Hed passed through this place once before. Louis looked up, knowing what to expect.

Five or six miles up, he thought. The Map of Mars stood forty miles high. This level would be near the roof. Louis could make out its contours. Think of it as the back of a mask… the mask of a shield volcano the size of Ceres.

Needle had smashed down through the crater in Mons Olympus, into the repair center that underlay the one-to-one scale Map of Mars. Teela Brown had trapped them there after she turned protector. She had moved the ship eight hundred miles through these corridors, then poured molten rock around them. Theyd used stepping disks — the puppeteers instant transport system — to reach Teela. For all these years since, the ship had been trapped.

Now Tunesmith had brought it back to the workstation under Mons Olympus.

Louis knew Tunesmith, but not well. Louis had set a trap for Tunesmith, the Night Person, the breeder, and Tunesmith had become a protector. Hed watched Tunesmith fight Bram; and that was about all he knew of Tunesmith the protector. Now Tunesmith held Louiss life in his hands, and it was Louiss own doing.

Hed be smarter than Louis. Trying to outguess a protector was… futz… was both silly and inevitable. No human culture has ever stopped trying to outguess God.

So. Needle was an interstellar spacecraft, if someone could remount the hyperdrive. That tremendous tilted tower — forty miles of it if it reached all the way to the Repair Center floor — was a linear accelerator, a launching system. One day Tunesmith might need a spacecraft. Meanwhile hed leave Needle gutted, because Louis Wu and the Hindmost might otherwise use it to run, and the protector couldnt have that.