Louis looked skeptically at his wife. “And colleagues say my ideas are strange. Do you think the Klikiss could walk through solid rock walls?”

Margaret turned to Sirix. “What do you think?”

“I can offer no input, Margaret Colicos.”

Louis looked up with his crooked grin. “You three robots must be excited! Now we’ve finally got a very real possibility of learning what happened to your creator race and why all your memories were wiped so long ago.”

“Don’t overestimate what we’ve just found, old man,” Margaret cautioned. “This isn’t the equivalent of a Rosetta stone.” But if it did offer the key to a Klikiss transportation system, perhaps it would provide all the information they needed.

Louis knelt on the hard stone floor again as he contemplated the maze of mechanical components before him. “Ah, I see what to do with this now, but the power source is corroded. I’ll need to jump-start it using some of our own equipment back in camp.” He looked up at Margaret. “Could take hours, dear.”

DD interrupted. “In that case, might I call attention to the time? The sun has gone down, and we are already an hour beyond our usual mealtime. Perhaps this would be a good point to break for the day? We can begin our labors fresh tomorrow morning.”

“I hate to stop when I’m so close …” Louis said.

Margaret frowned wryly at him. “Old man, you’re always too optimistic. You’re never as ‘close’ as you think you are.”

They arrived at the tents after a trudge through gathering darkness. Arcas sat by himself near the water pump and the prefabricated storage sheds, surrounded by glowing light panels. He looked stunned and speechless.

Margaret immediately sensed something deeply wrong. “What is it? What’s happened?” The green priest looked at the palms of his hands and then stared up at her. “When I linked with the trees, I… I watched the events as they happened on Earth …”

Louis came forward. “Well, tell us, Arcas! You look like you’ve seen a ghost.”

“The deep-core aliens declared war on all of humanity and said it was because of the Klikiss Torch!” His voice sounded strangled. “By turning Oncier into a sun, we killed millions of their people.”

Louis stammered, “But the Torch was … just an experiment. We only wanted to warm up those moons for new colonies.”

Margaret understood immediately, though. “The aliens live inside gas giants, old man. We incinerated their home world.”

Louis dropped to his knees in the dirt beside Arcas. “We didn’t know. How were we to know? The aliens never showed themselves.”

“Now they have,” Arcas said. His breath hitched. “And then … and then there was an explosion. The emissary killed Old King Frederick and fifty-three others in the Throne Hall.”

“That is indeed terrible news,” DD said.