by Simon Kewin
The shiver of delight ran up her spine once again as she faced the being. It was taller than she was, so far as she could tell, but had something like the same basic biological form. She caught a glimpse of a face, of eyes and nose and mouth in the usual arrangements, but whether because it was alien, or because of the constant shifting, the expression was impossible to read.
There was a voice, too, its musical tones flowing and songlike. At the same time, she understood it perfectly; it appeared to be conversing directly with her mind. Not the augmentations she carried within her cranium, but the language centres of her organic brain.
The alien object, whatever it was, spoke to her in her own tongue. “Welcome to you, Selene Ada, I have been awaiting your arrival. The night has been long but now the dawn is coming.”
3. The Depository
“How do you know my name? How did you know I'd be coming here?” She couldn't tell if the alien entity understood her, but the shattered planes of its form glinted in greys and greens in time to her words. Which she took to mean that it did.
“The long night must see a dawn.”
Great. Enigmatic utterances, just what she needed. Was it stalling while it summoned attackers? It must have known she was coming, though. She studied its incursion into her organic brain with the diagnostic mechanisms Ondo had embedded. It had touched areas of her prefrontal cortex with a gentle electromagnetic pattern-matching analysis. It had inflicted no discernible harm, but it could easily have acquired her public identity, her name, the Selene Ada she presented to the universe. Some sort of automated greeting mechanism. At the same time, it had delved deep enough to understand how her brain interpreted sensory perceptions as ideas. As language. The level of cognitive interference required for that trick wasn't supposed to be possible without her express permission.
“What dawn? What night? Explain what you're talking about.”
“The long night through which this Depository has waited in readiness.”
Selene stepped sideways, circling the creature or machine or whatever it was, studying it. It appeared to be talking in metaphors that it had calculated she would understand. It clearly hadn't calculated very accurately.
“In readiness for what?”
The entity didn't turn to track her, but at the same time it always appeared to be facing her. Glimpses of face and limbs, its mouth mid-syllable, an eye, flashed in and out of existence. It was trying to be organic – or some semblance of it.
“For when it is needed.”
“Needed for what?”
The entity stuttered. It was badly broken, on the point of disintegrating at any moment. Maybe this inner sanctum hadn't escaped damage after all.
“These treasures are kept under my warding until the day they are needed.”
“How long have you been here?”
“I waited while the galaxy aged. The long night.”
She was pretty sure the entity was a mechanism rather than a living creature. A broken mechanism, with a limited understanding of her language and fragmented logic trees that sent it circling again and again through the same sentences. It didn't appear to have summoned anything to attack her. Quite possibly it had malfunctioned, gone offline for some unknown span of time and her appearance had brought it stuttering back to life. She tried a different approach.
“What happened to you?”
“The Great Enemy fell upon us. The darkness flooded in to eat us all.”
“Concordance were here?”
“The enemy came before we were ready, and there was nothing we could do.”
“Who came?”
Suddenly there was a direct answer. “The Great Enemy. Morn.”
Morn. The weapon Vulpis had used to raise Concordance to its position of absolute control, if Ondo was to be believed. Perhaps Vulpis had used the technology and the builders of this Depository had been unable to defend themselves. But in that case, why had he then abandoned it? Why weren't Concordance still here?
“Morn,” she said.
The shards of glass that made up the creature flashed through shades of black and red. Fear? Rage? Hard to say. She was probably projecting her own emotions onto the entity.
“Morn,” the entity repeated. “The Teeming Death.”
She checked with her inner Ondo, who was still able to see and hear everything she did. “Have you ever encountered anything like this?”
“Never. It is fascinating. I see no way to gauge how old it is, or to test the accuracy of what it is saying.”
“It doesn't seem to have a solid grasp of the passage of time, but it looks to me like it predates the war.”
“What makes you say that?”
She couldn't put it into words. “I don't know, this whole place feels older. Or not older, more … timeless.”
“The objects on those plinths might tell us something useful. Maybe there was something here that Vulpis was looking for. A weapon.”
“In which case, maybe he took it away and left the rest. Perhaps there was a fight, and he damaged this warden mechanism. If I go nearer the plinths, I might end up very dead.”
“Its reactions don't appear to be hostile. It almost seems like it's trying to be helpful.”
Helpful, right. She edged closer to the first dais, watching the entity for some power build-up, some sign of attack. It didn't move to stop her. Instead, it kept its distance, moving as she moved, shadowing her.
The first plinth she came to bore a death-mask encrusted in what she assumed were diamonds. Or maybe, for all she knew, it wasn't a death-mask at all but the face itself. She couldn't pick it up to study it, the blue glow of the protective stasis field resisting her. There was no explanation of what she was seeing, no details of the object's context. Most likely she lacked the necessary brain augmentations to interface with the mechanism.
The next item was either a sculpture of shining metal or perhaps a machine of some unknown purpose. Its lines were complex and hard to follow, folding in upon themselves like the strands of an impossible knot. Planes twisted and became a gap between two other planes as you tried to follow them. Even her left eye found itself confused. She walked around the device constructing a three-dimensional model of it in her brain, but the object refused to comply, resisting her efforts to map it.
The next pedestal contained an object that flickered in and out of existence, jumping repeatedly from one side of its containment field to another. Of all the objects she could see, it was the only one moving. It was another thing that seemed impossible: a stasis field by definition held an object outside of the normal passage of time; something within it couldn't move or decay because time wasn't passing. Yet here was this object doing exactly that. It was a black X-shape about the size of her hand. It put her in mind of a four-legged arachnoid without any central body, although it was impossible to say if the thing was organic or metallic. It gave her the distinct impression it was trying to get at her, sniff her out, devour her.
She moved on. There was a plain black cube made of metal or stone, no light reflecting off it, its purpose completely unfathomable, then a set of what looked like crowns, but big enough only to fit fingertip-sized heads. There was something like an outsized piece of jewellery or a totem, wrought from a silvery metal, in the shape of a central circle with lines radiating off it, sockets for beads set at random intervals along the lines, only one of which was filled. The next plinth contained two glass beads on their own: one green, one black. On the next was a stylized stone sculpture of a tall, bipedal being, its head strangely elongated.
On and on it went: countless artistic treasures or technological artefacts. She could feel Ondo's burning desire to get his hands on the objects, study them, find out what they were and what they did. She felt something of the same urge, the same delight: there were treasures here from across the galaxy, their age and provenance unknown. The secrets they harboured might explain many things.
Ondo's disembodied voice sounded puzzled in her mind. “Why
would someone construct a repository such as this and then abandon it?”
“As a place to store looted treasures? We might have this all wrong. Perhaps Concordance didn't attack this place, perhaps they built it. We may not be able to trust anything this Warden says; its memories are clearly garbled.”
Ondo was unconvinced. “Why would Concordance need a safe place to store valuables? Who would they be hiding them from? Besides, you were able to simply walk in here, and that does not sound like Concordance to me. If this was their repository, they would defend it with all their firepower.”
“So maybe someone assembled it during the war, some faction we don't know about, and then they died out, and all knowledge of the place was lost. You said there were different schools of thought within the Omnian religion.”
“I still would have expected defensive systems.”
“Perhaps we'll discover there are when I try to leave. I might be trapped in here for the rest of time.”
“I don't see signs of a fight. This vault has not suffered any bombardment damage like the outer chamber.”
“The Warden entity is a wreck.”
“Which might simply be because it is old. Its systems have decayed because it's been active for longer than was originally intended. Ageing can do that.”
She ignored his attempt at humour. “I don't understand why Aefrid's forebear never found any of this. It isn't exactly well hidden.”
“That's a good question, one that's been puzzling me.”
The idea of Ondo sitting inside her own brain, thinking his own thoughts, continued to trouble her. “Have you been consuming my brain processing power by running your own analysis?”
“I did explain, Selene. The flecks containing my engrams do not interfere with your cognitive processing in any way, except when you allow them to do so. The amount of chemical energy I draw is tiny, the equivalent of you rising your little finger once every hour. Your additions have plenty of energy reserves to draw on.”
“Right, okay.” He also couldn't tell when she was mocking him. Maybe she needed to make it more obvious. “You haven't come to any conclusions?”
“Hypotheses only. Find out everything you can from the entity. It might give us some clues.”
“I'll try. It's not exactly being cooperative.” The shimmering alien hadn't moved, awaiting instruction like a good little automated greeting system.
“These objects,” she said out loud. “May I take them?”
The entity's reply was as frustratingly implacable as ever. “My work will be done when the locks are opened.”
“Okay, sure, so when will the locks be opened?”
“I do not have they key.”
“Who does have the key?”
“I do not have they key.”
She thought about persuading the mechanism to be more helpful by pointing her blaster at it, threatening to rewire it permanently. She held herself back; it wasn't going to respond to her threats, and she might destroy the one chance they had of activating whatever needed to be activated to recover the artefacts. For all she knew, if she attacked the entity the entire structure might collapse into cataclysmic ruin, entombing her inside it. Whatever the purpose of this place was, the mechanism had protected the objects it warded for some time. They would be safe a while longer.
She had the glass bead they'd recovered from the ice of Maes Far on a chain around her neck. She fished it out from her suit, and pressed the combination of microswitches that released the sphere from its clasp. She held it up for the flickering entity to see. As usual, the sphere refracted electromagnetic radiation across a wide spectrum in complex and shifting ways.
“Do you know what this is?” she asked.
The entity shimmered out of existence, and she thought it had vanished completely, finally succumbing to its age and damage. But then she saw it had reappeared two hundred metres down the gallery behind her. There was a distinct colour shift to its hues: now it glinted in purples and marine turquoises. Was that significant?
Selene muttered to herself, “Right, well, I'll follow you, shall I?” She weaved down the line of plinths. All were occupied, the objects in no order she could discern: a mechanism of cogs and rivets constructed from some black metal, a multifaceted crystal the size of her head, a book printed on some sort of paper analogue, gold symbols in an unknown alphabet across its blood-red cover. Works of art and artefacts of science, natural wonders and items she couldn't begin to identity.
She also passed side-doors leading off into chambers that housed larger objects: statues and carved columns, titanic skeletons and the façades of ornate temples. The scale of the place was dazzling, the twisting layout impossible to follow. Through one arched doorway she glimpsed an avenue of huge, stone beasts with six legs and snarling maws. There were hundreds of them, receding into the far distance of a chamber suffused with a golden, sunset light, its curved roof hundreds of metres high. Did the vaults fill the interior of the planet, or was something else going on here, some extra-dimensional effect she didn't understand? So close to the star, an energy supply wouldn't be a problem. The place was a museum, a repository, a treasure house. A catalogue of objects and wonders. What worlds had the objects come from? Who had brought them here? Had they been stolen or rescued from conflagrations and natural disasters for safe storage? If this was Concordance's work, what were they doing it for?
Ondo was making little whimpers in her head at each new sight, his delight at what he was seeing almost sexual in its fervour. She said nothing; no point spoiling his fun. And, in truth, she got it. She found herself wondering what her father would have made of the place. They could have explored it together, father and daughter.
She kept walking towards the entity, which was glinting beside a curved alcove in the walls. She'd thought it was another doorway, but instead she saw a pearl-white hemisphere embedded in the wall there, two metres in diameter. Some sort of artwork? But there was a tiny circular slot directly beneath the hemisphere which was, clearly, the right size for the glass bead.
“I put this in here?” she asked.
The entity didn't reply, but nor did it intervene when she moved her hand towards the slot. The bead slipped in effortlessly, seemingly sucked in by some mechanism. It was, as she'd imagined, a display port of some description. The hemisphere went crystal clear, and a representation of the entire galaxy appeared. Some of the stars blinked, and symbols appeared around the edges of the display.
“Can you make anything of those, Ondo?”
“I've recorded a few fragments of something similar, but never enough to translate. The script bears no correlation to any existing galactic calligraphic system that I'm aware of. One or two runes match those of known alphabets, but that appears to be random chance. There's only a fixed number of symbols cultures can use.”
So no, then. “What do you figure this thing is?”
“A data retrieval mechanism would be my best guess.”
“There doesn't seem to be much on it other than a pretty picture of the galaxy.”
“Or we don't know how to access the rest of the data.”
“I could try ripping the hemisphere off the wall and lugging it back to the Refuge for analysis.”
“I suspect that's beyond even your powers.”
“Maybe.” She took a step forwards, thinking she'd at least try. As she moved, the galaxy blinked out and was replaced by a rapid series of other images: screens of text, landscapes, worlds, living creatures, fleets of starships, faces, constellations. They flicked by with such dazzling rapidity that even she couldn't focus on any of them.
“Selene, slow down! We need to see these images, study them.”
She turned Ondo off. She didn't need the distraction. Had movement activated the device? She tried standing perfectly still, but it made no difference to the torrent of information. If she could capture it, that would be something. Her left eye normally blinked in perfect synchronicity with her right eye, but now she inst
ructed it to remain open. She would record the images streaming past her retina and worry about interpreting it later.
Five minutes later, the pictures stopped and she was returned to the galaxy image. Some kind of pictorial index, she guessed. She tried moving forwards and backwards again but nothing happened, the pictures didn't repeat. Maybe this mechanism was broken, too, and she'd retrieved all she was going to get. Maybe she'd transferred all the data from the bead, and what she'd seen was the information flowing into the Depository's systems.
The glass sphere protruded slightly from the wall where she'd inserted it. She touched it, and immediately the galaxy disappeared. The bead slid out to land in the palm of her hand.
She reactivated Ondo. “I've captured some data from the bead.” She gave him access to the memory dumps from her optical system.
He studied it for a few moments. “There's a lot here. An incredible amount. I think now might be a good time to return so I, that is the real Ondo, can study it in detail. We can always come back if that seems like the best approach.”
“You mean, you figure the real you will want to come here.”
He conceded the point. “Partly that, yes. But you've acquired so much already that it would be a shame if it were … lost now.”
“Yeah, it would be a terrible shame.”
She retraced her steps towards the doorway, keeping a wary eye on the Warden for some sign it intended to intervene and attempt to stop her. It followed her, but didn't act in any other way. Despite her earlier caution, she still thought it likely the doorway wasn't going to reappear as she approached. Upon the third plinth in line, the fast-moving blur of the X-shaped object flicked restlessly backwards and forwards. She strode on, and the doorway slid into existence, exactly as it had before.
“You will return with the dawn?” The entity was suddenly very near her, the broken planes and angles of its form tilting and spinning, as if it were desperately trying to piece itself back together to form coherent thoughts.