«The Edenists will be here, I expect. So will all the planets, physically if nothing else. Some of their societies will advance, possibly even to a state similar to the Kiint; some will revert to barbarism. But there will be somebody left to hear the message and help.»

«You're a terrible optimist.»

They arrived at the ninth deck, only to find the doorway was sealed over with composite.

«Odd,» Roman datavised. «If there's no corridor or compartment beyond, why put a doorway here at all?»

«Because this was a change made after the accident.»

«Could be. But why would they block off an interior section?»

«I've no idea. You want to keep going down?»

«Sure. I'm optimistic enough not to believe in ghosts lurking in the basement.»

«I really wish you hadn't said that.»

The tenth deck had been sealed off as well.

«My legs can take one more level,» Wai datavised. «Then I'm going back.»

There was a door on deck eleven. It was the first one in the ship to be closed.

Wai stuck her fingers in the dimple, and the door dilated. She edged over cautiously, and swept the focus of her collar sensors round. «Holy shit. We'd better fetch Marcus.»

• • •

Decks nine and ten had simply been removed to make the chamber. Standing on the floor and looking up, Marcus could actually see the outline of the stairwell doorways in the wall above him. By xenoc standards it was a cathedral. There was only one altar, right in the centre. A doughnut of some dull metallic substance, eight metres in diameter with a central aperture five metres across; the air around it was emitting a faint violet glow. It stood on five sable-black arching buttresses, four metres tall.

«The positioning must be significant,» Wai datavised. «They built it almost at the centre of the wreck. They wanted to give it as much protection as possible.»

«Agreed,» Katherine replied. «They obviously considered it important. After a ship has suffered this much damage, you don't expend resources on anything other than critical survival requirements.»

«Whatever it is,» Schutz reported, «it's using up an awful lot of power.» He was walking round it, keeping a respectful distance, wiping a sensor block over the floor as he went. «There's a power cable feeding each of those legs.»

«Is it radiating in any spectrum?» Marcus asked.

«Only that light you can see, which spills over into ultraviolet, too. Apart from that, it's inert. But the energy must be going somewhere.»

«OK.» Marcus walked up to a buttress, and switched his collar focus to scan the aperture. It was veiled by a grey haze, as if a sheet of fog had solidified across it. When he took another tentative step forward the fluid in his semicircular canals was suddenly affected by a very strange tidal force. His foot began to slip forwards and upwards. He threw himself backwards, and almost stumbled. Jorge and Karl just caught him in time.