The Trouble with Tall Ones — Ian Watson

Prior to what follows, our plucky quartet of Xiaolong, Zbeth, Yatta, and Ngela—who crew the time machine salvage ship Fibonacci which sets out from Cranberry, Oz, in 2776 Common Era aided by Homer the Artificial Intelligence to salvage time machines gone astray—became involved with tall aliens who left a dozen of their species in stasis cabinets in Antarctica 100K years ago until an asteroid melted Antarctica's ice-cap in 2072 CE. Alas, Ngela perished inside dwarf planet Ceres from a giant spider bite but later turned up alive inside a stasis cabinet due to a 'Bolt mann Brain' from the utterly far future, quite a conjuring trick. Now read on . . .