Could she reopen the Coronade entrance using the metakey they'd been given by the Warden? Perhaps. The archway had clearly been designed to ensure people couldn't easily move from Coronade to the dead star system, and perhaps prevent them from returning at all. It was a puzzling fact if you accepted Ondo's view of the golden age culture. Why go to such lengths to construct miraculous passageways among the stars, and then prevent their use? Ondo had to be wrong; the Coronade civilisation had been radically different to the one he'd imagined.
In any case, she would try to make the return journey. Ondo would know nothing of her actions; he was too far gone for it to matter. She would return through the tunnels, attempt to reopen the archway and fight their pursuers. She would have no chance – they would drop more atmospheric nukes or unleash beam-weapon fire and she'd be vaporised – but perhaps, somehow, she could get to them first, take some of them with her.
She forced herself to her knees, then to her feet. She retched, her mouth filling with bitter-sour liquid. She swallowed it back down. Vomiting inside a sealed suit was never a good thing. Stars swirled in her vision and the galaxy threatened to black-out completely, but she willed herself to remain upright and conscious. She took a step forwards, and then another, leaving Ondo's body where it was on the ground.
She stepped through the archway, taking the short, featureless tunnel that led to the outer planet they'd first arrived at. If the tunnels had ever had breathable atmosphere, it was long-gone now; whatever form of energy walls the archways propagated hadn't prevented any air from leeching away. Perhaps the builders simply hadn't considered the possibility of the atmosphere at one end of the tunnel being torn away. She and Ondo had tried and failed to find some sort of control mechanism that might restore air-pressure but hadn't found any.
She talked to him, the copy in her head at least, as she battled forwards. Partly it was to take her mind off what she was doing, partly to hear his voice. Also, it felt right for him to know everything that had happened.
He absorbed her news without comment, whatever sense of loss he might be feeling left unexpressed. She wondered whether he thought he was dying, or whether it was someone else, just a different Ondo.
“Do you still think there's a trail?” she asked. “That we were led here for a reason?”
He paused very briefly before replying. “I think so, yes. The real me clearly believed it. Perhaps some of your innate scepticism has leeched into my thoughts from your brain, so I have some doubts, but I still think we have a purpose. There are fragments of the picture here.”
“It's hard to see a picture if you're dead,” she said. “You said this supernova was engineered, an anomaly, but maybe you were wrong. Even my enhanced senses give us only crude readings. This could have been a completely natural disaster, nothing more. A star exploding after its core collapsed unexpectedly.”
“This was clearly a technological society; you've seen the scale of the ruins. From the similarities in the architecture, I'd say this was the same culture spread across multiple worlds: the three that we've glimpsed, and perhaps others. There's no way a society that advanced wouldn't know its star was close to catastrophic explosion. And you've studied the readings; the mass of stellar material is at odds with what we can calculate from the planets' original orbits. My view is still that someone did this: triggered solar collapse and wiped out these worlds in a moment of galactic time. Even the farthermost planet would have been devastated within a few minutes. If there was no warning, no chance to evacuate, billions of people must have died. Billions of lives and much that was unique and glorious, all gone. We have to accept that's the most likely explanation.”
Walking was an effort, an act of will. Her muscles were cramping and her brain threatened repeatedly to succumb to the darkness. Her breathing was rapid, panicky. She forced herself to keep moving and talking. “Then, perhaps there was some end-of-days cult going on; the people chose to live close to the edge of destruction, knowing the end could come at any moment. People do things like that, right? Perhaps they embraced catastrophe like Concordance do.”
“It seems so unlikely. From what I can tell of the ruins, the buildings must have been quite beautiful.”
“What the hell does that have to do with anything?”
“I suppose I can't believe that a people capable of such marvels – technological and aesthetic – would embrace death to that extent.”
“The ships Concordance use, the Cathedral ships, they're beautiful, yet they embrace death. They're all about death. You're projecting how you think about the universe onto unknown cultures.”
“Concordance are anomalous, and I don't believe they are responsible for creating the wonders they wield.”
“Who is, then?”
“That, of course, we don't know. But it's clear Concordance aren't fully in control of the technology at their disposal. For one thing, they're not here. If they knew about the tunnels and the archways, they'd have come for us. They'd have been waiting for us. I don't believe they know where we are and I don't believe they understand how the metaspace pathways function.
