Deepsix

They crossed a room, passed through a door on the opposite side, and came out into a new passageway. One wall had been lined with windows, but whatever transparent material had sealed off the interior was gone, and the wind blew steadily into the building.

They went up a ramp.

Reluctantly, she began using her laser to mark the walls so they could find their way back.

They kept a cha

"Large numbers?" asked Marcel.

"Wide corridors."

"How many people ride on a skyhook?"

"I don't know."

There were shelves and niches. All the surfaces were covered with thick dust, with centuries of accumulation, but whenever Hutch took time to wipe something clean, it looked as if it had been recently installed. Whatever it was, she decided, the construction material had resisted aging remarkably well.

They were in a passageway with a series of windows, all open to the outside.

"Hey." Nightingale dropped to one knee. "Look at this."

A sign. Hung in a wall mount. But the mount was low, down around her hips. It contained several rows of symbols. The symbols were faded, turned to gray, but not illegible. She made sure it became part of the visual record. Then she delightedly discovered she could lift the sign off the mount. It was a plaque, and it came out whole.

"Why is it down there?" she asked. "Why not put it at eye level?"

"It probably is at eye level," said Nightingale. "For the crickets."

She studied the symbols. "That's strange."

"What is?"

There were six lines. The style and formation of the characters varied extensively from one to another. But within each individual row they were quite similar. Some symbols were even repeated, but only in their own line.

"I'd guess we have six alphabets," she said.

"Is that significant?"

"What'll you bet it's the same message in six different languages?"

He shrugged. "I don't see why that's important."

"It's a Rosetta stone."

"Well, maybe. But I think that's overstating the case a bit. The message is too short to qualify as a Rosetta stone. It probably says only PASSENGERS past THIS point. Nobody's going to solve a language from that."

"It's a begi

"Going where?"

"You haven't figured it out?"

He looked at her. "You know what was going on here? What all this was about?"

"Sure," she said.

Hutch detected movement on the circuit and wasn't surprised to hear Marcel's voice: "It was a rescue mission, Randy."

Nightingale looked at her, and his brow creased.

Kellie broke in: "When they date this place, they'll discover it's three thousand years old."

"The ice age," said Nightingale. "The Quiveras Cloud."

"Sure." Mac speaking now. "Somebody tried to evacuate the locals."

"A whole planetary population?"

"No," said Hutch, "of course not. Couldn't have. Not with one skyhook. No matter how much time they had. I mean, the natives would have reproduced faster than they could be moved."

Nightingale nodded.

"We met some of the folks that got left," she added.

Outside, branches creaked in a sudden burst of wind.

"The hawks were the larger species."

"I'd think so."

"The rescuers."

"Yes."

"That's incredible. Did everybody know this except me?"

No one spoke.

She wrapped the plaque, but it was too large to put into her pack, so she hefted it under one arm.

Wall markings, most badly faded, began appearing with some regularity. She recorded what she could, started to put together a map to indicate where everything had been found, relied on her visual link to make a record of the place, and belatedly realized she hadn't been using her laser consistently and was lost. But that shouldn't be too much of a problem. They could follow the radio signals back in the correct general direction.

They walked into a bay and encountered their first furniture. Small benches, on a scale for the crickets. "But none for the larger species," said Nightingale.

They were a type of plastic, and they, too, seemed to have endured well.

Ramps led to both lower and higher levels. They went down, where they found more inscriptions, some in passageways, some on the walls of individual cubicles. These were at Hutch's eye level. Possibly a bit higher.

The offices and corridors seemed designed for the use of the hawks. The placement of inscriptions, and the size of the doors, supported that thesis.

Hutch wished the fog would go away so she could get a good look at her surroundings. "They brought everybody cross-country, some maybe by air, certainly some by hovercraft."

"How'd the hovercraft get up here?" The one they'd seen could never have climbed the mountain.

"That's a detail, Randy. They probably took them to an airport somewhere, and flew them up."

"Must have been one hell of an operation. I think I'd like to meet the hawks."

XXX

Life is a walk in the fog. Most people don't know that. They're fooled by the sunlight into thinking they can see what's ahead. But it's the reason they are forever getting lost or falling into ditches or committing matrimony.

— Gregory MacAllister, The Marriage Manual

Hours to breakup (est): 33

The asteroid was almost spherical. It was somewhat more than a kilometer in diameter, contained within a metal web that was itself attached to the assembly by means of a plate.

Janet watched an Outsider team descend onto the 'plate and begin to cut it loose from the assembly. When they were finished, only one shaft, the Alpha, would remain attached. And only 320 kilometers of that.

John Drummond oversaw the action on a bank of screens. He was charged with monitoring all the Outsider operations: the asteroid units, the four teams that would shortly go outside on each of the ships, the five that were now being dropped along the assembly to sever the Alpha from the bands that held the structure together, and the net unit that was en route with Miles Chastain.

She didn't particularly like Drummond, who behaved as if anyone not involved in advanced mathematics was wasting her life. There was a lot of pressure on him at the moment, and she understood that, but Janet had concluded that if circumstances were normal, he'd still be a jerk.

Their pilot's name was Frank. Frank didn't care much for Drummond either, and probably for the same reasons. She could hear it in his voice, but if Drummond noticed, he paid no attention. While Janet watched their teams spread out, Frank turned in his seat and informed them that one of the Star shuttles would be alongside in a few minutes. That would be Miles and Phil Zossimov, who wanted to get a look at the net.

"Okay, Frank." Drummond glanced down at his instruments. "We'll start in three minutes." He brought the asteroid up on his screen, rotated it, leaned forward, plumped his chin on his fist, and directed the AI to show him the proposed line where they would cut the net. The area where the plate co

Janet looked out at the net, which was visible only when the shuttle's lights hit it the right way. Its links were narrow, no more than a finger's width, and they were closely co