There were no sounds at all. And strangest of all, no apparent movement . . . as if the HBs were toys that had had their batteries removed.

Even close to the “southern” or coreward end of the habitat, where the HBs had constructed a track and mining car system to transport Substance K, things were quiet, as if the equipment had not been used in days.

Dale was still reeling a bit from his communion with Keanu, however, and as he approached the core-side exit, he had one frightening thought:

He had died. The reason he saw no one, no movement, no life, was that he no longer existed in that universe. Given what happened with humans who died on Keanu, this wasn’t as purely terrifying a notion as it might have been—it was possible to come back.

Though not likely.

This dark fantasy persisted until Dale stubbed a bare toe on a small rock. The pain convinced him that he still lived . . . and encouraged him to put his clothes and sandals on.

Then, feeling as if he were once again completely back in the land of the living, he considered his options. He could return to the Factory and resume his explorations. He would survive; he might even prosper. Let Harley and Sasha and Jaidev and the others go to hell.

But Dale could not forget the original reason he had returned to the HBs . . . his knowledge of trouble for Rachel and the others on Earth, and his larger sense that something truly momentous and game-changing was about to happen . . . something that would affect Keanu.

There was nothing to be gained by returning to the Factory. His mission was onward, ever onward—to find Zhao and Makali.

His close contacts with Keanu left Dale with a three-dimensional real-time model of the NEO in his mind.

It proved to be a terrific guide when he slipped out of the human habitat and began prowling the tunnels that would lead him toward the Skyphoi habitat. (There was only one other choice: the route that led back to the Factory.)

He noted with amusement that the HBs had extended their mining-car operation toward the Skyphoi. The structure of rails, supports, and buckets occupied a third of the space of the tunnel. Like Dale, the HBs must have concluded that the Keanu railcars would never run again.

Or they were simply so desperate to sustain the flow of Substance K that they took the chance. (There were still big pools of Substance K inside the Factory. Dale half-suspected that the random noises he heard there were signs that the manufacturing system was still operating. If the HBs had bothered to find him, they might have saved themselves a lot of work.)

He moved swiftly across the floor of the tunnel, which was hard-packed smooth rock. Someone had strung a row of glowworms across the ceiling, giving some light. (One of the things that kept Dale from exploring every centimeter of Keanu’s passageways was the utter lack of illumination.)

As he approached the junction where entry to the Skyphoi habitat was located, Dale wondered if those gasbag creatures had given the HBs help in their operation. It seemed unlikely—and the schematic in Dale’s head was no help here, like a Google map that had not been updated.

The Skyphoi were involved; some kind of multicolored and asymmetrical piping took up half the entryway, which meant it was large. (The Skyphoi averaged five meters in diameter.)

It didn’t connect but ran parallel to the human mining car network that continued on past the Skyphoi nexus.

Dale wondered how long this had been going on, and who among the HBs had the ability to get the Skyphoi involved in anything human. Absent some kind of motivation—like the crisis in 2019 about Keanu’s dying power core—the gasbag creatures seemed to emerge only once every decade.

Dale was compelled to search farther. And now, for all his years of wandering within the NEO, he found himself entering Keanu Incognito.

When he accessed the map inside his head, he grew convinced that he was working his way deeper into Keanu’s interior . . . as if this particular branch of passageway were a coil winding tighter and tighter around some central shaft. He was amused to realize that, setting aside his eventual need for food and water—which he hoped to find farther on; it would be troublesome as well as humiliating to be forced to return to the human habitat—he could probably accomplish an internal orbit of the NEO . . . the three-dimensional squiggles in his mental map suggested that this passage might eventually lead him back to the Factory, the long way around.

It would still take days, but what a journey! Unfortunately, this voyage was not one of exploration. It was to deal with a crisis.

And, based on what he was seeing now, a mystery.

To Dale’s surprise, the mining track and Skyphoi tube continued on. He wondered where they would lead—his Keanu map was fuzzy regarding the space directly in front of him. He assumed there would be another habitat, possibly two . . . but how big?

And who or what would be living in them? If anyone or anything?

Wait! Whether it was the Keanu map inside his head or his own heightened senses, Dale realized that he was being followed!

He slowed long enough to glance behind him, but saw nothing, no one. Heard nothing.

Yet . . . he knew. But what choice did he have? It wasn’t as though he could turn and ambush his pursuer. Keep walking—

There, in his peripheral vision—a shadow, meaning there was light behind it.

He began to walk faster, a desire complicated by his instinct to look back. Yes, something bright was behind him in the passageway, and getting closer.

The passageway curved, which allowed him to feel as though he was putting space between himself and the pursuer.

Not far ahead he could see a second branch, too. Which presented him with a decision . . . go right or go left. Or follow the twin rails and pipes straight ahead, to their terminus.

He assumed he would learn nothing by merely escaping. There was also this: Of all the humans living on Keanu, Dale Scott was the closest thing to a master of the NEO that could be found.

Why the hell should he be running away? What was there on Keanu that was a real threat? Even the Skyphoi, while indifferent and uncooperative, were never hostile. He’d never felt unsafe in his few encounters with them.

Suddenly he was at the end of the line . . . the rail and tube structures made a curving turn to the left into a large entrance.

And now Dale could hear his pursuer. He could smell something unusual but also somehow familiar. It was the acid tang of the Skyphoi atmosphere.

Which mean that he was about to be caught or at least met by one of the gasbag aliens.

But first—

The entries to habitats were deep, wide at times, and always complicated, usually involving several membranes and, once you penetrated past the initial opening, branching side passages. The membranes played the role that hatches did in spacecraft airlocks, since the atmospheres inside habitats were rarely the same as that in the tunnel system.

Dale slipped through the larger opening and saw immediately that the whole unit had been further rearranged to accommodate the human and Skyphoi pipes. Rather than press on through the obvious central entry, he chose to climb on top of the railcar track and squeeze through a series of membranes that way.

He emerged into a habitat, and immediately had to stop.

First reason . . . there was almost no floor. He was standing on a platform of sorts that jutted into a spherical chamber perhaps a fifth the size of the human or Factory habitats. The platform extended around the perimeter, broken only by the railcar and pipe system. From where Dale stood, he saw that the Skyphoi pipe brought material into the chamber, and the railcars took it away. In the center was a giant filmy balloonlike thing at least thirty meters across that Dale recognized from twenty years past.