“We'd like to take this object,” she said. Always best to take the direct approach. “You said you kept them under your warding until the day they are needed. We need this one now.”
The shards of light making up the entity's form swirled and glinted, as if it were giving her request due thought.
“The long night…” it began.
She held up her hand. “The long night must see a dawn, yes. This is us, trying to bring it about. You must release this object.”
“The long night,” it said again, then stopped. Its neural pathways were fritzed to fuck; reasoning with it wasn't going to get them very far. She drew the blaster held in her suit's thigh holster and pointed it at the next plinth, the statue of the bipedal being. Which, now that she thought about it, somewhat resembled the entity inside the Radiant Dragon's core, with its elongated limbs and head. Was that significant?
“A night without a dawn isn't a night,” she said. “It's just endless darkness. I will start destroying these artefacts, one by one. Give us this item, and we'll be on our way, no damage done.”
The shifting planes of the entity glinted with different colours, purples flashing into reds that it was hard not to interpret as anger or a threat. A rising whine came from it as some energy store built up charge. Either it was going to blast her to pieces and was having trouble lining the components of its weapons systems up, or it was simply going to explode from the suppressed effort of it. She'd hoped it would sacrifice one of the artefacts to save the rest, but it didn't look like that was going to work out. It was planning to sacrifice her and Ondo instead.
She flicked her aim to the plinth containing the totem they wanted. Maybe she could blast out the stasis field and grab the object before the Warden pulled itself together. She was sending the fire commands to the gun when Ondo intervened, stepping forwards to stand between her and the plinth, hands held up in a clear attempt to placate the alien mechanism. Only her augmented reactions stopped her firing and punching a hole clean through his body.
“Please, there is no need for this,” he said. “We need to activate the Gamma Spinwards Tunnel.”
For one, two seconds, the entity stopped flashing, stopped swirling as it absorbed Ondo's words. It appeared to understand what he was talking about. She knew for a fact that Ondo did not.
“The Tunnel is dark,” said the entity. “Sealed off. The risk is too great.”
Selene caught the flash of delight on Ondo's features as he glanced back at her over the swelling of his helmet yoke. His guess had struck home.
“We wish to open the Tunnel again,” said Ondo.
He held up his gauntlet and projected moving images from it into the air in front of the entity. They were the correlated telemetry streams she'd pulled from Coronade, rendered as a complete globe, the land masses of the continents and, clearly visible, the pattern of islands and lines in the ocean. Ondo had subtly emphasised them, marking them out for clarity.
Selene talked to him directly, brain-to-brain. She had to hope the Warden entity didn't have the technomagic required to decrypt what they were saying. “If this entity thinks we're going to try and use this tunnel, it might decide it's best to kill both of us.”
“Perhaps,” Ondo replied, “but it hasn't done so yet. I think it's confused about us. Whoever placed these objects under its care clearly assumed the time would come for them to be released, or else why go to so much trouble? The same may be true of the Coronade structures; they also haven't been wiped from the face of the galaxy. I think that's because, someday, it was thought they might be needed.”
“You don't know they haven't been destroyed. You want to think there's something active on Coronade, I get it, but there may not be, not anymore.”
The entity still hadn't responded. Ondo spoke out loud to it. “The Gamma Spinwards Tunnel is damaged and broken, but we believe it has survived. The risk of using it may be great, but so is the danger of doing nothing. You must be capable of weighing up the best course of action, to decide what is best for the objects in your care. The galaxy is reaching a turning point, and if we don't take the correct step, all could be lost. The dawn may never come.”
Was any of that true? The Warden was certainly spending its time considering Ondo's words. The energy signature within it was a constant, jarring note in her head: not falling back, but not climbing either. She picked up stutters in it, hesitations, as if the entity were drawing on all its reserves to perform its computations.
Ondo pressed his point, a catch of emotion in his voice. “Please. I have followed this trail for many years, for most of my life. I have dug in the dust of dead planets only to find more dust, and I've been lost in the despair of dead-ends, feeling I would never uncover the secrets. I have been shown only glimpses and shadows. Now, here, you must let me take the next step.”
The entity finally responded. It shimmered backwards, like it was getting a good angle to spray both of them with blaster fire. The constituent shards of its body pulsed and swirled, and then finally aligned into the shape of the body it had intended to have all along. Or, in fact, multiple forms: different arrangements and structures to suit the different needs it might have. It morphed into a squat tank-like entity bristling with kill-weaponry, then to a small, slight sliver of life little more than a shaft of light, then to a towering form with an elongated, animal head that had to be, from its jackhammer limbs, immensely
