by Simon Kewin
In the end it was a faint warble from a nanosensor dropped on her previous visit that gave her the ghost of the reading she needed. She caught a glimpse of a coastline beneath the sensor. She calculated her approximate distance from the device based on its signal strength, while pattern-matching the line of the landmass with what they knew of the geography of Coronade.
The approximate fix was encouraging: they were over the western edge of the ocean containing the circular islands, around a hundred kilometres from where they needed to be. Pretty good. She glanced across at Ondo as he saw the calculations. The look of anticipation in his eyes was bright. He was so near the answers he craved.
Battling the bucking lander, she pulled the nose up to some semblance of level and eased on the undercarriage thrusters to slow their descent. The winds were less extreme at the surface, but they were still violent, scouring the rugged terrain three hundred metres below. Going down any lower was dangerous: a sudden sidewind could flip them over and dash them to the rocks before she had chance to react. She turned the lander's nose south and edged on the thrusters. They passed in and out of the base of the streaming cloud layers, enough to give her an occasional radar glimpse of the surface terrain. She picked out structures that were clearly the ruins of buildings, lining the coast for hundreds of kilometres. There were, seemingly, the outlines of many different architectural styles: the embassies and enclaves of a thousand different cultures. They passed over the ruins of a city, arranged around three wide, spiralling roads running from its centre to its edges.
Two minutes later, she picked up the radial line of the oceanic structure that would lead them across the water to the gateway island corresponding to the Warden's metakey. On their images it had been a delicate spiderweb line, but on the ground the true scale of it was apparent: it was a thirty-metre-wide bridge, joining the continental landmass to the circular islands strung out through the ocean. Its foundations had to be firmly embedded in the ocean floor bedrock, even out in the depths: a pontoon would have been swept away long ago. She turned the lander onto a vector to follow it.
Another light flared in the high atmosphere, hundreds of kilometres away. In a way it was good. Their escape plan involved lurking in the atmosphere for as long as they could stand it – Ondo had suggested a week – then bursting out at a random spot to hook up with the Radiant Dragon. The more nukes Concordance dropped, the more they might speculate that she and Ondo were dead.
She slowed the lander to a halt as it neared the island. It was clearly artificial: the smooth walls plunging down through the tortured oceans could be the product of no natural process. It was small, a hundred metres in diameter, and its land surface was completely flat, forty metres above the surge of the mountainous waves. Perhaps there had been more structures upon it once, buildings swept away by repeated tsunami devastation, but there was a single object extant upon the island: a pointed stone arch in the precise centre. Battling the vicious sidewinds that threw the lander around, she put the lander onto an approach vector.
When they passed over the lip of the island, the buffeting from the air immediately cut out. They were in clear air.
“The island is shielded.” said Ondo.
She studied the lander's external environment. “Partially. We're still open to the atmosphere. Sunlight too, if there were any. But the winds have been cancelled out.”
“Engineered to allow ships to land safely.”
“Looks that way. How can that work? And how in the name of Omn's perfectly-formed balls is it still operating?”
Ondo didn't reply, but she could tell he was quietly delighted at the discovery. She put the ship down ten metres from the arch, pointing one battery of the lander's external lights upon it so they could study it in detail. They sat in a bubble of illumination, hundreds of kilometres of raging darkness around them, the arch eerie in the gloom. Selene and Ondo suited up and descended the lander's ramp to approach, their bodies casting long shadows on the ground before them. A faint blue light glowed from the arch as they neared. It was thirty metres tall, twenty wide, and numerous symbols she couldn't read were etched around its stonework. She'd seen their like before, though: around the star charts in the viewing orb at the Depository. The archway appeared to be the product of the same technological culture.
There was a space in the line of symbols two metres off the ground. A slot into which the metakey object would fit perfectly.
“Shall we put it in and see what it does?” she said to Ondo.
“We have to.”
“What if it does nothing at all?”
“Then our journey has been wasted. We've taken the wrong road.”
She pulled the metakey from the leg-pocket she carried it in. Disappointingly, it didn't glow or feel warmer to the touch. She'd been expecting – what – a clue that she held the key to open up this ancient lock? Something. She placed the metakey into the slot.
A quiver running through the ground was the first indication that the mechanism was active. She picked up a high-pitched whine, rapidly disappearing into the far supersonic, and then the archway turned into light. It glowed white, the symbols adorning it burning in blues and reds. The space between the uprights of the arch moved in a way she couldn't quite identify. It swirled, and the darkness she could see through it became, somehow, blacker still. Then there was an audible crack, like a small sonic boom, and the space through the arch flicked to a creamy white.
Selene's left eye adjusted near-instantly to the change in illumination. The archway now led to a tunnel, leading for two hundred metres, or three, to another archway. None of it, clearly, was physically there on Coronade. Like the doorway at the Depository, if she walked around the side of the archway, she could see the tunnel leading the other way, through where she'd been standing.
“It's here,” said Ondo, the delight clear in his voice. “It's really here.”
Another light flared then, somewhere above them, a ball of pearlescent white in the heavy gloom of the atmosphere. Another came, and then another. It took her a moment to grasp they were nothing to do with the archway.
They were more aerial nuke blasts, nearby. Concordance had seen the lights from the lander or the archway and reacted. She and Ondo had only moments before the blast wave slammed into them. Could the safe-landing shield around the island protect them? She didn't want to wait around to find out.
Ondo still hadn't moved, still hadn't worked it out, his brain running too slowly. She grasped him by the hand and threw herself through the archway, into the whiteness of the tunnel. Ondo sprawled onto the floor while she turned to the archway. The same symbols were on this side, too, and there was the metakey, somehow on the inside of the doorway. She plucked it from its slot. Outside, the light of an exploding sun boiled the air. Then it was gone as the doorway blinked back to darkness.
There was a moment of calm during which neither of them moved and nothing happened. She held out a hand to haul Ondo to his feet.
He spoke out loud. “We can't go back.”
“No. Not now, anyway. Perhaps not ever. But you were right about this place, your golden age and your trail through the stars. Coronade and our forgotten history. It's all real.”
“The question is, what lies at the other end of this tunnel?”
“Only one way to find out.”
They walked slowly, warily. The portal behind them did not open again. Concordance, it seemed, did not possess a metakey of their own, did not know the secret of the archways.
Or, she thought, maybe they did, and were happy for her and Ondo to take the walk they were taking.
One hundred metres along, equidistant between the two archways, she paused. Part of her brain was scanning for threats but another part had bubbled up a question from nowhere. She might not get chance to ask him again. And perhaps she simply wanted to hear his voice in the still quiet of the alien structure. Speaking over the comms link, she said, “My father … how well did he know Marita and your daughter?”
>
Ondo took a moment to react to the conversational switch. He stopped to look at her. “Well enough. He took being Juma's folkfather very seriously.”
“In a way she would have been my sister.”
A sad smile spread across Ondo's features, visible through his visor. “In a way. Except, if she'd survived, I suspect none of this would have happened, at least not to me, and Seben, and therefore you. If I hadn't lost Juma and Marita, I'd still be on Sintorus and the universe wouldn't have you in it.”
“I'm sorry.”
“Don't be; it is pointless to attempt to tally these things, to weigh one possible timeline against another. The galaxy unfolds as it does and this is all we have: a past we have to live with and a future we can attempt to change. And, between them, the now, the fleeting moment where we can act, try to do the right thing. But, given what happened, you should know I'm very glad you came into my life. Little has made sense to me over the years, but your arrival at the Refuge felt like the pieces of a broken picture slotting into place. Like the Warden suddenly becoming coherent rather than a collection of shattered pieces. You are not my daughter, of course, but I have secretly thought of you as my folkdaughter. If you don't mind.”
Perhaps he was taking the opportunity to say things he might not get chance to again, as well.
“No, I don't mind,” she said. “What do you hope we'll find at the end of this tunnel?”
“Hope? I hope to find an enclave of an unknown pre-Omnian War culture, a survivor of the golden age that can give us the answers we crave – and also the tools we need to battle Concordance.” He smiled to himself. “You see, it is easy to hope.”
“I haven't always found it easy.”
He conceded the point with a slight nod of his head. “But when it does come, it is easy to hope for the stars. Shall we go and see?”
“Yes. We should.”
The metakey activated the archway at the far end of the tunnel, just as it had at the entranceway. The arrangement was interesting; it was apparently designed to ensure that both doors couldn't be open at the same time. Like an airlock, but not for air. She let Ondo step through first before following him.
They found themselves in a circle of three archways, the one they'd stepped through and two shorter ones. Towering over them stood the ruins of a city: domes and fallen towers, rank upon rank, all dark. Beyond them lay a sky that was a blazing arc of plasma stretching from one horizon to the other, bright enough to illuminate the scene around them. It was undeniably beautiful, glowing across a wide electromagnetic spectrum.
It was hard to pick out the background stars through the nebulous cloud, but from those she could discern, she got a rough fix on their galactic coordinates. “We're nowhere near Coronade. By the look of it, we're on the opposite side of the galactic wheel completely.”
“The metaspace tunnels,” Ondo replied.
“I guess.” She ran some more calculations, triangulating off the magnitudes of the stars she could identify. “There's something else, too: I think we're bang in the middle of one of the dead zones.”
“How sure are you?”
“Pretty sure. We're in another corner of the galaxy that someone does not want us to visit.”
Scanning local space with her augmentations, Selene picked out the dead sun at the system's core by its intense magnetic field: the superdense neutron star that had ejected most of its mass in the cataclysmic convulsion of its end. A supernova. The star was tiny, now, a few kilometres in diameter, blasting out gamma rays but giving off no heat. A neutron sun around which there could be no life.
Ondo was silent for a moment. She'd given him access to the enhanced telemetry her left eye could gather.
“This close the blast wave should have obliterated everything,” said Ondo. “The planet's atmosphere would have been stripped away, but these structures survive. That's remarkable.”
“Protected by some unknown tech, like the archways. However that works, it's clear there's no life here. There's no biosphere left.”
“The ruined structures are extensive. A lot of people must have lived here. Lived and died.”
“We should try the other archways. Perhaps they lead where we need to go.”
The smaller archways appeared to require no metakey to activate them. White tunnels, shorter than the one they'd arrived by, were visible down both.
They tried the first and emerged on another dead planet. This time they were upon a mountain peak, the devastated world spread out around them, buildings and structures stretching to the horizon in every direction. From her readings of the dead star, she calculated that she and Ondo were some fifty million kilometres farther out of the system. Still, the annihilation was total. Once again, miraculously, structures had survived, but the planet was utterly lifeless.
Neither of them speaking, they returned to their arrival point and took the third archway.
This time it was clear they were on a world much nearer the star. There was nothing of the planet left: the archway and the fragment of rock it stood upon tumbled alone through the void. A cloud of other fragments was smeared across local space, scraps of rock and ice that might, in time, coalesce to form a new world. The supernova had blasted the planet to pieces.
Selene finally spoke. “There is no one here. No golden age civilisation, no miraculous weapon. The trail has led us to a dead end.”
Something in the spectrography of the dead star was engrossing Ondo. “Are you sure of that?” he asked.
“Of course I'm sure. Look at this place. There's nothing here but death and destruction. Whoever we were supposed to find, they're long-gone.”
Even then, there was a note of hope in Ondo's voice. “Which means, perhaps, that someone wanted us to see the death and destruction, understand what has happened and what might happen again. Someone is giving us this warning. The trail has led us to this point, but it does not end here, I know it. See: this supernova has been engineered; from what I can calculate of the original star's mass, it shouldn't have exploded for a billion years. Someone did this.”
“You can't know that. The corpse sun may have sucked in mass from a sister star.”
“There's no sign of any second star, judging by the orbits of the surviving planets. They look too regular.”
She looked at the readings, saw that he was probably right. Which meant that billions of lives across at least three planets, a significant interplanetary culture, had been wiped out in a single galactic moment. A sickening trickle of dread wormed through her. It was another technosignature of a highly-advanced stellar engineering capability: the Depository in Dead Space, its star altered to create an impossible blue dwarf. Now this. Was it possible Morn was a weapon for obliterating worlds? For annihilating entire star systems?
“You think Concordance did this?” she said. The horror of it was too large to fully grasp. So many lives ended, so much love and achievement and hope snuffed out. Did they know what was coming at the end, all those people?
“I don't think so,” said Ondo. “This has to be an older atrocity. I think we are seeing another echo of events predating Vulpis.”
“Which shows us your idea of a golden age of peace and civilisation centred on Coronade is completely wrong after all. The galaxy was riven by war and horror, before Concordance arose to impose their order upon it.”
Ondo shook his head, troubled. “The age of this; once again, I'm not sure it fits. I think this has to be much older. If I could make proper observations, study them from the Refuge, I'd be able to arrive at a more accurate date.”
“Whatever the truth of it, we're trapped here,” said Selene. “We've proven your theories, but we'll still run out of oxygen in a few hours and die. There's no way out.”
“I don't believe it,” said Ondo. “We were meant to travel here. Someone will come, I know it.”
“Who? There's no one here. There can be no one here.”
“Someone,” said Ondo. “I'm sure of it.”
�
��You're saying that without any evidence. You're saying you just believe, Ondo.”
“I'm saying the trail is real, and that it wouldn't just stop. Someone will come.”
She didn't respond. All she could think about, suddenly, were the Cathedral ships, one within each inhabited solar system. Perhaps she and Ondo had been brought here for a moment of realisation.
“Maybe this is their plan.” she spoke quietly. “You were always puzzled by the Cathedral ships' fascination with the suns in their systems. Don't you see? They aren't watching the planets; they're studying the stars. Altering the stars. One ship in each system, ready to trigger stellar collapse when the moment comes. This is Godel's catastrophism, this is their design. This is what they found at the heart of the galaxy, the means to do this. The rest of it – suppressing superluminal travel, imposing their own history, the shrouds – they're keeping the galaxy in line while they prepare for the ultimate act of destruction.”
Ondo opened his mouth, about to reply, but then didn't. He knew she was right. They were safe from Concordance for the moment, they'd walked the path, but they were out of weapons, without a ship, hundreds of light-years from the Refuge or any hope of rescue. The need to act was greater than ever, but suddenly there was nothing they could do.
A familiar rage coiled within Selene, raising its head: the need to strike out. But for the moment, she had nothing to strike with, and no one to strike at. She let out a cry of frustration. Somehow, she didn't know how, but somehow, she'd continue the fight. If the trail had led them nowhere, then she would force a path of her own. Ondo placed a hand upon her shoulder but didn't speak.
