FOUR

Chapter 49

As the shuttle skimmed low over the surface of the frozen planet, it was the circle of the dead that first struck Abil.

Not that, in those first moments, he understood what he was seeing.

Captain Dower was piloting the shuttle herself, an effortless display of competence. The planet was far from any star, and the shuttle was a bubble, all but transparent, so that the hundred tars and their corporals flew as effortlessly as dreams over a plain of darkness. Below, Abil could see only the broad elliptical splashes of paleness picked out by the flitter’s spots. The ground was mostly featureless, save for the subtle texture of ripples in the ice — the last waves of a frozen ocean — and, here and there, the glistening sheen of nitrogen slicks. Dower had said the ocean of water ice had probably frozen out within a few years, after the Target had been ripped away from its parent sun by a chance stellar collision, and then the air rained out, and then snowed.

Abil looked into the sky. This sunless world was surrounded by a great sphere of stars, hard as shards of ice themselves. In one direction he could see the great stripe that was the Galaxy. It was quite unlike the pale band seen from Earth: from here it was a broad, vibrant, complex band of light, littered with hot young stars. The Third Expansion of humankind now sprawled across tens of thousands of light-years, and had penetrated the dust clouds that shielded much of the Galaxy’s true structure from Earth. When he looked back the other way, the fields of stars were unfamiliar. He wondered where Earth was — though surely Earth’s sun would be invisible from here.

Once, all of humanity and all of human history had been confined to a single rocky world, a pinpoint of dust lost in the sky. But since humankind had begun to move purposefully out from the home planet, twenty thousand years had shivered across the face of the Galaxy. And now, in the direction of home, every which way he looked he was seeing stars mapped and explored and colonized by humans. It was a sky full of people.

His heart swelled with pride.

Captain Dower called, “Heads up.”

Abil looked ahead. The spots splashed broad lanes across the ice, diminishing to paleness toward the horizon. But they cast enough light that Abil could see a mountain: a cone of black rock, its flanks striped by glaciers. All around it was a broad, low ridge, like a wall around a city. The diameter of the rim walls must have been many miles. There was some kind of striation on the plain of ice inside the rim wall, a series of lines that led back toward the central peak.

Dower turned. Her metallic Eyes glinted in the subtle interior lights of the shuttle. “That’s our destination. First impressions — you, Abil?”

Abil shrugged inside his skinsuit. “Could be an impact crater. The rim mountains, the central peak—”

“It isn’t big enough,” came a voice from the darkness. “I mean, a crater that size ought to be cup-shaped, like a scoop out of the ice. You only get rim mountains and splash-back central peaks with much larger craters. And anyhow I haven’t seen any other craters here. This planet is a sunless rogue. Impacts must be rare, if you wander around in interstellar space.”

That had been Denh. She was in Abil’s unit, and Abil needed to get back in the loop.

“So,” he said, “what do you think it is, smart-ass?”

“That peak is tectonic,” Denh said. “It’s hard to tell, but it looks like granite to me.”

Dower nodded. “And the rim feature?”

“… I can’t explain that, sir.”

“Honesty doesn’t excuse ignorance. But it helps. Let’s go see.”

The shuttle dropped vertiginously toward the ground.

The profile of the rim feature was — strange. It was a raised ridge of some gray-white, textured substance. It ran without a break all around that distant mountain. It had a bell-shaped profile, rising smoothly from the ice on either side, and a rounded summit. Its texture was odd — from a height it looked fibrous, or like a bank of grass, trapped in frost. Not like any rock formation Abil had ever seen.

The shuttle slowed almost to a stop now, and began to drift down toward the upper surface of the rim feature.

Abil saw that distance had fooled him. Those “fibers” were not blades of grass: they were bigger than that. They were limbs — arms and legs, hands and feet — and heads: human heads. The rim was a wall of the dead, a heaping of corpses huge enough to mimic a geological feature, naked and frozen into incorruptibility.

Abil was astounded. Nothing in the predrop briefings had prepared him for this.

“It’s a ring cemetery,” Dower said matter-of-factly. “Warren worlds are subtly different, but the template is the same, every damn time.” She glanced around sharply at the hundred faces. “Everybody okay with this?”

“There are just so many of them,” somebody said. “If the whole of the rim wall is like this — miles of it — there must be billions of them.”

“It’s an old colony,” Dower said dryly.

The shuttle swam on, heading toward the central mountain.

On the edge of a lake of frozen oxygen, the shuttle landed as gently as a soap bubble. Dower ordered a skinsuit check — each trooper checked her own kit, then her buddy’s — and the walls of the shuttle popped to nothingness.

Gravity was about standard. When Abil clambered off his small T-shaped chair he dropped the yard or so to the ground without any problem. He walked around, getting the feel of the ground and the gravity, listening to the whir of the exoskeletal servers built into his suit, checking telltales that hovered before him in a display of Virtual fireflies.

Around him a hundred troopers did likewise, stalking around the puddle of light cast by the shuttle’s floods. Their backpacks glimmered murky green, the color of pond water.

Abil walked out to the edge of the light, where it blurred and softened to smeared-out gray. The water ice was hard under his feet, hard and unyielding. The surface of the frozen ocean was dimpled and pocked. Here and there frost glimmered, patches of crystals that returned the lights of his suit, or of the stars. The frost was not water but frozen air.

Oxygen, of course, was a relic of life. So there must have been life here — life that mightn’t have been so different from Earth-origin life — long gone, crushed out of existence as the sun receded and the cold’s unrelenting fist closed. Perhaps that life had spawned intelligence: perhaps this world had once had a name. Now it only had a number, generated by the great automated catalogs on Earth — a number nobody ever used, for the tars called it simply “the Target,” as they called every other desolate world to which they were sent.

“Gather ’round,” Dower called.

Abil joined the cluster of troopers around Dower. He found his own unit, marked by red arm stripes. He joined them, showing his command stripes of red and black.

“Look here.” Dower pointed to the edge of the oxygen lake.

Footprints, on the water ice shore: human prints, made by some heavy-treaded boot in a shallow nitrogen frost, quite clear.

“The warren’s bio systems are probably highly efficient recyclers, but nothing is perfect. They still need oxygen …”

Abil walked up to the prints. His own foot was larger, by a few sizes. Standing here, he saw that the prints led back, away from the oxygen lake, forming a path that snaked almost dead straight toward the central mountain. And when he looked the other way, beyond the lake, he saw more trails leading off toward the rim, the circular heap of corpses.