Dembowska was of the third rank, two hundred kilometers across. Like other circumsolar bodies, it had paid its homage to the laws of chance. In the time of the dinosaurs, something large had hit Dembowska. The visitor was there and gone in a split second, leaving chunks of its impact-melted pyroxene embedded in the crust as it flew apart in gouts of fire. At the point of impact, Dembowska’s silicate matrix had shattered, opening a ragged vertical crevasse twenty kilometers down to the asteroid’s nickel-iron core.