When they passed over the lip of the island, the buffeting from the air immediately cut out. They were in clear air.
“The island is shielded.” said Ondo.
She studied the lander's external environment. “Partially. We're still open to the atmosphere. Sunlight too, if there were any. But the winds have been cancelled out.”
“Engineered to allow ships to land safely.”
“Looks that way. How can that work? And how in the name of Omn's perfectly-formed balls is it still operating?”
Ondo didn't reply, but she could tell he was quietly delighted at the discovery. She put the ship down ten metres from the arch, pointing one battery of the lander's external lights upon it so they could study it in detail. They sat in a bubble of illumination, hundreds of kilometres of raging darkness around them, the arch eerie in the gloom. Selene and Ondo suited up and descended the lander's ramp to approach, their bodies casting long shadows on the ground before them. A faint blue light glowed from the arch as they neared. It was thirty metres tall, twenty wide, and numerous symbols she couldn't read were etched around its stonework. She'd seen their like before, though: around the star charts in the viewing orb at the Depository. The archway appeared to be the product of the same technological culture.
There was a space in the line of symbols two metres off the ground. A slot into which the metakey object would fit perfectly.
“Shall we put it in and see what it does?” she said to Ondo.
“We have to.”
“What if it does nothing at all?”
“Then our journey has been wasted. We've taken the wrong road.”
She pulled the metakey from the leg-pocket she carried it in. Disappointingly, it didn't glow or feel warmer to the touch. She'd been expecting – what – a clue that she held the key to open up this ancient lock? Something. She placed the metakey into the slot.
A quiver running through the ground was the first indication that the mechanism was active. She picked up a high-pitched whine, rapidly disappearing into the far supersonic, and then the archway turned into light. It glowed white, the symbols adorning it burning in blues and reds. The space between the uprights of the arch moved in a way she couldn't quite identify. It swirled, and the darkness she could see through it became, somehow, blacker still. Then there was an audible crack, like a small sonic boom, and the space through the arch flicked to a creamy white.
Selene's left eye adjusted near-instantly to the change in illumination. The archway now led to a tunnel, leading for two hundred metres, or three, to another archway. None of it, clearly, was physically there on Coronade. Like the doorway at the Depository, if she walked around the side of the archway, she could see the tunnel leading the other way, through where she'd been standing.
“It's here,” said Ondo, the delight clear in his voice. “It's really here.”
Another light flared then, somewhere above them, a ball of pearlescent white in the heavy gloom of the atmosphere. Another came, and then another. It took her a moment to grasp they were nothing to do with the archway.
They were more aerial nuke blasts, nearby. Concordance had seen the lights from the lander or the archway and reacted. She and Ondo had only moments before the blast wave slammed into them. Could the safe-landing shield around the island protect them? She didn't want to wait around to find out.
Ondo still hadn't moved, still hadn't worked it out, his brain running too slowly. She grasped him by the hand and threw herself through the archway, into the whiteness of the tunnel. Ondo sprawled onto the floor while she turned to the archway. The same symbols were on this side, too, and there was the metakey, somehow on the inside of the doorway. She plucked it from its slot. Outside, the light of an exploding sun boiled the air. Then it was gone as the doorway blinked back to darkness.
There was a moment of calm during which neither of them moved and nothing happened. She held out a hand to haul Ondo to his feet.
He spoke out loud. “We can't go back.”
“No. Not now, anyway. Perhaps not ever. But you were right about this place, your golden age and your trail through the stars. Coronade and our forgotten history. It's all real.”
“The question is, what lies at the other end of this tunnel?”
“Only one way to find out.”
They walked slowly, warily. The portal behind them did not open again. Concordance, it seemed, did not possess a metakey of their own, did not know the secret of the archways.
Or, she thought, maybe they did, and were happy for her and Ondo to take the walk they were taking.
One hundred metres along, equidistant between the two archways, she paused. Part of her brain was scanning for threats but another part had bubbled up a question from nowhere. She might not get chance to ask him again. And perhaps she simply wanted to hear his voice in the still quiet of the alien structure. Speaking over the comms link, she said, “My father … how well did he know Marita and your daughter?”
Ondo took a moment to react to the conversational switch. He stopped to look at her. “Well enough. He took being Juma's folkfather very seriously.”
“In a way she would have
