“This deal with the neverkey and the lock,” she said to him. “What do you make of it?”
“Conceptually, it's like an airlock, built on a vast scale. But, instead of keeping vacuum out, they were making sure the Morn couldn't use the tunnel to reach the wider galaxy.”
“It sounds like complete paranoia to me.”
“Or the Morn were so destructive that all chance of contact had to be avoided.”
“How destructive could an enemy be to a race that could engineer stars, build all this?”
“It's a very good question.”
After a few minutes of following the twisting passages, Surtr stopped at a door that, to Selene, looked no different to any of the others.
“The key is in here.”
“And we simply walk in and take it?” Selene asked.
“I … yes.”
She noted the pause in its reply. “You don't sound very sure.”
“I have never been inside this room to see whether the key is there.”
“In all this time, you've never been inside? Why?”
“There has never been the need.”
“Are there any other parts of the ship you haven't visited?”
“Yes.”
“You weren't ever tempted to explore?”
“No. The mechanism is to be left unused unless it is needed. Other areas of the ship need to be left untouched for other reasons.”
Selene caught Ondo's amused glance. Surtr's lack of inquisitiveness was incomprehensible to Ondo.
“Well, the key is needed now,” she said. “Let's go in and get it.”
Surtr performed another of its phased, circular blinks, then held out a hand to touch the door. Quietly, it slid into the floor to grant them access to the room.
Inside was a white cell that was something like the ones she and Ondo had woken up in. But there was no bed: instead, a plinth stood in the centre of the room. It clearly resembled those they'd seen at the Depository: the same bare, cylindrical design around a metre high, the same orb of blue stasis light on top protecting the item held within. She recognized that, too. Its similarity to the metakey was obvious: the neverkey was a hand-sized object wrought from the same silvery metal, although this one was helical in shape. A single bead had been set at its centre like an eye.
Surtr stepped closer to the plinth, and the stasis field winked out of existence. There was the faintest smell of ozone in the room: dissipating stasis fields often triggered the production of trioxygen, although the concentration was harmless, so low that Ondo wouldn't even be able to pick it up.
Surtr, meanwhile, appeared to be hesitating. Selene stepped past it and picked up the key with her left hand. Surtr didn't attempt to stop her. The key was constructed from the same dense, metallic material as the one they'd used to activate the Coronade tunnel. Her enhanced touch sense picked up microscopic patterns covering its entire surface, tight swirls like the mapped lines of a magnetic field. Or, like the swirling patterns etched onto the inner surface of the cone.
“Okay,” she said. “Let's open this tunnel. How do we get outside the ship?”
“I will take us through the dome.”
“There isn't a conventional door you can open and close?”
“This is how the ship functions.”
“You need to arrange the passageways so we can get back to our rooms.”
“It is already done. When you are ready, come to the dome and we will leave the ship.”
Once they were suited up, they re-joined Surtr on the viewing platform. As before, it propagated a glow around itself to open a way through the transparent bulkhead into space. This time, however, the field covered Selene and Ondo. They walked through the field of light, and the hard surface of the platform disappeared beneath their feet.
The dome opening was near the surface of the cone where the ship had landed, but still there was a ten-metre drop. She'd been preparing herself for a zero-gravity descent, but she needn't have worried. By some means that she couldn't understand, Surtr floated all three of them to the surface, as if they were descending an invisible staircase. They also weren't in zero-gravity: the surface of the cone acted like a deck in a ship, propagating an artificial pull.
She tested the exterior environment and ascertained that Surtr hadn't been lying about that, either: there was breathable air, although how far away from Surtr it extended, she couldn't tell. She also didn't remove her helmet, just in case Surtr hadn't fully grasped how vital breathing was to them.
They set off across the surface of the cone. The sheer alienness of the situation struck her as they strode forwards. She imagined seeing herself from high above: a dot crawling across a wide, artificial expanse, accompanied by Ondo and the mysterious Aetheral entity.
Once, as a girl, attempting to learn the musical notation required to play the qurang, she'd sat and watched an ant crawl across the sheet of music in front of her. Each time the tiny insect came to the edge of a symbol or a line, it had stopped, feeling ahead with its antennae, confused about what the marks beneath its feet meant. Of course, it could never understand the messages of the symbols, or even grasp that they had an abstract significance in the first place. Its intellectual capacity was several orders short of that required to hear the sounds – the music – that the black marks represented. In truth, she'd struggled to make sense of them herself, and she'd known what it was she was supposed to be trying to do. She felt a little like that ant now, walking across the alien surface, stepping upon the spiralling markings covering it. Were they, too, the markings of some unknown alphabet? Did they signify something that she couldn't even begin to ask questions about? She wondered if her father had ever witnessed anything like the structure, before settling down to become the family-man she'd known. Whether he'd
