—After twenty thousand years?—Somebody guffawed.

But there was. A crewman found electricity coursing through conduits high above. Cermo said,—No bodies, so far?—

—Nobody’s reported any.—Toby answered.—They’re gone, I guess. Evaporated away, like the plants in the parks.—

—But why not in here? I mean, this was sealed.—

Toby wondered why mechs would leave this vault under air pressure, if they were the last ones here. He walked among the ranks of shadowy machinery and puzzled over what it was for. There was a certain cast to the bulky assemblages, a style that was not like the mech machines he had feared and hated all his life.

It struck him that these were human machines, by far the largest he had ever seen. He smiled with pride. Men and women had once worked on the scale of mechs. He had lived with the automatic assumption that only the malevolent, intelligent machines could achieve great works. Argo was an ancient human work, of course, but it was of the Arcology Era, used to fly between the Hunkered-Down colonies on the far-flung planets. And Argo had used many parts scavenged from mechs. These old human artifacts were different. Beautiful, he decided.

Killeen sent,—Team Lambda has found same engraving in a wall. I want full spectro-copies of it.—

Toby had the gear for that.—Yeasay, coming.—

He turned to go and a sudden blaring signal erupted through the comm line.

I AM A BOMB. I AM SET TO EXPLODE IN THREE HUNDRED TIME INTERVALS. *BEEP* THIS MARKS THE BEGINNING OF A TIME INTERVAL. THERE ARE TWO HUNDRED NINETY-NINE TO GO. I AM A BOMB. I AM SET TO EXPLODE IN THREE HUNDRED TIME INTERVALS. *BEEP* THERE ARE TWO HUNDRED NINETY-EIGHT TIME INTERVALS TO GO.

The signal came from somewhere in the vault, Toby’s locator told him.—Evacuate!—he called and started for the lock.

It was closing. Cermo was in front of him, moving with a speed and dexterity surprising for his size. Cermo aimed his weapon at the lock and blew off a hinge. The door stopped.

Toby got through the entrance and then stopped.—You figure it’s a nuke?—

—Might be,—Cermo sent.—Move!—

—Let’s push the lock door back in place. It might contain anything less than a nuke.—

Cermo swore but agreed. They swung the door shut with the help of three other crew. The time wasn’t lost anyway, because others were still coming out. The last crewwoman squeezed through and they slammed the bulky steel shut.

Nobody wasted time on breath. They rushed down silent, inky hallways. Teams came streaming out of the Chandelier. Toby got into free space just as the relay transmitter they had left in the vault sent:

*BEEP* I AM A BOMB. THIS HAS BEEN A WELCOME CONCLUSION TO MY HISTORIC MISSION. I BID GOOD-BYE TO THOSE WHO CREATED ME AND GAVE ME THIS OPPORTUNITY TO SERVE. THANKS ALSO TO THOSE WHO TRIGGERED MY COMPLETING MOMENT. I NOW DETONATE WITH RESOLVE AND ELOQUENCE. *BEEP*

Its transmission shut off.

The Chandelier shook visibly. Spires sheared away. Walls split.

A helical tower cracked. Then it all came apart in slow motion, buckling and fracturing into shards that spun away, tumbling. In the silence of space it was like watching a mountain come apart piece by piece.

Toby watched the debris as their flyer sped away. It had been a close call, but the Chandelier was fracturing with little energy left over. Argo was already speeding away. They probably wouldn’t sustain much damage.

—Whew! We were lucky.—he said.

—Maybe,——Killeen answered.

Cermo said,—I don’t think that stuff can really hurt us much.—

—Me neither,—Killeen answered.—But maybe it wasn’t supposed to.—

Toby puzzled.—Huh? What else could it have been for?—

—Wish I knew. But anybody who just wanted to kill us wouldn’t have given any warning.—

Toby blinked.—And putting it inside an airlock . . . —

Cermo said,—Mechs wouldn’t be drawn to an atmosphere. They work better without one. We’d be suckered in, though.—

—So I figure,—Killeen said.—We set off a humans-only alarm.—

They watched in silence the slow-motion wreck of their ancient ancestral home. Toby’s oldest Aspects murmured, stirred by memories he could probably never know. He felt also the unspoken anguish in the scattered comm comments. Even though picked clean, there had been a feeling to the place, a taste of what humans had been like many millennia ago. A flavor of antiquity, faint and echoing. Tantalizing, sweet—and then snatched away forever.

—Too bad I didn’t get to that engraving,—Toby said.

—Yeasay. Team Lambda got a few quick shots, though.—Killeen scowled, lines deepening in his face.

—I don’t get it. Why destroy such a beautiful thing? They didn’t even catch us.—

Cermo said,—Dunno. Me, I figure mechs maybe just like busting up anything human. Anything that means something to us.—Killeen said darkly,—Let us hope it is only that.—

FIVE

Ancient Flavors

Toby liked working outside. Grunt work in zero-gravs was more like dancing than real labor, demanding some body-smarts—but there were moments that took plenty of muscle, too.

There was joy in popping out a sweat. He used it to work off his frustrations, which were getting to be many. Even the best skinsuit got pretty swampy after a while, though, and it was a lot of trouble to pee, so you didn’t drink anything for hours before going out. That meant your throat dried out and you got by on sips of tomato juice.

This job was tougher. Their passage through the molecular cloud had somehow shorted out some of the ship’s sensors. Cermo said it was all those banks of dust. Then the Chandelier explosion had pocked the hull. Most of the debris was small stuff, but each gouge had to be patched. Tedious, messy, and essential, just like most jobs on a starship. When there’s only one skin between you and high vacuum, you take care of it.

Toby helped get a crushed antenna back into shape, depending on instructions from a Face he carried. A Face was a trimmed down Aspect, really just a catalog of technical lore and tricks. Toby let the Face tell him which tools to use and electrical connections to make, which left him free to just puff and sweat for a while. Techno-thinking was intricate and hard and he tired of it. But the repair routines went into muscle-memory, so he would be able to do it better next time.

When a break came he took a stroll over the hull while the rest of the work gang rested on their tails. He was beginning to see what his father liked about spending so much time out here, beneath the seethe of sky. A million pinprick fires shone through the blobs and swirls of twilight radiance—dust and gas, tortured into smoldering luminescence by huge electrical currents.

Staring outward for long moments, he could sense the slow churn of the entire disk of the galaxy. Everything here whirled about a single point that no one could see: the black hole at True Center.

The Eater. As a boy on Snowglade he had seen it, a smoldering presence behind churning molecular clouds. Some legends called it the Eye, from an age when it had glared down on Families like an avenging angel, or devil, or both.

Toby could only glance at the eye-stinging brilliance there—the disk of captured matter that spiraled about the hole. Then he had to look away, or his body’s own systems would close down his optical vision, to avoid getting burned out. Still, it was eerie, staring at clouds of dust as they slid into the death grip of that tiny, vicious maw. A mouth that was always hungry, always impatient.