Trinli said, ‘We’ve known for years that the Spiders evolved here, that they never had a higher tech.’ ‘Quite so. And their own archeologists have no solid evidence of visitations. But this … this stuff is an artifact, even if only we can see it as such. Anne’s automation has spent several days on this. It’s a coordinated processing matrix.’ ‘I thought you said it was refined from native ores.’ ‘Yes. It makes the conclusion all the more fantastic. For forty years we’ve thought the diamond powders of Arachna were either infalls or biological skeletons. Now it looks like they are fossil
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