“Not yet,” she conceded. In the brief moments she'd had to explore more of the ship, she'd found nothing that she could work with in order to override its controls. She couldn't even locate the controls: there were apparently no drives, no command pathways, no nav mechanisms, nothing. All of that had to be somewhere in the ship's structure, but either she was being prevented from seeing it, or it was sealed away. She'd looked, also, for an external hatch so she could EVA around the vessel: work out how big it was, how it functioned, maybe even find another way back inside. She'd found nothing. It was hard to escape the notion that she and Ondo were trapped inside some kind of prison.
“We don't even know if this ship is capable of metaspace travel,” Ondo was saying.
“It has to be,” said Selene. “How else did it get here?”
“It might have been built in this location. Or it evolved organically from some earlier, more basic station, just as Surtr did. Or it's been hobbled so that it can't leave the system. Who knows?”
“Most likely, it's just a ship,” she said, “and the simple fact is that we need a ship.”
She turned her head to peer up at the impassive Aetheral. She spoke, trying to sound as if the question had just occurred to her from nowhere. “How are you steering us?”
As before, Surtr's voice whispered into her mind. The fact continued to unsettle her: both the entity and Ondo were communicating with her in very similar ways, their words arriving directly into her brain. Could she be absolutely sure it couldn't overhear their conversations, that there wasn't some message crossover?
That, at least, appeared not to be the case from the Aetheral's placid response. “I will the ship to move, and it does.”
“Like it's an extension of your body?”
“Something like that, yes.”
“What is this ship called?”
“It has no name. Again, there has never been any need for one.”
She asked her next question as if it was simply a matter of intellectual curiosity. “Is it capable of performing a metaspace jump?”
“My understanding of that term is indistinct.”
“If you willed the ship to jump to a distant star, across the galaxy, could you do so?”
“I don't know; I have never tried.”
“You've never been curious?”
This time, there was a definite pause before it replied. “Sometimes I have wondered what lies outside, beyond the confines of this region, but I have never attempted to find out. Leaving this system does not form part of my purpose, and I might miss the moment of the Great Enemy's appearance.”
“You could do it anyway,” she said. “The hell with your purpose and what other people expect of you. You could do your own thing.”
“Is that what you're saying I should do?” it asked.
She gave up; she wasn't going to get much sense out of the entity. “Forget I spoke.”
Surtr glanced down at her, triple-blinked, but didn't respond further. She had the clear impression that it was, indeed, wiping its memory of their conversation.
She returned to her debate with Ondo. “It seems more childlike the more I talk to it.”
“It is an intriguing entity,” said Ondo. “I don't think it can be running up to a metaspace translation, though. Even I, with my limited faculties, can tell we're heading towards the neutron star, not away from it.”
“Perhaps this is another ship capable of making miraculous metaspace jumps near gravity wells.”
“But why make a jump riskier by moving nearer the star?”
“Perhaps its control over the vessel isn't that good.” It wasn't an encouraging thought.
“Are you able to work out how we could command the ship if we needed to?” Ondo asked. “Do you sense any core intelligence?”
“There's nothing I can reach; my best guess is that if there is a controlling Mind to this ship, Surtr here is it. Perhaps they're parts of the same structure, ship and pilot in perfect harmony, body and brain. I've attempted to interface directly with the vessel, but I got nothing, no indication that it noticed or even that there was anything there to notice.”
“We should be careful,” said Ondo. “We have no idea what Surtr might perceive as an attack.”
He meant she should be careful. “Yeah, I…”
She stopped mid-sentence as she caught a glimpse of something in the void outside the ship. An object they were approaching. It was little more than a vague shadow in the darkness at first, edges lit by the glow of the nebulous clouds. Slowly, it took on solidity, became an arrangement of hard lines, the bulk of it eclipsing the glow behind it.
“What is that?” she said to Ondo.
“I have no idea.”
On Maes Far there'd been venomsnakes lurking in the upland flower meadows: shy, sly creatures that reacted to a perceived attack by rearing up and opening their mouths wide in a clear display of aggression. If you ignored the display and went too close, they struck. What she saw through the bulkhead reminded her of one of those snakes: the gaping maw, the knotted curl of the sinuous body behind it. The sprung pose spoke to her of danger: a riled venomsnake could kill with a single bite, as every child she'd grown up with knew well.
Details of the object became clearer. Now it resembled nothing so much as a brass musical instrument, all winding tubes and a flared open end. Or, no, better still, it was a vast, wide-mouthed gun: the complex loops its firing-mechanism and the flared nozzle its barrel.
Ondo had clearly been thinking along the same lines. “Is this the delivery mechanism for that swarm-weapon?”
“If it is, it's pointing the wrong way: at the star rather than outwards to where the planets were. It has to be something to do with the stellar engineering.”
“What is this structure?” she
