Mar Kellen stood in the middle of the room’s blank white walls, shadowless, hands folded in front of him. Olmy stayed in the doorway. “This room is the gateway to a very great secret,” Mar Kellen said. “Of no practical use to anybody…not now. But once, it must have been very useful indeed. Maybe it was used, and none of us heard about it. Maybe it was considered too dangerous. Come in, come in.”

With Olmy standing beside him, Mar Kellen lifted one hand, extended one finger, and pointed it at the floor. “Down, please.” The floor vanished. The room was a lift shaft. They dropped quickly, without sensation, into darkness. Every few seconds, a thin illuminated red line marking some unknown depth passed. This went on for several minutes.

Olmy had never heard of inhabited tunnels extending more than two kilometers into the asteroid. They must have descended at least twice that far.

“More and more interesting, hm?” Mar Kellen said. “Buried very deeply, very securely. What could it be?”

“How far down?” Olmy asked.

“Six kilometers into the asteroid wall,” Mar Kellen answered. “The lower levels have their own power grid. It doesn’t show up on any chamber accounts.”

“It’s an illegal data dump,” Olmy guessed. He had heard of such things, super-secure dumps used by police and politicians who in centuries past had feared falling out of favor with the Hexamon. But he had never actually seen one.

“Almost correct, Ser Olmy, but not illegal—extra-legal. The lawmakers had this built. Can the lawmakers do anything illegal, strictly speaking?”

Olmy didn’t answer. It was a truism, even in the highly ethical world of Hexamon politics, that no governing system could survive a totally rigorous enforcement of its own laws.

A white square rose beneath them to become the floor again. A door opened, and Mar Kellen led him down a short hall into a dim cubical cell, barely three meters on a side.

“This is the memory access terminal,” Mar Kellen said, sitting on a curved metal stool before a broad featureless steel panel mounted at stomach level in one wall. “I played with it…and I found something horrible.”

He touched the panel and faint round lights appeared in two places. “Access, general key-code. I am Davina Taur Ingel.”

That name would have belonged to an ancestor, probably female, of the former Infinite Hexamon presiding minister, Ilyin Taur Ingel. Mar Kellen handled the board as if he had had some practice.

“This was the tough part. The security systems have deactivated, but there were access mazes in place beyond them, built into the memory structure. They were very careful, our mysterious extra-legal people. If there had been no mazes, I might have given this to you, for free, just one old friend passing something useful to another. But I wasn’t alone when I made this discovery. I had Beni with me…”