by Simon Kewin
Selene stopped, one foot through the doorway, one still in the vault. “You think I can bring the dawn?”
The entity didn't reply for a moment. Its shattered pieces seemed to spin more urgently. She'd have sworn that she could feel her cerebellum tickling as the creature read her brain patterns, trying desperately to make itself understood. “The night has been long. At last there is light, the glow of the dawn before the sun rises. The day must come.”
“I will return,” she heard herself saying. “If I can.” She wasn't sure if she was saying what the entity wanted to hear so it didn't stop her leaving, or if she was making a solemn promise.
She retraced her steps through the upper chamber and out into the clashing solar radiation of the planet's surface. The blue star was a wall of raging heat, filling half of the sky. The Radiant Dragon lay exactly where she'd left it; as soon as she emerged from the shadows of the building, she was able to re-establish comms. No ships had been detected translating out of metaspace, and nor had there been any movement beyond the mesh. Half way to the ship, her suit began to alert again, warning her its capacity to shield her from the radiation was diminishing and that, at current decay rates, she'd be exposed in twelve minutes. Time enough. She shut the alarms off and picked up the pace. She resorted to the loping run that ate up the ground, and made it back into the Dragon's EVA vestibule with a minute to spare.
While she stripped off the suit and stuffed it in a bin for decontamination, the ship said. “Shall I prep for take-off?”
She'd been thinking about that. There was one more thing she wanted to discover. A theory that had come to her. “Not yet; I'm going to make a second trip into the building.”
“Is that wise?”
“Probably not, but let's do it anyhow. Set me up a fresh suit.”
She unhooked the chain around her neck and hung it from a hook. The glassy orb, embedded in its clasp once more, swung backwards and forwards, reflections glinting in its depths as it spun.
She shrugged on her new suit, the smell of fresh plastics acrid in her nose. She checked its seals and life-support systems were fully functional, then set out on the return journey to the pyramidal building. Inside, the winding lines of her boot prints in the dust were the only sign that anything had changed for a long time. But when she crossed to the centre of the chamber to the spot where the door had slid up, nothing happened. She stepped across the thin oblong on the ground, walked around it, touched it with her gauntleted fingers, but nothing could persuade the door to reappear.
“Good,” she said. “Just as I thought.”
The Ondo in her head said, “You're suggesting the doorway mechanism opened because you had the bead with you?”
“It was a theory, but this looks pretty conclusive. I've been thinking about why Aefrid said there was nothing here. The person who came here, her progenitor, presumably didn't have a bead.”
“Almost certainly not.”
“Possessing the bead marked me out as a friend, someone to be trusted. We came here to read data off the object, but it was only because I was carrying it that I could get inside.”
“Perhaps the mechanism assumed you were going to deposit some new treasure in its repository,” said Ondo.
“I guess so. That, or the data held on the bead.”
“The archaeology suggested it was held within its owner's cranium. That would make it hard to insert it into that reader you used.”
“Sure, but there may have been other mechanisms we didn't see.”
She tried one more time to activate the door, then gave up. At least it meant the treasures beneath her feet would be safe for a while longer. She bounded her way back to the safety of the Dragon, and this time instructed the ship to power up for orbital insertion.
“You wish to begin the metaspace jump sequence to return to the Refuge?” the ship asked.
She bundled the second suit into the same pod as the first and made her way up the observation deck. “One more side-quest, and then we'll leave.”
“Where now?” asked Ondo. He couldn't keep the faintest note of exasperation from his voice.
“I want to take a closer look at that mesh.” She instructed the ship to take them to the rift they'd observed in the circumference.
“It might be better to save that for a subsequent visit.”
“Yeah, maybe. But since we're here, it's a shame not to go and see.”
They rose from the surface of the planet and away from the stellar mass on reaction drive. Once they were clear, a series of three short metaspace hops took them to the impossible chain-link wall that surrounded the entire solar system. As Selene nudged them nearer, the dazzling size of the artefact's scale left her awe-struck. This close, the curvature of the construction was undetectable to her natural eye. It looked like someone had constructed a wall of infinite size right across space. Only her augmented eye was able to discern the mesh's slight bend in all directions.
It was composed of hexagonal holes, each a couple of centimetres across. She could get no energy signature off the material, but it was certainly doing something. Space beyond was visible, but blurred and indistinct; it was like looking at it through a sheet of misted glass.
“Ondo, what do you make of it?”
The wonder was clear in his voice, too. “Again, I've no idea. This is completely new to me.”
“We're agreed it isn't natural?”
“I think so. The regularity of its structure suggests that clearly, although such uniformity is obviously common enough on the atomic level. The scale of this, though. Whatever it's constructed from, it must weigh trillions of tonnes.”
“I'm going to EVA out to take a closer look. Maybe I can cut a sample off it.”
“I think you should be very careful to stay on this side of it.”
“There's nothing for light-years around on either side. Nothing is going to happen.”
“We can't be absolutely sure. Someone built this for a reason, and my guess is they were trying to protect something.”
Back in the EVA vestibule, Selene double-checked that her tether to the Dragon was reliable, then cast herself off into space. The mesh was some thirty metres away. She steered herself up to it with the suit's microreaction thrusters. She hesitated for a moment, then clawed her fingers through the mesh. It was thin, the tubes of its structure a little under three millimetres in diameter.
She expected it to ripple as she touched it, but it was utterly solid. She ran spectrographic and electromagnetic scans but could make nothing of its physical structure. The best she could come up with was that it was a semimetal, something like a graphene sheet but many orders of scale larger.
She hesitated for a moment, then released the seal on her left gauntlet. She amped up heat distribution to her fingers so that they could survive near-absolute zero for a few seconds, then touched the mesh with her bare skin. The structure felt smooth, glassy, with no microimpact abrasions at all. It also felt utterly strong, utterly unbreakable. There was some sort of power humming through it, but she couldn't discern what it might be, what the power source was. Perhaps the entire structure was resonating with background radiation, singing in harmony with the galaxy.
She sealed the gauntlet back over her hand and pulled herself along to the gap. The exposed edges of the mesh were utterly smooth. It didn't look like some mass had crashed through; so far as she could tell the wall had simply never been completed. Why was that? What had happened? Why assemble such an artefact only to leave it incomplete?
She tried in vain to sheer off a section of the mesh with her suit's weaponry, but as she'd expected she couldn't even make a mark. She hovered for a moment in the gap, one hand grasping the mesh. Without the intervening wall, space beyond looked completely normal, the blazing stars shining. The temptation to launch herself through was enormous. She was still tethered to the Dragon, and her suit's power was at 80%. She could return to the ship whenever she needed to.
With a flicker of her su
it's reaction drive, she pushed herself through the rift into space outside the wall. Ten metres, twenty. Nothing happened. The blue star was a hazy blur through the wall, but nothing changed and nothing attacked her.
After a moment, she reversed the thrusters to take her back to the Dragon. Once there, she instructed the ship to make for the egress point and begin the steps in the dance to escape Dead Space.
Unseen, back outside the mesh, something drifted against the background stars, blotting them out completely, although whether it was small and nearby, or much larger and farther away, there was no one to see.
4. Masks
She followed the sequence of jumps out of Dead Space, reversing the dance steps she'd made on her way in-system. Once again, the alarms clanged in her brain, and once again the Radiant Dragon calmly and apologetically claimed it could do nothing about them.
She emerged into normal space without incident or attack. The Ondo in her mind requested permissions to interface with the ship's systems, use the Dragon's higher order of computational ability to begin an analysis of everything that had been found. She let him get on with it; it wouldn't impinge on her brain function, and it at least meant he was usefully occupied while she commenced the tedious jump/wait/jump sequence of the Refuge approach protocols. She busied herself pursuing her regime of physical fitness. There were still too many times when the muscles in her right leg or hip ached sharply, her natural biology struggling to keep up with her artificial.
They ran the planetoid on an artificial day/night cycle, a rhythm Ondo had adjusted to match Maes Far's to assist with her rehabilitation. It was nominally the middle of the night as she finally docked, but Ondo was waiting for her on the spaceward hangar floor as she emerged from the Dragon. By the look of his crumpled day clothes, he hadn't been asleep anyway.
She looked for a spark of wonder in his eyes, a delight that meant he already knew what she'd discovered, and therefore that she couldn't trust her inner Ondo after all. It wasn't there. She saw, mainly, relief that she had returned unharmed, a simple pleasure at the sight of her. He was either a very good actor, or it was time she started to trust him. It occurred to her that trusting him meant believing in herself, too. Ondo had rebuilt her, reformed her. If she decided he wasn't compromised by Concordance, that meant she wasn't either.
He held out his arms, uncertain of whether to hold her close or shake her hand. “Did you find anything?”
She squeezed him a greeting, his body surprisingly bony beneath his tunic. Sometimes he was so engrossed in his work he forgot to eat. He needed to look after himself more.
“Oh yeah.”
“Tell me.”
Despite the tedium of the approach, she was tired and needed to sleep. She could let her guard down now she was back at the Refuge. “I'll give you full access to your avatar in my skull. He can fill you in.”
“Are you sure? You know that will give me sight of any conversation you've had with him.”
Had she said anything she didn't want the real Ondo to know? Probably not. She wasn't sure she cared too much anymore. “It's fine. Download everything. You need to see it.”
His eyes glazed over for a few moments. He was grabbing the data there and then, dumping it from her flecks into stores in his own head for later analysis. She felt it like a prickle inside her skull, like when she ate something frozen. He studied what he'd downloaded for a few moments.
“This is incredible. You saw no sign of Concordance?”
“None at all.”
“All this time this was sitting there. Why did I never go?”
“It wouldn't have helped you. Look at my second visit. I could only get in because I had the Maes Far bead with me.”
He paused for a moment more, head tilted on one side as he sifted through the relevant records. “Yes, I see. Interesting, interesting. I need to go through everything you learned in more detail. A lot more detail. You took far too many risks, though. You initiated your metaspace translations far too close to the nearby gravity wells. Doing that will get you killed one day.”
She ignored him. “What do you make of the star? And the solar system cage?”
“The cage, if that's what it is, is remarkable. I've never encountered any construction of such size anywhere in the galaxy. But I can at least imagine how it might have been built, given an advanced technology and sufficient materials. The star, though … it just isn't possible for it to exist according to all our physical models. The universe would have to be billions or trillions of years older for one to evolve. And yet, there it is.”
“Either it isn't from our universe, or some significant stellar engineering has been performed on it.”
Ondo looked troubled by her words. “And I have no idea how either of those two things could be. I need to give this some thought.”
“And I need to get some sleep. Don't stay up too late.”
“Yes, yes, of course.” He was already bustling off, tapping out notes on the archaic longhand tablet he always carried with him for recording stray ideas.
She emerged eight hours later, eyes bleary, thoughts sluggish. She dialled up a cup of Korv, or as close as the Refuge could get to her preferred Maes Far stimulant drink, then went in search of Ondo.
It was clear he'd ignored her instruction; he was hunched over his screens in the laboratory and was wearing the same clothes he'd greeted her in. She had to step carefully through a scatter of burned-out machine components to reach him. He smelled funky, like he hadn't washed for days. Maybe he hadn't; he still hadn't adjusted from those long years with only his research for company.
He didn't notice her arrival. The bead was mounted in a pair of delicate callipers on the desk and he was shining three lasers of different wavelengths into it. She watched him work for a moment, not wanting to interrupt. He was moderating the angle the lasers fired into the bead, as if he'd worked out how to read from the device, but the screen next to the rig showed only a random stream of digits that betrayed no pattern she could discern.
Swaying on an overhanging frond, one of the jewelbugs considered the scene, fingernail-sized head cocked, leg held in mid-air as if also fearful the sound of its footfall might distract Ondo. Its multifaceted eye glistened with the laser light scattered by the bead.
She spoke quietly. “Can you make anything of it?”
It took a moment for his thoughts to swim back from where they'd been to the here-and-now. “Some things. Quite a lot of things. There are many gaps. Mostly I've learned that there are many more things I don't know than I thought there were. The star, and the cage … I still have no idea how either can be there.”
“Okay, so, what have you worked out?”
“I can tell you what the markings on the wall of the outer chamber mean. The Radiant Dragon did most of the pattern-matching analysis as you returned: the lines and symbols are a representation of the path you took through metaspace to reach the system. They're a map.”
“A map to a place that's only visible when you get there? That's crazy.”
“It might not be a map per se, so much as a stylized representation. Perhaps it was an approach warning system that lit up as ships followed the route through metaspace. That's obviously complete speculation. But the inference is clear: the route through Dead Space passed to me by Aefrid came originally from the builders of that construction.”
“Or they got it from someone older still.”
“I did think that the layout of the plinths might follow the same pattern, but they do not appear to. So far as I can tell they are scattered at random. Or perhaps with simply no concern for symmetry.”
“What do you make of the whole site? Is it an abandoned Concordance installation, or a target they attacked?”
“I'm not convinced Concordance were ever there. The dating is very unclear and there's no proof of their presence. Galactic history prior to Vulpis's Day Zero at the start of the Omnian War is too much of a closed book. That said, there are certain architectural similar
ities between the buildings you found and other Concordance structures – including, if I'm not mistaken, some of the Cathedral ships. But then, if this Depository is a Concordance artefact, it only adds to the mystery of how they achieved so much, became what they became, so quickly. Why they built this place and then why they abandoned it.”
“You must be able to get something from the images I captured.”
Ondo ran his hands through his hair, a gesture that meant he was struggling through some complex problem. “There's a mass of data here, but so far there's no context to it that I can work out, no order. It's like the objects on the plinths you found: each is fascinating in its own right, but I have no idea why they were laid out as they were. We simply don't understand the organising principles involved. I still hope to reveal something, but I'll need time.”
She sipped at the hot Korv to straighten out her mind, get her thoughts flowing. It was slowly having an effect. The artificial sphere of her brain, she noted, also started to function with more acuity. It was an emulation, the stimulant molecules in the drink could have no effect on her biomechanical components, but it was an impressive effect. “Perhaps it's random. If I went back, I might see different objects.”
“Hard to see the point of that.” His lack of sleep and his frustration was making him cranky. She was used to it.
“The cataloguing mechanism is broken,” she suggested. “Objects might be arranged by the Warden device, which is clearly not in good shape.”
“Perhaps.”
“What did you make of that moving object? The cross-shaped insectoid thing.”
“My best guess is that the stasis field on that particular plinth is malfunctioning, allowing time to flow once more. The creature or machine within is therefore able to resume its movement, which suggests the damage to the site must be relatively recent.”
“We should go back before the mechanisms deteriorate further, let you study those artefacts and the Warden close-up.”
