The wind rose and fell in squalls, carrying sea spray and spatters of raindrops from the overcast sky. Taya gripped the rail with one hand and pulled the hood of her overjacket closer around her face. A mile behind the boat, crumbling ice cliffs brooded over waves tossing restlessly beneath banks of mist. The snowfield above the ice cliffs rose in smooth slopes and ridges toward the outcrops of the distant coastal range. Ahead, beyond the mouth of the bay, several smaller islands of the polar archipelago lay amid gray water flecked with floating ice and occasional larger bergs. The offshore platform, known simply as the "Rig," stood closer in, on a bank forming an underwater continuation of the headland.

The boat was known as a caloosh--a converted war galley stripped of its masts, sails, and benches for rowers, with a strengthened hull and plasma-electric propulsion system devised by Engineer. Taya stood on the raised prow, forgoing shelter to study the Rig better as they approached. With her were Spak, Engineer's local supervisor of operations, wrapped Azurean-style in a long coat of sealskin with fur trim, and Vaysi, wearing an orange one-piece thermsuit. Nyelise had stayed in the warmth of the aft cabin with its plastic-sheeted windows, in the company of the two Azureans and Kort. Although Kort's current body was ornamented in the same style of silver and blue points as the original, like the other mec-minds, he had taken to wearing clothes in Azure's more variable and extreme conditions. They protected against dust and abrasion, and were easily to clean and replace. Currently he was in a tan boiler suit with plastic boots to keep the salt water out of his joints.

Taya and Kort, along with Nyelise and Vaysi, had flown overnight from Aranos to "Icebowl," the arctic scientific base set up a year previously in a basin on the reverse side of a ridge about a mile inland from the cliff line. By local time it was mid-morning, although at that time of year darkness lasted little more than two hours. They had lunched with Spak and several others of the staff, who had updated them on the current state of the work. Afterward, two power sleds had brought them to the pontoon shore station beyond the cliffs, where a boat was waiting to take them out to the Rig.

The Rig had the approximate shape of a truncated pyramid. Three steel piers, braced by girders and cross-ties, converged upward from the water to support the main platform fifty feet or so above the surface, which projected on one side to provide a landing pad for short-range flyers, of which Icebowl boasted a permanent complement of two. One, however, was undergoing maintenance and the other away ferrying supplies to an outpost on the ice sheet, which was why the visitors were coming out by boat. The main platform carried the superstructure, below which a central column containing twin elevator shafts, ventilation pipes, and supply lines descended to the lower workings on the seabed. On the far side from the approaching boat, four tethered barges lay below hoppers that discharged the rock and debris brought up from the excavations.

"It's bigger than I expected," Taya commented as the boat neared the floating dock attached to one of the piers, with stairs and a hoist connecting to the levels above. "Those legs look thick enough to shore up a mountain."

"The seas here can get pretty heavy, especially in winter," Spak said.

The materials and components for constructing the base and its offshore extension had been supplied by extraction and fabrication plants that machine intelligences linked to Merkon had established at various places around Azure. So far there were only a few dozen of them, and their output was never enough to satisfy the demands of all the activities that had come into being. The last twenty years had been a time of ceaseless invention and discovery. The machines had had no knowledge, nor even any concept, of mining raw materials and refining metals out of ores; indeed, before Merkon's arrival at Azure, they hadn't even known what a rock was. In many ways they had learned as much from the natives as the Azureans had from them. Progressing from those beginnings to the development of planet-based methods to shape steel and other alloys into forms like those used in the construction of the Rig, or make parts such as those that the motors driving the boat were assembled from, had taken most of that time.