“I think we would have found more evidence of them if that were the case,” said Alan.

“Well, didn’t we just?” said Jenan.

Kira had no easy answer to that. “Did you learn anything more about the site while I was in cryo?”

“Mmm,” said Neghar, and held up a hand while she struggled to finish coughing into her sleeve. “Gah. Sorry. Throat’s been dry all day.… Yeah. I ran some subsurface imaging before I pulled you out of the hole.”

“And?”

“There’s another chamber, right below the one you discovered. It’s pretty small, though, only a meter across. It might be housing a power source, but it’s impossible to tell for sure without opening it up. Thermals didn’t pick up any heat signature.”

“How large is the whole structure?”

“Everything you saw above ground, plus another twelve meters below. Aside from the rooms, it looks like just solid foundation and walls.”

Kira nodded, thinking. Whoever had made the structure, they had built it to last.

Then Marie-Élise said, in her high, flutelike voice, “The building you found doesn’t seem like the same sort of work as the Beacon. That is, it’s such a small thing in comparison.”

The Great Beacon. It had been discovered out on the edge of explored space, 36.6 light-years from Sol and 43-some light-years from Weyland. Kira didn’t need to check her overlays to know the distances; she’d spent hours upon hours as a teen reading about the expedition.

The Beacon itself was an amazing artifact. It was, quite simply, a hole. A very large hole: fifty kilometers across and thirty deep, surrounded by a net of liquid gallium that acted as a giant antenna. For the hole emitted a powerful EMP burst every 10.6 seconds, and with it, a blast of structured noise that contained ever-evolving iterations of the Mandelbrot set in ternary code.

Attending the Beacon were creatures that had been dubbed “turtles,” although Kira thought they looked more like ambulatory boulders. Even after twenty-three years of study, it still wasn’t clear if they were animals or machines (no one had been foolish enough to attempt a dissection). The xenobiologists and the engineers agreed it was unlikely the turtles had been responsible for the Beacon’s construction—not unless they’d lost all their technology—but who or what was responsible was still a mystery.

As for its ultimate purpose, no one had any idea. The only thing they knew for sure was that the Beacon was around sixteen thousand years old. And even that was merely a rough estimate based on radiometric dating.

Kira had an uncomfortable suspicion she might never find out whether or not the makers of the Beacon had anything to do with the room she’d fallen into. Not even if she lived for several hundred more years. Deep time was slow to surrender its secrets, if ever it did.

She sighed and dragged the tines of her fork across the side of her neck, enjoying the sensation of the metal tips on her dry skin.