"Lamprey is in airlock and is functioning," Tekla said, and closed the hatch. Dinah had some ambivalent feelings about Tekla, but there was no one she’d rather work with in a case like this. She was all business; she got the job done without useless conversation or touch-feely stuff. Dinah closed the Flivver’s hatch and began going through the undocking sequence while Ivy, strapped into the vehicle’s pilot seat, ran down the preexcursion checklist. Befitting a craft that had been designed in a hurry to be Flexible and Light, this wasn’t that lengthy, and so Flivver 3—one of a fleet of eight—was under way before Markus’s 704 seconds of silence had quite expired. Dinah strapped into a jump seat beside Ivy’s. The Flivver’s front end dome consisted largely of windows, bolstered by a sturdy web of curved aluminum struts, so from behind Ivy looked like a bombardier seated in the glass nose of a World War II bomber. She touched the controls and made the craft rotate in a way that caused Earth to pass beneath them, and then the resemblance became stronger. Dinah was reminded of a painting Rufus had shown her, depicting a bomber flying over a burning city, red light flooding into the plane from below. The same effect held now, save that the firestorm covered most of the surface of the Earth.