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“Something interesting here,” said Josala Krenn.

Kroddok Stopa bent forward over the surface scanner. The false-color image mapped the undulations of a great glacier as it crawled its way along a widening, steep-sided valley toward a frozen sea. “Where?”

“Here,” said Josala, pointing out a string of small blue blotches scattered along the northeast edge of the glacier. “The side-scanning radar pulled these up—they’re sitting anywhere from eleven to nineteen meters down in the ice.”

“Rock from the lateral moraine?”

“No, for two reasons. First, they’re awfully regular in size, oblong, between one-point-five and two meters in the long axis. And second—do you know anything about the flow lines in the accumulation zone of a glacier?”

“Not a thing.”

“Something that falls on the surface of a glacier moves down-valley with the ice and down into the body of the glacier as more snow falls on top of it,” Josala said. “The lateral moraine running through that part of the glacier is made up of rock coming off this cliff face.” She pointed at a side valley well back along the path of the glacier.

“So by the time that rock gets to here—”

“It’s fifty meters down. These other objects, they haven’t been in the ice as long as that rock underneath them. And they would have had to come onto the ice somewhere in here.” Josala traced a circle with her finger over a flat area up-valley.

“That’s out in the middle of nothing,” said Stopa.

“Right.” She wrinkled her face in thought. “It’s hard to be sure of the timetables with cataclysmic climatic change, but I’d guess that whatever these are, they’ve only been in the ice for fifty to a hundred years.”

His eyes widened. “Bodies. Burials on the ice.”

“That was my thought.”

“It makes sense. Nomadic groups, or perhaps caves somewhere nearby—ice caves, possibly—”

“It doesn’t matter where they lived, so long as we’ve found where they died.”

“How deep is the shallowest of those bodies? Eleven meters?” When Josala nodded, Stopa turned to the pilot. “We’re going to want our rover.”

“Kroddok—”

“I know, I know. But hear me out—we’ll wait until the weather’s good there,” Stopa said, his eyes animated by anticipation. “We’ll set the rover down right on top of the site. We leave the engine running at idle so there’s no chance for anything to freeze up. We work right out of the gear bay, because all we have to do is take a core. Our equipment ought to be able to handle that.”

“You want to drill a core?” Josala said in horror. “That’ll mangle the remains.”

“Yes,” Stopa said. “I know it violates the usual protocols. But we weren’t sent here to recover bodies. We were sent here to recover biological material. When our reinforcements arrive, they can go down and excavate the other sites. But in the meantime, we’ll have something we can analyze and report back on.”

Josala shook her head. “I’d really rather wait for the people who know what they’re doing.”

“But we know how to take a core,” Stopa said. “Krenn, a first-year apprentice knows how to take a core. We’ll be out of there in thirty minutes. Twenty.”

Josala’s reluctance still showed on her face.

Kroddok drew closer and dropped his voice. “The bonus from the NRI would be enough to fund the expedition to Stovax,” he said. “But if we wait until Penga Rift arrives, we’ll have to share the bonus. We might even end up being cut out completely.”

He waited to see if that would sway her, then added, “I give you my word that we’ll withdraw at the first sign of any trouble. No, better, I’m making you expedition boss. You say ‘That’s it,’ and that’s it.”

Josala looked up at him with a frown, then past him to the pilot. “What Dr. Stopa said. We’re going to want our rover.”

The archaeologists’ little Mark II World Rover skimmed across the top of snow-covered southwest range and began its descent into the glacier valley.

“You’re on the beam, eight hundred fifty meters out,” said the voice of IX-26’s pilot, continuing to talk Stopa and Krenn down to their destination. The navigation and sensor arrays of the rover were no match