In those early days, the starships that had set off from Port Sol had been driven by nothing but water rockets, using ice as reaction mass. They had crawled along much slower than light, their missions lasting generations. With the acquisition of FTL drives, Port Sol was suddenly redundant, its ice no longer necessary. Even as mankind’s great galactic adventure had begun in earnest, Port Sol’s time was already done. Since then it had orbited out here in the dark, its population dwindling, its name an exotic memory.

But now, it seemed, Port Sol had a new purpose.

An odd flash in the sky caught Pirius’s eye: a twinkle, there and gone. He knew that some of the earliest colonies here—from the days even before Michael Poole, very low-tech indeed—had relied for their power on nothing more than sunlight, gathered with immense wispy mirrors thousands of kilometers across. Even now nobody knew for sure what was out here. The Kuiper Belt was a vast spherical archipelago, its islands separated from each other by the width of the inner Sol system. In this huge place, perhaps some of those ancient communities survived, following their obsolescent ways, hidden from the turbulent politics of mankind.

His new sense of curiosity strong, Pirius felt a deep thrill to be in this extraordinary place. But stare as he might, he didn’t glimpse the mirror in the sky again.

The car nuzzled against a small translucent dome set on the edge of the Pit of the Mayflower. The dome was cluttered with low, temporary-looking buildings. There was an inertial generator somewhere, and to everybody’s relief the gravity in here was no lower than the Moon’s, and the walking was easy.

Pirius and Torec were the first out, eager to reach the transparent viewing wall on the dome’s far side, so they could see the Pit for themselves.

The Pit of the Mayflower was a smooth-cut crater a kilometer wide. Despite its size, the Pit was itself enclosed by a vast, low dome, around which lesser structures, like this habitable dome, clustered like infants. On the floor of the Pit stood the relics of heavy engineering projects: gantries, platforms of metal, concrete, and ice, and immense low-gravity cranes, like vast skeletons. Globe lamps hovered everywhere, casting a yellow-white complex light through the Pit. Nothing moved.

Bustling after the ensigns, Nilis said, “What a place—a relic of the grandeur, or the folly, of the past. A mine for archaeologists! Ah, but I forget: under the Coalition we are all too busy for archaeology, aren’t we, Minister?”

Gramm was waddling at a speed obviously uncomfortable for him, and though the dome’s air was cool he was sweating heavily. “Nilis, we may be far from home. But you are a Commissary, and I suggest you comport yourself like one.”

“I am suitably abashed,” Nilis said dryly.

“But you must remember,” Faya Parz said, “that this is a place of history, not just engineering. Many of those first starships were crewed not by explorers but by refugees.”