Surtr still hadn't moved. It was uncanny the way it was able to remain absolutely rock-still, as if it had petrified where it stood.
“You're planning something,” she said. “Tell me what you're going to do.”
“I am going to do what you suggested,” Surtr replied. “I have concluded that you were right.”
“Right about what? If you're about to do something dangerous, then that is not what I told you to do. I do not want your destruction on my conscience. I have enough of that shit going on in my head already, believe me.”
“You told me to transcend what I was, find my own path.”
“What are you going to do?”
There was no longer any hesitation in Surtr. Its voice in her head sounded assured, the words flowing. “I understand, suddenly, what this ship is, and so what I am. Once again, the knowledge has come to me at the time at which I needed it.”
“Okay, tell me. What is your ship?”
“It is a transportation mechanism for a frozen stellar explosion. A sunburst the Tok called it; an artificial supernova caught in stasis at the nanosecond before detonation. That is what the large orb contains, and that is why entering it is forbidden. Why I have never felt any curiosity about trying to get inside. And me? I am simply the trigger, the firing mechanism. That is all I ever was. Ondo was correct; my consciousness evolved by mistake, an unexpected consequence of my long existence and ability to repair. I was placed at the dead star to watch for the Morn, to eliminate them if they ever appeared by unleashing a second nova.”
“The Tok take wiping out the Morn really fucking seriously.”
“Yes.”
She knew what it was going to say next, but she asked the question anyway. “What are you going to do? There are no Morn here.”
“I will fly my vessel into the heart of this Concordance fleet and detonate.”
“No, Surtr, you can't do this.”
“I must.”
“But … they aren't your Great Enemy. Concordance are bad, but they're the galaxy's problem. Destroying them is not what you were designed to do.”
“No, but I have decided to alter my purpose.”
“Great, pleased to hear it, but don't sacrifice yourself. You've achieved self-awareness, freedom; you don't need to express that by simply following your self-destructive programming. That makes no sense. You can decide to live.”
Surtr's voice was as gentle as ever. “This course feels right to me. It is a consciously taken decision. I was built to destroy the Morn, but I choose instead to destroy what I can of Concordance. I have seen something of what they are and what they do. Perhaps the Morn truly are gone, eliminated by the Tok millennia ago. Perhaps this act is the best and finest thing I can do now.”
Strange that she had once been so wary of Surtr, so suspicious of its intentions. The thought of losing it was suddenly unbearable. “Destroy this Concordance fleet by all means, please, but you don't have to kill yourself at the same time. Send the ship and come with us. Carry on living with us…”
Her words trailed off.
“I'm sorry, but I cannot,” Surtr said. “I am too fundamentally intertwined with my vessel. We are two parts of the same mechanism. It cannot act without my presence onboard; it was designed so that that would be impossible. For it to trigger, I must be there; I must go with it. That was how the Tok made me.”
“Then leave it. We'll park it in intergalactic space or back at the dead star and you can be free of it.”
“It is too much a part of me. I am like the two halves of your body, the parts interconnected. Without the ship, without the rest of my body, I can't survive for long. I will succumb to entropy and end.”
It explained why the entity had been so reluctant to cede navigational inputs to her. It would be like giving someone control over her own limbs. “You say these Tok were enlightened beings. They sound like complete fucking bastards to me.”
“I speculate that they simply wanted to be sure that the sunburst device did not fall into the wrong hands; that some malign enemy could not seize it and deploy it. It makes sense from their perspective. The destructive power of this ship is substantial, capable of eliminating all life within a single solar system. The name they gave it, the name which I find I now know, translates as something like Ragnarok or Armageddon Machine in your language. The Tok went to great lengths to ensure that only I know the codes to perform the triggering, and that is what I now have to do.”
She stepped in front of the impassive giant and turned to face it, as if she could physically stop it doing what it planned. “You've come so far, evolved so much. Evolve more; find a way to overcome your limitations. Destroy the enemy and survive. I survived despite what happened to me, even though it changed me. You damn well have to do the same.”
Surtr looked down at her. “I do not wish to die, truly, and the thought of losing you – and Ondo – opens up chasms of loss and sadness within me that I did not know existed. That I did not know could exist. But what I am about to do feels right. In a strange way, it will make me happy. Happy is another slippery word, is it not? I have learned that. The Tok had over forty-two distinct words that map to
