They came to an intersection where H’lim swung right, and Titus stopped him. “There’s a gap in the hull and the sun’s coming from that direction.”

“Let’s go down this way,” suggested someone, “and we can circle back to Biomed without going outside.” She led the way confidently down into the nearly flattened underside of the ship. Titus recognized her as an engineer who’d been studying the propulsion system, and his interest quickened. Though he hadn’t revealed anything important so far, H’lim was more helpful now than he’d ever been. Or– Titus stopped dead in his tracks, then shuffled forward as people pressed up behind him. No, he couldn’t be creating a diversion for Abbot. On the other hand, Abbot might have arranged the timing of this tour to get Titus out of his way.

Titus squeezed back beside Colby and made small talk while he inspected her for any trace of Abbot’s renewed Influence. “Do you really think,” he asked her, “that our study of this ship will be stopped when the war is over?”

Since the suitphones were all on the same channel, everyone listened to Colby. “Even if the W.S. wins, public support for our work may have dwindled by appropriations time. It’s important that we come up with results very soon.”

“I heard,” said someone else, “that W. S. might just fold up, in order to stop the war. It could easily just scratch the whole program, and then the secessionists’ organization would fall apart leaving W. S. in power as always. After all, with the probe gone, what’s to fight about really?”

“Us,” said a woman with Brink’s markings on her suit and an Australian accent. “The secessionists think we’re a plague station even though there hasn’t been so much as a cold here in Months. Even if we could build duplicates of this ship and fly them, we wouldn’t be accepted again on Earth.”

“We don’t need your gloom-and-doom, Irena. We may never drum up enough support for the probe again, but this station will be operating long after we die of old age.”

“Yeah. Here.”

“Game’s not over ”til it’s over,“ said a Thai accent.

Colby cut in, “That’s the spirit. Watch your heads everyone!” They had to duck low and scramble down a newly cut makeshift ramp.

The lower area was a maze of squashed and buckled corridors propped up by stanchions where the lower hull had been torn away and they’d had to excavate into the lunar rock to create a walkway. As he went, Titus became convinced that Colby had not been Influenced by Abbot recently, except to smooth over some of the memories Abbot wanted to stay buried. Dangerous but not reckless.

Still, Abbot could have controlled the timing of this jaunt simply by delaying completion of H’lim’s suit.

H’lim stopped to examine an area where the broken hull was curled and buckled. The woman who led them had to stop him from touching the torn metal. “It could cut suit fabric.”

H’lim looked at his gloved hand with trepidation and Titus could see his opinion of humans’ vacuum suits plummet. Oblivious of this, the engineer commented, “You know, the pilot of this ship should be decorated, even if posthumously. He almost made a soft landing, dead stick and all. And there was no subsequent explosion.”

Titus had asked H’lim about the absence of explosion before, recounting the story of his ancestors’ arrival, and H’lim had told him there were older ships than Kylyd still in service, not very well-built ones that did carry escape pods and vacuum suits because they had a lamentable tendency to explode. As far as Titus had been able to gather, newer ships, ships built within the last century or so, also carried more safety equipment, for some obscure reason.

H’lim ignored the engineer’s bait and corrected, “She.

“What?”

“The pilot. She.”

“Did you know her?”

“No.”

“Did you know you were about to crash?”

“No. Else why would I have been-dining.”

“But the ship’s approach was long and slow enough.”

H’lim repeated the answer he’d always given Cognitive. “I understood they intended to orbit-a star or a planet, I’m not sure-recalculate our position, and proceed to our scheduled destination. We were lost, not broken down. Nobody aboard expected the disaster.”

“That seems clear from the evidence,” said someone.

A little farther on, the engineer squatted before a wide but low opening that had been cut, Titus was sure, by Gold’s magnetic shears. The room beyond was several feet lower than the corridor floor but there were no steps. There were some lumpy casings strewn about inside.

“This is one of the things that’s puzzled us,” said the engineer. “Have you any idea what this room was for?”

He peered inside. “I think you know very well, young lady, what a power plant looks like.”

She flashed a grin from ear to ear. “Well, that’s what we thought, but we weren’t sure.” She stood up, aborting a dust-off gesture, as she added pleasantly, “It wasn’t the only power plant, though. It’s barely adequate to handle the environment and internal power requirements. And we’ve never found any fuel. What does fuel this ship, anyway?”

As always with that question, H’lim answered, “I don’t know. It’s not my field.”

“But everybody knows what fuels airplanes!”

“Of course. They call it jet fuel.” H’lim could be maddening when he wanted to be. But this time, he relented. “Actually, I don’t know what this particular ship used for fuel. Almost anything you can name is used by someone. If we were carrying anything dangerous, it was likely discarded in a stellar dump when the crash became inevitable. They don’t tell passengers about fuel dumps. Tends to upset us.”

Mollified, the engineer grunted, “I see,” then led them off down a slope toward the rear section of the ship.

“Oddly enough,” she lectured, “this is where we found the only intact lighting panel.” Titus remembered the room, but much more radical dissection had been done on everything in it, walls and floors included. “Possibly another power plant was in here, but the two plants couldn’t have driven this ship-certainly not anywhere near lightspeed.”

“I’ve never been in this area before,” said H’lim.

“Step carefully,” she warned, leading them through the grid pattern of the debris, “and I’ll show you something we found back here that’s got us really stumped.”

In a far wall, a hatch stood open. It was thick, like a bank vault’s door. They had cut the cowling out of the wall and jacked the whole thing aside. “We thought the ship might blow up when we did this. That door-and this wall-seem to be the most heavily insulated. But even here, the seams were sprung and there was no radiation leakage.”

She paused, faceplate swinging toward H’lim, who made no comment. Titus thought he was reading the labels on or around the door. Politely, the luren looked over the engineer’s shoulder and Titus edged around to see too.

It was a large, totally empty room, with a fantastical floor that might have come from a sultan’s palace. Precious metals and colored stones which had to be gems were patterned around a large, dark area in the middle of the floor. The dark area“ was gold-rimmed, and the rim was marked like the points of a compass.

“Now logic,” said the engineer, “dictates that this must be the interstellar drive. The walls and floor are thick, the floor is overlaid with heavy metals and stone like marble and granite and nobody knows what all else in tiny chips. Mass-wise, this room accounts for almost a third of the mass of the entire ship. You don’t carry something like that around unless it’s useful, and the only use that could justify it would be power-generation. But the room’s hardly damaged, and I don’t see any drive, just a ruddy dance floor! Or is it just a dance floor?”

“No,” answered H’lim.

“A temple?” asked Cognitive’s photographer.

“No. Were there any bodies found in here?”