“It's not a lesson we can put to any use, given how near to dying I am.”
“How close are you?”
She granted him access to her internal status. “That close.”
“There isn't much time left,” he said after a moment.
“No. I noticed that.”
She emerged at the circle of three archways, stumbling to the ground as she did so. She was on her back, confused about how she'd got there. The ruined domes and archways of the planet crowded around her peripheral vision. Like people standing silently around a deathbed, peering in at her.
The glowing plasma blotted out the stars above her. She thought about the times she'd looked at the galaxy from the Refuge, imagining it as something like a brain. And, again, on Migdala, sitting with Myrced upon the roof of her house, that sweet interlude in her recent life. She, Selene, had said then that the stars move, that things changed, but sometimes so slowly you couldn't see it. The stars turned, yes, but they moved in other ways, too: forming and dying. She wished she could tell Myrced that. Change was possible. Change was inevitable. And, it wasn't only a natural process: stars could be created and destroyed in acts of stellar engineering. What seemed constant, untouchable, could be swept away. Perhaps that meant Concordance could be swept away.
With a grunt of effort, she forced herself onto her side. A glint of light in the dust of the ruins caught her eye, down at ground-level, reflecting the glow in the sky. What was that? They'd explored briefly upon first arriving and had found nothing but debris and destruction among the ruined walls and domes. The spark was dim; her natural eye wouldn't have been able to detect it. She moved her head from side-to-side a little and the mote of light disappeared, reappeared, disappeared. It was only visible from the one spot she happened to have fallen in. Some shard of glass perhaps? Hard to know how far away it was, but she guessed it was relatively small and near judging by the tiny movements needed to affect it.
The archway that would take her back across the galaxy to Coronade was a few paces away, but the speck of light intrigued her. Another tiny glow in a sea of darkness. She would find out what it was. She deactivated her inner Ondo – she didn't want to give him any explanations of what she was doing – and worked her way to her knees, her feet. She could no longer see the light, the angle of the reflection wrong. She knelt back down and by positioning her head just so, saw it again.
Very well, she would crawl. It was about all she had energy left to do anyway.
She toiled forwards, eyes fixed on her target. This world hadn't been blown to fragments by the nova, and it still rotated in a ghost of its day and night cycle. That meant the mysterious light might shift at any moment, wink out. Its life was tenuous, brief. She suddenly had to get to it, as if it held all the answers she sought.
The floor of the archway circle was smooth stone, protected somehow from the drifting powder of the ruins all around, but once she moved off it, her hands and knees sank into a dense layer that was more like volcanic ash than dust from collapsed buildings. It weighed her down, clogging her movements. Three times she knelt on some buried fragment of sharp rock. Her suit cushioned her, but alarm cut through her that a puncture would vent all her remaining oxygen. Then she would only have moments.
The clock in her brain chose that point to give her an update, sounding annoyingly calm.
Oxygen supply 0.8% - 4 minutes remaining
The mote of light glinted to her through a ragged hole in the side of one of the ruined buildings. The gap at ground level was too small; she'd have to climb through an opening a metre up. The effort of it nearly broke her, sent nausea and panic washing through her. Her heart rate was a desperate flutter. Her enhanced half was dragging her oxygen-starved biology along. She hauled herself though the gap and half-fell back to the ground on the other side, the surface-layer of dust engulfing her.
Oxygen supply 0.2% - 1 minute remaining
She'd lost awareness; minutes had slipped by unnoticed. Once again, she forced herself to act, flipping herself over to wade on hands and knees through the carpet of ash and dust. Her tissues screamed their alarm, sending more adrenaline through her. She gulped deep breaths but she might have been inhaling sand.
Gloriously, she saw the light again, brighter now, glinting close-by. She willed herself towards it, refusing to be beaten.
A skull protruded from the dust layer, on its side, one eye socket staring at her. They hadn't found many biological remains, and at first had hoped that the planets had been abandoned before the nova event. A brief chemical analysis of the detritus layer suggested otherwise: there was a widespread concentration of what appeared to be organic markers: bone-calcium and protein strands. They'd also unearthed a few visible fragments of skeleton. Many people had died there.
The skull was elongated in shape, reminding her of something she could no longer recall. A ragged hole had been punched into it from some crushing injury, filling it with the glow of the plasma. The light she'd seen twinkled through the eye socket, refracting through something inside the cranium.
She reached out with a gauntleted hand, scrabbling with her fingertips to snag the skull. She caught it, pulled it towards her. A glass bead, half a centimetre in diameter, fell out through the open floor of the bone cavity, disappearing into the dust layer. A glass bead inside a skull: that triggered a memory. They'd found one just like it somewhere. Thinking was hard
