For another second, she just stared at the torch in her hands. Then she lifted it high and started leading the way down.

A hundred meters on, we came to the first rockfall. Part of the ceiling had given way, dumping a load of stone and soil. The wreckage had been shoved off to the sides of the tunnel, leaving a clear trail down the middle.

I slopped long enough to nudge a chunk of debris with my foot. Any girl brought up in Sallysweet River develops a canny feel for stone. Fleck by fleck, this looked like granite… but overall its texture was too regular, with none of the wrinkles you find in honest-to-igneous rock. My gut said it was artificial — poured like concrete, then flash-hardened.

Strange, when you thought about it. If this was a mine, why line the walls with synthetic rock? Shouldn’t mines have rock of their own? Then again, the bedrock here must lie a lot deeper than in the Great St. Caspian shield… so this part of the tunnel might need to be shored up with extra support till it got down into solid stone.

Could be. But it sounded a lot like rationalization.

There were more rockfalls as we went along, some several meters long, some only a litter of stones. Each lime, a path had been cleared so we could pass through prance-easy: the work of Maya and Iranu, or more likely, their robots. Here and there, they’d propped support poles from floor to ceiling to shore up parts of the roof: places where the pseudo-granite showed thready black cracks of strain.

I’d never seen any such cracking in the abandoned mines around Sallysweet River. Then again, Great St. Caspian had bugger-all in the way of earthquakes. I didn’t know much about Mummichog specifically, but the whole Argentia continent had a reputation for being seismically active, so no surprise this particular mine suffered the occasional crumble.

At length we came to an area where the slant of the tunnel flattened to a wide room, much like the one up north where we found Kowkow Iranu. Rusty lumps sat scattered about the floor like dog turds — just left lying, though you’d think archaeologists would scrape up the stuff as valuable artifacts. At the very least, Maya should have chalked measurement lines on the floor. But no. Nary a sign she’d paid attention to this junk at all.

"Look there," Festina said in a low voice, pointing the torch-wand toward the far end of the room.

Another tunnel collapse — this one taking out part of the wall. Beyond was another room, dark, too far for the torch-light to reach. I couldn’t help noticing there was no visible door between that room and ours. If the wall hadn’t fallen in, there’d be no way through.

Queer thing, that.

I Festina walked toward the wall-breach. Debris had been cleared here too, leaving a gap you could walk through. Festina pulled up in front of it. "Stop," she yelled into the next room, "you’re making me allergic."

"You saw something?" I asked.

"No. But why take dumb chances?"

She poked the end of the torch-wand through the breach. A trio of androids stood on the other side, jelly guns raised.

Like lightning, Festina dropped the wand, dived sideways, jigged the moment she hit the floor, and rolled to her feet, weaving like a kickboxer in full defense mode: guard up, chin down, body loose. My own reaction wasn’t half so dramatic — I just jumped to the side, out of the line of fire from the hole.

Waiting. The torch-wand rolled along the ground, shadows shifting in response… till the wand ran up against a chunk of stone, rocked back, lay still.

Nothing from the robots.

Slowly I let out my breath. "Good call with that ‘allergic’ thing," I told Festina.

She let her fists relax. "Yeah," she agreed, lifting her hand to her cheek. "A faceful of acid would ruin my complexion."

"Don’t obsess — there’s nothing wrong with your cheek that couldn’t be solved with a nice hard kiss." It felt good to say that out loud. I bent and picked up the light. "Now let’s see what’s next door."

The androids had shut down, just like the ones near Sallysweet River: standing there stock-still, frozen in the blink before firing. We slithered past them, avoiding the tiniest touch for fear they’d wake again.

Beyond the robots? More robots… only these weren’t humanlike. Their bodies were fat ellipsoids, the shape and color of watermelons but almost as tall as me. They had no separate head, but the top of their watermelon torso was ringed with pits and niches that I guessed were for sensing — eyes going all the way round, 360 degrees, plus holes that might be ears or nostrils or breathing orifices. They had thinnish legs, bony and tough like an ostrich’s. As for arms: three pairs each, spindly, insectish, covered with coarse hairs that might have been sensors or bristly protection.

How did I know they were robots? There were four of the beasties within reach of the light, and all had patches where the epidermis was peeled away — flayed sections of arm, flaps cut into the torso, an entire leg where the skin had tattered. Beneath the exterior were metal flexors, armatures, ball bearings, fiber optics… eerily similar to what I’d seen in Pump Station 3, when jelly acid bared the androids’ innards.

I took a step toward the closest watermelon. Festina grabbed my arm full strength and yanked me back. "Don’t touch. Their natural skin chemicals are poisonous to humans. Nerve toxins."

"You know the species?"

She nodded. "They’re Greenstriders."

"Never heard of them," I said.

"The fleet made contact with their people a couple times. Not a friendly species — arrogant landgrabbers, dangerously greedy. Worse than humans, believe it or not. A few years back, the League of Peoples rescinded their certification of sentience: grounded every Greenstrider space vessel till they learn to play nicely with others."

"So what are these doing here?" I asked.

"They must have arrived before the League clamped down. At one time, the Greenstriders set up colonies all over this arm of the galaxy; but their settlements had a habit of fizzling out… which is a polite way to say they degenerated into civil war. Striders have a rabid territorial streak that they seldom bother to control."

"Are they a robot species?"

Festina shook her head. "They’re organic. These must be the Greenstrider equivalent of androids — robots built in their own image. How old did you say these mines are?"

"Three thousand Earth years."

"Then they could have been dug by Greenstriders. The striders were definitely active in this neighborhood back then."

"How sophisticated were they technically?" I asked. "Compared to us."

"Who knows?" Festina replied. "The striders don’t share confidences. We have no idea how advanced they are now, let alone three millennia ago. But they were a spacefaring race even back then, so they may have had some interesting goodies."

"And that’s what Maya and Iranu were looking for."

"Probably."

So: hypothesize a sequence of events. Yasbad Iranu, Kowkow’s father, discovered this place thirtyish years ago, back before the plague. His first thought — scour the mine for alien tech… and do it on the hush so our government didn’t interfere with the game. Unfortunately for him, Iranu senior wasn’t careful enough, and the feddies caught him smuggling. Away he went, first to jail, then booted off planet as persona non grata. He never found a way to sneak back.

Forward two decades: Iranu junior gets friendly with Maya Cuttack on some archaeological dig in the Free Republic. Kowkow shares the secret of his father’s discovery. He and Maya head for Demoth to resume dear old dad’s work… not just here in Mummichog but at Sallysweet River and other sites round the planet. When the Freeps begin trade talks with Demoth, Iranu wangles a place as aide to the negotiating team, probably by milking his family connections. Next thing you know, the treaty contains a clause that opens Demoth archaeological sites to Freep exploitation.