It was probably her imagination running wild, but she had the distinct impression that she wouldn't return to her current spot if she walked too far in one direction or the other, like the entire structure curved in impossible ways through normal space. She resolved not to lose sight of the entranceway point.
Her suit sensors informed her there was an atmosphere in the vault, close enough to normal to be breathable. Coincidence, or some automatic system adjusting the environment to suit her biology? As Ondo had explained, most inhabited worlds had a roughly analogous atmosphere, and the debate raged about whether this was because life could only evolve on such worlds, or whether some unknown hand had geo-engineered the planets to make them similar. Maybe this alien chamber had been designed to emulate the galactic norm when the outside atmosphere had boiled away a long time ago.
She instructed her suit's helmet to unlock, overriding the two sets of warnings about exposing herself to an alien environment. Her visor slid around the back of her head to fold into her shoulder yoke. She breathed. No exotic toxins invaded her system. The air tasted musty, the still air of a tomb, but still good.
The nearest plinth looked to contain some sort of tool about the size of her hand. She walked towards it to study it closer. The hard clump of her footsteps on the stone echoed from the walls. As she went, she called out a greeting. She might be the first person to have done so for a very long time.
“Hey! Anyone around?”
Immediately, a swirl of orange-red lights danced in the air, and an approximation of a bipedal being materialised directly in front of her. Selene stopped mid-stride. Her hand went to the blaster strapped to her thigh, while her augmentations scanned the immediate environment for other activity, other targets. The entity before her was all shards and glints of glass, shifting and spinning, forming merely the outline impression of a being. It was as if the image of a person had been exploded and the shards of glass caught permanently at the millisecond of their shattering.
The shiver of delight ran up her spine once again as she faced the being. It was taller than she was, so far as she could tell, but had something like the same basic biological form. She caught a glimpse of a face, of eyes and nose and mouth in the usual arrangements, but whether because it was alien, or because of the constant shifting, the expression was impossible to read.
There was a voice, too, its musical tones flowing and songlike. At the same time, she understood it perfectly; it appeared to be conversing directly with her mind. Not the augmentations she carried within her cranium, but the language centres of her organic brain.
The alien object, whatever it was, spoke to her in her own tongue. “Welcome to you, Selene Ada, I have been awaiting your arrival. The night has been long but now the dawn is coming.”
3. The Depository
“How do you know my name? How did you know I'd be coming here?” She couldn't tell if the alien entity understood her, but the shattered planes of its form glinted in greys and greens in time to her words. Which she took to mean that it did.
“The long night must see a dawn.”
Great. Enigmatic utterances, just what she needed. Was it stalling while it summoned attackers? It must have known she was coming, though. She studied its incursion into her organic brain with the diagnostic mechanisms Ondo had embedded. It had touched areas of her prefrontal cortex with a gentle electromagnetic pattern-matching analysis. It had inflicted no discernible harm, but it could easily have acquired her public identity, her name, the Selene Ada she presented to the universe. Some sort of automated greeting mechanism. At the same time, it had delved deep enough to understand how her brain interpreted sensory perceptions as ideas. As language. The level of cognitive interference required for that trick wasn't supposed to be possible without her express permission.
“What dawn? What night? Explain what you're talking about.”
“The long night through which this Depository has waited in readiness.”
Selene stepped sideways, circling the creature or machine or whatever it was, studying it. It appeared to be talking in metaphors that it had calculated she would understand. It clearly hadn't calculated very accurately.
“In readiness for what?”
The entity didn't turn to track her, but at the same time it always appeared to be facing her. Glimpses of face and limbs, its mouth mid-syllable, an eye, flashed in and out of existence. It was trying to be organic – or some semblance of it.
“For when it is needed.”
“Needed for what?”
The entity stuttered. It was badly broken, on the point of disintegrating at any moment. Maybe this inner sanctum hadn't escaped damage after all.
“These treasures are kept under my warding until the day they are needed.”
“How long have you been here?”
“I waited while the galaxy aged. The long night.”
She was pretty sure the entity was a mechanism rather than a living creature. A broken mechanism, with a limited understanding of her language and fragmented logic trees that sent it circling again and again through the same sentences. It didn't appear to have summoned anything to attack her. Quite possibly it had malfunctioned, gone offline for some unknown span of time and her appearance had brought it stuttering back to life. She tried a different approach.
“What happened to you?”
“The Great Enemy fell upon us. The darkness flooded in to eat us all.”
“Concordance were here?”
“The enemy came before we were ready, and there was nothing we could do.”
“Who came?”
Suddenly there was a direct answer. “The Great Enemy. Morn.”
Morn. The weapon Vulpis had used to raise Concordance to
