“It’s obvious that something like that must have happened,” Zhao said. “But why would anyone do such a thing?” Listening to his growing agitation, Rachel feared she was going to be personally challenged to justify the Architects and all their actions. “Exploration?”

“How about invasion?” Pav said.

“I don’t know,” Rachel said. “Although I can’t imagine what you would find on another planet that would be worth a trip of a thousand or ten thousand years. What? Water? Slaves?” She had heard some of this from her father. He would often sit with her and watch old sci-fi movies like Independence Day or War of the Worlds…but he would never sit quietly.

“How about our music?” Pav said.

“What, they came here for Beethoven?”

“A thousand years ago they wouldn’t have heard of Beethoven.”

“You were the one who suggested music,” Rachel said. “Besides, they could get our music by listening. They wouldn’t have to come here.”

“He just means art,” Zhao said. “Which is as valid an argument as any, given the utter lack of information.” He not only seemed engaged in the conversation, he was actually striding out with purpose. “Exploration, maybe. Invasion, no. But there is another motivation: the search for new products and ideas.”

Pav laughed out loud. “That’s China for you. ‘Give us your ideas and we’ll build them more cheaply than you. And sell them back to you.’”

Zhao’s head turned to Pav with such energy that Rachel expected a punch to follow. But the Chinese engineer and spy merely smiled. “That has been China’s philosophy for thirty years,” he said. “We learned it from the Japanese and the Americans and the English before them.”

“Speaking of business,” Rachel said, “I wonder how expensive something like Keanu is. I mean, could the Architects afford to build one, or a hundred?”

“And how does it support itself?” Zhao said, clearly warming to the subject. “Are these habitats filled with objects or machines or materials that can be traded?”

“I don’t think so,” Pav said. “If they came here to trade spices and furs, why did they scoop us up? As I recall, they weren’t even stopping until we landed here.”

“Maybe the landing showed them that we might have something worth trading,” Rachel said. She was having a tough time concentrating on these subjects—normally they would have bored her. And she thought she might be seeing a turn in the tunnel ahead.

The others said nothing, however, and the dog stayed where he was, pacing them.

“But then why did they acquire two hundred human beings?” Zhao said.

“Maybe they trade people, not stuff,” Pav said, shooting a gotcha smile behind Zhao’s back at Rachel.

“Nonsense,” Zhao said. “If anything, they would be trading information, which really wouldn’t require a vessel this size or a mission lasting thousands of years. There would be…no point.”

“Speaking of lack of points,” Rachel said, “do you really think Keanu was a giant starship filled with aliens or machines?” She knew it was all speculation, but she had a strategy. Megan Doyle Stewart had once told Rachel, “Some people don’t want to talk, or think they don’t, especially after a trauma like a train crash or a tsunami. Get them to argue. Get them talking about money or religion or politics, and they’ll open right up.”

And it had worked! Rachel had been burdened with two men who were like statues, and in order to get their spirits back from wherever they were hiding, Rachel had provoked them into an argument! Pav had picked up on it!

Maybe he wasn’t so dim. “What else would it be?” he said.

“Well,” she said, grateful again for the hours of space-related chat that her parents had bored her with, “if you don’t have some magic stardrive, you know that anything you launch is going to take thousands of years to reach its destination. Machines simply don’t last, right?” She directed the last question at Zhao.

“It’s difficult to think of materials lasting a millennium,” he said, “much less anything that uses heat or energy or moving parts.”

“So, what I think they did,” Rachel said, and she really was enjoying this, “is they had this goo, this nanostuff, that didn’t have moving parts and wasn’t some kind of brittle material. It was just the stuff you could make anything out of, assuming you had enough energy. They probably didn’t have to bring a thousand workers to Keanu…they didn’t have to build anything. They’d already built it on their home planet.” To Zhao, she said, “Whatever it looked like. They sent the goo and the instructions here. It built itself. And it keeps building itself.”

Zhao laughed. “But the instructions! The programming! The macro controls…I can’t imagine the complexity, the processing power. It’s as if…you might need a good chunk of the time and energy of an entire star!”

“Maybe that’s what they had,” Rachel said. “They were doing whatever they were doing a thousand or ten thousand years ago.”

“I can’t see it,” Zhao said.

“I see it,” Pav said.

“Oh, really—” Zhao’s tone was sarcastic, but he never finished the sentence.

“Not your argument,” Pav said. “That.”

He pointed ahead of them, where there was more light—and sufficient light to see shapes and structures.

Cowboy barked and took off.

Rachel began jogging toward the light.

“Looks fresh,” Pav said.

Rachel and Pav arrived within a couple of minutes to find not only an intersection where another passage crossed theirs…but one of the branches opened into a small Beehive.

And, as Pav had noted, fairly recently; the walls were dripping and the cells pulsed with light.

“Maybe that was what all that goo was doing,” Rachel said. “Flowing down here to, I don’t know, rearrange things.”

Zhao had finally caught up with them. Panting, he said, “Why were you running?” Then, seeing what was around them, he stopped. “Oh.”

“This looks like what my dad was talking about, a Beehive,” Rachel said. “And that is one of the pods that just hatched…something.”

Pav grabbed her arm. “Someone,” he said, pointing down one of the passages.

Looking a bit like a revived mummy from an old monster movie, a human figure was shambling away from them.

Rachel gasped. It had happened before; why couldn’t it happen again?

“Mom!” she called.

“Hey,” Pav said, grabbing her. “Wait.”

He pointed down the passage to their left, the one that terminated in the Beehive.

The entire cylinder was rippling.

“That’s not good,” Rachel said.

The ripples were moving toward them, and they looked bigger and stronger than anything she’d seen. A big, nasty cat’s-eye was headed directly toward them.

VALYA

This had, without doubt, been the worst day of Valentina Makarova’s life. It wasn’t as long as the agonizing day when her father had been struck while walking drunk on a Moscow highway and been taken to a hospital to die. It wasn’t as physically taxing as the time she had contracted pneumonia and was out of her mind with fever and fear.

It wasn’t as disorienting as last week’s transit from Earth to Keanu in the vesicle.

But this day combined the worst of all three.

And it did not appear to be over yet.

In fact, confronting a large, terrifying alien just as she and Dale, Zack, and Makali had reached some kind of shelter meant there was only bad yet to come.

Valya knew she had not been an example of plucky pioneer spirit or gritty determination on the trek from Vesuvius Vent to this one. She had, in fact, spent most of the hike on the edge of hysteria—

To her amazement, Zack was right in front of the alien. Of course, there was almost nowhere else to go. Valya, Dale, and Makali were crowded behind him.

The Sentry was half again as tall as a human being, roughly symmetrical; it had a head, a torso, two arms, and two legs. But it also had two other pairs of arms protruding from its midsection. All arms ended in similar flaplike hands—each with half a dozen long fingers, at least two of them opposable.