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burns and other injuries he’d received in the final showdown with Kimura three years earlier. Her plastic surgery work in particular was excellent. Few people knew his face well enough to spot the subtle scars left over from the skin grafts. Theresa could, but she never let him know it. If anything, the fresh skin had taken a few years off his face. She didn’t mind.
    â€œI was just coming to that. Administrator, the video if you please.”
    Valmassoi pointed at the holo tech and made a “get rolling” gesture with his index finger. A moment later, the lights in the room darkened as one of the walls lit up, displaying a scene that everyone in the room, indeed everyone in the city, had already spent hours watching over the last three years.
    Video feed streamed from inside the temple on the continent of Atlantis the natives had built around the first of Pathfinder’s rovers they’d discovered. The rover itself was powered by a radioisotope thermoelectric generator with a half-life measured in decades, which was why it was still operating three years after being captured.
    Aside from a couple of scientific instruments that had glitched or fallen victim to the natives’ curiosity, it was still fully functional and had been gathering information on their new neighbors the entire time. Much had already been learned about their physiology, culture, and even language thanks to the happy accident of the rover’s capture.
    It appeared they were watching another of the Atlantians’ frequent offering ceremonies, where the village elders tried to earn favor from the rover with bribes of tubers, fungus, piles of seeds, and the occasional animal. The rover would show its gratitude by taking measurements, collecting and analyzing samples, and even dissecting certain specimens, all under the control of an exuberant exobiologist sitting in a lab aboard the Ark. They could only guess at what the natives made of its odd behavior.
    Theresa watched intently as the rover’s binocular camera mast panned through the collection of aliens, their bioluminescent skin glowing in rhythmic patterns synchronized with the haunting melodies of their prayer songs. The scene was utterly foreign, yet compellingly beautiful. The sheer number of individuals jumped out at her. There had to be three hundred of them crammed into the circular room, well above normal. Attendance at these ceremonies had slacked off over the years, falling into a pattern resembling the spikes for Christmas and Easter Mass at the Catholic cathedral, and relative calm the rest of the year. But today didn’t fall into that pattern of holy days for the Atlantians.
    Something had happened to bring a lot of faithful back into the fold. It was only then that Theresa pulled back from the video enough to look at the time/date stamp in the bottom right corner of the image.
    â€œThis isn’t a live stream?” she said.
    â€œNo,” Mahama answered. “This was recorded this morning, just after midnight local time for their village.”
    â€œIt’s certainly a big turnout. But what are we looking for, specifically?” Benson asked.
    â€œThe answer is coming right about… now.”
    A wave of activity spread through the crowd, starting at the temple entrance. The natives parted to either side, allowing two figures to pass into the center of the room. It took a moment for the rover’s cameras to adjust on the pair of dark faces, but once the faces resolved–
    â€œMei Nakama,” Theresa said breathlessly as the rest of the room erupted in shouting.
    â€œOrder,” Valmassoi said sternly. “Quiet down, please.”
    â€œShe’s supposed to be dead!” This came from Gregory Alexander, latest heir to a very long line of bigwigs stretching all the way back to the construction of the Ark itself. His family name still graced the tallest residential building in Avalon module, and now he was the