Charon hung directly over Pirius’s head. It was a misty blue disc, six times the size of Luna as seen from Earth. He had been trained for spectacles like this, but he flinched from the sight of a world hanging over him like a light globe. Charon’s surface looked pocked. No doubt there was plenty of impact cratering, even here in this misty, spacious place, but many of the gouges he could make out, even with his naked eyes, were deep and quite regular.

“They are quarries.”

He turned. One of Draq’s gaggle of followers had come to stand beside him. She was evidently a woman; her face, turned up to the light of Charon, had a certain delicacy about the brow, the cheekbones.

“Quarries?”

“My name is Mara. I work with Draq.” She smiled at him, then looked away. Though she seemed rather awestruck, she evidently didn’t share Draq’s giggling foolishness. “Michael Poole himself came here, thousands of years ago. Our most famous visitor—before you, of course! He traveled from Jupiter on a GUTdrive ship, and he and his engineers used Charon ice to make exotic matter—”

“To build a wormhole mouth.”

“Yes. Here, Poole completed his cross-system wormhole transit network. When it was done, why, you could travel from Pluto all the way to Mercury almost as easily as you walked through that tunnel from your ship . . . there.” She pointed up toward Charon’s limb. Pirius made out a spark of light, no brighter than the remote stars, but it drifted as he watched. “That’s Poole’s interface station—or the ruins of it.” The Qax had of course shut down Poole’s venerable spacetime engineering, and over the millennia since, most of his interface stations had been broken up, their raw material reused. Not here, though; nobody had bothered to do even that much.

Mara defended her adopted world. “It’s true nobody lives here—nobody but us, that is. The Coalition has tried to establish settlements, but they always fail. There has never been enough to keep people here, no resource you couldn’t find on a thousand Kuiper moons, and in more shallow gravity wells at that. But we do have our marvels.”

Pluto’s orbit was so elliptical it sailed within the orbit of Neptune. At the closest approach to Sol, the atmosphere expanded to three planetary diameters. Then, when Pluto turned away from Sol and sailed into its two-hundred-year winter, the air snowed down.

Mara described all this lyrically. She seemed eager to have someone new to talk to. Those exiled here called themselves Plutinos, she said. Pirius was drawn by her sense of this remote world, which swam through immense, empty volumes while slow, subtle seasons of ice came and went.

“Ah,” she said now. “Look up.”

Puzzled, he glanced up at the looming, misty shape of Charon. “I don’t see anything.”

She waved a hand, and the light intensity in their corner of the dome reduced.