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.