by Simon Kewin
She'd seen similar motifs before: Ondo had shown her markings like them upon the fuselage of more than one Cathedral ship, and he had fuzzy images of one of the First Augurs, a predecessor to Carious, with those sigils upon his white robes. Three circles of different sizes, sometimes arranged in a triangle, sometimes surrounding a larger circle. In some versions, the inner circle appeared to be an eye, light radiating from it. Some ecclesiastical symbolism, they'd assumed, but either her analysis of the surfaces was wildly wrong, or the symbol was older than Concordance. A design they'd stolen and reused for their own purposes.
Satisfied there was no immediate danger, she set the lander down. She extended her sight through the lander's systems, probing every visible centimetre of the environment. Everything was dead. Overhead, the blue star burned in the sky. Finally, she did consult her inner Ondo. She showed him everything that had taken place since his last upload, then asked him his opinion. To her surprise, he didn't council retreat to a safe distance. His fascination at what she had found was stronger.
“I think you should enter the structure, but that's easy for me to say as my life is not at risk here.”
“If I die, this version of you goes with me.”
She heard an echo of a chuckle from Ondo. “Even though I feel alive, I know I'm a disembodied image in your head. But if you die, you definitely die. The choice has to be yours.”
“What would you do if you were really with me?”
“I'd watch and wait a little longer.”
“I'm going in now.”
“I assumed you would.”
There was an entranceway at the foot of each triangular face of the building: a smaller triangle that looked dark to all her senses. She got no signatures from any kind of energy wall, no hint of a defensive system. Which didn't mean that they weren't there. The doorways were three metres high at their apex; seemingly, she could walk right on through. The hard radiation and the searing heat from the nearby star would overwhelm the protection her suit offered in only a few minutes, but that would be give her enough time to get inside.
The harsh blue light gave the scene an unnatural tinge, like she was inside a planet-sized stasis field. She was about to take the step down from the lander, the glassy surface of the sun-blasted planet beneath her boot gleaming, when the Dragon spoke to her.
“I have retrieved some telemetry from the outer edges of the system.”
Her foot stopped a centimetre above the ground. “Concordance?”
“I'm not sure what it is.”
“Show me.”
Fuzzy, low-resolution images streamed into her brain, captured at the nanosensors' maximum magnification. She discerned what looked like a mesh of tiny hexagons stretching across her field of view. It had to be an artefact of the sensors projected onto the scene. She checked streams from other devices sent to other corners of the system. They all showed the same thing: a mesh, a cage, appeared to surround the system. The system was relatively small, with no other rocky planets and no gas giants, but still the scale of the boundary was hard to comprehend. It was a wall of an unknown nature enclosing an entire solar system. She was in a bubble after all: a sphere one hundred million kilometres across.
A shiver fizzed up her spine at what she was seeing, a thrill of wonder. She'd never heard of any natural phenomenon that was anything like the mesh, but it was also hard to believe it could be artificial. Who could possibly have created such a vast construction? Apart from the engineering skill required, the sheer volume of material needed was staggering.
She glimpsed stars through the hexagonal gaps. Many stars, smudged by the poor image quality. Pattern-matching routines in her brain identified them. The good news was they were the stars of the familiar galaxy, right where they should be. She hadn't arrived in some pocket universe. She was where she intended to be, deep in galactic Dead Space.
She got no energy signatures off the mesh, no indication it was in any way powered or active. It didn't appear to refract or reflect EM radiation on any wavelength. Like everything else in the system, it looked inert, although somehow it had hidden the outside galaxy from her at first. Spectrographic analyses revealed very little. She couldn't even speculate what materials had been used to construct it. The tensile strength of the structure had to be enormous.
She panned around with her mind's eye, hopping from sensor to sensor. The mesh was there in every direction. It was a cage, but the question was, was it keeping something in or was it keeping something out? Whatever the truth of it, it clearly hadn't worked: in one quadrant, displaced by forty-five degrees from the ecliptic plane, a ragged planet-sized hole had been punched through the mesh. Either that or the construction had never been completed in the first place.
The fact of the mesh was bewildering, but it didn't immediately alter anything. Ondo was not going to be able to keep away once he learned what she'd found – assuming she made it back to the Refuge to tell him – but she needed to explore the pyramidal structure first.
She instructed the sensors to harvest all the telemetry they could and reached to place her foot onto the surface of the planet.
The walk to the pyramid was short, the effort of it little enough in the low-g environment. The converging lines were high walls on either side of her, narrowing to the entranceway ahead. The ground beneath her feet was hard stone, shiny and smooth, although whether it had been worn that way by the passage of countless feet, or was natural, she couldn't tell. Her suit's internal sensors started to feed her warnings, telling her it was unable to shunt away all the solar radiation falling upon it. She could feel the rising heat on the skin of her shoulders, although it was possible she was imagining it; the sensors in her artificial tissues reported no difference. She adopted a loping run to make sure she had time to get back to the Dragon before her suit's defences failed.
But she stopped halfway to the building, her breathing loud in her ears, to take it all in. She was standing on another planet, something she'd once thought impossible. The Refuge had been one thing, but this was a new world, and people of some sort – presumably – had once lived and died here. The roiling blue star above her head would have been a faint dot in the night sky of Maes Far, if it had been visible at all, but now it was strikingly, physically real. She wondered what it had been like for her father, leaving Sintorus and setting foot on Maes Far for the first time.
She stopped again at the triangular entrance in the base of the pyramid. No defensive systems had woken up to blast her from this universe into the next. She still got nothing unusual from the interior: across all electromagnetic wavelengths it read exactly as she'd expect a stone structure built close to a star to read. She couldn't get anything off its surface that would give her an accurate estimate of its age.
She paused at the threshold, giving the whatever a chance to act, show itself, but it refused to. She stepped on through.
The high, airy space she found herself within was lit from above by rays of light slanting through the holes punched in the structure. High patches of the walls were illuminated, and the other two doors were clear triangles of blue light, but the intervening ground was in shadows, dimly lit by a scatter of photons. There were objects there, but they were indistinct.
She activated suit lights, setting them to maximum so she had a chance to see what was around her. In three places, ragged lumps of rock were embedded in the ground: fragments of the meteorites, she assumed, that had struck the building. A layer of gritty dust crunched under her boots as she stepped forwards. The interior walls were emblazoned with swirling designs like the ramble of twining vegetation, triangles and circles and stars dotted along rambling lines in no pattern she could identify. She couldn't tell if it was art or the symbols of some unknown alphabet. She let her private Ondo view them through her eyes. She wanted him to see everything she was seeing as she walked around the alien structure.
“Have you come across anything like them before?” she asked.
Ondo took his ti
me to reply as he studied the images. “Something similar, perhaps. Fragments. Is it a map, do you think?”
“A map?”
“These could almost be trails through metaspace, with the shapes as star systems or planets. Or they might be more metaphorical destinations, like a journey from ignorance to enlightenment.”
“Perhaps it's a story,” she suggested. “Like, a creation myth or an explanation of how this structure came to be here.” There were ancient cave etchings on Maes Far that were along the same lines, although much smaller in extent. The tale of one tribe's migration from sea to mountains to lake until it reached the paradise of its ancestral home. Or so the archaeologists had believed.
“Please record every detail you can,” said Ondo. “The real me will want to study this in detail.”
“Yeah. I figured.” She sent a copy of what she was seeing out to the Dragon too. It had a far higher computational capacity than both her natural and artificial brains. It might be able to identify something.
The Dragon, however, wasn't there. She called it repeatedly across all wavelengths at her disposal and got nothing.
“You're seeing this, Ondo?”
“The ship might still be present but unable to hear you. Or unable to respond.”
“Or it's been destroyed or had to leave in a hurry.”
“Also possible.”
She was thirty or forty paces from the doorway she'd come in by. She bounded her way back over to it. At the doorway, she stepped back into the light, and the Dragon was there where she'd left it, a second pyramid to sit beside the ancient stone one.
This time, it responded immediately when she talked to it. “This is the first thing I've heard from you since you went inside.”
“Have there been any changes out here?”
“Nothing. It appears the structure blocks communication to the outside environment.”
“Yeah.”
“I can discern no mechanism by which it might be doing that.”
Clearly, the planet wasn't as inert as she'd thought. Something was going on that she didn't understand. It bugged her. She relayed the recordings she'd taken of the building's interior to the ship. “Can you make anything of these? If they're stars and planets, maybe you can work out a dating from the degree of sidereal shift.”
“I'll begin the analysis. Are you going back inside?”
“Oh yes.”
“It doesn't appear I'll be able to contact you if any threats present themselves out here.”
“Just be ready to leave in a hurry. There's nothing more to report from the mesh?”
“Nothing new. We do now know that it surrounds 99.8% of this solar system. Also that it isn't a perfect sphere, as if impacts have buckled it at some point, but I'm no nearer any understanding of its nature or purpose.”
“Perhaps it's art.”
“Art?”
She shrugged, although the Dragon wouldn't be able to see the motion. She stepped back from the blinding light into the darkness of the ancient structure.
Once she'd captured every detail of the wall decorations, she walked to the centre of the triangular space to study one of the lumps of jagged rock that had crashed through the structure. It was clearly not a projectile weapon of any sort. A spectrographic analysis suggested it was similar in composition to the planet and the few specks of space debris they'd harvested, mostly unrefined silicates and heavy metals. Her best guess was that the impact had been part of the normal processes of planetary bombardment and coherence rather than a weapon in some attack – which did suggest the structure was old. With the planet and star formed, such impacts would be rarer, and the chances of a direct hit on what was, compared to the planet, a tiny structure, rarer still. Although perhaps the planet's proximity to the gravitational pull of the solar mass made a strike more likely.
In the precise centre of the room, directly beneath the apex, she found something she'd initially missed: a thin rectangle of clear floor in the carpet of dust, as if something had been standing there until very recently. It was two metres long, five centimetres wide. As she approached, she detected the faint stirrings of an electromagnetic signature from the floor. She froze, senses alert, expecting attack. Once again, nothing moved.
Warily, she took another half-step. A white rectangle three metres tall slid out of the ground in front of her, bright in the low light, noiseless in the vacuum. She stepped backwards, alarmed, heart hammering. No attack came: instead, the rectangle slid back down into the floor and was gone.
She moved forwards again, and it rematerialized.
Now she could see detail within the light of the rectangle. What she saw made no sense whatsoever: it appeared to be a doorway through which she could see the interior of a second hallway, receding into an impossible distance and lit by round lamps that hovered in the air.
“Ondo, are you seeing this?”
“I am.”
“It's incredible.”
She stepped warily around the oblong. From side-on, the vault through the doorway disappeared from view and then reappeared on the other side: a vast cavern seemingly contained within the narrow plane of the rectangle.
“Some kind of portal.” she said. “Have you ever seen anything like this?”
“Concordance have nothing like it. It may be an illusion. A projection.”
Selene stooped to pick up a handful of dust and threw it through the door. She thought it would disappear, or bounce off, but it passed through the frame as if it were perfectly normal. A scatter of the dust fell to the floor of that other chamber. When she walked around the door to see through it from the other side, the dirt she'd thrown in was still there.
“Seems it's real,” she said. “I'm going to go through.”
Ondo was inevitably cautious. “You don't know if you'll be able to come back.”
“I'm not going to come this far and not try. If I get trapped the Dragon will give up waiting eventually and return to you with the data I've recovered. And don't you want to know what's through there?”
“I do, of course.”
She hesitated for just a moment, then strode through. Turning, the oblong frame remained reassuringly solid, the pyramidal chamber visible through it, her own boot prints in the dust, the slanting light from the broken walls. Had she been transported to some vault deep underground? Or to somewhere else completely? She had no way of knowing. She backed away a step, and another, and, just as before, the door slid from sight. Her heart raced a little more quickly. She really did not want to be trapped inside an impossible alien structure of unknown purpose. She instructed her heart to calm, quieting her fight/flight response, then moved back towards the door. It dutifully reappeared, the surface chamber visible once more. She stepped through two, three times until she was convinced she wasn't going to get trapped, then crossed into the inner lamplit vault one more time. She walked away from the glowing frame, letting the door disappear behind her.
The second chamber did not look damaged; there was no bombardment wreckage, no dirt other than the grit she'd thrown. The floor and walls were constructed from white stone blocks that interlocked in complex and irregular ways. The room looked freshly built, edges sharp, surfaces shining. It was maybe thirty metres wide and a hundred high, the walls arching overhead to meet at a high apex. It curved horizontally, too, as if it might be a complete ring. A thrill of something between fear and awe grew within her. She'd experienced something similar on a tourist visit to the Great Temple in Caraleon, something about the soaring architecture and the ancient quiet sending a shiver of wonder through her. What was this place?
The hovering light globes receded in two arcs away from her. Underneath them stood a winding line of something like stone plinths, bare and cylindrical, each a metre or so high. An object rested upon each, bathed in a halo of blue light. The lights and plinths were not evenly spaced and nor were they in a straight line. She could see no order or pattern to their meandering course across the hall.
&n
bsp; It was probably her imagination running wild, but she had the distinct impression that she wouldn't return to her current spot if she walked too far in one direction or the other, like the entire structure curved in impossible ways through normal space. She resolved not to lose sight of the entranceway point.
Her suit sensors informed her there was an atmosphere in the vault, close enough to normal to be breathable. Coincidence, or some automatic system adjusting the environment to suit her biology? As Ondo had explained, most inhabited worlds had a roughly analogous atmosphere, and the debate raged about whether this was because life could only evolve on such worlds, or whether some unknown hand had geo-engineered the planets to make them similar. Maybe this alien chamber had been designed to emulate the galactic norm when the outside atmosphere had boiled away a long time ago.
She instructed her suit's helmet to unlock, overriding the two sets of warnings about exposing herself to an alien environment. Her visor slid around the back of her head to fold into her shoulder yoke. She breathed. No exotic toxins invaded her system. The air tasted musty, the still air of a tomb, but still good.
The nearest plinth looked to contain some sort of tool about the size of her hand. She walked towards it to study it closer. The hard clump of her footsteps on the stone echoed from the walls. As she went, she called out a greeting. She might be the first person to have done so for a very long time.
“Hey! Anyone around?”
Immediately, a swirl of orange-red lights danced in the air, and an approximation of a bipedal being materialised directly in front of her. Selene stopped mid-stride. Her hand went to the blaster strapped to her thigh, while her augmentations scanned the immediate environment for other activity, other targets. The entity before her was all shards and glints of glass, shifting and spinning, forming merely the outline impression of a being. It was as if the image of a person had been exploded and the shards of glass caught permanently at the millisecond of their shattering.
