According  to  the  names  stencilled  above  their  faceplates, she had  found  one third  of the original salvage crew. Arranged  as an element  in a tableau installation  or  primitive  waxwork, the title of which might be Death Site XIV or The Final Exploration, MENGER sat, legs splayed wide and shoulders slumped, at the base of the wall, the headpiece of her eva suit nodding  forward, hands  resting lightly between her thighs. SIERPINSKI,  posed awkwardly on  one  knee  as if proposing,  proved  in  fact to  be writing on his suit forearm the word ‘curvature’. Was it less an observation, Liv Hula wondered,  than  a warning? ‘There isn’t a mark on either of them,’ she informed the Nova Swing. Which of them had died first? The woman, certainly, seemed caught in the very act of giving up. Was there an element of solicitude, even tenderness,  in the way SIERPINSKI  leaned towards  her? The tunnel, narrowing here and split into three by curiously marbled and streamlined pillars, curled over their heads like a frozen wave. Unwilling to look into the dulled faceplates, an act which would turn discovery into voyeurism, and frightened less that she would see MENGER & SIERPINSKI than that she wouldn’t, that the suits would prove to be abandoned  and empty, Liv skirted them and  went  on.  The dial-up  remained  open  but  silent, until  she remarked  suddenly,  ‘The whole wreck’s been  penetrated  again and again from the outside. Hard to guess when.’ The closer she approached  the reactor, the more openings she found. Here and there, yellow Tract light fell from one of them in a slanting beam on to ductwork or a sheaf of cable; low level ionising radiation lent everything else a bluish glow. She heard her own breath: behind that, Fat Antoyne coughing and choking into the dial-up pipe as he tried to extricate himself from the ship systems. Behind Antoyne, the familiar FTL interference everyone describes differently, but which Liv always heard as distant  shouts of alarm. ‘I’ve got the reactor in front of me.’ It was in a containment  vessel the size of a house, around which the original material of the wreck had tried to grow. Pipes led in and out of this fibrous crystalline mass. ‘They pumped water into a slurry of 235U, it vented itself as superheated steam on a five-hour cycle.’ She consulted her head-ups. ‘Decay levels indicate it was last operating in the Devonian period of Old Earth. It’s not attached to an output  device. God knows what it was for. All it ever did was raise its own temperature  a couple of hundred  degrees. I think it might have been an environment  for whatever lived here orginally.’ On the Nova Swing they experienced a long pause. Then: ‘Antoyne, I heard  the same noise as before.’ A dull buzz, at sufficiently low frequencies to feel as if it had not so much invaded her nervous system as replaced it, this was accompanied by sensations of vertigo and a metallic taste in the mouth. Later, the chaotic pans recorded by her helmet cameras would reveal only a bluish, mucoid blur. ‘I’m heading back.’ As she turned  to leave, it was obvious that something was in there with her after all. ‘Antoyne? Are you getting any of this?’ Her visual feed went down, and for a minute  or two only broken  phrases could be heard from her, ‘shiny lacquerwork’, ‘domed head’ and repeatedly – ‘Antoyne?’ Liv dragged herself and her equipment through the fibrous corridors. It was like being lost inside a major organ. Behind her, she could sense the artefact tunneling its way impassively towards her across the pumice-like structural  grain of the wreck, bursting out of one wall only to disappear instantly through another. She imagined it waiting there for four hundred million years. Had it hunted the salvage crew the way it was hunting her?