“They can control gravity.” Elena’s voice was calm, but when she turned back to the screen, her face was wet with tears. “They did that on the station. I don’t think there’s much they can’t do. But I agree, it’s not possible something like that – what was it? kaiju? – could evolve naturally, so it must have been engineered and altered, if not created from scratch. I know you said the Liars like to tinker, but that thing… it’s way beyond tinkering.”

“I vote we don’t go down there to explore,” Janice said. “I don’t care if the place is cram-packed with priceless alien artifacts. I don’t like bugs when they’re bug-sized...”

“If an emergency protocol brought us here, do we think it lit up a tattletale light somewhere down there in that city?” Callie said. “Are the Liars going to come out and greet us, thinking we’re old friends who need help?”

“It’s possible,” the ship said. “But honestly, captain, it looks like a ghost city down there. An occupied planet produces all sorts of detectable noise – transmissions across a vast range of the electromagnetic spectrum, energy signatures – but we aren’t getting anything. It’s just inert, apart from the mile-long bug-monster. No, wait – there’s another one.”

This new kaiju, identical to the first, clambered up the side of one immense structure, and crawled ponderously along. On the viewscreen it looked almost close enough to touch. The branch it moved along was powdery gray, but when it passed over, a dull silvery sheen was left in its path. “Is it cleaning the structure?” Callie said.

“Like a snail crawling up the wall of an aquarium,” Elena said. “Huh. I wonder if that’s what they are – just mindless cleaners? The one in the space station that picked up my friends… maybe it perceived them as pests, or detritus, just trash to be collected.”

“You think my kaiju friend down there is a robotic vacuum cleaner?” Ashok said. “My sense of wonder just took a pretty big hit.”

“So the Liars abandoned their homeworld?” Callie mused. “Left their robot vacuum cleaners running and headed for parts unknown? Or maybe this was a military base in some ancient conflict, and there’s an old emergency protocol in our bridge generator that brought us here even though it’s not an active facility anymore?” She sighed. “I’m just making shit up now. Incorporate some of this footage into your message for the authorities, would you, Stephen?”

“Already working on it,” he said.

“Ho, shit, look.” Drake sounded almost delighted.

The cleaner-kaiju had spread immense wings, four of them, iridescent as a dragonfly’s, and now it flew over the city, though it didn’t seem to flap its wings – they appeared to be more for steering, as it banked and leaned and spun, landing on another part of the structure miles distant, and beginning to clean that one.