“Can you sense anything?” she asked her e-butler.

“This unit’s sensors are registering some weak electromagnetic activity,” it replied. “It is difficult to locate an origin point. It appears to be operating on a regular cycle.”

“Some kind of radio signal?”

“No. It is a multiband emission, there is no identifiable modulation.”

“A powerburst, then?”

“That is a source which would fit the sensor data.”

“What kind of equipment would generate that?”

“That is unknown.”

“Okay, which direction is it coming from? Give me a graphic.”

The e-butler expanded a simple map into her virtual vision. Justine started walking, pushing the vines apart.

“The emission just repeated,” her e-butler said after she’d gone about fifty meters. “It was much stronger. The sensors are registering a degree of residual activity. There is no pattern to it.”

“Am I still going in the right direction?”

“Yes.”

“What about the pulse duration? Does that correspond to the one which hit the hyperglider?”

“It is very close.”

The trees seemed to be spaced slightly farther apart—although that could have been her imagination. The undergrowth and vines certainly didn’t slacken off. She’d gotten long scratches on her legs.

The overlaid map faded from her sight. “What’s happening?”

There was no reply from her e-butler. She halted and looked at her bracelet. The little power light behind one of the emeralds was winking red.

“Reboot complete,” her e-butler announced abruptly.

“Did the pulse hit you?”

“No data from the event was retained. Another pulse is the most obvious explanation.”

“Can you safeguard against another one?”

Silence answered her.

“Damnit,” she muttered. But she was intrigued now. Something was close by, and it wasn’t pirates.

She almost missed it. The vines had completely swamped the low walls, making the small building look like nothing more than another impenetrable cluster of greenery. But the door had sagged inward, leaving a dark cleft amid the leaves.

Justine pushed up her sunglasses to study the structure for a moment. It certainly wasn’t a house, it was too small for that: just a simple square shelter five meters to a side, with a sloping roof no more than three meters high at the apex. When she pulled the thick cords of creeper from the wall around the door, she found the surface beneath was made of some dull gray composite. Simple panels bolted onto a metal frame, put together in a few hours. It could have been made anywhere in the Commonwealth, even Far Away had the resources to produce this. By the look of the material, and the vegetation clinging to it, the shelter had been here for decades.

There was no lock, so she put her shoulder to the warped door and shoved. It flew open after a few pushes. Light streamed in through the opening; there were no windows. The floor was a single sheet of enzyme-bonded concrete, wet and crumbling. In the middle was a black cylinder just over a meter in diameter and eighty centimeters high. When she went over to it she saw it was actually embedded in the concrete, so she had no idea of its true length. It seemed to be made from a dark metal. Two sets of thin red cable emerged from the top, and ran across the floor to disappear into a translucent disk, half a meter wide. Examining that, she found the disk was also set into the concrete. It glowed with a faint vermilion light that originated deep inside, seemingly well below the concrete floor.

Justine narrowed her eyes at the disk as memories began to stir. She wasn’t even sure why she’d kept such old times in her head when she rejuvenated. But she’d seen something like this before; a lot of buildings on Earth used them as a power backup, places like hospitals and police and transport control centers. A solid-state heat exchange cable sunk kilometers down into the crust, where the geothermal energy could be tapped. They didn’t generate a huge amount of electricity, just enough to keep essential systems functioning in case of emergency.

So what the hell is one doing in the middle of a jungle, halfway up the biggest volcano on Far Away?

She stared at the cables, which were presumably superconductors. The cylinder they were feeding power into must be the source of the em pulses. And the whole arrangement had obviously been here for a long time, at least a couple of decades, and probably a lot longer than that. Certainly nobody had visited for ages, and concrete didn’t crumble overnight. So what could possibly use or absorb that much electricity year after year?

Her puzzlement was pushed aside by surprise as she realized the only thing the cylinder could be: a niling d-sink. They were the ultimate storage devices, and as such were rarely used within the Commonwealth simply because few people needed to store that much power. CST used them as backup supplies for their wormhole gateways, but she couldn’t remember any other organization, commercial or government, having a use for them. They were a quirk of physics, a zero-size sinkhole in spacetime that you could keep filling with energy. Theoretically, any power level could be contained providing the confining quantum field was strong enough. And after uninterrupted decades of charging from the heat exchange cable, this one would have an accumulated power level that wasn’t so much measured in kilowatt hours, more like kilotonnage.

So, a niling d-sink that pushed out an em pulse…Unshielded!

Justine got out of the shelter quickly. If it truly was unshielded, the electromagnetic emission would be intense enough to harm her nervous system as the quantum field cycled ready to admit its next input charge.

She hurried away, even more confused now she’d found the source. It began to rain before she got a hundred meters. The storm that had split to curve around the volcano had finally caught up with her.

Kazimir McFoster watched the girl pull a fist-size ball of shiny blue plastic out of the compartment that had opened under the hyperglider’s cockpit. He was sheltering behind a finicus bush, fifty meters away from where the sleek machine had landed. Rain pattered away on his head and the long dark crimson leaves alike. He paid it no heed; this was the weather he had grown up with; always at this time of year the storms would come in the morning. In another hour or so the rain clouds would have blown away to the east leaving the rest of the day mercilessly hot and humid.

The girl casually threw the ball over her shoulder, then tugged a big cylindrical bag from the compartment. He was impressed, for the bag was large and obviously heavy. But despite the clumsy way she carried it, she could lift it easily. She was strong. All offworlders were strong, he knew that. What he hadn’t expected was her beauty.

He had seen the glider pass overhead an hour earlier, a simple cruciform shape, black against the glaring sapphire sky. The sight had enthralled him, it was so graceful, so elegant. All the stories and learning of the Commonwealth and its ways had never prepared him for this. That a machine could be so poised, not just in shape but in function, was a revelation. Machines as Kazimir knew them were blunt and functional.

From his vantage point atop a lava outcrop he’d watched as it swooped ever lower over the jungle. Only once did it wobble in an ungainly fashion, and that was only for an instant. Then its wings had moved like those of a nimble bird as it alighted in the open space. Kazimir had stood looking at the place where it had sunk from sight behind the trees, a simpleton’s smile on his face. It took him a while to realize he was exposed on the rock. Harvey would scold him relentlessly for such a lapse; there would probably be short rations as well to emphasize the point. He was supposed to be well past making such stupid mistakes; that was why he was out here alone in this his final groundwalk, to prove he had mastered the wild. After he returned alive to the clan in another fifteen days, he would be ready to join battle against the alien monster. But not if he stood around like a first-year novice, offering himself as an easy target for any enemy who might be passing.