A large, hazy moon fell behind them as they passed into night. (A big moon had been found orbiting every world that had ever produced a civilization.)

The planet itself was moderately larger than Earth, with almost the same gravity. It turned on its axis in approximately twenty-seven hours, and it had a seventeen-degree axial tilt. “A bit colder than Earth, on average,” Jim reported, “but comfortable enough in the temperate zones.”

Worlds orbiting named stars automatically retained the name, and received a number to designate their position in the system. But Sigma 2711 was a catalog designator rather than a formal name. “Nobody there,” said Rudy. “Damn.”

No one else said anything. It wasn’t a surprise, of course. Had there been a high-tech civilization, they’d have known before now. But actually seeing an empty world was painful nonetheless.

“I guess,” said Hutch, “we should give it a name.”

“Port Hutchins,” said Antonio. He grinned and looked at her. “After your father.”

“That’s too close to home,” she said. “I vote we name it for the guy who started SETI. Call it Drake’s World.”

“Better,” said Matt, “would be to name it for the guy who made it possible for us to come this far. How about Far Silvestri?”

That prompted a couple of comments about Far Out Silvestri and Long Gone Silvestri, but everybody approved, Jon beamed, and Matt logged it in.

“‘Long gone’ might be the right descriptive,” said Rudy. “The place does look empty.”

Jim showed them images of ruins. Everything was buried, sometimes by forest growth, often simply by the earth. Some were quite deep.

“The place is a long time dead,” Jon said. “We might as well move on.”

“Can we tell how old the ruins are?” asked Antonio.

“We’d need specialists,” said Rudy. “Anybody here with a background in carbon dating?”

“WE WON’T FIND a Smitty on this world,” said Jon.

“Probably not.” Rudy wasn’t ready to give up quite that quickly. “But let’s at least take a look.”

“Lot of critters down there,” said Hutch. “It’s not safe.”

“Who gives a goddam, Priscilla? What did we come for? To cruise past and wave?”

Antonio looked accusingly at her, too, but said nothing.

She could have insisted. Even if she couldn’t bully Rudy, she could have directed Matt not to go, and that would have ended the idea. But she couldn’t bring herself to do that. “Let’s find a place.” She sighed. “There should be something out of harm’s way.”

“Very good.” Rudy rubbed his hands together. “Now we’re making sense.”

Jim started flashing images on the screen, cities buried in thick forest, buildings that might have been cathedrals or city halls or power companies overgrown with hundreds and maybe thousands of years of thick vegetation.

“There’s something,” said Rudy. An enormous structure that could have passed for an Indian temple, with broken statuary, shattered columns, balconies and porticoes.

“Jim,” said Matt, “show us what it would have looked like in better times.”

“Okay,” he said. “Meantime I have news.”

“What’s that?”

“There’s a space station in solar orbit. No indication of power.”

ANTONIO’S NOTES

As we left orbit, Hutch blinked the ship’s lights. When I asked her why, she just smiled and shook her head.

—Thursday, January 17

chapter 28

THEY REMAINED ON the McAdams, left the Preston in orbit around Far Silvestri, and made the jump out to the station. Matt brought them in less than an hour away from their target. It was, he thought, a remarkable tribute to the precision Jon had built into the Locarno.

The planetary system was extensive. There were at least six gas giants and a handful of terrestrials. Sigma itself, seen from this distance, was no more than a bright star, and they needed Jim to locate it for them.

As they’d known it would be, the orbiter was dark. It was larger than Union by about half, an agglomeration of spheres linked by shafts and tubes. It was an asymmetric maze, reminding Matt of a child’s puzzle, the sort you start on one side and have to find your way out the other. “Not the simplest way to construct one of these things,” said Jon, as they approached. “It must have appealed to someone’s sense of aesthetics.”

They watched as it tumbled slowly along its eleven-hundred-year-long orbit. Antennas, scanners, and collectors were fixed to the hull. Some were missing, others broken, trailing at the end of twisted cables. They could make out viewports and hatches, and there were barely discernible symbols in several places across the hull. The characters might have been at home in an ancient Sumerian text. “No power leakage,” said Jim. “It’s dead.”

No surprise there.

They drew alongside, and the navigation lights fell full on the orbiter. He looked across the arrays of pods and connecting shafts and radio dishes and spheres and wondered how long it had been there.

Rudy was sitting up front with him, his face creased, utterly absorbed.

“What do you think happened?” asked Matt.

Rudy shrugged. “No way to know. The most obvious explanation would be that it was blown out of orbit during a war. But I don’t see any damage that would suggest that.”

“The hull’s pretty badly beaten up.”

“Collisions with rocks.”

“How old you figure it is?”

Rudy appeared to be doing a calculation. “A few thousand years, at minimum. The Cherry Hill signal was sent fifteen thousand years ago.”

“You think it came from here? The Cherry Hill transmission?”

“Who knows, Matt? Probably. But it’s all guesswork at this point.”

Hutch appeared in the open hatchway. “Rudy, we’re going to go over and take a look. You want to come?”

“Of course. We leaving now?”

Matt noticed the invitation had not been extended in his direction. “Me, too,” he said.

“One of us has to stay back here, Matt. In case there’s a problem.”

“How about you?”

Hutch delivered one of those smiles. “Look,” she said, “I’ll make a deal with you.” She turned to Rudy: “When we get back to the Preston, did you want to make a landing somewhere? Take a look around?”

“Hutch,” he said, “I’d assumed we’d already decided to do that.”

“Okay. I’ll sit that one out, Matt, if you want.”

“You’re pretty generous. You get an ancient space station, and I get somebody’s farm.”

“R.H.I.P.,” she said. “And you never know what you might find on a farm.”

JON AND ANTONIO announced their intentions to go, too. Hutch pulled on a go-pack, and Rudy, strapping on his e-suit, looked admiringly at the thrusters. “We don’t get a set of those?”

“You don’t need one,” Hutch said. She wore a white blouse and slacks, and Rudy had a white sweater that probably belonged to Antonio. Jon had a gold pullover that read RAPTORS, and Antonio wore a red and silver jacket with WORLDWIDE stenciled across the back. The idea was that they be as visible as possible. Each of them carried an extra set of air tanks.

Hutch had attached an imager to her harness, so that Matt could watch the action. And, of course, he could listen in to the conversation.

There wasn’t much to hold his attention. While Hutch used a laser to cut her way inside, Jim announced he could not raise an AI. They’d have been shocked had he been able to do so.

The interior was, of course, pitch-black. The boarding party wore lamps on their caps and wrists. Rudy was excited, but was trying hard to behave as if he broke into alien constructs on regular occasions.