She approached the structures she'd seen from space warily, alive to the dangers of defensive fire. None came. It was hard to escape the notion that the radiating lines were directing her inwards to the central point. There, the triangular shape was a tetrahedron, a pyramid with three faces rather than the four of the Radiant Dragon. It appeared to be built from stone. The structures had received considerable damage at some point in the past. Whether this was the result of cataclysmic bombardment, or the long accumulation of meteorite strikes, it was impossible to say, but deep gouges were cut through the radiating lines on the ground, and a chunk had been bitten out of one of the corners of the pyramidal structure.
An accurate Microimpact Count Analysis of the surfaces was impossible to obtain without landing, but the numbers she had suggested that the structure was old. Decay rates would be impossible to predict accurately in such an environment, but her best guess was that the ruin had stood for many centuries. Maybe even millennia. She circled the pyramid, studying it with the ship's battery of sensors, looking for dangers. A design had been carved into each of the three faces: a simple circle. They were not, she noted, the same size as each other. The designers had deliberately made one smaller, one larger.
She'd seen similar motifs before: Ondo had shown her markings like them upon the fuselage of more than one Cathedral ship, and he had fuzzy images of one of the First Augurs, a predecessor to Carious, with those sigils upon his white robes. Three circles of different sizes, sometimes arranged in a triangle, sometimes surrounding a larger circle. In some versions, the inner circle appeared to be an eye, light radiating from it. Some ecclesiastical symbolism, they'd assumed, but either her analysis of the surfaces was wildly wrong, or the symbol was older than Concordance. A design they'd stolen and reused for their own purposes.
Satisfied there was no immediate danger, she set the lander down. She extended her sight through the lander's systems, probing every visible centimetre of the environment. Everything was dead. Overhead, the blue star burned in the sky. Finally, she did consult her inner Ondo. She showed him everything that had taken place since his last upload, then asked him his opinion. To her surprise, he didn't council retreat to a safe distance. His fascination at what she had found was stronger.
“I think you should enter the structure, but that's easy for me to say as my life is not at risk here.”
“If I die, this version of you goes with me.”
She heard an echo of a chuckle from Ondo. “Even though I feel alive, I know I'm a disembodied image in your head. But if you die, you definitely die. The choice has to be yours.”
“What would you do if you were really with me?”
“I'd watch and wait a little longer.”
“I'm going in now.”
“I assumed you would.”
There was an entranceway at the foot of each triangular face of the building: a smaller triangle that looked dark to all her senses. She got no signatures from any kind of energy wall, no hint of a defensive system. Which didn't mean that they weren't there. The doorways were three metres high at their apex; seemingly, she could walk right on through. The hard radiation and the searing heat from the nearby star would overwhelm the protection her suit offered in only a few minutes, but that would be give her enough time to get inside.
The harsh blue light gave the scene an unnatural tinge, like she was inside a planet-sized stasis field. She was about to take the step down from the lander, the glassy surface of the sun-blasted planet beneath her boot gleaming, when the Dragon spoke to her.
“I have retrieved some telemetry from the outer edges of the system.”
Her foot stopped a centimetre above the ground. “Concordance?”
“I'm not sure what it is.”
“Show me.”
Fuzzy, low-resolution images streamed into her brain, captured at the nanosensors' maximum magnification. She discerned what looked like a mesh of tiny hexagons stretching across her field of view. It had to be an artefact of the sensors projected onto the scene. She checked streams from other devices sent to other corners of the system. They all showed the same thing: a mesh, a cage, appeared to surround the system. The system was relatively small, with no other rocky planets and no gas giants, but still the scale of the boundary was hard to comprehend. It was a wall of an unknown nature enclosing an entire solar system. She was in a bubble after all: a sphere one hundred million kilometres across.
A shiver fizzed up her spine at what she was seeing, a thrill of wonder. She'd never heard of any natural phenomenon that was anything like the mesh, but it was also hard to believe it could be artificial. Who could possibly have created such a vast construction? Apart from the engineering skill required, the sheer volume of material needed was staggering.
She glimpsed stars through the hexagonal gaps. Many stars, smudged by the poor image quality. Pattern-matching routines in her brain identified them. The good news was they were the stars of the familiar galaxy, right where they should be. She hadn't arrived in some pocket universe. She was where she intended to be, deep in galactic Dead Space.
She got no energy signatures off the mesh, no indication it was in any way powered or active. It didn't appear to refract or reflect EM radiation on any wavelength. Like everything else in the system, it looked inert, although somehow it had hidden the outside galaxy from her at first. Spectrographic analyses revealed very little. She couldn't even speculate what materials had been used to construct it. The tensile strength of
