He climbed up a hill, slow and careful because the slope was muddy and partly washed out, but the erosion had exposed a lot of roots he could use as handholds. When he got to the top he found a patch of green lady mushrooms, bright and still damp from the rainwater sifting down from the trees above. He hummed happily as he plucked the stems and caps and put them in the basket. Once he was done, he straightened up, stretched his back, and looked across the gully before him–

  Something was buried in the hillside across the way. He caught a flash of light on glass, and the gleam of metal. That hillside had also been torn up by the storm, but even more so: a tangle of uprooted trees lay at the base, tumbled down from the ridge, resting now amid piles of mud. The root system of those trees had been holding all the soil in place, and with so much washed away, the secret at the heart of the hill was revealed.

  Keon’s own heart fluttered. He wasn’t sure what he was looking at, what kind of forgotten tech, but whatever it was, it was big. Size wasn’t everything – power cells weren’t very large, and they were about the most valuable thing you could find – but Torvald over at the mech farm paid for scavenged metal by weight. A find like this might not save the farm, but it sure would slow the rate of failure considerably.

  Keon set his basket down and carefully picked his way toward the metal gleam. A stream of water still ran along the bottom of the gully between the hills, about a meter across and shallow, the remnant of what must have been a great flood the day before. He stepped across, climbed over the mess of fallen trees, and finally reached the exposed hillside. Using both hands, he brushed away the mud from the surface, trying to reveal the full extent of his find.

  He uncovered a rectangle of shining metal, two and a half meters high by a meter and a half wide, with a plate of square glass set in the middle, just above his head height. The glass was milky, and he couldn’t see anything behind it, but he realized with surprise that there might be something behind it, because this surely did look like a door, didn’t it?

  People found ancient vehicles sometimes, shuttles and trucks, and maybe this was an unusually large example. Or maybe… maybe it was something else. There were always rumors of hidden spaces below the forest, secret tombs or vaults in the more fanciful stories, or just rooms the long-ago inhabitants of Darit had built to keep supplies dry or hide from storms, in the more plausible legends. There were ancient tales of plucky youths finding caves full of treasure and making their fortune, though no one knew anybody it had actually happened to.

  Keon looked for a handle and couldn’t find one, but he did find a crack where the door didn’t quite sit true in its frame. Even the best-built artifact of the olden days would fail when left out in the weather for hundreds or thousands of years. That crack could mean everything inside would be buried in mud, but metal was metal, dirty or not, and Keon was up for the hard work of excavation if it meant saving his farm.

  Keon’s jolt-stick was made of stout metal, and would serve as a pry bar. He hesitated, thinking of the dangers that sometimes accompanied old tech, but he was an experienced if out-of-practice salvager. If he saw anything glowing or oozing mysterious liquids, he’d back away fast and just sell Torvald the location of the place instead. He’d make less money that way, but it was an adequate fallback plan.

  Settled in his mind, Keon worked the end of his bar into the crack beside the door and heaved, then moved the stick a few centimeters down and heaved again. He worked his way along that seam, using all his weight and strength and leverage, and when he’d worked his way through about three-fourths down the crack, he heard the pop of a seal breaking and a hiss of air. Maybe the inside wasn’t going to be so muddy after all; the door was loose but not broken.

  After that, he was able to work the bar deeper into the crack, and a few more hard, grunting heaves got the door open enough for him to squeeze through the gap. He peered through first though. The space beyond was dark, and he was nervous – he didn’t have anything with him to make a light – but no animals could have gotten in to make their lairs inside, and it wasn’t like whoever’d lived in this place hundreds or thousands of years ago would still be lurking around. Nothing could live that long, no matter how good their tech was. He didn’t believe in ghosts, either, not since he was young.

  My eyes will adjust, he thought, and squeezed into the hill.

  Adjustment proved unnecessary, because when he entered, lights came on, and hidden machinery hummed to life. Keon froze, overwhelmed first by the sudden brightness and then by all the things it revealed.

  The room was as big as his whole cottage, and the first thing he noticed was the skeleton on the floor. Keon had seen such remains before – a flood had unearthed sections of the old graveyard when he was a boy, and there’d been bones strewn for a kilometer afterward – but never one all together like this, still in the shape of a person… or something like a person. This one was on its belly, one arm down by its side, the other reaching over its head, legs cocked at funny angles. Whoever it was had fallen down and never gotten up again. There were metal straps and bits of old cloth crisscrossing the skeleton – the remnants of clothes or jewelry, or both, maybe? How long had this body been here? And what kind of body was it? The shape of the head was all wrong for a human, too thin and too bulbous, and something about the proportion of the limbs was strange too. There were aliens in the galaxy, everyone knew that, but Keon never expected to see one on Darit, alive or dead.

  I’m a grave robber, Keon thought with something like horror. He stepped around the skeleton and took in the rest of the space. The room contained a metal table, with a stone bowl and cup on top, all coated in a layer of dust. There was a metal frame in the corner, low and rectangular, and after a moment Keon realized it was a cot, its sleeping surface long since turned to dust. There were crates full of cans and tins, probably food, but Keon would never be hungry enough to risk opening something that ancient. There was probably nothing inside except dust by now anyway.

  All that was basically ordinary. The back wall of the chamber was something else, though. It was covered from the ceiling halfway to the floor in shiny black surfaces, screens like the one in the burgher’s house, each a meter long on each side. Beneath the screens there was a sort of ledge, or maybe desktop, covered in switches, dials, knobs, and lights. Those lights were all lit up now, some steady green, most pulsing orange, a few red and flashing rapidly. As he watched, some of the oranges turned green, and some of the reds went orange. Were they changing because of him? He hadn’t touched anything!

  There were eight screens in three rows: three along the top, three along the bottom, and in the center, just one on the left, and one on the right. That left a space right in the center, and it was glass, too, but instead of being blank and black like the screens, it was transparent. At first Keon thought it was just a different kind of screen, but when he stepped close, he saw it was more like a window. There was a chamber beyond, the same dimensions as the window, and maybe two meters deep. There were things protruding from the walls and ceiling of that little compartment: nozzles, maybe, and shining rods that came to sharp points, and oily-looking eyeball-sized hemispheres. Keon couldn’t even begin to imagine what any of it was for. Even Torvald would scratch his head, Keon reckoned. He’d never even heard tell of such things.

  Keon glanced down at the console. All the red lights were gone now, and as he watched, the last orange one turned to green.

  Then all the screens lit up, some scrolling with symbols that were meaningless to him, others displaying colored bars, a few showing the progress of zig-zagging lines. The machinery behind the clear glass started to move, rods turning slowly, hemispheres emerging from the walls to reveal themselves as spheres, nozzles sliding back and forth on hidden tracks. Keon leaned forward, hands on the ledge, to get a closer look–

  Something gave beneath the palm of his hand, and he leapt back, horrified. A panel had slid open on the console, revealing a square button, and he’d put his hand right on it – he’d pushed the button down! What had he done? What if this was some kind of weapon?

  A bright drop of blood shone on the end of his fingertip, and he put it in his mouth and sucked it instinctively, then pulled his finger out and stared at it, a sick feeling roiling in his guts. What if he’d just been poisoned?

  Nothing happened, though. The lights continued to pulse green, and the other screens continued to display data that was entirely incomprehensible to him. One of the colored bars started to rise, and one of the others shrank, which suggested something was happening, but he couldn’t know what. The blood was troubling. Maybe he’d just brushed his finger on a sharp burr of metal, a little accidental lancet too small to see. He’d wash the wound out with icewort when he got home and wrap it up good and hope it didn’t get infected, or worse.

  Assuming he didn’t die from that little prick, this was a life-changing find. Whatever this place was, it was unimaginably valuable. He’d gone way beyond making up for a bad harvest and a sick flock. Once he brought this out, and started selling it to Torvald… he’d be wealthy by the time he was done. Indeed, he’d have to sell it in bits and pieces, because otherwise Torvald wouldn’t be able to afford it all. This place could set Keon and Willen up for life.

  For an undertaking like this, though, he’d need tools, and equipment. He could borrow a drone from the mech farm – he’d been meaning to do that anyway, to pull some stumps and expand the back field, so no one would think twice about it. He would come back here tomorrow and start taking this place apart, breaking it down into components he could transport.

  Back outside, he dragged some of the smaller fallen branches around until he’d covered up the door in the hillside. He was pretty far out in the woods, and thought it unlikely anyone else would stumble on this place. On the way out, he carved a few discreet markings on tree trunks so he’d be able to find it again, his head spinning with visions of his glorious future.

  When he got home, Willen didn’t notice his good spirits, absorbed as she was in her own troubles. He couldn’t give her a child, maybe, but he could give her a better life, of plenty and comfort. Maybe they could afford a journey to distant Tallmount, where they were supposed to have all manner of fancy medical machines – could be the doctors there could sort out this whole fertility thing once and for all.

  He decided not to tell her about what he’d found. He was being superstitious, not counting his caprids before they were lambed, because he didn’t want to risk handing his poor wife another disappointment. He made a big show of cooking up the bird-of-the-wood just the way Willen liked it, hoping that would explain his irrepressible smiles. We won’t have to eat forage anymore after this, he thought.

  The next day, he borrowed a mech and went out to the woods. The machine walked along after him on its four nimble legs, pincer-arms dangling at its sides until it was time to pull or lift something, its body nothing but storage space and a few sensors to keep it from walking into things.

  Keon made his way back to the bunker, only consulting his trail signs once or twice to confirm he was on the right track – the path was burned into his memory. He had a tool satchel, and he was already planning out how to take apart the console to get at all the valuable wire that must be inside, and to remove the screens without cracking them. Maybe he’d even hang one in his own house, and be as fancy as the burgher was–

  When he stepped inside, the screens looked different. Now some of them showed different views of a newborn baby – her puffy red face on one, her body as a whole on a second, her curled fist on a third. Three other screens showed the inside of her body: the shape of her bones, her organs, her brain. The remaining two screens were just those incomprehensible symbols, scrolling by.

  Keon walked forward, baffled. Who was that girl? He leaned over the console and peered through the little window at the center of the screen, careful not to touch anything this time.

  The machine somehow sensed his approach anyway, though, because the window turned out to be a door, and slid aside into the wall.

  The tiny baby girl in the compartment there sucked in her first breath of Darit’s air, and let out a great whooping cry.

  Chapter 7

  “You found me inside a machine?” Bianca said.

  “It was a miracle,” Willen said. “You’re a miracle.”

  “You never told anyone about this place you found?” Voyou said to Keon.

  Her pa shook his head. “When I found the baby… Bianca… I knew I couldn’t tell. People would ask questions, wouldn’t they, if I found a baby and a bunch of old tech on the selfsame day, or even in the same year? Plus, I don’t know how to explain it, it seemed ungrateful to tear apart the place that gave me a daughter. Breaking up a miracle to sell it for scrap. Does that make sense? I just took Bianca home… I showed her to Willen, I showed her our daughter… and the next day I went back. I stepped inside the bunker again, but the lights were off, the screens dark, the chamber where I found Bianca empty. I was a little afraid there’d be a new baby in there every day.”

  “No,” Voyou said. “The machine was made to incubate just a single child. What did you do next?”

  Keon shrugged. “I used the mech to jam the door shut, then I made it shift about a ton of dirt and buried the hillside again. I shoved all the fallen trees up against the hill, and turned that place back into the grave it used to be. Before I left, though, I said ‘thank you’ to that alien skeleton. I don’t know who he was, or what he was doing there, but if he’s the one who made it possible for me to have a family, I’ll give him thanks every day.”

  Voyou nodded, once, apparently satisfied. “This version of events accords with our own analysis. I needed to hear your story, in case there were unexpected elements, but I am pleased to say there was nothing of concern.”

  “Why is no one talking about the fact that I was made by a machine?” Bianca’s mind spun with horror and wonder, confusion and dismay. “Does this mean I’m not even human, am I even a person, am I some kind of machine?”

  “You are biological,” the undercommandant said. “That machine was a sort of incubator. You were tucked away inside it, nearly ready to be born, frozen in a sort of stasis field. You would be there still, if your father had not activated the machine and completed the process of your birth.”

  Bianca frowned. Her father hadn’t described an incubator – they had one of those for caprids who were born too early. The thing he described had machine components, nozzles and manipulators, and what were those for? But she didn’t have any other explanation. What was the alternative? That the chamber had somehow made her? Printed her out? What kind of technology could, what, fabricate a baby, and in the course of a single night? She’d never heard of technology like that, even in the stories she’d read.

  She’d ask old Torvald about it, though. Wow, would he be astonished by all this!

  “You know about the machine?” Keon asked Voyou.

  “Of course I do,” the Letnev said. “My people built it, after all, when they first ruled this planet.”

  Bianca opened her mouth to say, “But you never ruled Darit,” and only just stopped herself in time. She knew the Barony had never controlled this world, but only because Torvald’s database knew, and he’d never forgive her if she revealed that secret, especially to their new alien overlords. Was Voyou lying, or confused? Or was he right, and Torvald’s database wrong?

  “I bring you glad tidings,” Voyou said. “Your daughter is very special. She is, to put it in simple terms, a princess of the Barony of Letnev.”

  That astonishing assertion was met by a long beat of total silence, and then Willen said, “What?”

  Voyou sat back in the chair and laced his long fingers over his stomach. “It is an interesting tale, and one with deep roots in the history of our people. As you may know – though perhaps not, given how remote this world is – there was once a single galactic empire, ruled by a race of cruel oppressors known as the Lazax. My people rebelled under the yoke of their rule and fought for our freedom, inspiring many other worlds and peoples to do the same. The Lazax empire did not fall quickly, but it did fall, and even now we continue to rebuild what was lost in that time of turmoil. That’s why we’ve reclaimed your planet. The Barony of Letnev is positioned to found a new empire, and gathering in all of our lost worlds is an important part of that process.”

  “What does any of this have to do with me?” Bianca said.

  Voyou gazed at her with a benevolent smile. “During those tumultuous days, there were, of course, factions, even within the Barony. Some people remained loyal to the Lazax emperors – contemptible lapdogs, unworthy even to be called Letnev, but they possessed power and influence. These divisions expanded into the aristocracy, with some nobles siding with the empire, and others with the revolutionaries. The nobles fought with the tools they always had: private armies, assassination, hostage-taking. There happened to be one nobleman, highly placed in our society, who was also a brilliant scientist, adept at all matters biological. He was loyal to the revolution – indeed, he was a hero of that war. His wife was pregnant, and very nearly ready to give birth to the family’s only heir, when he was attacked by his cowardly enemies. He fled, his wife dying from her wounds, his unborn child’s life in grave danger as well. He vanished from our history then, and we all believed he was dead, his line and legacy extinguished… until we reached this planet and began our survey. Our sensors picked up the same bunker your father found – fortunately, it was close to the surface and its seal was broken, or else we might have missed it entirely. Such places are often shielded from detection, you see, when their systems are intact.” Voyou leaned forward, smiling at Bianca with his small, even teeth. “We found the skeleton. We found the incubation chamber. We accessed the computer systems there, and have spent the last weeks analyzing the data. That skeleton belongs to your true father, the nobleman and scientist Ranulph Malladoc – we have confirmed this definitively. You are also the daughter of Adeliza Malladoc, a noblewoman in her own right, who must, sadly, have passed away en route to this remote place, where your true father took refuge. Your father took you from her dying body and placed you in stasis.”