The brilliant lights built into his suit blazed through the abyssal darkness, illuminating the ridge ahead.He shuffled towards the edge of this ridge, noting the way the alien derelict teetered on the edge of an abyss that fell away into bottomless depths. The derelict, he thought, looked like some sculptor’s impressionistic rendition of a giant squid, with long spines curving out from a relatively smaller central body. But even that core part of the derelict loomed several storeys above his vantage point.Some of the spines looked badly damaged, presumably by the impact of landing. Where the hull material had been torn away from their tips, a bone-like structural latticework was visible beneath.Peering down over the side of the ridge and into the depths beyond—or as far as he could see, before the range of his lights gave out—set Corso’s stomach churning. He was clearly standing at the mouth of a deep vent that had probably been in place for several million years. And if the calculations were correct, the real derelict—as opposed to this onboard simulation—had rested by the vent for over a hundred and sixty thousand years.Yet it was still intact, and according to Kieran Mansell at least, defensive systems were still running somewhere inside it.The ocean above him only existed because the moon on which the derelict had been found orbited a Jovian-scale gas-giant, accompanied by a score of similar bodies ranging in size from mere boulders all the way up to minor planets.
