Ondo bobbed his head from side-to-side, in a way that meant, Yes, but I'll keep my mind open. It was a familiar, if maddening, gesture.
“You were the one who thought this ship was sent by Concordance to capture us,” he said.
“I believed that at first, yes, but I was clearly wrong,” said Selene. “Look at the evidence. Everything here is massively ancient: these devastated worlds, the destroyed star, all of it. This predates Concordance and your Coronade culture.”
“If the star died that long ago, the heat and debris should have completely dissipated; we shouldn't be able to even pick up echoes of it. There should be no supernova remnants at all.”
“And I don't believe that there are. Supernova remnants and a nebula are two completely different things, as you well know. Something is going on here that we don't understand, but we cannot be witnessing recent galactic events.”
Their telemetry now suggested that the nebula had formed sometime after the supernova, as they could pick up no echoes of the conflagration in the clouds of dust and ionized gas – but that didn't make a lot of sense, according to the astrophysical models they were using. Matter in the local area of the star should have been swept away by the nova, but there it was, glowing away. If they'd had access to a metaspace ship, they could settle the question of the supernova's timing by travelling to a point thirty million light years away and looking for a blaze of light from the right point in space. As it was, they were stuck with the hints they could pick up from local readings.
Ondo didn't reply for a time. He was processing, weighing up the scraps of evidence they'd acquired. In the end he'd come round; he'd have to accept that advanced civilisation in the galaxy extended a great deal further back in time than he'd imagined – and that, therefore, there had probably been multiple civilisations, with the more ancient ones perhaps just as mysterious to the people of the Coronade culture as they were to she and Ondo.
“Whatever Surtr's origins are, it could be a useful ally,” he said, finally. “If Concordance have encountered the Morn, or are making use of their extant technology, then an entity such as this is very definitely going to be on our side. It appears to have a horror of that species built into it at a fundamental level.”
He was changing the subject. She let it go. “But I don't want a possibly psychotic, walking bomb travelling around with us. I don't trust it or the culture that created it. It's like a child; a massively powerful child, as if someone gave a toddler limitless power and let them play with it.”
“We don't know for sure that it's that dangerous.”
“I also don't trust its mental state,” she pressed on. “There's so much that it doesn't know, or that it claims it doesn't know, or that it doesn't appear to care that it doesn't know. Is it telling us everything? I doubt it.”
“It has had no evolutionary need to be inquisitive, so it isn't,” said Ondo. “A curious nature is only the norm because most species develop in an environment where problem-solving confers an advantage.”
“And if you ask me, it's either lying about everything, or it's receded into superstition, believing against all the evidence that the Tok still exist. Either way, how can we trust an entity like that?”
A brief smile flashed across his features – rapidly suppressed. He was trying hard not to give away the fact that they were conversing to Surtr. “You're the one who prefers to believe Surtr is thirty million years old. Perhaps it is one of these mysterious Tok, and they have survived like this.”
“It isn't a matter of what I prefer, it's a matter of what the evidence says,” she said. “Surtr is clearly nothing more than a highly complex thing, not a person. And there's a difference between a single entity hidden away in this nebula, and the survival of an entire unknown galactic civilisation. In any case, we have more pressing things to worry about. If this thing knows some way of escaping this system, then fine, let's make use of it. But if not, our best chance is to disable it and fly this ship ourselves. Run through quarantine, take all the necessary precautions, then get back to the Refuge. Get back to the fight. This ship could even be the new Radiant Dragon.”
“And I think we shouldn't be so quick to dismiss Surtr,” said Ondo. “You might be correct about the timeline of galactic history, I concede, but I still believe this entity could be invaluable. You didn't trust me at first.”
“You're hardly the same thing. I mean, you're pretty old, but you're not that old.”
He ignored her attempt at humour. “What I mean is, given everything that's happened to you, it's perfectly understandable that you're wary of the powerful and the unknown. I get that. But even you can't defeat Concordance on your own, however much you'd like to. You need help – we need help – and Surtr has to be capable of all manner of wonders. We've seen some of what it can do; I suspect even it doesn't know the extent of its powers. If we could study it, work out how it functions, we could learn much. Imagine the secrets and clues it carries within itself, things even it doesn't understand.”
“Which is exactly the problem,” said Selene. “Who knows what could trigger it into slaughtering us all, or detonating, or committing some other atrocity? From what I can tell of it, it wouldn't even know itself until the moment came. We can't trust it; we should try and cripple it and take control of the ship.”
“Do you have any idea how to achieve that?”
He
