They were a few hundred metres from the ship, finally giving them a view of its exterior. She stopped to consider the vessel. Most of its bulk was a single, large orb that was nearly a kilometre in diameter. It hovered above the surface of the cone, like an impossible moon looming over her, filling her sky. In between that sphere and the much smaller observation dome was a delicate-looking twist of white superstructure: the housing for all the rooms they'd found. The whole thing resembled some vast, legless insect with a three-parted body: the dome for its head, the thorax in the middle, then the massively-bloated abdomen.
“What do you make of the bigger sphere?” she asked Ondo.
“I have no idea what it is. Clearly there's a lot more to this ship than we thought.”
“Is it a drive mechanism housing?”
“If it is, it's like none I've ever seen or heard of. There could be anything in there.”
“If we ask Surtr it's not going to tell us, is it?”
“I doubt it.”
She tried anyway, but the entity appeared to know nothing. This was simply the structure of its ship.
“Has it always been like this?” she asked.
“Its form has altered little.”
“You say you don't know the purpose of the large sphere – have you ever been inside it?”
“That is another area I have never ventured into.”
“Are there any doorways into it?”
“I have never found one.”
“But, have you looked?”
“No.”
The entity was infuriating. She ran through the internal maps she'd built up of the chambers and passageways. All would definitely fit into the neck section of the vessel. She and Ondo hadn't been allowed into the larger sphere either.
They walked across the alien surface for another two minutes, then Surtr stopped at a point which looked utterly identical to every other.
“It is here.”
“You're sure?” asked Selene.
“Yes.”
She glanced at Ondo. His raised eyebrow was visible through the visor of his helmet, illuminated by his face lights. He was intrigued, she could tell.
He said, “This spot looks identical to every other point in, what, a quarter of a million square kilometres of surface area.”
“It is this point,” Surtr said again, with no hint of annoyance at being doubted. “Only at this one point does the key match the markings on the ground.”
“You know that for sure?” Selene asked.
“Yes.”
She carried the key in an exterior pocket on her EVA suit leg. She pulled it out now and knelt to the ground, the movement slightly clumsy in the bulky suit. She scanned the swirling lines etched into the hard surface of the cone around her. It took her a few seconds to identify the precise location where the markings matched those on the object. Where the bead was on the neverkey, a single dot pitted the surface, as tiny as a full-stop at the end of a sentence. If Surtr was right, and this was the only point where the markings matched, the chances of finding the location without knowing where to look were surely infinitesimal.
She broke the seals of her left gauntlet and pulled her hand free, exposing her artificial skin to the void once again. Carefully, she placed the key into place on the ground.
Her fingers picked up the minute vibration that hummed through the object in response. The key had woken it, done something. It was hard to escape the thought that they were standing within the outlet, the barrel, of a vast firing mechanism. And that, clearly, the mechanism wasn't dead.
She stood again to peer into the distant interior of the cone. A single point of light began to flash there, cycling through multiple wavelengths. Was it a warning? Was the tunnel about to open into the interior of some distant star, blast superheated plasma down the cone towards them? And, if that did happen, was Surtr's protective sphere going to be any defence against it?
Despite herself, she found herself stepping behind the towering figure of Surtr. The distant light blinked a few more times, quicker and quicker, then cut out completely.
8. Sigma Counterspin
She counted out the seconds, waiting for the wall of superheated solar gas to flare into them, boil them and the ship into oblivion. Or else, for a Concordance battleship to thunder down the cone at them, beam-weaponry blazing.
Neither thing happened. The blast wave didn't come, and no ships appeared. She reached out with all her senses, trying to discern whether anything had changed at the apex of the cone, bouncing more radio waves off it. The telemetry was fuzzy, hard to interpret. There was still a hard surface there, but it behaved differently, scattering the electromagnetic radiation she fired at it rather than reflecting it back at her in predictable ways. So far as she could tell, there was now a disc of some unidentified substance at the far end of the cone. It was hard to be sure of the size of it; maybe ten kilometres in diameter. The doorways they'd passed through on the journey from Coronade hadn't given her such readings; they'd simply absorbed any energy she'd fired at them.
“What happened?” she said to Surtr over their shared brain-to-brain connection.
“The lock has been opened,” said Surtr. “Now we must wait for the gateway to the Sigma Counterspin Tunnel to activate.”
“You didn't say anything about having to wait before. And since when did this cone lead to the Sigma Counterspin Tunnel? You told us you had no idea where it led.”
“It is only now that this knowledge has revealed itself to me, and that I know we must wait.”
She turned to face the implacable alien giant. “Only now. What the hell does that mean? Why aren't you telling us everything you know?”
“I am telling you everything that I am consciously aware of.”
Ondo spoke to her privately. “I believe it could be telling us the truth. My guess is that the knowledge of how this gateway functions had to be kept secret – so secret that even
