“And this has something to do with the Kuiper Belt’s missing mass?”

“We haven’t ruled it out. But in the meantime we have found something stranger still.” Faya snapped her fingers. A Virtual image whirled in the air. It was a tetrahedron, Pirius saw, four triangular faces, straight edges. It turned slowly, and elusive golden light glimmered from its faces. But the image was grainy.

“What’s this?”

“It’s called the Kuiper Anomaly. Obviously an artifact, presumably of alien origin. It was detected in the Kuiper Belt long ago—before humans first left Earth, even. It was the size of a small moon.”

“Was?”

“By the time humans finally mounted a probe to study it, it had disappeared.” She snapped her fingers; the tetrahedron popped and vanished.

Pirius said, “So perhaps the missing planetesimals were used to manufacture this—Anomaly.”

“It’s possible. The mass loss looks about right, from what we know of the object’s gravitational field. But if so, it must have been there a long time, since the formation of the system itself.”

Torec said, “What was it for?”

“We’ve no idea.”

“Where did it go? Was it connected to the dark matter?”

Faya smiled. “We don’t know that either. We’re here to answer such questions.” She would say no more.

Pirius found it a deeply disturbing thought that some alien intelligence had built such a silent sentinel on the fringe of the system, long before humanity even as the sun was fitfully flaring to life. In fact, he felt resentful that somebody had used that immense resource for their own purposes. Those were our ice moons, he thought, knowing he was being illogical.

They completed the circuit of the Pit, coming back to where they had started. They longed to go further—to see more of Michael Poole’s heroic engineering, or even find the fabled Forest of Ancestors, where the native life-forms in their sessile forms waited out eternity. But they had work to do.

Regretfully, they returned to the conference room. It turned out to be set high on a gantry, overlooking the Pit of the Mayflower. It had a startling view of the gantries and cranes that had once built starships.

But nobody in the conference room was interested in the view. They were too busy with a tremendous row.

Luru Parz paced, small, cold, determined.

“In its day, the Coalition served a purpose. We needed a framework, guidance to help us recover from the terrible wasting of the Qax Occupation. But we quickly slipped into an intellectual paralysis. Do you not see that, Minister? Even now we look back over our shoulder at the past, the Occupation, the near-extinction of mankind. The Druz Doctrines are nothing but a rationalization of that great trauma. And since then, obsessed with history, we have sleepwalked our way into a Galactic war.