She followed the trail over a ridge and paused at the top to take in the view. Off to the south, she could just see the jeweled sparkle of the sea, its true vastness hidden in distant haze. To the west, the spire of the Halemeeting hall was the only visible sign of her village, though the road to the next nearest settlement was that way too. To the east and north, there was only the forest. From here it was a brown blur, but up close it was a dense world of towering trees and twining vines (and the delicious mushrooms the brave, the foolish, or the well-armed went in to harvest). The northern part of the forest was less menacing, since the foresters picked away at the edges there, but the eastern expanse was purely wild.

  Bianca turned and looked back the way she’d come. Her house was there, surrounded by fields and pasture. Smoke rose from the fire she’d lit. In the nearest meadow, the tiny speck of her father walked around their caprid flock. The animals made milk and they made wool and, every once in a while, they made meat, but mainly what they made was dung and noise and mud.

  Bianca wanted so desperately to get out of the mud. There was no mud among the stars.

  She continued along the ridgeline until she reached the dry streambed that led her at last to the proper trail, almost a road, that meandered from Torvald’s gates down to the town. The last part of the road was steep, though, and in poor repair. She’d asked Torvald once, “Why don’t you fix it? Surely you could cobble together a road-building mech.”

  “Ah,” he’d said, “but since the road is bad, and people can’t get carts or wagons up here, that means they usually rent one of my cargo mechs to carry things to and from their transport, and that’s good for old Torvald, innit?”

  She’d snorted, knowing he was full of it – half the people he dealt with bought on credit that Torvald wasn’t too zealous about collecting, and many of the others paid him with a portion of the harvests his mechs made so much easier. He just liked pretending to be a canny trader sitting on a hoard of treasure. In a way, he was as prone to fancy as Bianca was. That was probably why they got along so well.

  She stood before the tall gates of the mech farm, made of welded-together scrap, and pounded on the metal with her walking stick.

  “State your name and business,” the gate said, its mechanical voice harsh and grating.

  “My name is Empress Bianca, and I’m here to kill the old man.”

  “Enter,” the gate said. The small door set into the left gate clicked unlocked for her. The big gates only opened when something really large had to come in or out.

  “I mean it,” she said. “I am here on a mission of murder.”

  “Enter,” the gate said again, this time buzzing afterward, as if for emphasis. During business hours, the gate opened and closed for visitors, but that voice didn’t actually understand or care what you said. Torvald said he’d read about intelligent machines, but there weren’t any of those on Darit, and he didn’t know if those stories were any more real than the tales of forest demons or alien sorcerers or sea monsters he’d collected over the years.

  Once inside, Bianca gazed around the chaos of the mech farm to see if there was anything new. Mostly she just saw piles of scrap junk, some merely as tall as her, others three times as high, all waiting to be repaired or repurposed or melted down. Some of those piles had been waiting for decades. There were wheels, and rods, and sheets of metal; mysterious cylinders, and spheres, and cubes; and messy coils of wire, cable, and conduit. The predominant colors were gray and dull silver, but there were flashes of bright paint or peculiar iridescence. There were bits of things that might have been automated transports or even spacecraft, once upon a time, but they were all jumbled in with iron bedframes and rusty farm implements, metal drums and busted appliances. Grandly’s family had a working icebox, courtesy of Torvald; that had halfway tempted Bianca to accept Grandly’s last proposal, during the hottest part of the summer.

  There were also countless busted-up mechs, ranging from ones half her size to behemoths as big as her house. Once upon a time, Torvald said, Darit had been a mining planet, a colony of the empire, and there’d been legions of mechs to work the seams and serve the inhabitants. Of course, that was so long ago nobody even knew if the empire still existed, and most people didn’t know it had ever existed in the first place. There were still remnants aplenty buried all over, though, and Torvald’s family had been experts at salvage and repair for generations. People found things in their fields sometimes, and more often in the forest (when they dared to venture in), and brought those curiosities to Torvald for trade. Bianca had earned enough money for a few dresses over the years with her own lucky finds while stone-picking in the fields – just bits of colored glass and mud-packed springs and fist-sized bolts, but Torvald could get them shiny and useful again.

  Torvald emerged from his shack, wiping his greasy hands on his perpetually stained overalls. He grinned, his wrinkled face lighting up. “Bee! Did you bring me something nice?”

  “I brought myself. What’s nicer than that?”

  “I’d trade you for a broken rheostat, but I suppose you’ll do, if that’s all you’ve got.” Torvald had never pair-bonded or had children of his own – rumors were that exposure to some of the more exotic items in the depths of the mech farm had made him infertile, but Bianca was pretty sure he’d just never bothered – and she wondered, sometimes, what would happen to this place when he eventually died. He’d pretty much told her she could sign on as his apprentice if she wanted, and that was currently at the top of a mental list titled “The Least Terrible of All the Terrible Options I Hate,” just above “Run Away from Home” and “Pair-Bond with Grandly And At Least Have Ice All Summer.” (Running away from home would have been higher up, but this habitable zone was only so big, and the places she could reach without transport and cold-weather gear to navigate the tundra in between weren’t much different from her own.)

  “What can I do for you, if you didn’t come bearing gifts?” he asked.

  “Pa says our power cell is running down. I came to see how bad you’d cheat us for a new one.”

  He rolled a toothpick around in his mouth. “Oh, only medium bad. One of the foresters tripped over a rock that turned out to be the corner of an autonomous cargo container buried in a dry streambed. I don’t even care to guess how long it’s been there. He used a stump-puller mech to clear the ground around it until he found a hatch, and do you know what he found inside?”

  “Certain death?” Bianca was seething with jealousy. She’d never found anything bigger than she could pick up in both hands.

  “He mostly found a bunch of crates that used to hold rations, probably, before they got filled with mold instead. He did recover fully half a dozen power cells, hardly even drained. They were slow to wake up, of course, but I got them refreshed. I can let you have one if you’ll butcher down a caprid for me before the year turns.”

  That was a good deal. She sighed heavily and shook her head. “You’re a bandit, Torvald. If I take that offer back to Pa, he’ll butcher me.”

  “You have to invite me over for Turnsday dinner, too,” he said placidly. “I’ve been missing your ma’s root mash.”

  They always invited him to that anyway. “I’m just a humble farm girl, and no match for your cruel and avaricious big city wiles,” Bianca said. “It’s a–”

  Something came howling across the sky from the direction of the sea. Bianca screamed and clapped her hands over her ears as the horrible roar vibrated her from skullbones to toes. The – ship? – passed over them in a moment, the wind of its passage so ferocious that it kicked up a huge cloud of dust and sent a pile of sheet metal falling over with a crash.

  “What was that?” Bianca shouted, her ears still ringing from the din.

  “Aliens, I reckon,” Torvald shouted back. “And they’re headed for the forest.”

  Chapter 2

  “Why would they go to the forest?” Bianca said. “Why not land in town?”

  “Where they go depends on what they came for, I suppose,” Torvald said. “Come on into the shack with me. I need to look at something.”

  She stared at him. “What are you talking about? There’re aliens here! From space!”

  “Probably not from space, Bee. People – even alien people – don’t usually live in space. Not too hospitable up there. Cold, nothing to breathe, lots of radiation. They’re aliens from a planet or a moon, more likely, or a space station, or just possibly an asteroid.”

  “What do you know about it?” She spun to face him, fists clenched, unsure why she was suddenly so furious. “You always talk like you know the secrets of the galaxy, but you were born on this dirt ball just like I was, and you don’t know anything!”

  “I don’t know much about anything currently, that’s true.” Torvald wasn’t unflappable like her pa, but he tended to react to her outbursts with a sort of distant amusement. He led her toward his little shack. “I couldn’t tell you who sits on the throne on Mecatol Rex these days, if anyone even does. But I know a lot about how things used to be. I have a… family heirloom, you could say, in my shack. Or under it. A keeper of secrets, except mostly they’re secrets nobody on this planet would care about even if I got up in the middle of a Halemeeting and gave them all away. I think you might care, and if you’d accepted my offer to sign on as an apprentice, I was going to show you. But today…” He paused a moment and looked at the sky. “Today might be the beginning of a whole new world. Suddenly the idea of hoarding my secrets seems silly, especially since ancient history might just have some bearing on current events. Now will you come on, so I can expand your understanding of the universe and our little place in it?”

  She nodded, her fury draining out of her. Secrets? She did like those. Or she thought she would. She’d never really known any worthy of the name.

  Torvald opened the flimsy door and gestured her inside. She’d been into his home a few times, but there wasn’t much to see: it was one big room with a bed, a couple of chairs and a table, a desk, a screen that mostly just flickered, and shelves of books. There was a kitchen with all the appliances she’d ever heard of (most of them even worked, though a couple were purely decorative, like the one that was supposed to make toast). There was a little dome-headed serving mech that did a bad job of cleaning up when it even worked, currently switched off in the corner. The shack only had one door, and that led to a small tidy bathroom with a toilet and a shower.

  This time, though, Torvald lifted up the faded old rug, revealing… more stone floor. She’d been hoping for a secret hatch or a trapdoor or something. “Stand beside me,” he said. She obeyed, and he cleared his throat. “Two friendlies, coming down.”

  The floor lurched, and she stumbled against Torvald as the ceiling receded above them. A square section of the floor, two meters to a side, was dropping down a smooth-walled shaft, and it was dropping fast. “What is this?”

  “An elevator,” he said.

  She let go of him, straightened up, and refused to be impressed. “Stupid name. We’re going down. It should be called a descender.”

  “It goes back up too, Bianca.”

  She looked up at the growing distance above her head. “That’s good. It would be a long climb otherwise.”

  After a few moments, they thumped to a stop. “Good job,” Bianca said. “We’re at the bottom of a dry well–”

  The wall in front of her split in two, one side sliding to the left, the other to the right. She grabbed Torvald again. She’d seen automatic doors before – in Torvald’s gate, of course, and the Halemeeting hall had one – but those just swung in and out! They didn’t disappear into the walls!

  “Come on.” Torvald stepped into darkness, and recessed white lights switched on, revealing a space roughly the size of the living quarters above, though there was a metal door on the far wall, suggesting deeper recesses beyond. The walls, floor, and ceiling were all gray metal, and there were only a few pieces of furniture – a simple bunk, a chair on a swivel, a table.

  One of the walls held a huge blank screen. The burgher in town had a working screen, one that showed a ten-minute loop of bizarre birds like no one had ever seen in real life flying over a purple ocean, but this screen was easily twice as big. Bianca could have walked right up to it and stretched her arms out and not quite touched the edges. “What is this place?”

  “We call it the bunker,” Torvald said. “It’s been in the family so long nobody remembers who originally found it. My parents told me there are probably chambers like this scattered across Darit, but I’ve never found one, or met anybody else who has. I sure wish I could, because if they held treasures like this one does, I’d be a rich man. Of course, I don’t know what I’d do if I was a rich man. Buy more junk, probably. It’s all I know.”

  “Go back. You said treasure. What kind of treasure?” There were no chests full of gold coins, no racks of alien weapons, no shining crowns or bolts of rare cloth or works of art.

  “Information, Bee. Knowledge.” He approached the screen. “Access local surveillance.” The screen lit up and showed a view of the mech farm, and his shack, seen from a strange angle – what you’d see if you stood on top of one of the vertical posts on one side of the gate, she thought. “Roll back to, hmm, ten minutes ago.”

  The screen flickered, and now showed Bianca and Torvald standing among the scrap heaps, talking. “That’s us!” she said.

  “There are cameras up there, recording. Here it comes.” The ship streaked across the screen, and Torvald said, “Freeze.”

  The ship hung frozen on the screen, just barely in the top of the frame. The vessel was bigger than Bianca’s house, and made of dark metal, with spikes and spines all over it, like some sort of airborne cactus. “Analyze ship to determine origin,” Torvald said. The wall began to hum.

  “Who are you talking to?” Bianca said. “You said there weren’t any smart machines on this planet.”

  “Oh, well. The bunker isn’t smart, exactly. It doesn’t actually know things – it just contains knowledge. Sort of like a book. The bunker can’t think, any more than a book can, but imagine if you had a book where you could say, ‘Turn to the page with that kissing scene I like,’ and it would flip right to it? Or where you could say, ‘What’s the name of the character who killed the hero’s daughter,’ and the book could answer you? It’s like that.”

  “Sounds pretty smart to me,” Bianca said.

  “Could be the lines between smart and not-smart get a little blurry with some machines,” Torvald conceded. “The bunker isn’t much of a conversationalist, let’s say that much at least. But what it does have is a long memory, full of the history of this planet from the days when it was an imperial mining colony, mostly in the form of records kept by a woman called the ‘interim provincial governor.’ I couldn’t tell you what’s happened outside Darit for the past three thousand years, but if you want to know what was going on in the galaxy before that, I know at least part of it.”

  “Ship unknown,” the wall said, in a warm, womanly voice.

  Torvald sighed. “I was afraid of that. I didn’t figure the aliens would be flying a ship so old my bunker would recognize it, but it was worth a try. Hmm. Bunker, what’s the closest known vessel to the ship we just saw?”

  “The closest comparable vessel is a Barony of Letnev light cruiser.” A drawing appeared on the screen, and it did share a lot in common with the ship they’d seen, especially the way the hull bristled with hostile-looking protuberances. “There are multiple points of structural and design overlap, but the ship most recently recorded is far smaller.”

  “That’s because it’s some kind of shuttle,” Torvald muttered. “But if the design and the aesthetics and such are that similar, then maybe it’s a Barony vessel.”

  “What are all those spikes for?”

  “Maybe they’re sensors,” Torvald said. “Or weapons. Maybe the Letnev just like how they look, the way Milt Karnecki painted flames on the side of his auto-cart. I couldn’t tell you.”

  “You’re the one with the secret database of hidden knowledge!” Bianca was so frustrated. Torvald had been sitting on a talking encyclopedia of the outside world all this time. “You knew about everything outside Darit, real things, instead of just hints and forgotten stories! You could have… have…” She slumped. “You could have done… something for me.”

  “The bunker doesn’t have directions to the nearest spaceport, Bee.” He said it kindly, and that was worse. “Nor does it know any special radio frequency to hail a passing ship to take you out into the stars. I know you’ve always set your sights higher than the next shearing or harvest, Bianca, and I admire that. My own interest in what lies beyond our atmosphere is more about the knowledge than the experience. But if I could have cobbled a working spacecraft together from the junk on my mech farm, you would have flown out of here three years ago on your sixteenth birthday, and you can believe that.”

  “Sixteenth birthday observed,” she muttered. Her birthday was a guess, since she was a forest foundling, but based on how new she was when her pa found her, it was probably right to within a day or two. “But thank you. I still wish you’d told me.”

  Torvald nodded, perfunctory. “Maybe I should have. What’s done is done. The reason I brought you down here now is because aliens have come to Darit. Even if they’re human, they’re aliens to us. They might be your ticket off this planet, or they could be trouble for all of us. My database is thousands of years out of date, but it’s all we’ve got to go on, unless the aliens start talking. If those visitors really are from the Barony of Letnev, and the Barony still bears any resemblance to the one that was part of the empire way back when… Well. It could be worse, but it could be better, too.”