She panned around with her mind's eye, hopping from sensor to sensor. The mesh was there in every direction. It was a cage, but the question was, was it keeping something in or was it keeping something out? Whatever the truth of it, it clearly hadn't worked: in one quadrant, displaced by forty-five degrees from the ecliptic plane, a ragged planet-sized hole had been punched through the mesh. Either that or the construction had never been completed in the first place.
The fact of the mesh was bewildering, but it didn't immediately alter anything. Ondo was not going to be able to keep away once he learned what she'd found – assuming she made it back to the Refuge to tell him – but she needed to explore the pyramidal structure first.
She instructed the sensors to harvest all the telemetry they could and reached to place her foot onto the surface of the planet.
The walk to the pyramid was short, the effort of it little enough in the low-g environment. The converging lines were high walls on either side of her, narrowing to the entranceway ahead. The ground beneath her feet was hard stone, shiny and smooth, although whether it had been worn that way by the passage of countless feet, or was natural, she couldn't tell. Her suit's internal sensors started to feed her warnings, telling her it was unable to shunt away all the solar radiation falling upon it. She could feel the rising heat on the skin of her shoulders, although it was possible she was imagining it; the sensors in her artificial tissues reported no difference. She adopted a loping run to make sure she had time to get back to the Dragon before her suit's defences failed.
But she stopped halfway to the building, her breathing loud in her ears, to take it all in. She was standing on another planet, something she'd once thought impossible. The Refuge had been one thing, but this was a new world, and people of some sort – presumably – had once lived and died here. The roiling blue star above her head would have been a faint dot in the night sky of Maes Far, if it had been visible at all, but now it was strikingly, physically real. She wondered what it had been like for her father, leaving Sintorus and setting foot on Maes Far for the first time.
She stopped again at the triangular entrance in the base of the pyramid. No defensive systems had woken up to blast her from this universe into the next. She still got nothing unusual from the interior: across all electromagnetic wavelengths it read exactly as she'd expect a stone structure built close to a star to read. She couldn't get anything off its surface that would give her an accurate estimate of its age.
She paused at the threshold, giving the whatever a chance to act, show itself, but it refused to. She stepped on through.
The high, airy space she found herself within was lit from above by rays of light slanting through the holes punched in the structure. High patches of the walls were illuminated, and the other two doors were clear triangles of blue light, but the intervening ground was in shadows, dimly lit by a scatter of photons. There were objects there, but they were indistinct.
She activated suit lights, setting them to maximum so she had a chance to see what was around her. In three places, ragged lumps of rock were embedded in the ground: fragments of the meteorites, she assumed, that had struck the building. A layer of gritty dust crunched under her boots as she stepped forwards. The interior walls were emblazoned with swirling designs like the ramble of twining vegetation, triangles and circles and stars dotted along rambling lines in no pattern she could identify. She couldn't tell if it was art or the symbols of some unknown alphabet. She let her private Ondo view them through her eyes. She wanted him to see everything she was seeing as she walked around the alien structure.
“Have you come across anything like them before?” she asked.
Ondo took his time to reply as he studied the images. “Something similar, perhaps. Fragments. Is it a map, do you think?”
“A map?”
“These could almost be trails through metaspace, with the shapes as star systems or planets. Or they might be more metaphorical destinations, like a journey from ignorance to enlightenment.”
“Perhaps it's a story,” she suggested. “Like, a creation myth or an explanation of how this structure came to be here.” There were ancient cave etchings on Maes Far that were along the same lines, although much smaller in extent. The tale of one tribe's migration from sea to mountains to lake until it reached the paradise of its ancestral home. Or so the archaeologists had believed.
“Please record every detail you can,” said Ondo. “The real me will want to study this in detail.”
“Yeah. I figured.” She sent a copy of what she was seeing out to the Dragon too. It had a far higher computational capacity than both her natural and artificial brains. It might be able to identify something.
The Dragon, however, wasn't there. She called it repeatedly across all wavelengths at her disposal and got nothing.
“You're seeing this, Ondo?”
“The ship might still be present but unable to hear you. Or unable to respond.”
“Or it's been destroyed or had to leave in a hurry.”
“Also possible.”
She was thirty or forty paces from the doorway she'd come in by. She bounded her way back over to it. At the doorway, she stepped back into the light, and the Dragon was there where she'd left it, a second pyramid to sit beside the ancient stone one.
This time, it responded immediately when she talked to it. “This is the first thing I've heard from you since you went inside.”
“Have there been any changes out here?”
“Nothing. It appears the structure blocks communication to the outside environment.”
“Yeah.”
“I can discern no mechanism by
