in my visual field, so I was tempted to repeat. But I thought better of it. That was how we’d frequently got into trouble in the video game: by doing too much of the right thing.

I had a long-distance wireless transceiver, for use only in emergencies. I left it switched off. When the balloon was close enough for the short-range system to work, I said “Reticule scan,” and a few moments later the suit came back with “Network joined,” drowned out by Sammann’s voice: “How was that for a ride?”

“I want my money back,” I said, and suppressed a feeling of wild joy that came over me on hearing his—anyone’s—voice. Glancing down at a display below my face mask (actually, projected into my eyeballs so that it looked that way), I saw ikons for myself, Sammann, and Fraa Gratho. But as I was looking, Esma’s face and then Jules’s were tacked on. I looked around to see two other monyafeeks converging on us. They were flying in improbably close formation. Actually, one of them—Esma—was towing the other. “I grappled Jules. He was drifting,” Esma said. Fortunately, I had grown accustomed to the Valers’ habit of modest understatement. I’d only just managed to get here alone. In the same time, Esma had tracked someone else, maneuvered to snag him, and brought him home.

“Jules? What’s up? You okay? Is this what passes for a joke on Laterre?” Sammann asked.

“I locked him out of the reticule,” Esma said. “He was speaking incoherently of cheese.”

“Twenty minutes to line of sight,” said an automated voice—referring to the time when the Daban Urnud would be able to see us. The balloon now was huge in my vision, and I could see Sammann hovering to one side of it in his monyafeek, Gratho in his about fifty feet away. Both looked strangely colorful and fuzzy, like toddlers’ toys. The monyafeeks, and the other, non-human payloads that had been sent up at the same time, were surrounded by unruly clouds of fibrous netting that had been crammed into sealed capsules for the ride up, but that had popped open once we’d hit orbit, and expanded to ten times their former volume. We looked like drifting red pompoms.

“You guys performed the star check?” I asked.

“Yes,” said Gratho, “but I invite you to verify our results.”

I used the trackball to nudge myself around until I could see the vaguely circular constellation that outlined the Hoplite’s shield, and compared its position to those of Arbre and of the balloon. This was a simple way of assuring that when our orbit took us around to where telescopes on the Daban Urnud might be able to see us, the balloon would be between us and them.

By now, the Geometers must know that something big was afoot. We had timed it, though, in such a way that Arbre had blocked their view of the two-hundred-missile launch. That was soon to change. Our orbit was almost perfectly circular—its eccentricity, a measure of how unround it was, was only 0.001—and it skimmed just above the atmosphere, at an altitude of a hundred miles. It took us around Arbre once every hour and a half. The Daban Urnud’s orbit was more elliptical, and its altitude ranged between fourteen and twenty-five thousand miles. It took ten times as long—about fifteen hours—to make one revolution. Imagine two runners circling a pond, one staying so close to the shore that his feet got wet, the other maintaining a distance of half a mile. The one on the inside would lap the one on the outside ten times for every circuit made by the other. Whenever we were lapping the Daban Urnud, they could look down and see us against the backdrop of Arbre. Soon, though, we would scoot around behind the planet and be lost to their view for anywhere from forty-five minutes to an hour. We had launched during one of those intervals of privacy; now it was halfway over.