‘I don’t fucking think so!’ someone shouted suddenly.

A pulse-gun fired and a figure spun out from behind a pillar and landed in the pool. Then came the detonation, blowing the same figure up out of the water in tatters, drenching the chainglass ceiling and all surroundings. Thorn quickly moved in—only one opponent left here. He spotted Scar running in from the other side of the pool, levelled his weapon. The ceiling abruptly transformed into a white shower of debonded chainglass as the remaining telefactor dropped through. A black gloved hand speared out from behind the pillar, suspending on one finger a gas-system pulse-gun by its trigger guard.

‘Okay, you’ve got me!’

The gun clattered to the floor and a woman with cropped brown hair stepped out from behind the pillar, her arms held out from her sides, gloved hands wide open. Thorn considered stunning her anyway, but the shattered body in the pool told him all he needed to know. Aphran’s voice, issuing from the telefactor, confirmed this:

‘Freyda, I take it you are not quite prepared to die for the cause?’

The latest eruption dumped a layer of ash an inch thick, pocked with large spatters of cooling magma. Blegg stepped down off one of the ceramal beams glued in a gridwork across the Atheter artefact, stooped, and brushed away more ash. The cutting machines inevitably left swirls of stone stuck all over the surface since they had been programmed to hold back from actually digging into the object itself. However, some stone flaked away by itself to reveal translucent green crystal underneath. Blegg considered what all this meant.

This green substance was some form of memcrystal similar to that used in the Polity today. The most basic form of memcrystal — the sort that did not use crystal-interstice quantum processing, or etched-atom processing as it was sometimes called—could still store huge amounts of information. Just a piece of such a memcrystal the size of the last joint of a man’s thumb could model the function of and store the memories of a human mind over a period of twenty-five years—though those who possessed memplants would upload more often than that just to keep their Soulbank copy up to date, thereby freeing up space in the crystal implanted inside their heads. If only of that kind, what could a single mass of crystal this size potentially contain? The mind of a god? The stock market transactions of an entire galactic civilization? Alien porn tapes and family albums? Atheter blogs?

With information technologies it was accepted that crap naturally expands to fill the space available—that recording media and the media it recorded always somehow outpaced memory storage. The whole new science of information archaeology was based on that truism. But this object was alien, so everything it contained would be new, unfamiliar and worthy of lengthy study. Even information that would be considered dross in human storage would inevitably reveal things never before known about the constructors of this huge item.

Blegg stood up and looked around. The recent eruption streaked smoke across the lemon firmament, and a river of magma thrashed past some way to his left. He turned, remounted the beam and headed back towards his shuttle, which rested like a large grey slug on a rubble mound at the giant crystal’s edge. As he reached the beam end, a shadow fell across him. He glanced up to see the tug arriving: a manta-shaped behemoth.

He stood and watched as cables rappelled down from it, lowering spiderish grabs. These grabs hit the surface then scuttled along to grip large U-shaped lugs welded to the beams, then the cables drew taut. The entire artefact began vibrating—the gravmotors underneath it starting up. He stepped from it at that point, scrambling up the rubble slope to his shuttle’s airlock. Inside he waited as a blast of frigid air brought the exterior of his hotsuit down to a manageable temperature, then opened his shimmer-shield visor as he entered the shuttle’s interior. He dropped into the pilot’s seat and studied the scene outside. The artefact was rising now, but the impression given was of his own vessel sinking. Feeling the shuttle readjust its landing gear on the rubble below it, he engaged AG and lifted it a few yards into the poisonous air. Soon the artefact became a black line cutting from right to left. Fumaroles ejecting sulphurous gas clouded the view underside for a while, but that soon cleared to reveal the gravmotors attached beneath it. Keeping his shuttle positioned to one side, Blegg followed the huge object up into the sky. Other observers joined him—grabships from the station, telefactors, and floating holocams recording every instant of this ascent.

As the artefact rose through the acidic atmosphere it left a trail of ash and then, as the air pressure began to drop, volatiles complemented this trail with poisonous vapours. Five hours later, when the artefact lay only a mile away from the Hourne, all the ash and volatiles were gone. The tug released its grabs, wound in its cables and drew away. Now the grabships moved in to delicately clamp their claws onto the crystal rim. Very slowly and very carefully, they eased the artefact through a gap in the Hourne’s skin, and into a large enclosed space where shock-absorbing jacks closed in on its surface. Even as Blegg brought his shuttle back round the giant ship, he observed suited figures and telefactors shifting plates of hull metal to weld into place and seal the entry gap.

When Blegg returned inside to stand at a viewing blister overlooking the artefact, the beams used to brace it were being removed and beetlebots were busy scouring the crystal surface of the last layers of accreted stone. Around the internal chamber’s perimeter, multiheaded optic interfaces were waiting on telescopic rams ready to be pushed into position. Back in the ship itself, haiman, human and Golem scientists, and the Hourne’s AI, were awaiting that crucial moment of connection with something of an alien race believed long dead.

Despite this place having been pounded into rubble, some remnants of the Reich here still fought on. The jeep lay sideways in the dust, its engine screaming and one rear wheel spinning madly, the driver’s headless corpse now draped over a nearby pile of rubble. A long spatter of blood linked vehicle to body. Herman—as he now called himself—walked a little closer to see if he could locate the head.