Ondo placed a reassuring hand on her shoulder. “No sign of any Concordance incursion at all. If they have scrambled to protect multiple locations, this doesn't appear to be one of them.”
Her eyes ached from the effort of forcing the ship to move. “Or they left when we showed up at Coronade.”
Ondo was examining telemetry while Selene stood and stretched. He said, “The nanosensors you left indicate no activity whatsoever. Either they're waiting beyond our light-speed horizon, or they're simply not here.”
“Let's get in and out before they show up,” she said. “The sooner we can leave here, the better.”
This time they took a lander down to the alien planet, boiling under the harsh blue light of the raging star. The previous time, she'd only made it into the pyramidal structure by racing against the damage that the hard radiation was inflicting upon her suit, but she doubted Ondo would be strong enough for such an effort. She nestled the tiny ship down between two of the high, converging walls, thirty metres from the triangular entranceway.
The building was exactly as she'd left it, no sign that Concordance or anyone else had been there since her visit, no footprints in the dust other than her own. That was something. She hurried towards the centre of the vault where the door had appeared. Ondo lingered behind her, turning around, fascinated by every detail of the alien structure.
“The age of this place,” he mused over the comms, but mostly speaking to himself. “Do I have this wrong? I thought it might predate the war by a few years, a few centuries, but now I see it properly, I don't know. It could be millennia older. But then, who built it? And why? This hard radiation … perhaps a spectroscopic analysis of the walls would tell me something.”
“We have to hurry, remember,” she called to him. “Galaxy under threat, enemies massing to defeat us, clock ticking.”
“Of course. It's just … this structure. I could study it for decades.”
“Please don't, not now anyway. Give me the bead.”
He handed her the glass sphere he'd brought with him from the Refuge. Clutching it in her gauntlet, she strode confidently towards the point where the doorway had appeared. As before, she sensed the electromagnetic tickle of the mechanism before the oblong slid out of the floor. Clearly visible through it lay the gallery with its multitude of plinths, stretching impossibly away into an unknown distance.
“After you,” she said.
“Did you have any feeling of translation last time, like a fall into metaspace?”
“Nothing. It's as easy as stepping through a door.”
“You said there was atmosphere in there. How does it not escape when the entrance appears?”
“I have no idea; some mechanism prevents the inner vault from explosive decompression. None of this makes sense; the vault is clearly not directly here. Are we going to go in?”
“Yes. Of course.”
She followed him as he stepped through.
As before, the doorway slid back into the floor as they strode into the cavernous vault that was either deep underground – or somewhere else entirely. So far as she could tell, the artefacts on the plinths were arranged in the same order as before. She'd dispersed nanosensors on her previous visit, but she couldn't detect a whisper from them. As before, she overrode the life-support alerts from her suit and slid back her visor.
“Are you sure that's wise?” asked Ondo.
“Not completely.”
“What happens if you accidentally go near the doorway and it activates?”
“Whoever built this place knew what they were doing. There's no damage here despite the planetary bombardment the surface structures have been subjected to.”
After a moment, Ondo slid back his own helmet. “This talk about metaspace tunnels … I can't help wondering if we're even on the same planet. We might be anywhere.”
“None of my sensors can provide any kind of positioning lock. The gravity's the same as outside, that's all I know.”
Ondo leaned in to examine each artefact closely, peering through his multiglasses to study each across a wide spectrum of electromagnetic radiation, walking around the plinths to see each object from every angle. He muttered to himself as he did so, “This is incredible. But how? I don't even… Oh, now this…”
The moving object, the X-shaped four-legged spider thing, especially fascinated him as it flicked to and fro inside its stasis containment.
“Do you see it move?” he asked.
His question puzzled her. “You don't?”
“I see it disappear and reappear, but I don't see it occupying the spatial points in between.”
She looked closer. He was right; there were no intervening points in the object's movement that she could detect. “Some sort of drive mechanism? Or a prototype of one?” she suggested.
“I could spend lifetimes down here studying these objects,” was his only answer.
They moved to the item they'd come for: the silvery totem whose arrangement of lines and rings resembled the structures on the surface of Coronade. Selene scanned the object more closely, looking for details she might have missed. There were no markings, but the higher-resolution images revealed an even greater fidelity to the layout of the planetary islands. Either the object had been made to accurately represent the land masses, or the islands had been constructed to replicate the object. Or both were based on some other, unknown design.
“How did you summon the Warden before?” asked Ondo. “It must know what these objects are, what their function is.”
“Last time it turned up when I spoke out loud. Maybe it's broken completely now and can't materialize.”
“What did you say last time?”
“You know me, I'm always polite. Just hello.”
Ondo raised his voice to address the entire room. “Hello. Please, we need you.”
The shimmering, slow-motion explosion flickered into existence. It had clearly been aware of their presence all along but was only manifesting when summoned. It seemed its original purpose was to be helpful rather than protective,
