Captain Radford snorted mildly. "You'll get used to it," he said. "I think you'll find you've got bigger problems down there than lack of decent scenery."

"No doubt," Meredith conceded. Radford had been ferrying workers and equipment back and forth for nearly a year now and undoubtedly knew more about the place than Meredith, who'd spent that same period up to his zygomatic arch in organizational details for the permanent colony. "Are we anywhere near the settlement? My map-reading courses never included looking at the terrain from this height."

"We're just coming up on it now." Radford indicated the western edge of the continent below. "You see that sort of four-fingered bay, with the big island just off it? That's the place. Right near the mineral deposits, with several feeding rivers for fresh water and the sheltered areas of the bay for fish breeding. The main military base and landing facilities are on the island; the towns are on the bay or within a dozen kilometers of it."

"Um." Meredith's eyes traced the line of mountains arcing into the bay from the southeast, shifted to a solitary shadow fifty kilometers or so due east of the settlement. "What about that volcano?"

"You mean Olympus? No sweat—the thing's been dormant for centuries."

"Yes, that's what the preliminary report said. Anybody done a more careful check of it since then?"

"I don't know. You've got your own geologists, though, don't you? I'm sure they can put your mind at ease."

Meredith pursed his lips momentarily at the other's faintly patronizing tone. A lot of the colonel's colleagues thought him overly cautious on the subject of volcanoes… but then, none of them had seen firsthand the aftermath of the '88

Izalco eruption that had killed four hundred people in El Salvador. "I'm sure they can," he told Radford evenly. "All right. How soon can we launch shuttles and start getting this crowd down?"