Henry went on doggedly. “It’s a slow affair. Restricted to low velocities by relativity, by lightspeed and energy requirements. Maybe it’s driven by some kind of low-tech thing, like a solar sail. Whatever. It reaches a star system. Like the Solar System.” He closed his eyes. “It’s surrounded by a cloud, of something like the assemblers the nanotechnologists talk about.”

“The Moonseed,” said Bromwich.

“Yes. As it passes through the System, the assemblers hit on local resources. Principally small rocks, floating in space, asteroids and comets. There’s an awful lot of that stuff floating around out there; no need to go all the way down into a planet’s gravity well to retrieve it. It takes the rocks apart, and makes—”

“What?” Petit demanded.

“I don’t know.” Henry spread his hands. “Starship parts. I think, if we go back into the Moonseed pools, that’s what we’ll find.”

Petit just laughed.

“But if it does reach a planet,” Henry said, “the Moonseed goes further.”

Alfred spread his hands. “That’s true. Venus now seems to be some kind of black hole factory. Extremal black holes, which flee at the speed of light. I know it sounds implausible, but—”

“Good God,” Bromwich said. “I hate this sci-fi stuff. Why the hell?”

Alfred said, “Maybe it’s a starship drive. How about that?”

Henry smiled. “Even I never thought of that. A black hole rocket. Well, why not? The exhaust velocity would be lightspeed. The specific impulse—”

Admiral Bromwich was shaking her head. “So where is this fucking starship?”

Henry shrugged. “I don’t have all the answers. Maybe the starship has gone. Maybe it was destroyed. Perhaps the Moonseed have been here a long time. It could be the starship got here when the Solar System was forming — lots of debris just floating around, the planets not yet stabilized. The System would be a dangerous place back then — but better adapted for the Moonseed, no planets yet, just a thin cloud of rock flour. The kind of system such a ship would aim for. But dangerous. Maybe it suffered some kind of catastrophic accident.”

“And,” said Synge, “if the Moonseed has been around that long—”

“Maybe it has evolved, somehow. Or devolved. Maybe it forgot how to make anything except itself. Maybe it forgot how to make a starship drive properly.”

“So Venus is a screw-up,” said Alfred.

“If there was a ship,” Bromwich said doggedly, “where did it come from? Where was it going?”

“…Maybe there was no ship,” Monica Beus said. “Maybe the ‘ship’ was a hive. Then you don’t need to speculate about motive, or destination: nothing above survival, reproduction, propagation.”

And as she framed the thought, she shuddered. On some deep level, she felt she had stumbled on a truth, in this insight. My God. A hive. What are we dealing with here?