by Simon Kewin
“Okay,” she said, “so we're going to do this? Attempt the journey back through Dead Space, seize the object from the clutches of the Warden, hope the Radiant Dragon doesn't go insane or explode from the trauma of it, then return to Coronade and attempt to penetrate an extremely volatile atmosphere without Concordance seeing us but before they act to completely annihilate the planet? And then escape the planet and the Concordance blockade strung around it? All in the hope of uncovering the next clue in this imaginary trail you think we're following?”
“Yes,” said Ondo. “I think that's what we should do.”
“In that case, leave the Aether Dragon where it is, EVA over, and we'll get started.”
4. The Metakey
Once again, the Radiant Dragon struggled against Selene's navigational inputs as she attempted to steer it along the complex path through Dead Space. It felt like multiple personalities were warring inside the ship's Mind, some friendly to her, others hostile. She flew manually, not trusting the ship to obey the course if she laid it all in beforehand, fearing the ship might simply refuse to fly, or steer them into a star rather than face the pain of repeating the journey to the Depository.
So far, the navigational controls were more-or-less responding, but with each jump she sensed more resistance from the ship, a swelling reaction that was something like anger and something like fear. She was forcing the ship to take a series of actions that went fundamentally against its nature, and the effect was inflicting further damage upon the ship's core. She found herself apologizing out loud at each shudder running through the bulkheads. She tried to reach that inner Mind, offer it explanation, but it remained locked away. Sweat trickled down her back from the effort of directing the vessel.
She caught Ondo's eye. “Can you hear it, too? The screaming? The whole ship cries out for us to stop.”
“I hear it,” said Ondo quietly. His distaste at what they were doing was clear in his eyes.
“Perhaps they're locks put in place by Concordance to stop anyone using the ship to reach the Depository,” she said. She knew she was saying it to make herself feel better. The ship's resistance went too deep; it felt terrified. “Are similar strictures built into the Aether Dragon?”
“In my experience, all vessels built by pre-Omnian War civilisations had such bars embedded into their navigational systems. Whatever the perceived danger is, it goes deep.”
“It may have been a cultural response to revered sites. Like, sacred ground.”
“I could have believed that if it was only a few cultures, but not all of them.”
“This golden age of yours – perhaps this was one of their spiritual beliefs or their social taboos. Regions of space only the elect few could approach.”
Ondo shook his head. “It seems so unlikely. We know little of the culture, of course, and all cultures are complex, conflicted melanges rather than a single, simple thing. But from all I've learned, I don't believe it. They seemed so enlightened, so advanced.”
“But those are all subjective concepts, and you're defining what you consider to be advanced. Besides, they weren't so superior that they didn't crumble when Concordance burst out of the galactic centre.”
Ondo was about to reply when a shock jolted through the ship, as if they'd struck something solid – impossible as that was in metaspace. A look of anxiety shot between them.
“This is going to get worse before it gets better,” he said. “Even if the ship doesn't refuse to follow your instructions, it might tear itself to pieces before we get there.”
“If we do get there, let's just hope it feels better about getting away afterwards. Flying like this is agony, it's tearing my head in two.”
In the end, they stuttered rather than jumped into existence within visual range of the blue dwarf star. Selene detached her mind from the ship's navigational controls with a sense of huge relief. It was like some constant, nerve-shredding noise finally stopping, the absence of it glorious.
Ondo placed a reassuring hand on her shoulder. “No sign of any Concordance incursion at all. If they have scrambled to protect multiple locations, this doesn't appear to be one of them.”
Her eyes ached from the effort of forcing the ship to move. “Or they left when we showed up at Coronade.”
Ondo was examining telemetry while Selene stood and stretched. He said, “The nanosensors you left indicate no activity whatsoever. Either they're waiting beyond our light-speed horizon, or they're simply not here.”
“Let's get in and out before they show up,” she said. “The sooner we can leave here, the better.”
This time they took a lander down to the alien planet, boiling under the harsh blue light of the raging star. The previous time, she'd only made it into the pyramidal structure by racing against the damage that the hard radiation was inflicting upon her suit, but she doubted Ondo would be strong enough for such an effort. She nestled the tiny ship down between two of the high, converging walls, thirty metres from the triangular entranceway.
The building was exactly as she'd left it, no sign that Concordance or anyone else had been there since her visit, no footprints in the dust other than her own. That was something. She hurried towards the centre of the vault where the door had appeared. Ondo lingered behind her, turning around, fascinated by every detail of the alien structure.
“The age of this place,” he mused over the comms, but mostly speaking to himself. “Do I have this wrong? I thought it might predate the war by a few years, a few centuries, but now I see it properly, I don't know. It could be millennia older. But then, who built it? And why? This hard radiation … perhaps a spectroscopic analysis of the walls would tell me something.”
“We have to hurry, remember,” she called to him. “Galaxy under threat, enemies massing to defeat us, clock ticking.”
“Of course. It's just … this structure. I could study it for decades.”
“Please don't, not now anyway. Give me the bead.”
He handed her the glass sphere he'd brought with him from the Refuge. Clutching it in her gauntlet, she strode confidently towards the point where the doorway had appeared. As before, she sensed the electromagnetic tickle of the mechanism before the oblong slid out of the floor. Clearly visible through it lay the gallery with its multitude of plinths, stretching impossibly away into an unknown distance.
“After you,” she said.
“Did you have any feeling of translation last time, like a fall into metaspace?”
“Nothing. It's as easy as stepping through a door.”
“You said there was atmosphere in there. How does it not escape when the entrance appears?”
“I have no idea; some mechanism prevents the inner vault from explosive decompression. None of this makes sense; the vault is clearly not directly here. Are we going to go in?”
“Yes. Of course.”
She followed him as he stepped through.
As before, the doorway slid back into the floor as they strode into the cavernous vault that was either deep underground – or somewhere else entirely. So far as she could tell, the artefacts on the plinths were arranged in the same order as before. She'd dispersed nanosensors on her previous visit, but she couldn't detect a whisper from them. As before, she overrode the life-support alerts from her suit and slid back her visor.
“Are you sure that's wise?” asked Ondo.
“Not completely.”
“What happens if you accidentally go near the doorway and it activates?”
“Whoever built this place knew what they were doing. There's no damage here despite the planetary bombardment the surface structures have been subjected to.”
After a moment, Ondo slid back his own helmet. “This talk about metaspace tunnels … I can't help wondering if we're even on the same planet. We might be anywhere.”
“None of my sensors can provide any kind of positioning lock. The gravity's the same as outside, that's all I know.”
Ondo leaned in to examine each artefact cl
osely, peering through his multiglasses to study each across a wide spectrum of electromagnetic radiation, walking around the plinths to see each object from every angle. He muttered to himself as he did so, “This is incredible. But how? I don't even… Oh, now this…”
The moving object, the X-shaped four-legged spider thing, especially fascinated him as it flicked to and fro inside its stasis containment.
“Do you see it move?” he asked.
His question puzzled her. “You don't?”
“I see it disappear and reappear, but I don't see it occupying the spatial points in between.”
She looked closer. He was right; there were no intervening points in the object's movement that she could detect. “Some sort of drive mechanism? Or a prototype of one?” she suggested.
“I could spend lifetimes down here studying these objects,” was his only answer.
They moved to the item they'd come for: the silvery totem whose arrangement of lines and rings resembled the structures on the surface of Coronade. Selene scanned the object more closely, looking for details she might have missed. There were no markings, but the higher-resolution images revealed an even greater fidelity to the layout of the planetary islands. Either the object had been made to accurately represent the land masses, or the islands had been constructed to replicate the object. Or both were based on some other, unknown design.
“How did you summon the Warden before?” asked Ondo. “It must know what these objects are, what their function is.”
“Last time it turned up when I spoke out loud. Maybe it's broken completely now and can't materialize.”
“What did you say last time?”
“You know me, I'm always polite. Just hello.”
Ondo raised his voice to address the entire room. “Hello. Please, we need you.”
The shimmering, slow-motion explosion flickered into existence. It had clearly been aware of their presence all along but was only manifesting when summoned. It seemed its original purpose was to be helpful rather than protective, but that didn't mean it couldn't be both.
“We'd like to take this object,” she said. Always best to take the direct approach. “You said you kept them under your warding until the day they are needed. We need this one now.”
The shards of light making up the entity's form swirled and glinted, as if it were giving her request due thought.
“The long night…” it began.
She held up her hand. “The long night must see a dawn, yes. This is us, trying to bring it about. You must release this object.”
“The long night,” it said again, then stopped. Its neural pathways were fritzed to fuck; reasoning with it wasn't going to get them very far. She drew the blaster held in her suit's thigh holster and pointed it at the next plinth, the statue of the bipedal being. Which, now that she thought about it, somewhat resembled the entity inside the Radiant Dragon's core, with its elongated limbs and head. Was that significant?
“A night without a dawn isn't a night,” she said. “It's just endless darkness. I will start destroying these artefacts, one by one. Give us this item, and we'll be on our way, no damage done.”
The shifting planes of the entity glinted with different colours, purples flashing into reds that it was hard not to interpret as anger or a threat. A rising whine came from it as some energy store built up charge. Either it was going to blast her to pieces and was having trouble lining the components of its weapons systems up, or it was simply going to explode from the suppressed effort of it. She'd hoped it would sacrifice one of the artefacts to save the rest, but it didn't look like that was going to work out. It was planning to sacrifice her and Ondo instead.
She flicked her aim to the plinth containing the totem they wanted. Maybe she could blast out the stasis field and grab the object before the Warden pulled itself together. She was sending the fire commands to the gun when Ondo intervened, stepping forwards to stand between her and the plinth, hands held up in a clear attempt to placate the alien mechanism. Only her augmented reactions stopped her firing and punching a hole clean through his body.
“Please, there is no need for this,” he said. “We need to activate the Gamma Spinwards Tunnel.”
For one, two seconds, the entity stopped flashing, stopped swirling as it absorbed Ondo's words. It appeared to understand what he was talking about. She knew for a fact that Ondo did not.
“The Tunnel is dark,” said the entity. “Sealed off. The risk is too great.”
Selene caught the flash of delight on Ondo's features as he glanced back at her over the swelling of his helmet yoke. His guess had struck home.
“We wish to open the Tunnel again,” said Ondo.
He held up his gauntlet and projected moving images from it into the air in front of the entity. They were the correlated telemetry streams she'd pulled from Coronade, rendered as a complete globe, the land masses of the continents and, clearly visible, the pattern of islands and lines in the ocean. Ondo had subtly emphasised them, marking them out for clarity.
Selene talked to him directly, brain-to-brain. She had to hope the Warden entity didn't have the technomagic required to decrypt what they were saying. “If this entity thinks we're going to try and use this tunnel, it might decide it's best to kill both of us.”
“Perhaps,” Ondo replied, “but it hasn't done so yet. I think it's confused about us. Whoever placed these objects under its care clearly assumed the time would come for them to be released, or else why go to so much trouble? The same may be true of the Coronade structures; they also haven't been wiped from the face of the galaxy. I think that's because, someday, it was thought they might be needed.”
“You don't know they haven't been destroyed. You want to think there's something active on Coronade, I get it, but there may not be, not anymore.”
The entity still hadn't responded. Ondo spoke out loud to it. “The Gamma Spinwards Tunnel is damaged and broken, but we believe it has survived. The risk of using it may be great, but so is the danger of doing nothing. You must be capable of weighing up the best course of action, to decide what is best for the objects in your care. The galaxy is reaching a turning point, and if we don't take the correct step, all could be lost. The dawn may never come.”
Was any of that true? The Warden was certainly spending its time considering Ondo's words. The energy signature within it was a constant, jarring note in her head: not falling back, but not climbing either. She picked up stutters in it, hesitations, as if the entity were drawing on all its reserves to perform its computations.
Ondo pressed his point, a catch of emotion in his voice. “Please. I have followed this trail for many years, for most of my life. I have dug in the dust of dead planets only to find more dust, and I've been lost in the despair of dead-ends, feeling I would never uncover the secrets. I have been shown only glimpses and shadows. Now, here, you must let me take the next step.”
The entity finally responded. It shimmered backwards, like it was getting a good angle to spray both of them with blaster fire. The constituent shards of its body pulsed and swirled, and then finally aligned into the shape of the body it had intended to have all along. Or, in fact, multiple forms: different arrangements and structures to suit the different needs it might have. It morphed into a squat tank-like entity bristling with kill-weaponry, then to a small, slight sliver of life little more than a shaft of light, then to a towering form with an elongated, animal head that had to be, from its jackhammer limbs, immensely strong. Maybe it had drawn greater energy from its surroundings and, for a moment, and quite literally, pulled itself together. Finally, it settled on a polished-smooth black body, like the blank of a person before all the features were added, a standardish bipedal form like, she thought, her artificial half before any features were added.
As the Warden's body and movements came together, so, apparently, did its thoughts. It began to speak in complete sentences rather than broken fragments. “In the darkness of your mind, you imagine what is not there,
Ondo Lagan. I do not know what this dream-journey you describe is, nor where it may take you. But you may take a metakey. This one however, must remain under my guard. The gateway it controls is to remain sealed until the end of days.”
With a sweep of one of its arms, it set the winding row of plinths into sudden motion. Selene flung herself back from them, pulling Ondo with her. The line of objects slid past at a greater and greater rate, as if the white floor were a conveyor belt, although she could see no join, no mechanism by which the meandering line could be moving.
The columns picked up speed, faster and faster until only her left eye could resolve each in the millisecond moment they were in front of her. More and more unfathomable objects, small and large, their nature mechanical, organic, unidentifiable. She caught Ondo's look: his senses were enhanced, too, but not as highly as hers. She could count the objects, image each, but to him they would be nothing more than a blur.
Through them, in staccato freeze-frames, the featureless black form of the Warden looked on.
Abruptly, the plinths stopped, seemingly untroubled by their former momentum. The plinth directly before them bore another silver totem like the one they were seeking. Stepping forwards, Selene could see that the single bead it contained occupied a different circle within its design. The good news was, the island it corresponded to on Coronade was another that had survived the planetary bombardment.
The Warden did something to the mechanism, sent instructions to it, and the stasis field around the object dissipated, exposing the totem to the air. The invitation was clear. Not waiting to be asked, Selene picked it from its pedestal.
It was surprisingly weighty, constructed from a dense metallic substance she couldn't identify. The Warden made no attempt to stop her removing the object.
