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.