Ondo considered her words, scratching the side of his face as he sometimes did to help him think. “Even if we can do that, we can't jump to the Refuge. We'd have no way of properly quarantining this ship to be sure Concordance aren't tracking us. I wouldn't even know where to start.”
“As long as we're not being hauled off to have our minds pulled to pieces, I can live with simply getting away from this system.”
“Let's see what we can find.”
They walked together through the twisting passageways, Selene's flecks slowly building up a three-dimensional model of the space they were moving through. Subjectively, it felt like they were going around in circles, rising and falling, but her internal map clearly showed that they were spiralling upwards, the layout strangely asymmetric, following some design that she couldn't make sense of. They passed doorways that opened into empty, cell-like rooms but saw no one in them. She spent her time reaching out with all her senses, natural and artificial, trying to understand what was happening, what threats they faced, where they were. It struck her that everything was very quiet: at the Refuge, or on the Radiant Dragon, there was always a background symphony of sound: gurgling in pipes and creakings in bulkheads. Here, there was nothing save the sounds they carried with them: their wary footsteps, their breathing, the pumping of their hearts.
The passageway eventually wound its way up to a wide set of arched doors, as tall as all the other entrances they'd encountered. The doors slid apart at their approach to reveal a room like a vast dome, its walls transparent so that exterior space was visible all around. The glowing light, blazing across the electromagnetic spectrum, told Selene exactly where they were.
“We're still in the dead star system. Is this a ship or some permanent structure?”
“Can you tell where in the system we are relative to the archways?” Ondo asked.
She could pick out the background stars, but they were indistinct. “I can't get an accurate fix. We're about two hundred million kilometres from the neutron star, judging by the intensity of the gamma ray bursts.”
Ondo nodded, but he wasn't looking at her. His attention was caught by the scene outside. “Now that we're not about to run out of oxygen, I can appreciate how glorious all this is; it's a view I could never grow tired of. I believe there's something very odd about it too. The physics of it confuses me, although I don't have the data to analyse it properly. It could be that…”
He trailed off; he was essentially talking to himself. As he did. She could genuinely imagine him spending the rest of his life contemplating the supernova remnants, but that wasn't going to help anyone.
“It's spectacular, but I could get bored with it quickly enough. What baffles you about it?”
It took him a moment to return to the here-and-now. “If this supernova is as ancient as I believe, why is the plasma and heat still here? The star should have exploded in its blaze of electromagnetic radiation, then burned out long ago.”
“The gas and dust of the nebula was already here, and the nova helped spark it into life. Or they're unrelated, a chance coincidence.”
“Perhaps that's it,” he said, but he looked sceptical, as if he'd have preferred a more exotic explanation, or as if he believed something completely different was going on.
Selene said, “I'd like to know more, I really would, but I think we face more pressing dangers than interesting cosmological puzzles. I'm going inside this dome.”
Ondo sighed, but conceded the point with a nod of his head.
A walkway led off into the sphere, held up without any manner of supporting structure. It twisted chaotically throughout the space, looping under and over itself so that it was difficult to follow with the eye. It appeared to lead to a central platform at the heart of the space, like the nucleus at the core of a cell. The scale of the sphere was hard to take in, and it was only by bouncing radio waves off the far surfaces with her artificial eye that Selene was able to come up with any accurate measurements. The orb was three hundred metres in diameter, and the apparently precarious central platform at the end of the spindly walkway was in fact twenty metres wide.
Selene caught Ondo's questioning look. There was no sign of anybody inside the sphere. She stepped onto the path. Once again, nothing attempted to stop her.
They walked along it side-by-side. Although the walkway looked spider-web delicate from a distance, it was broad and completely solid up close. Something odd was happening with local gravity too: although the path wound around like a knotted ball of string, the surface they walked upon was always down, even if it had been up a few metres earlier. It was only by consulting the map she was building up in her head that she was able to disprove her suspicion that they were sometimes walking along the underside of a path they'd previously traversed. What would happen if she jumped off the side of the walkway? Would she fall, or rise, or stay where she was? She decided not to test it out.
She still couldn't detect any pattern or sense to the way the pathway wound around; to her mind, it simply made the walk to the central platform unnecessarily long and confusing. Whether that had been the original designer's intention, with some aesthetic or metaphorical meaning to it, she had no way of knowing.
The path often brought them close to the transparent bulkheads, affording them impressive
