Willis Corto, Colonel, had plummeted through a blind spot in the Russian defenses over Kirensk. The shuttles had created the hole with pulse bombs, and Corto’s team had dropped in in Nightwing microlights, their wings snapping taut in moonlight, reflected in jags of silver along the rivers Angara and Podhamennaya, the last light Corto would see for fifteen months. Case tried to imagine the microlights blossoming out of their launch capsules, high above a frozen steppe.