“There is no destiny. Fuck destiny.”
“Could you stop trying to destroy Concordance, even though you know you have no realistic chance and that the attempt will probably kill you?”
“Of course; I just don't want to. And it is not going to probably kill me.”
“It is what you feel you have to do. This is the same.”
She shook her head, felt tears welling in her eyes, right and left. But she could think of no more words to speak to try and dissuade Surtr.
“How will you do it?” she asked eventually.
“I once said I had weapons, but in truth I do not, not in the way you meant. I have only the single, final weapon. I could attempt to accelerate into the system, batter my way into the heart of the fleet and hope they do not destroy me before I get near enough, or flee before my detonation-wave hits them, but I calculate that I might not succeed. They have the system under close nanosensor observation.”
“Then we'll withdraw, regroup. Think of a better plan.”
“No; there is another way. Knowledge of the metaspace tunnels is within me, and there are roads that Hessia has not catalogued. I see how the pathways interweave and twine, and also how they connect. There are three that feed into this one: the Phi, Chi and Psi Spinwards Tunnels. It appears that Concordance are only monitoring the other ends of two of them; they do not know which system lies at the other end of Psi. I do. I will traverse metaspace to that system, enter the tunnel and emerge at the heart of their battlefleet, directly next to the weapon. They will not be aware of me until it is too late. All one hundred Concordance ships will be annihilated, along with the device.”
“There are lots of other Cathedral ships in the galaxy; this wouldn't be a decisive blow.”
“We must each do what we can to make things better. I can do this. You said yourself this is the largest gathering of enemy ships you've ever seen.”
More telemetry was trickling into her head from the farthest nanosensors. The Cathedral ships were moving, arranging themselves into two distinct battle formations. They had spotted Surtr's ship and the Dragon. She picked up the first echoes of Void Walker attack ships fanning out from the fleet, hundreds of them deploying in a surround pattern. She had never seen so many of them. The great weapon was not moving; it appeared Concordance were determined to defend it while it activated.
She tried one final argument. “The Psi tunnel may not open for you.”
“I know it will. I must do this now, before they fire the stellar engineering mechanism.”
She could think of no other words to say. She looked away.
Its words became hesitant again, as if it was unsure of the thoughts forming in its mind. “If you ever find the Tok, will you tell them about me? Will you tell them that I did what I thought was the right thing to do?”
She stopped herself from repeating that the Tok had to have died out a long, long time previously. Instead, she said, “I will. I will tell them that you carried out your watch for the Morn faithfully. And I will tell them that, in the end, faced with an unanticipated dilemma, you chose a new path and did a noble thing. They will be proud of you, I'm sure.”
Surtr triple-blinked. “I also have an item to give you, to assist you on your journey.”
“What item? You didn't mention this before.”
“It was to be kept safe until no other options existed.”
A shiver went through the towering body of Surtr, like some tall building riding out an earthquake, and it made a strangely organic noise, a gasp of pain or pleasure coming from deep within it. It lashed its elongated, equine head from side-to-side, and then a horizontal split appeared in its muzzle where a mouth might be. The split crept up both sides of its head. Inside, curiously, she could see only white light, as if its interior glowed.
An indistinct mass appeared in the creature's mouth. The object's outline slowly became sharper, and it was a sphere, the same size as the one she'd retrieved from the skull at the dead star and the one she and Ondo had retrieved from the ice of Maes Far. Instead of being iridescent, though, this one burned red. It emerged from Surtr's mouth, floating through the air towards Selene. She held out her left hand, and it landed on her palm, a red bead upon the black substrate of her artificial flesh. It was blood-red, as if she held in her hand a miniature red star.
“This was given to me by one of the Tok,” said Surtr. “The one who came to me long after I began my watch. He told me to hold it in case it was ever needed.”
“What does it do?”
Surtr's head was healing itself back up, the split disappearing, shutting away the light within it. “A path was given to me, too.”
“If this contains some kind of map, we have no way to read it.”
“The clues are elusive, I know, but I think that was deliberate. The secrets they lead to had to be protected from anyone who would abuse them.”
“Even if we can, somehow, get data off this bead, we won't be able to make sense of it. We haven't been able to decode any of the ancient linguistic structures we've recovered.”
“I can at least add that knowledge to the mechanisms you carry within your brain, if you consent.”
“Do it.” She felt only the faintest tickle in her head, a tingle of electricity passing through her.
“Now I will go,” Surtr said. “I will wait one hour before I return and detonate, to give you time to leave the system and
