Selene climbed to her knees, her feet, then offered Ondo an arm to help him up. Her natural skin was slick with sweat from the trauma of what she'd witnessed. She addressed Surtr. “Where did the images you showed us come from?”
“I do not know. They are something like a nightmare that haunts me. Perhaps it didn't happen, or perhaps you witnessed an amalgam of multiple events. I believe something similar took place on the inhabited planets of this system.”
“That storm cloud weapon – who unleashed it?”
“I know a word, nothing more.”
“What word?” She asked even though she thought she knew what Surtr was going to say.
“Morn.”
“Ah,” said Ondo. He looked at her, and a moment of understanding passed between them. The Warden entity had also used the phrase The Teeming Death. It seemed like a good description of what they'd experienced. The ravenous cloud was a weapon unleashed by the Morn, a technological or biological hybrid swarm apparently capable of destroying all life.
She said to Surtr, “If you've been instructed to watch for the Morn, then who told you to do so? And why here?”
“There was a great war,” Surtr replied, “and this system was one of the battlegrounds.”
“What war?” asked Ondo. “Was the culture centred on Coronade involved in any way? Perhaps a precursor of it?”
“I do not know the name Coronade either.”
“What do you know?” asked Selene. “Who fought?”
“I know that the Tok eliminated the Morn in this system.”
Tok. The word meant nothing to her. She looked to Ondo, but she could see from his furrowed brow that he'd never heard the name either. The Radiant Dragon's Mind had referred to a we in her conversations with it – and it hadn't meant she and Ondo. Much that we learned has not been revealed to the galaxy. Had it meant these Tok?
“When was this?” Ondo asked.
“The battle happened before I was placed here to watch.”
“You're saying that a race called the Tok created you, and stationed you here to be sure the Morn never returned?”
“The Tok set me here to watch for their Great Enemy. My assumption is that you are envoys of the Tok, sent with new commands.”
“You think we're your creators?”
“Aren't you?”
“No,” said Selene, “we're really not. We're not anything to do with the Morn, but we're not these Tok either.” Surtr absorbed her words without replying, as if it couldn't understand what she meant. Was it possible it looked disappointed?
“This battle,” said Ondo slowly, as he picked his way through his thoughts, “did it involve engineering the star to explode? Did the Tok defeat the Morn by eliminating all life from this system, incinerating the planets and everyone living upon them?”
“That is my belief,” Surtr replied. Selene couldn't help thinking that it was being deliberately evasive in its answers. Surely it could have worked out the truth for itself. Surely it wondered? Perhaps this was another aspect of the story it was having trouble expressing in clear terms.
She found herself taking a step back from the creature. Despite its size, it seemed so harmless, so gentle. And it had saved them. Yet, it was apparently the product of a culture that had fought a battle by slaughtering billions of people, extinguishing the culture of an entire solar system. And who had those people been: one side or other in the war, or simply innocent bystanders in a galactic conflagration, their system a flashpoint between two merciless races?
“Does either of these races survive?” she asked. “The Tok or the Morn? Are they still here?”
“Of the Morn, I do not know,” said Surtr. “I have waited and watched, but there has been no sign.”
“And the Tok?”
“Nor them. But why would I still be here if they are not? I believe they are watching and waiting, as that is also my purpose. Somewhere in the galaxy, they still exist. And now you have come here.”
“I told you, we are not anything to do with them,” she said.
She wanted to ask Surtr how it would feel if it learned that the race who had created it was long-dead, if it no longer served the purpose it was created for. But it seemed kinder not to.
Instead, she said, “How are you supposed to tell them? How do you get a message through to the Tok if you need to?”
“There is a way for me to reach them should the need arise. A way to communicate.”
She doubted they'd reply, doubted the mechanism would still be functional, but she still asked the question. “Will you show us?”
The Aetheral blinked a round of blinks. “I will.”
6. Alien Megastructures
“We can't trust this entity,” said Selene, speaking brain-to-brain with Ondo. “It may claim it knows nothing about Concordance, but it was clearly created by something just as evil. The scale of the destruction unleashed by these Tok make that very clear.”
She and Ondo stood on the platform at the centre of the observation dome once more. This time, the ship was moving; she could pick up minute parallax shifts within the plasma cloud structures against the background stars. Surtr stood between them, unmoving, by some invisible means steering them towards a set of coordinates closer to the neutron star. They were still assuming that it couldn't intrude on their private conversations – although they were still in the dark about the extent of its abilities.
Ondo said, “Are we absolutely sure Tok isn't simply another name for Concordance? A name Surtr heard somewhere, or made up?”
“Ondo, you have to let this go. We've looked at the telemetry again, and the dating for that clearly doesn't work.” They'd studied more readings from local space, the ship's movements helping, giving them glimpses of more distant regions. Selene's spectroscopic analysis had allowed her to extrapolate with greater accuracy when the star had exploded, and how cataclysmic the detonation had been. The evidence was completely clear – to Selene, at least. The destruction of the nearby star had occurred millions of years previously. Somewhere, in fact, around
