Sylveste stepped onto the ladder which led into the pit and moved quickly down the side. He had made the journey up and down this ladder so many times in the last few weeks that the lack of vertigo was almost more disturbing than the thing itself. Moving down the cofferdam’s side, he descended through layers of geological time. Nine hundred thousand years had passed since the Event. Most of that stratification was permafrost—typical in Resurgam’s subpolar latitudes; permanent frost-soil which never thawed. Deeper down—close to the Event itself—was a layer of regolith laid down in the impacts which had followed. The Event itself was a single, hair-fine black demarcation—the ash of burning forests.

The floor of the pit was not level, but followed narrowing steps down to a final depth of forty metres below the surface. Extra floods had been brought down to shine light into the gloom. The cramped area was a fantastical hive of activity, and within the shelter of the pit there was no trace of the wind. The dig team was working in near-silence, kneeling on the ground on mats, working away at something with tools so precise they might have served for surgery in another era. Three were young students from Cuvier—born on Resurgam. A servitor skulked beside them awaiting orders. Though machines had their uses during a dig’s early phases, the final work could never be entirely trusted to them. Next to the party a woman sat with a compad balanced on her lap, displaying a cladistic map of Amarantin skulls. She saw Sylveste for the first time—he had climbed quietly—and stood up with a start, snapping shut the compad. She wore a greatcoat, her black hair cut in a geometric fringe across her brow.

“Well, you were right,” she said. “Whatever it is, it’s big. And it looks amazingly well-preserved, too.”

“Any theories, Pascale?”