A few standard days later after their very profitable trip to the rim, and now deep into the long lunar night, Kira was back at the lowest level of the newly discovered gallery in the old ice mine. She was operating the newest and largest of the fusion-powered digging machines. The managers of the mine, in consult with their engineers, had determined that a careful excavation consisting of a few horizontal bore holes into the massive ice wall should be completed before further excavations could begin. The amount of ice mined from this site in the low Lunar gravity well could be worth trillions of credits as water, oxygen and hydrogen exported to Mars, the Belt and to Earth-based exploration concerns. It was possibly one of the most valuable finds in the solar system.

The Big Beast as they called the massive machine had been chewing through the beyond ancient ice at the lightning-fast pace of over one meter per hour when the proximity alarm alerted and stopped the rotation of the cutter wheel. Multiple alarms sounded and forced an automatic halt to the excavation program and the machine ground slowly to a halt. The sensors were designed to stop and alert the operator of changes in the strata from ice to rock and to stop when any void was detected by the Lidar sensors or a magnetic field from any metallic object.

Kira checked her readouts and was puzzled at first. The comp indicated solid water ice at minus 40 degrees centigrade which was within a few degrees of the average in the deep part of the mine. What the machine's rudimentary AI had stopped for was an object less than one meter from the workface. Whatever it was, was on the other side of the block of ice that had been there for a very long time. Kira looked at the readings again and thought for a moment. She knew that the predecessors to the current Chinese Hegemony, the CCP had landed probes of the lunar South Pole 50 or 60 years before the People's New Revolution. She knew however, that none of those small, crude robotic probes could bore through more than a few meters below the surface. The metallic object she had discovered was more than a kilometer below the mean lunar surface and frozen in a block of ancient ice at least 100 meters thick. She looked at her readings one more time and tapped her comm panel. "Mine Control, Digger One. Sensors show a hold for, ah, some kind of buried object."

From a few thousand meters above her, the response from the control room came over her comm system. "Say again Kira, confirm you are on Nav program gamma-6 in ice gallery #3 in the new borehole?"

From inside her hard suit, Kira rolled her eyes before responding. "Roger that Control. I'm right on the bore line, coords are tunnel #3 Alpha, 220 meters from the main gallery, depth readout shows 1,169 meters from the surface datum."

"Copy all. What again was the alert for?"

Kira paused, took a deep breath and repeated the content of her first message. "Like I said Control, the sensors showed a large metallic object less than one meter from the cutter face and shut the unit down."

There was a long silence on the comm band and then Kira shrugged. "I could just override the safety cutouts, but I think that would probably be a bad idea. Maybe you guys should come down here and take a look."

Kira's supervisor on that shift was an old Earther named Wang-Ho who had been at the Lunar South Pole base for as long as anyone could remember. Everyone always joked about Ho and Ko on the same shift. Within an hour, the woman who was somewhere between 65 and 80 standard years old made it to Kira's work site. She and her assistant arrived in a non-pressurized four-seat utility vehicle with several pieces of equipment secured in the cargo area. The little machine looked like a child's toy parked next to Kira's giant tunneling unit.

The short woman unstrapped from the driver's seat and stepped up to Kira. "So, M. Ko, what have we here?"

Kira took a sip of warm reclaimed water from a bite nipple in her helmet. The water did not taste good and as she had been in her hard suit for the better part of 12 standard hours, the smell of the air was not great either. "Hard to say exactly. I was cutting the long access tunnel on this plane just at the lower level of the void in the cavern beyond that ice wall. Anyway, like I said before, all of the sensors went off-scale right and commanded an auto-shutdown for a large metallic object."

Wang Ho turned and looked at her assistant who was a tall Lunarian who could not have been more than 19 standard years old. "Technician Lu, let's start with the magnetometer and verify Tech-2 Ko's findings and then we'll take a 3-D Lidar scan."

The young technician removed the bulky scanner from the back of the utility vehicle and rolled it to the work face. "Right here M. Ho?"

"That should work..."

After an hour of careful scans, the three miners had more questions than answers. Ho shook her head. "Well, Kira, you have most definitely found something the likes of which I have never seen. I thought it might just be a nickel-iron asteroid, but none of these readings make sense. It's way too big and that void makes no sense at all. I think that we had best call some of the smart people from topside to come down here and take a look."

It took until late in the following shift for the ad hoc team consisting of the station's Doctor Elize Park, Chief Mine Director Dassir, his executive assistant/accountant Cho and the young Chief Engineer from the main fusion power core who had a long name but was simply called Jim by his colleagues. The ad-hoc team rode a slow-speed crawler several hundred meters from the ice face in the main cavern through the smooth fusion-bored tunnel to where Kira's machine lay dormant. The massive unit's reactor was in idle/standby and provided enough residual heat to keep the machine and its lubricants, parts and human operators from freezing solid. As the slow transport crawler arrived, Director Dassir was first to exit. He gazed up at the massive boring machine and greeted the tall Lunarian woman in the red Kevlar reinforced miner's vacuum suit. "M. Ko, Kira what kind of trouble are you up to?"

Kira laughed and held out an armored hand and he shook it. "The usual sir, just doing my job. It's just that I have a knack for finding interesting stuff."

The older man smiled at the memory of when Kira at age 9 had discovered one of the richest veins of helium-3 bearing rock ever discovered on the moon. She claimed at the time to be researching a school science project and didn't get into too much trouble for borrowing the small digging unit that she had used to find the multi-billion credit ore vein. He gestured to the giant tunneling machine in front of them. "Please, as always lead the way M. Ko."

At the same time as she was leading the group to the cutter face and her new discovery, she tongued the comm unit in her suit to a seldom-used lower band frequency and tapped a few keys on her wrist unit to engage a secure channel. "J. K here. How do you copy?"

There was a long pause before her friend answered. "2 by 1, soft but scratchy. Something down here is causing a lot of interference on this band. What's up K?"

Kira looked around at the four suited figures behind her and gestured ever so slightly with a finger to the right side of her helmet indicating. "Not now, too many might be listening. Just wanted to make sure that you were with me."

She then gestured with one vertical and one horizontal finger indicating 1-5 minutes. From his place at the rear of the procession, Jim tapped his right shoulder acknowledging her signal. A few minutes later, Kira led the team to the workspace. She used a remote LED light from the top of the boring unit which shone with almost 100,000 lumens. It illuminated the workface in bright blue-white light. "So here is where my sensors started picking up the anomalous readings. It was off the chart on the Lidar as well as the magnetometer. There is no way that there should be any metallic object down here, and nothing that has the mass to send the readings off the scale right."

She pointed to the ice wall at the end of the tunnel a few meters from where she had back to the machine off. "I considered overriding the safeties and digging on but knew I had better stop and call in the Home Office. So, ladies and gentlemen, that's why we are here."

The group moved forward and examined the workface. The circular bore of the tunneling machine had left a smooth translucent wall of ancient ice. Long ago, it had been well established that the moon had been formed about 3.5 billion years ago when the proto-earth had been struck by a Mars-sized planetesimal called Thera. The resulting collision had created the moon out of a large collection of the Earth's early crust and mantle. The Apollo missions had returned samples that had confirmed this hypothesis of the moon's formation. Some of the other anomalies discovered on Earth's very large satellite proved to be more elusive. The one question always asked by the ice miners at the South lunar pole deep in the shadowed craters was simply. Why was there so much ice, and so deep after over 3 billion years?

Kira was not quite ready to answer that question as she once again shined her spotlight on the tunnel face that her machine had discovered earlier that workday. "... So, as I was saying, this ice face has been unchanged for many millions of years, perhaps longer."

One of the topside bureaucrats who was a former base Physician asked with more than a bit of snark in her tone. "How can you be so sure of that miner Ko?"

From behind her visor, Kira rolled her eyes and paused before answering. "It's Mine Technician Second Class Ko, Doctor and the reason is of course the ratio of the elements and their associated isotopes. Do I need to explain the differences between Carbon-12 and Carbon-14 or Helium-2 and -3?"

"I apologize Technician, that won't be necessary please carry on with your explanation."

Kira again gestured to the work face. "Right then, based on the isotope ratios, this ice has been here an equally long time. It goes without saying that anything frozen in this primordial material has also been there a very long time, and by that, we're talkin' about 500 million years or so, and maybe way more than that."

From the back of the line, the Director's administrative assistant asked. "But how could that be?"

From inside her suit, Kira shrugged. "Beats me. Your guess is as good as mine. All of this should be impossible, but here we are almost 1,200 meters below the lunar datum and we have found something buried or frozen in primordial ice. This thing, whatever it is may have been here for half a billion years or more. How we proceed is up to the Home Office. We can go back to base, seal up this tunnel and pretend it does not exist or we can press on."

On the same channel, the voice of Kira's friend Jim said loudly and clearly for all. "Or we do what we've always done on this rock and see what we can see that no one else ever has before."

Kira smiled and thought silently. What could possibly go wrong?