“Morn,” she said.
The shards of glass that made up the creature flashed through shades of black and red. Fear? Rage? Hard to say. She was probably projecting her own emotions onto the entity.
“Morn,” the entity repeated. “The Teeming Death.”
She checked with her inner Ondo, who was still able to see and hear everything she did. “Have you ever encountered anything like this?”
“Never. It is fascinating. I see no way to gauge how old it is, or to test the accuracy of what it is saying.”
“It doesn't seem to have a solid grasp of the passage of time, but it looks to me like it predates the war.”
“What makes you say that?”
She couldn't put it into words. “I don't know, this whole place feels older. Or not older, more … timeless.”
“The objects on those plinths might tell us something useful. Maybe there was something here that Vulpis was looking for. A weapon.”
“In which case, maybe he took it away and left the rest. Perhaps there was a fight, and he damaged this warden mechanism. If I go nearer the plinths, I might end up very dead.”
“Its reactions don't appear to be hostile. It almost seems like it's trying to be helpful.”
Helpful, right. She edged closer to the first dais, watching the entity for some power build-up, some sign of attack. It didn't move to stop her. Instead, it kept its distance, moving as she moved, shadowing her.
The first plinth she came to bore a death-mask encrusted in what she assumed were diamonds. Or maybe, for all she knew, it wasn't a death-mask at all but the face itself. She couldn't pick it up to study it, the blue glow of the protective stasis field resisting her. There was no explanation of what she was seeing, no details of the object's context. Most likely she lacked the necessary brain augmentations to interface with the mechanism.
The next item was either a sculpture of shining metal or perhaps a machine of some unknown purpose. Its lines were complex and hard to follow, folding in upon themselves like the strands of an impossible knot. Planes twisted and became a gap between two other planes as you tried to follow them. Even her left eye found itself confused. She walked around the device constructing a three-dimensional model of it in her brain, but the object refused to comply, resisting her efforts to map it.
The next pedestal contained an object that flickered in and out of existence, jumping repeatedly from one side of its containment field to another. Of all the objects she could see, it was the only one moving. It was another thing that seemed impossible: a stasis field by definition held an object outside of the normal passage of time; something within it couldn't move or decay because time wasn't passing. Yet here was this object doing exactly that. It was a black X-shape about the size of her hand. It put her in mind of a four-legged arachnoid without any central body, although it was impossible to say if the thing was organic or metallic. It gave her the distinct impression it was trying to get at her, sniff her out, devour her.
She moved on. There was a plain black cube made of metal or stone, no light reflecting off it, its purpose completely unfathomable, then a set of what looked like crowns, but big enough only to fit fingertip-sized heads. There was something like an outsized piece of jewellery or a totem, wrought from a silvery metal, in the shape of a central circle with lines radiating off it, sockets for beads set at random intervals along the lines, only one of which was filled. The next plinth contained two glass beads on their own: one green, one black. On the next was a stylized stone sculpture of a tall, bipedal being, its head strangely elongated.
On and on it went: countless artistic treasures or technological artefacts. She could feel Ondo's burning desire to get his hands on the objects, study them, find out what they were and what they did. She felt something of the same urge, the same delight: there were treasures here from across the galaxy, their age and provenance unknown. The secrets they harboured might explain many things.
Ondo's disembodied voice sounded puzzled in her mind. “Why would someone construct a repository such as this and then abandon it?”
“As a place to store looted treasures? We might have this all wrong. Perhaps Concordance didn't attack this place, perhaps they built it. We may not be able to trust anything this Warden says; its memories are clearly garbled.”
Ondo was unconvinced. “Why would Concordance need a safe place to store valuables? Who would they be hiding them from? Besides, you were able to simply walk in here, and that does not sound like Concordance to me. If this was their repository, they would defend it with all their firepower.”
“So maybe someone assembled it during the war, some faction we don't know about, and then they died out, and all knowledge of the place was lost. You said there were different schools of thought within the Omnian religion.”
“I still would have expected defensive systems.”
“Perhaps we'll discover there are when I try to leave. I might be trapped in here for the rest of time.”
“I don't see signs of a fight. This vault has not suffered any bombardment damage like the outer chamber.”
“The Warden entity is a wreck.”
“Which might simply be because it is old. Its systems have decayed because it's been active for longer than was originally intended. Ageing can do that.”
She ignored his attempt at humour. “I don't understand why Aefrid's forebear never found any of this. It isn't exactly well hidden.”
“That's a good question, one that's been puzzling
