As contract Hansa employees, Margaret and Louis surrendered all commercial rights to any useful discoveries, though they did receive substantial bonuses. Margaret didn’t much care about the income stream, since she enjoyed doing what she loved, and Louis was happy as long as he had full freedom to publish all the scholarly papers he wished.

She and Louis had been married for thirty-seven years, and this would be their fourth Klikiss dig. They had investigated archaeological mysteries on Earth and Mars, but the ancient insectoid race fascinated them most of all. What had happened to this civilization? Why had the Klikiss left, and where had they gone? And why had they left behind their hulking armored robots, ten feet tall and sentient, looking like burly upright insects?

Although the Ildirans had frequently encountered remnants of the lost civilization, they had left the abandoned sites alone. “Why should we delve into the story of a vanished race?” Adar Kori’nh had asked Margaret aboard the observation platform at Oncier. “We have the Saga, which tells all the history we could possibly want to know.”

Indeed, the epic poem mentioned the Klikiss race numerous times, but only in passing, giving no details about the culture of the vanished civilization. Margaret’s scholar son Anton, studying ancient records at a university on Earth, had told her that it wasn’t clear whether the Ildirans had encountered the living Klikiss, or only their remnants. Their lack of interest in the topic struck her as incurious to the point of narrow-mindedness.

In the early years of Terran and Ildiran cooperation, human “colony prospectors” had scouted the unclaimed habitable worlds listed in Solar Navy records. One team, a woman named Madeleine Robinson and her two sons, had gone to Llaro, where they were astonished to find ruined cities and numerous dormant Klikiss robots, which they had accidentally reawakened. Since then, dozens of other Klikiss sites had been surveyed, and many more of the black beetlelike machines had turned up. The Ildirans, though, had known about them for centuries.

Now, the three ancient Klikiss robots who had surprisingly requested to join the Rheindic Co expedition used their massive mechanical strength to erect a weather tower at the camp perimeter. Finished with that task, the three big machines moved with a weird gait on flexible fingerlike legs toward marker stakes in the dry ground, where they began to raise the walls of a heavy storage shed.

Margaret looked at her hastily sketched site diagram and hurried over to the nearest alien robot. “Not there. You’re five meters off position.”

“It belongs here,” the robot said in a thin, humming voice.

“Which one are you? Sirix? Or Dekyk?” The trio looked identical to her.

“I am Ilkot. That is Dekyk.” The beetlelike robot gestured with two segmented worker arms that extended from his ellipsoidal torso. “Sirix instructed us to place the structure here.”

Frowning, Margaret allowed that the position of the shed made no real difference, though she didn’t understand the Klikiss robots or their occasional incomprehensible stubbornness. It was another example of how different these machines were from a “Competent Computerized Companion” like DD, who followed orders like a faithful servant.