On one side it seemed a fairly typical carbonaceous planetoid, like millions of others orbiting out here at the outer edge of the Belt. But this changed as the survey ship Hairy Thunderer orbited around the nameless hunk of rock and frozen gases. The sun’s vacuum brilliance cast long, sharp shadows across the ruined replication yards… jagged, twisted remnants of a catastrophe that had taken place when dinosaurs still roamed the Earth.

“Gavin!” she called over her shoulder. “Come down here! You’ve got to see this!”

In a minute her partner floated through the overhead hatch, flipping in midair. There was a faint click as his feet contacted the magnetized floor.

“All right, Urs. What’s to see? More murdered babies to dissect and salvage? Or have we finally found a clue to who their killers were?”

Ursula only gestured toward the viewing port. Her partner moved closer and stared. Highlights reflected from Gavin’s glossy features as the ship’s searchlight swept the shattered scene below.

“Yep,” Gavin nodded at last. “Dead babies again. Fleming Salvage and Exploration ought to make a good price off each little corpse.”

Ursula frowned. “Don’t be morbid, Gavin. Those are unfinished interstellar probes, destroyed ages ago before they could be launched. We have no idea whether they were sentient machines like you, or just tools, like this ship. You of all people should know better than to go around anthropomorphizing alien artifacts.”

Gavin’s grimace was an android’s equivalent of a sarcastic shrug. “If I use ‘morbid’ imagery, whose fault is it?”

“What do you mean?” Ursula turned to face him.

“I mean you organic humans faced a choice, a hundred years ago, when you saw that ‘artificial’ intelligence was going to take off and someday leave the biological kind behind.