"Cabinets? What's in them?"

"They've been cleaned out. But they're in decent condition. And they've got symbols carved into them."

"Good," said Marcel. "That's important, right?"

"Yes," she said. "That's important."

As he had with Beekman, he tried to sound enthusiastic. "Anything else there?"

"A couch. You believe that? For a little guy. You wouldn't be able to use it, but a ten-year-old could."

It was less than dazzling news. "Anything more?"

"A table. Pretty badly smashed, though. And another door. In back."

He heard Kellie's voice: "Hutch, look at this."

"Can we have more light?"

"I'll be damned,"said Nightingale.

Beekman frowned with impatience. But while they waited to hear what was happening, the AI broke in. "Marcel? I'm sorry to interrupt, but we have an anomaly."

"What is it, Bill?"

"Strange object adrift."

"On-screen, please."

Marcel couldn't make it out. It looked like a long pin. Very long. It extended from one side of the screen to the other. And apparently beyond.

"Bill, what is this thing? What are its dimensions?"

"/ am unable to determine its function. It's three thousand kilometers long. Roughly."

"Three thousand klicks," said Beekman. "That can't be right."

"Actually, three thousand two hundred seventy-seven, Gunther."

Marcel made a face and pushed back in his chair. "That's one odd-looking puppy, Gunny." It was long enough to reach from the tip of Maine down through Miami and well out into the Atlantic.

"Its diameter is seven and a fraction meters."

"Well," the planetologist said, "seven meters across and three thousand kilometers long." He looked at Marcel and shook his head. "That's not possible."

"Are you sure, Bill?" Marcel asked. "We don't think those kinds of dimensions can happen."

"I'll recheck the results of the scan."

"Please do."

"Bring it up to full mag," said Marcel. "Let's see a piece of it up close."

Bill complied. It consisted, not of a single very long barrel, but of a series of parallel shafts. They could see between the shafts, see the night sky beyond.

"The dimensions are correct as reported," said Bill.

Marcel frowned. "So what is it, Gunther? What's it do?"

"Don't know."

"Bill, is it a ship of some sort?"

"I do not see how it could be, Marcel. But this is not a type object with which I have any experience."

"Is this typical of the entire construct?"

"This is typical," said Bill. "The shafts are solid. They are connected at regular intervals by braces. A few cables are adrift at one end, and an asteroid is attached to the other."

An asteroid. "Bill, is it doing anything? The construct?"

"There is no sign of activity."

"You reading any energy output? Any evidence of internal power?"

"Negative."

Beekman was staring at the image. "I just can't figure it, Marcel. Object that long. It shouldn't hold together. Stresses would have to break it up."

"Wouldn't that depend on what it was made from?"

"Sure. But something like this would have to be pretty strong stuff. Diamond, maybe. I don't know. It's not my field."

"Range is sixty-two thousand kilometers, increasing. It appears to be in orbit around Maleiva III."

"What do you think?" asked Marcel. "Want to chase it down?"

"Hell, yes. Let's go take a look."

Marcel gave instructions to Bill, and let Hutch know what they were doing. "It sounds," she told him, "as if there's more to Deepsix than the Academy thinks."

"A lot more, apparently. You sure that place down there looks preindustrial?"

"It's all stone, mortar, and planks. Right out of the Middle Ages."

"Okay," he said. "By the way, it sounded as if Kellie found something a couple of minutes ago. But we got distracted."

Hutch nodded. "I don't think what we have is quite as interesting as your pole. But it looks like an armored vest. It was in one of the cabinet drawers." She turned toward it so he could see it. Like everything else, it was in miniature. It would have been secured from behind, and was designed apparently to protect as low as the groin. It was severely corroded.

Toni Hamner hated to admit to herself that she was bored, but it was true. She'd expected the expedition to be exciting. But she should have known it wouldn't work out that way: She'd been around the archeologists at Pinnacle and knew how deadly dull excavations could be. This, she'd thought, would be different. This time she would be with the first people in the door. She'd be there when the discoveries got made. But so far it had been just a lot of digging and dredging out of debris. Now, standing guard in the entrance to the tower, looking out across that flat dreary plain, she yearned for it to be over.

A flight of birds passed overhead. They were brown, with long beaks, flying in formation. For a few seconds they filled the sky, and then they were gone, headed southwest.

She let her mind drift back to the brief shipboard romance she'd been enjoying with Tom Scolari. She hadn't thought highly of Scolari in the beginning, but she'd begun to change her mind and was actually getting quite caught up with him when they'd come here and she'd watched him turn his back on Hutch. That seemed to her to be mean-spirited. Or cowardly. She couldn't decide which.

She was anxious to get home. To see old friends and restart her life. To see a few live shows. Go to an expensive restaurant again. (How long had it been?)

Below, the digging went on.

Hutch was taking a break when Marcel called to tell her how difficult it was to explain the presence of the construct. Could she keep an eye open for anything that indicated the inhabitants were more advanced than we were giving them credit for? She would, but she knew they'd find nothing high-tech near the tower.

They'd opened a passageway behind the Astronomer's apartment, and were now engaged in widening it. The work went slowly. Hutch had brought containers and digging implements so that they weren't entirely dependent on the lasers, which were dangerous in the close confines of the corridor. They had to remove the rock, dirt, and ice, which entailed a lot of crawling around.

It was only possible for one person at a time to dig in the passageway. A second carried away the debris, dragging it back through the Astronomer's apartment. A third picked it up there, hauled it through the connecting corridor and into the bottom of the tower, where he, or she, sorted through it looking for anything of value. They found a few shards, a knife, a broken shaft with a blade insert, and a couple of pieces of stone with engraved symbols. In time, as the bottom chamber began to fill up with detritus, they started carrying it up to the next level.

Eventually, they brought in a collapsible worktable and set it up

in the ground-level room. A plan of the site was hastily put together, and the locations of the artifacts were recorded thereon. The artifacts themselves were brought to the table to be tagged and bagged.

The cabinet they'd found in the Astronomer's apartment was made of wood. It had inlays and metal hinges, a door pull and some fasteners. It also contained several scrolls, too far gone to risk trying to unroll. They put them in separate bags, and sealed them.

"I can't see that it matters much," said Nightingale. "Nobody'll ever be able to read any of that."

Hutch set the bags carefully off to one side. "You'd be surprised what they can do," she said.

At midafternoon, Chiang, Hutch, and Toni went back down into the tunnel. Kellie was posted topside, and Nightingale stood guard at the tower entrance. He'd been there only a few minutes when a thing came out of a patch of trees several hundred meters to the south. It was on two legs, and it had feline grace and a feline appearance. Nightingale, who'd been standing out in the sunlight, scrambled inside. The cat stood for perhaps a minute looking toward the tower. Toward him. He wasn't sure whether it had seen him. But when it started walking casually in his direction, he alerted everyone. Within minutes, they were all in the doorway.