A sad smile spread across Ondo's features, visible through his visor. “In a way. Except, if she'd survived, I suspect none of this would have happened, at least not to me, and Seben, and therefore you. If I hadn't lost Juma and Marita, I'd still be on Sintorus and the universe wouldn't have you in it.”
“I'm sorry.”
“Don't be; it is pointless to attempt to tally these things, to weigh one possible timeline against another. The galaxy unfolds as it does and this is all we have: a past we have to live with and a future we can attempt to change. And, between them, the now, the fleeting moment where we can act, try to do the right thing. But, given what happened, you should know I'm very glad you came into my life. Little has made sense to me over the years, but your arrival at the Refuge felt like the pieces of a broken picture slotting into place. Like the Warden suddenly becoming coherent rather than a collection of shattered pieces. You are not my daughter, of course, but I have secretly thought of you as my folkdaughter. If you don't mind.”
Perhaps he was taking the opportunity to say things he might not get chance to again, as well.
“No, I don't mind,” she said. “What do you hope we'll find at the end of this tunnel?”
“Hope? I hope to find an enclave of an unknown pre-Omnian War culture, a survivor of the golden age that can give us the answers we crave – and also the tools we need to battle Concordance.” He smiled to himself. “You see, it is easy to hope.”
“I haven't always found it easy.”
He conceded the point with a slight nod of his head. “But when it does come, it is easy to hope for the stars. Shall we go and see?”
“Yes. We should.”
The metakey activated the archway at the far end of the tunnel, just as it had at the entranceway. The arrangement was interesting; it was apparently designed to ensure that both doors couldn't be open at the same time. Like an airlock, but not for air. She let Ondo step through first before following him.
They found themselves in a circle of three archways, the one they'd stepped through and two shorter ones. Towering over them stood the ruins of a city: domes and fallen towers, rank upon rank, all dark. Beyond them lay a sky that was a blazing arc of plasma stretching from one horizon to the other, bright enough to illuminate the scene around them. It was undeniably beautiful, glowing across a wide electromagnetic spectrum.
It was hard to pick out the background stars through the nebulous cloud, but from those she could discern, she got a rough fix on their galactic coordinates. “We're nowhere near Coronade. By the look of it, we're on the opposite side of the galactic wheel completely.”
“The metaspace tunnels,” Ondo replied.
“I guess.” She ran some more calculations, triangulating off the magnitudes of the stars she could identify. “There's something else, too: I think we're bang in the middle of one of the dead zones.”
“How sure are you?”
“Pretty sure. We're in another corner of the galaxy that someone does not want us to visit.”
Scanning local space with her augmentations, Selene picked out the dead sun at the system's core by its intense magnetic field: the superdense neutron star that had ejected most of its mass in the cataclysmic convulsion of its end. A supernova. The star was tiny, now, a few kilometres in diameter, blasting out gamma rays but giving off no heat. A neutron sun around which there could be no life.
Ondo was silent for a moment. She'd given him access to the enhanced telemetry her left eye could gather.
“This close the blast wave should have obliterated everything,” said Ondo. “The planet's atmosphere would have been stripped away, but these structures survive. That's remarkable.”
“Protected by some unknown tech, like the archways. However that works, it's clear there's no life here. There's no biosphere left.”
“The ruined structures are extensive. A lot of people must have lived here. Lived and died.”
“We should try the other archways. Perhaps they lead where we need to go.”
The smaller archways appeared to require no metakey to activate them. White tunnels, shorter than the one they'd arrived by, were visible down both.
They tried the first and emerged on another dead planet. This time they were upon a mountain peak, the devastated world spread out around them, buildings and structures stretching to the horizon in every direction. From her readings of the dead star, she calculated that she and Ondo were some fifty million kilometres farther out of the system. Still, the annihilation was total. Once again, miraculously, structures had survived, but the planet was utterly lifeless.
Neither of them speaking, they returned to their arrival point and took the third archway.
This time it was clear they were on a world much nearer the star. There was nothing of the planet left: the archway and the fragment of rock it stood upon tumbled alone through the void. A cloud of other fragments was smeared across local space, scraps of rock and ice that might, in time, coalesce to form a new world. The supernova had blasted the planet to pieces.
Selene finally spoke. “There is no one here. No golden age civilisation, no miraculous weapon. The trail has led us to a dead end.”
Something in the spectrography of the dead star was engrossing Ondo. “Are you sure of that?” he asked.
“Of course I'm sure. Look at this place. There's nothing here but death and destruction. Whoever we were supposed to find, they're long-gone.”
Even then, there was a note of hope in Ondo's voice. “Which means, perhaps, that someone wanted us to see the death and destruction, understand what has happened and what might happen again. Someone is giving us this warning. The trail has led us to this point, but it does not end here, I know it. See: this supernova has been
