“Selene, slow down! We need to see these images, study them.”
She turned Ondo off. She didn't need the distraction. Had movement activated the device? She tried standing perfectly still, but it made no difference to the torrent of information. If she could capture it, that would be something. Her left eye normally blinked in perfect synchronicity with her right eye, but now she instructed it to remain open. She would record the images streaming past her retina and worry about interpreting it later.
Five minutes later, the pictures stopped and she was returned to the galaxy image. Some kind of pictorial index, she guessed. She tried moving forwards and backwards again but nothing happened, the pictures didn't repeat. Maybe this mechanism was broken, too, and she'd retrieved all she was going to get. Maybe she'd transferred all the data from the bead, and what she'd seen was the information flowing into the Depository's systems.
The glass sphere protruded slightly from the wall where she'd inserted it. She touched it, and immediately the galaxy disappeared. The bead slid out to land in the palm of her hand.
She reactivated Ondo. “I've captured some data from the bead.” She gave him access to the memory dumps from her optical system.
He studied it for a few moments. “There's a lot here. An incredible amount. I think now might be a good time to return so I, that is the real Ondo, can study it in detail. We can always come back if that seems like the best approach.”
“You mean, you figure the real you will want to come here.”
He conceded the point. “Partly that, yes. But you've acquired so much already that it would be a shame if it were … lost now.”
“Yeah, it would be a terrible shame.”
She retraced her steps towards the doorway, keeping a wary eye on the Warden for some sign it intended to intervene and attempt to stop her. It followed her, but didn't act in any other way. Despite her earlier caution, she still thought it likely the doorway wasn't going to reappear as she approached. Upon the third plinth in line, the fast-moving blur of the X-shaped object flicked restlessly backwards and forwards. She strode on, and the doorway slid into existence, exactly as it had before.
“You will return with the dawn?” The entity was suddenly very near her, the broken planes and angles of its form tilting and spinning, as if it were desperately trying to piece itself back together to form coherent thoughts.
Selene stopped, one foot through the doorway, one still in the vault. “You think I can bring the dawn?”
The entity didn't reply for a moment. Its shattered pieces seemed to spin more urgently. She'd have sworn that she could feel her cerebellum tickling as the creature read her brain patterns, trying desperately to make itself understood. “The night has been long. At last there is light, the glow of the dawn before the sun rises. The day must come.”
“I will return,” she heard herself saying. “If I can.” She wasn't sure if she was saying what the entity wanted to hear so it didn't stop her leaving, or if she was making a solemn promise.
She retraced her steps through the upper chamber and out into the clashing solar radiation of the planet's surface. The blue star was a wall of raging heat, filling half of the sky. The Radiant Dragon lay exactly where she'd left it; as soon as she emerged from the shadows of the building, she was able to re-establish comms. No ships had been detected translating out of metaspace, and nor had there been any movement beyond the mesh. Half way to the ship, her suit began to alert again, warning her its capacity to shield her from the radiation was diminishing and that, at current decay rates, she'd be exposed in twelve minutes. Time enough. She shut the alarms off and picked up the pace. She resorted to the loping run that ate up the ground, and made it back into the Dragon's EVA vestibule with a minute to spare.
While she stripped off the suit and stuffed it in a bin for decontamination, the ship said. “Shall I prep for take-off?”
She'd been thinking about that. There was one more thing she wanted to discover. A theory that had come to her. “Not yet; I'm going to make a second trip into the building.”
“Is that wise?”
“Probably not, but let's do it anyhow. Set me up a fresh suit.”
She unhooked the chain around her neck and hung it from a hook. The glassy orb, embedded in its clasp once more, swung backwards and forwards, reflections glinting in its depths as it spun.
She shrugged on her new suit, the smell of fresh plastics acrid in her nose. She checked its seals and life-support systems were fully functional, then set out on the return journey to the pyramidal building. Inside, the winding lines of her boot prints in the dust were the only sign that anything had changed for a long time. But when she crossed to the centre of the chamber to the spot where the door had slid up, nothing happened. She stepped across the thin oblong on the ground, walked around it, touched it with her gauntleted fingers, but nothing could persuade the door to reappear.
“Good,” she said. “Just as I thought.”
The Ondo in her head said, “You're suggesting the doorway mechanism opened because you had the bead with you?”
“It was a theory, but this looks pretty conclusive. I've been thinking about why Aefrid said there was nothing here. The person who came here, her progenitor, presumably didn't have a bead.”
“Almost certainly not.”
“Possessing the bead marked me out as a friend, someone to be trusted. We came here to read data off the
