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collapsed tunnels—we left this planet over a thousand years ago.  But, we have plasma cutters, so if we get trapped we ought to be able to get out of most situations.”
    Rook nods, and looks back at the 3D representation of Kali’s surface.   She is a terrestrial planet, consisting of minerals containing lots of oxygen and silicon, metals, and other typical components of rock.  A great deal of it is covered in tholeiitic basalt, a magma series of igneous rock.  There has clearly been extensive volcanism here for tens of thousands of years; the sulfur in the atmosphere attests to continuous volcanic eruptions.
    As close to a survivable hell as one can get .
    One very interesting feature of Kali is the extensive plain throughout most of what Rook has declared , for the purposes of ease, the “eastern” hemisphere, which are unusually flat and broken by only the occasional dunes made of dark-brown and gray soil.  This is in contrast to the “western” hemisphere, which is pocked by craters miles wide.  The fact that one side of the planet has been left so clean and pristine, while the other side has seen such wicked scaring, points to a sudden pummeling by asteroids that probably happened all within one week some hundred thousand years ago.  This, according to the ship’s AI estimates.
    The eastern hemisphere has only 106 active volcanoes, whereas the western hemisphere has more than three thousand.  Bishop said that the theory was the asteroid bombardment thousands of years ago had been so intense that it caused great turmoil and wracked both the atmosphere and the surface.  There is a line of these volcanoes extending across an entire continent about the size of Australia, which Rook has labeled Pangea.  These volcanoes must erupt quite often, because the greatest concentration of storm clouds is in that region, indicating that they influence the weather greatly.  In fact, one of his drones caught images of purple lightning lancing out from the top of the largest volcano and shooting into the clouds.  Rook calls this volcano Thor’s Anvil.
    During the eighty hours he and Bishop have been orbiting this world and scanning it for signs of life or traps, Rook has followed some of the storm systems, making sure that the ship’s AI dedicated an entire program to keeping up with it.  Once, all Sidewinders had to know all about the weather of a world, so as to advise their pilots on how to fly through the atmospheres.  Rook is glad to find this weather-mapping system is still operational, and that he still remembers how to use it—it’s been a while since he’s had to map a terrestrial world.
    Presently, he glances at his micropad, to scan his to-do list, when something interrupts him.  A slight spike in the deep-field readers—the Sidewinder’s computers are programmed to cast a wide and continuous “net” of scans into the dark depths all around it, what are termed the deep fields.  Currently, it sees nothing beyond Kali at all, except for one very strange gravitic distortion.  It’s a small star—perhaps the last star on the fringes of the galaxy, one that scans show is running out of hydrogen to convert into helium.  Its helium core causes it to expand as it cools.  It’s dying.  But the strange reading beyond it…
    “S’funny,” he says.
    Bishop looks at him sharply.  “What is it?”
    “A powerful gravitic distortion, some far-flung object…not a black hole, but something warping spacetime.  About four-point-six light-years…that way.”   He points beyond Kali, then looks at Bishop.  “Mean anything to you?”
    “No.”
    Rook watches the alien for a moment, trying to read an unreadable face, then scans further down his to-do list, when he discovers Bishop hasn’t made his move yet.  “By the way,” he says, “it’s still on you.”
    “What?”  Bishop looks where Rook is pointing, at his micropad’s screen, at the chessboard.  “Oh,” he says, and quickly pulls