All of it trashed, burned out, knocked flat.

L’Eesh, his suit scuffed and filthy, began poking around a large battleship-shaped mound of rubble.

I squatted, chewing on a glucose tab.

L’Eesh called, “You know, there’s something odd here. I thought this was a fort, or perhaps some equivalent of a cathedral. But it looks for all the world as if it crashed here.”

“You don’t make aircraft from brick.”

“Well, whatever made such a vast, ungainly structure fly through the air is gone now. Nevertheless there was clearly once a pretty advanced civilization here. On the way in I glimpsed extensive ruins. And some of those impact craters looked deliberately placed. This whole world is an arena of war. But it seems to have been a war that was fought with interplanetary weapons, and then flying brick fortresses, and at last, fire and clubs … ”

He laughed, fiddling with his hood. “Of course it’s likely both moons were inhabited. Life could have been sparked on either moon, in some tidal puddle stirred by the Jovian parent. And then panspermia would work, spores wafting on meteorite winds, two worlds developing in parallel, cross-fertilizing … ”

On he talked. I wasn’t interested. I was here for Ghosts, not archaeology.

I waited until he took the lead, and we walked on, leaving the ruined township behind.

Another “night,” another broken sleep in the dirt. Another “day” on that endless plain.

We didn’t seem to get any closer to that damn bridge. In places the surface had been blasted to glass; it prickled my feet as I staggered across it.

We had nothing to do but talk.

A lot of it was L’Eesh’s refined bragging. “You know, I always wondered why the Commission is so tolerant of us, we hunters. Under the Druz Coalition, you aren’t supposed to get old and rich. The species is the thing! It is not comfortable to feel one has been manipulated, controlled. But it has been glorious nevertheless.”