She could see the dome more clearly from the next hilltop, beyond which lay only level plain stretching towards the cache’s abyssal pit. She saw now that, mixed in with the ruined buildings, there were what appeared to be the remains of a huge spacecraft broken into several sections and half buried in the dust.

As Dakota jogged down to the edge of the plain, she realized the dome was a lot bigger than it appeared at a distance. It had to be at least a hundred metres across, but no more than twenty in height, and it had presumably been designed to withstand whatever forces had destroyed the buildings surrounding it. Trader was well ahead of her by now and, as she started to make her way across the level ground, she saw him pass inside an entrance in one side of the dome, the sparkle of his field-bubble faintly illuminating the interior of the passageway beyond.

She soon reached it herself and stepped into its interior, noting how the relatively tiny inner space emphasized just how thick the walls were.

Dense drifts of dust gradually began to appear out of the gloom, as the filters over her eyes adjusted for the lack of light. She saw waist-high racks stretching from wall to wall in orderly ranks, with wide aisles running between. Identical flat, smooth plates were mounted in haphazard order within the racks, though, at a glance, less than a third of the racks contained them.

Is this what we’re here for?

Trader guided his bubble down a side aisle, his huge eyes swivelling from left to right. <These are modular shaped-field generators designed for use in battle situations. One must assume the colony here was wiped out before they could be used.>

Dakota turned in time to see the spiders were now threading their way in through the entrance, sending brilliant beams of light cutting through the darkness. Nancy followed them in soon afterwards.

<I want to ask something,> Nancy sent. <What did for all those ruins out there? I saw what looked like the remains of some kind of ship.>

The Meridians slaughtered each other over possession of the cache, Dakota replied. But it all happened a long, long time ago.

Nancy merely watched at first as Dakota started pulling the disc-shaped field devices out of their slots, dropping them to the ground for the spiders to collect. Then she started to help, pulling the discs loose and placing them where the spiders could get to them easily. Trader meanwhile simply hovered in his bubble; in truth there wasn’t much he could do but watch them.

<Here’s something else I’ve been wondering,> said Nancy after they’d been working away for a few minutes. <You said you detected some more of those . . . drones here, right? Like the ones you turned on those corvettes back home?>

What about them?

<How many of them are there? >