Rakesh switched his senses to his avatar as it plummeted through the stratosphere, curled up inside the heat shield that protected the whole exploratory package. There was no light source within the ceramic cocoon, but when he shifted his vision to infrared the differential heating of the shield provided enough contrast for him to make out his immediate surroundings. Parantham’s avatar was coiled snugly behind the laboratory/rover, his jelly-baby twin. Both of them were about a millimeter tall, and shorn of unnecessary extras, leaving torsos, pudgy arms and legs, and heads without mouths or noses. The lab’s machinery would do all the smelling, and their real bodies could do all the talking.
Rakesh felt the jolt of the chute unfurling, followed by a persistent deceleration. The heat shield slowly dimmed and his weight diminished as the package drifted down into the troposphere. There was some gentle buffeting, but the descent was uneventful, with nothing to presage the sudden thud of landfall. The plateau was some ten kilometers above the average surface elevation, not quite the highest point on the planet, but close.
The shield split open. A whirring sound followed as the chute was reeled back in. Rakesh restored his vision to the usual wavelengths and looked out across the surrounding terrain, a heavily corrugated igneous landscape. It conjured up fanciful images of boiling lava frozen into glassy black rock, sandblasted for an aeon but still not rendered flat. They were about a meter from the edge of the metallic patch. Had he been his normal size, the ground here would have looked merely dimpled.
Parantham’s avatar rose to its feet, and he joined her. The rover purred and advanced beside them on its flexible treads. Rakesh doubted that their diminished stature would cut much ice if there were locals watching from hidden strongholds who held some strange reverence for this site; treading lightly or not, trespass was trespass. Still, at least if these avatars were crushed out of existence their bodies on Lahl’s Promise would stand a chance. The last backup Rakesh had made for himself was on Massa, and he had no idea what, if anything, the Aloof were retaining of their guests as insurance against misadventure.
They tramped across the undulating lava field. According to the rover, the black rock beneath them contained almost no iron, and there was no obvious cavity marking out a distinct body of ferrous ore that the putative microbes might have mined. The layer of dirty metal ahead of them looked as if it had been sprayed on to the surface.
They reached the diffuse edge of one of the six lobes. The iron was stained green and brown, presenting no silvery sheen, but it still looked more like a layer that had been deposited on top of the igneous rock than something created by converting a pre-existing source in situ. Models of the planet’s surface evolution lent no weight to the idea that this elevated place had once been the bottom of a mineral-bearing sea, though they couldn’t entirely rule out six small, iron-rich puddles at the edge of a muddy alpine lake.
The rover probed the layer across the spectrum, then sent an invisible wave of nanomachines forward to gather more information and sharpen its tentative spectroscopic estimates.
Parantham displayed the evolving isotope data in a shared visualization in front of them. “This has been refined by smelting three or four different ores from different sources,” she said. “It’s not geological in origin, and it’s not biogenic. Iron, nickel, chromium. it’s an artificial alloy. This is steel. Designed to resist corrosion.”
“Can we date the smelting?” Rakesh wondered. “Aha!” There were minute traces of radioisotopes. The models suggested that the metal had been refined between one hundred and twenty and one hundred and eighty million years ago.
Rakesh’s thoughts hovered between astonishment and bemusement. Had the cousins just become a great deal smarter, or was he staring at a mirage? They had yet to find a single biological molecule here. Could life have flourished on this desolate planet, to the point of giving rise to a steel-making culture, and then shrunk back down to nothing, leaving this single, shriveled artefact as its only witness?
The nanomachines advanced, probing the composition of the deposit in all directions. It was not homogeneous. Time had blurred what might have once been sharp distinctions, but hints of structure survived as complex veins of impurities threading the six lobes.
Parantham said, “What was it? A sculpture of an insect?”
Rakesh glanced away from his avatar’s vision to a virtual schematic, a map of the impurities overlaid on an aerial view of the site. “It’s a robot,” he declared. “A six-legged robot.”
“Perhaps.” Parantham was pondering the isotope analysis again. She said, “There are markers in this metal that fit the meteor data far better than anything else on this planet.” She hesitated. “It’s a probe, Rakesh. From the meteor’s world. This planet isn’t the parent world, but the parent world sent this probe.”
Rakesh tried unsuccessfully to pull his jelly-baby face into a scowl of disbelief, but then everything fell into place.
The cousins had made steel, and mastered interplanetary flight. They had sent this six-legged robot to explore their barren sister world, more than a hundred and twenty million years ago. Out in the disk, a species with a head start like that might have circumnavigated the galaxy before Rakesh’s ancestors had touched a stone tool, and built a civilization to rival the Amalgam before humans had sent a single spore to a neighboring star.
This wasn’t the disk, though. Grand histories, here, were prone to truncation. A neighboring star had come too close, and either captured the planet or ejected it into interstellar space.
Rakesh said, “The meteor is about fifty million years old. The interloper passed through this system perhaps a hundred million years before then. That’s why the meteor’s path didn’t match its chemistry; the whole planet had been traveling away from its home star for a hundred million years before the meteor was blasted off it.”
“Yet the meteor still bore life,” Parantham said. “That DNA was the same age as the meteor itself, not a remnant from an earlier epoch. Whatever the parent world endured for those hundred million years, it wasn’t enough to sterilize it.”
Rakesh looked out across the stained patina of metal. “Microbes survived. But what about the probe builders?” It seemed too cruel a coincidence to believe that the interloper had come along just as they were developing the technology that might have allowed them to survive the encounter. Perhaps that had even been a trigger; perhaps they had been locked in some kind of cultural stasis until their astronomers realized that their world was in peril.
“We’ll scour the system,” Parantham declared. “There might be some more clues here, they might have left something on one of the gas giants’ moons.”
Rakesh agreed. “And then we go after them.” They would follow the meteor back to its source, and retrace the path of these unlucky exiles, deep into the crowded heart of the bulge.
10
As Roi launched herself across the Null Chamber, it struck her that she had never seen the place so alive with activity. She counted seven distinct groups, each numbering six people or more, gathered together on the walls and along the web, making measurements, adjusting machinery, talking excitedly, testing ideas.
She and Zak had scoured the Splinter from garm to sard in their hunt for recruits, braving libraries and workshops, abattoirs and storage depots, risking ambush every step of the way. Now the hard times were over; they had built their team, and its numbers bolstered their loyalty in a way that mere reason never could.