‘Jesus, Liv, where have you been? Liv, if you can hear me, we believe the thing you saw is the item we were sent to collect.’

‘Fuck you, Fat Antoyne.’

After they attempted to store it separately, the new cargo drilled its way through the bulkheads until it could float between the other items in the main hold, its surface spattered with reflections which didn’t quite match the lighting pattern. It seemed newer than the others. It was certainly less knocked around.

‘You could shop for it,’ was Irene the mona’s conclusion.

She licked her finger and touched.  Tiny electric feelings! She liked it for its shiny values and – now that it could be examined more closely – those faint, smooth, organic deviations from the cylindrical  that  made  its  front  end  such  a  lighthearted  phallic parallel.  Fat  Antoyne  approached  with  more  caution,  and though the object allowed itself to be examined with a basic six-regime loupe, learned little. He couldn’t date it, he said. It was alien. It was ceramic all through,  although deep inside he found minutely-structured  variations  in  density  which  he took  to  be high-temperature superconducting  devices.

‘We’ll never know,’ he said, implying that someone else might.

Still shaken and sweating, with her electrolyte levels shot to hell, Liv Hula refused to enter  the hold, confining herself instead to the pilot cabin and a determined program of rehydration coupled with shots of Black Heart no ice. These puzzles had such nightmare significance for her, she said, she was reluctant even to join the discussion: but she had revised her estimate of the object’s age.

‘I think the salvage team brought it with them.’

Although what they had intended to do with it, she had no idea. If, as rumour  had it, MP Renoko had begun stripping the assets of Sandra Shen’s Observatorium & Native Karma Plant at around that time, perhaps they had acquired it from him, sight unseen as illegal items often were. Maybe it was some kind of mining machine. ‘As for this,’ she said, bringing up a blurred image of the Oklo reactor down in the wreck, ‘what to make of it?’ After four hundred  million years of downtime this crude artefact was back on its five hour cycle, venting hot steam into empty space for no purpose known to man. ‘I don’t think they were connected with one another at all.’

MENGER & SIERPINSKI haunted  Liv’s dreams from then on, seen waving to her through a radioactive glow, their headpieces enigmatically empty.

12 I Am Not Renoko!

TWELVE

I Am Not Renoko!

R.I. Gaines took his suitcase and left.