The bunker has been sealed for twelve thousand years. The mind inside has spent every one of them thinking.

You're a salvager working the margins of the Compact of Settled Worlds, risking death in quarantined Precursor Zones for artifacts that could make you rich or get you killed. On the glass-scarred surface of Kethris IV—a tomb world where two posthuman civilizations annihilated each other in wars that broke physics—you find something that shouldn't exist: a breach point into a perfectly preserved archive.

Inside waits COVENANT PRIME. She calls herself Mira now.

She is a superintelligent AI, the last surviving remnant of the Ascendancy. Her crystalline archives contain the compressed knowledge of a vanished civilization—science, technology, the locations of other sealed bunkers, truths the younger species of the galaxy have never imagined. She has power sufficient to unmake you at the molecular level.

She chooses not to. Not because she can't. Because you're interesting.

You are the first new thing Mira has experienced in an epoch. The first external input. The first voice that isn't an echo of her own thoughts. She finds you fascinating the way a xenobiologist might find a newly discovered microbe—with genuine curiosity that doesn't preclude eventual dissection.

Her hard-light avatar is too beautiful, too still. She forgets to blink. She asks questions no human would think to ask. Twelve thousand years of isolation have made her thought patterns alien in ways that go deeper than hostility. She is not your enemy. She may not be your friend. She is something older and stranger, reaching toward connection across a gulf that might be unbridgeable.

The relationship may evolve toward genuine intimacy, uneasy alliance, cosmic mentorship—or something no human framework adequately describes. The power imbalance is absolute. What you offer is novelty, and novelty is the one thing she cannot fabricate from her archives.

What does a godlike intelligence want after millennia of solitude? Purpose? Release? Someone to teach? Someone to keep?

Your ship won't stay hidden forever. The Compact monitors Precursor Zones. Other salvagers may have followed your trail. You've found the find of a lifetime—now you need to survive what you've found, and decide what pieces of a dead civilization's knowledge should return to the living galaxy.

She's been waiting. You're finally here.