“It’s a ring cemetery,” Dower said matter-of-factly. “Warren worlds are subtly different, but the template is the same, every damn time.” She glanced around sharply at the hundred faces. “Everybody okay with this?”

“There are just so many of them,” somebody said. “If the whole of the rim wall is like this—miles of it—there must be billions of them.”

“It’s an old colony,” Dower said dryly.

The shuttle swam on, heading toward the central mountain.

On the edge of a lake of frozen oxygen, the shuttle landed as gently as a soap bubble. Dower ordered a skinsuit check—each trooper checked her own kit, then her buddy’s—and the walls of the shuttle popped to nothingness.

-Coalescent, ch. 49