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the crater, almost as if he knew what was down there.
    “Slow down!” de Lis said, fanning the dust from his face. “You’re kicking up potential evidence.”
    Shajda pointed to the bare ground repeatedly, drawing de Lis and Waters to the spot. The two trailed behind him with trepidation, regarding the soil cautiously. At the lip of the crater above, Gilmour and Mason watched the trio’s exchange with interest, if not outright amusement. Venturing that this was the best—if only—use of their time, they inched down the tracks left by the trio, taking note of the crater and its desolate contents, mainly its lack of eye-catching stones.
    “Stacia, get some more samples from the bottom, just for measure.” De Lis looked back to their guide, exasperated. “I don’t see anything out of the ordinary here. Why do you keep telling me that?”
    Waters retrieved several kilos of material and placed them in her bag while Shajda shoved a pile of loose rubble into de Lis’ hands.
    “This is the same material Doctor Waters is getting. Why do you keep giving it to me?”
    Shajda smiled and pretended to shovel with his hands. “Dig.”
    De Lis paused; if Shajda was anything like that old abbot, then he knew this place’s secrets as much as he knew its trails. The doctor peered over to Waters, ready to give the Sherpa another chance. “Stacia, break out your pickaxe!”
    Gilmour, Mason and Valagua walked up behind de Lis, puzzled at his swift call to action.
    “Everyone, your pickaxes!” de Lis yelled. “Start digging!”
    The five lowered their backpacks and removed their collapsible pickaxes, unfolding each to their full length. De Lis gathered the group at the very center, pointing out Shajda’s hand-scooped holes, then began his assault on the crater.
    Cracks from all five pickaxes broke the hardpan open, revealing soil unseen for decades, centuries even. Ten hands peeled away the broken earth and tossed it aside, exposing the dark, rich underlayer.
    Waters clawed a palmful and inspected the cake of burnt and unaffected desert humus closely. Flicking out a piece of burnt soil with her index finger, she compared it to a holograph of similar soil from her holobook. “This is definitely debris strata, Richard...maybe two hundred years old.”
    “Keep digging,” de Lis instructed. “Let’s try to find the impactor by sundown.”
    After several hours of excavation through two meters of ground, Valagua, Gilmour and Mason had uncovered a twisted chunk of metallic debris from its earthen cage, which, just moments earlier, Valagua had unknowingly whacked into with his pickaxe. Facing the darkness, de Lis and Waters rushed over to the trio and helped scoop out the reclaimed debris, eager to catch their first glimpse of the impactor before night reclaimed it. Taking shifts with their pickaxes and shovels, they managed to gain enough leverage to forcibly extract the metallic debris after several moments, lifting it out of the pit ever so slightly. With the team breaking for a moment, Waters scanned the meter-long debris with her holobook, allowing the device to estimate the material’s density and mass by its composition. Seeing the results, her eyes bugged out; the metal was denser than all but the most advanced industrial steel alloys humankind had yet conceived, little wonder it was able to survive a collision and remain in a good state. If this relatively small piece made it through, she had to wonder where the rest lay....
    Calling their break over, de Lis produced a line of osmium-nanotubular cord and tied it to one end of the debris, securing it with a winch that Gilmour and Mason had earlier drilled into the lip of the bowl. On command, the two agents and Waters pulled on the cord, while de Lis and Valagua pushed the debris up and out of the excavated hole, then clearing the lip of the bowl, where they left it lay. Hunched over and grabbing their knees, the team paused for a few breaths.
    Looking up from his work, de