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directly into his cerebral cortex via the navigation interface. It was like riding the rapture, only this was no hallucination. As the lander dissolved around him, his mind projected on waves of sensor energy, the notion of reality was a constant; it was just a hyperreality, with himself at its absolute center. He was part of Mars, and Mars was part of him.
    Refined intensity, he thought. It’s been a while.
    “Target intercept in two minutes,” Pitch said. “You got something special in mind, Commander, or are you just getting off back there?”
    “Can I help it if I love my work?” Nathan asked. He was only half-conscious of Pitch and Kellean, their voices distant and digitized. The human brain wasn’t very efficient at partitioning awareness, but with some effort Nathan managed to task enough of himself out to stay connected to them. “Our best shot is to make a single overhead pass at close range. I’ll do a general sweep and see if we can find anything that shouldn’t be here.”
    Kellean turned back toward him, studying his face through the imaging mist. Bathed in colors and shapes, Nathan felt like part of the construct.
    “What if that doesn’t work?” she asked.
    “Either way,” Nathan said, “we go in.”
    They continued the rest of the way in silence. Pitch took them down as the mountain rose to meet them, until the frozen lava flows that formed the shield volcano passed a scant hundred meters below. At the same time, Nathan reached out with the lander’s sensors, hoping to find a trace of the signals he detected earlier.
    Come on, he thought. Don’t be shy.
    A full minute passed. Nothing revealed itself. Nathan filtered ambient noise from the construct, laying Olympus bare of everything except neural impulses—but all he found was the weak output of their own nervous systems, stray electrochemical discharges like St. Elmo’s fire.
    Then the bottom dropped out, and they were suspended in space once again.
    The caldera opened up, sheer rock walls dropping over three thousand meters straight down. Within, a complex series of craters—formed long ago when the summit collapsed into empty magma chambers—radiated outward in irregular circles, intersecting one another to form a network of primordial violence. Fault lines spidered across the base of the pit, a latticework of striations that marked the edges of vast tectonic plates. For a moment, Nathan imagined what it must have been like when the mountain was alive, this cauldron full of boiling lava and plumes of ash. Perhaps this had once been hell, and mankind had just forgotten.
    “Conducting broad sweep,” he reported, and opened the aperture of the ship’s sensors to the widest possible field. Nathan saw everything and nothing all at once, the readings a confused chorus of radiation, gas, and chemical compositions. The construct sorted it all out, rendering the most detailed model of Olympus Mons ever created—but nothing pointed him toward that one, inscrutable signal.
    “Passing midpoint,” Pitch said.
    Kellean stared deep into the crater.
    “Commander?” she asked.
    “Working on it,” he started to say, but stopped abruptly. It wasn’t anything he saw —just a vague impression, like the memory of a dream. There was a subtle shift, somewhere, as if a tiny detail in the construct had rearranged itself. Nathan held still long enough to rule out his imagination, until a fragmentary blip appeared near the east wall of the crater.
    Gotcha.
    Nathan jumped on the precise location. “Hard turn, course zero-seven-nine,” he ordered the pilot, and felt the ship roll over as Pitch responded to his command. “I’m feeding you coordinates now.”
    Pitch studied the bitstream on his flight monitor, and watched it assemble into the image of a sheer rock face. The target area was near the base of the crater, marked with a blinking red dot. “Got it,” he reported back. “Any idea what the hell that is?”
    Nathan could barely answer. The