A ballistic flyer sets down on Arachna’s windy altiplano. Trixia Bonsol and Major Victory Lighthill begin a reverent, low-intensity search near a hillside where Sherkaner Underhill may have left a craft. With snow too scattered to hold prints and logs corrupted, Victory suspects Sherkaner wandered after catastrophe, “Wanderdeep” yet rational at the end.

As they climb and peer into shadows, Trixia reflects on her Focus years and bond with Sherkaner, contrasting the dreamlike certainty of translation with the real losses it enabled. Victory explains recent surveys: Sherkaner is not on the surface and may have fallen into a shallow hole, likely fatal. Yet new sonograms under ruined Southmost reveal fractured rock overlaying surviving superdeep voids, nurturing hope that General Victory and Hrunkner might still live.

They discuss the danger of digging now and imagine future rescue through improved methods, even cavorite-balanced tunneling. Pausing to rest, they watch the southern sky glow over vast cavorite mines and antigrav freighters rising—technology that is transforming local spaceflight despite the system’s poverty.

Victory’s composure slips. She has carried her parents’ Great Lurk to success but bears doubts and grief. She notes Rachner Thract, feeling betrayed, has left the King’s Service to join Jirlib and Didi with the Qeng Ho at L1. Defensively, Victory insists her mother was a good general; secrecy around the counterlurk was necessary but corrosive, since a single slip could have doomed them all.

Weeping, Victory hopes her mother finally confided the counterlurk to Hrunkner, their steadfast friend who disapproved yet remained loyal. Trixia comforts her as OnOff brightens the frozen landscape. They depart with no trace of Sherkaner found, but with renewed resolve and a fragile hope of someday reaching the superdeeps beneath Southmost.