Dead Star (The Triple Stars, Volume 1)

by Simon Kewin

  She couldn't take it all in; her head was throbbing from exertion and the long conversation. She hadn't spoken so much since her last days on Maes Far, her farewells with her family. “But these images you have: they can't be that ancient, otherwise the language would have evolved into something we couldn't understand.”

  “True. A few hundred years more of linguistic drift and we would have great difficulty making sense of the words. Recording language in flecks and books tends to slow that process, but it still happens.”

  “The language could just be something Concordance imposed upon the galaxy.”

  “Except, they've never claimed to have done that, and they're always very quick to trumpet their achievements. And I suspect that would be too big a lie to convince people of, even for them. They've imposed their own interpretation of historical events, but even they can't obliterate the cultural and linguistic records of every known civilisation, not without simply killing everyone.”

  Selene looked away from Ondo back to the view, which had returned to visuals of the galaxy. The Diamond Road. Apart from a few nearer stars twinkling as some speck of interstellar dust eclipsed them, it looked still, frozen. Of course, that was only a matter of perspective. Everything was moving, changing, it just wasn't always possible to see it. Imperceptibly, in the few minutes since she'd entered the room, the galaxy had turned.

  “I need to sleep, Ondo. I need to think about all this.”

  “Of course. My apologies if I've exhausted you. I've wanted to show someone this for a long time, and I'm afraid you've suffered because of it.”

  She turned and manoeuvred the chair back down the stairs. She was getting the hang of it now, but she still managed to scrape several walls along the way.

  She reached her room without pitching herself onto the floor. Exhaustion washed through her, sucking her down. She heaved herself onto the bed with the last of her strength and a gasp of pain.

  Visions of starships – uncountable, bizarre, exotic starships – thronged in her thoughts, their combined communications babble incomprehensible. She slipped back into unconsciousness to their troubled hubbub.

  4. A World in Shadows

  Slowly she became stronger, less prone to bone-heavy exhaustion. She found, as she came around from the last few operations, that her fears of pain and incapacity were being replaced by something else. Relief that she had survived; a sense of having a future, of thinking what it might hold. And something else: a growing anger at what had been done to her, to her world and to everyone she knew and loved.

  As her strength grew, so did her fury.

  She used it to push herself, to overcome the pain from her tortured tissues. She spent longer and longer in the Refuge's exercise room, forcing herself to build up the strength and stamina of her natural tissues. The emulated gravity in the little room was adjustable, allowing Ondo to acclimatise himself to the conditions of different worlds, and every week she bumped it up a notch to place more strain on her system. The difficulty was keeping her surviving biology and her enhancements at the same level of strength, but there Ondo had done a good job. As her natural muscles grew stronger, her artificial ones automatically adjusted performance to maintain a balance. It was as Ondo said: soon she was unaware of her additions in the way that she was unaware of her natural body. The artificial tissues responded without her having to think about them.

  She still suffered bouts of searing agony, but she learned to ignore them. Her body was adjusting. Day by day, slowly, they became less and less frequent.

  She'd played a musical instrument at home on Maes Far, a qurang, a simple device that had variations throughout the galaxy: a resonating acoustic box with taut strings whose length could be altered to produce different notes. Her father had played, showed her the basic hand-shapes required to get the different chords. She had no great skill, but playing had been a source of pleasure on Maes Far when the anxieties of life overwhelmed her. A simple, creative task she could fill her mind with. Ondo had nothing exactly the same, but he'd given her the closest he had, smaller and with eight strings rather than the six she was used to. She was teaching herself to play. It required a high degree of manual dexterity, but it also required complete coordination, both hands working as one as she plucked and strummed with her right hand and formed chords and shaped effects with her left.

  It was working, she could play the unfamiliar instrument – but it was also completely wrong. Her artificial fingers moved with astonishing speed, speeding up and down the fret like a scampering spider, never missing a note, but it was always too perfect, too mechanistic. She sounded like a person and a machine trying to play a duet: one expressive, emotive, the other clockwork and precise. In the end, always, she threw the instrument down in disgust.

  She explored the Refuge, first in the chair and then, for longer periods, on foot. It was larger than she'd first imagined, its paths winding without any apparent pattern. The two cold fusion reactors at its core powered a thriving hydroponic agricultural system, as well as caverns given over to greenery just because, apparently, Ondo wanted them to be there. They served no obvious survival purpose. There was running water: the asteroid had a large reserve of ice locked away beneath its surface, and Ondo had constructed the sort of water cycling system commonly found on starships so that the supply was, more or less, inexhaustible.

  A lot of the passageways and hollows in the rock were natural – presumably another reason Ondo had chosen the asteroid – but at some point in the past, he'd extended and connected the natural caverns to form an interconnecting warren. She found several observation points, granting views in all directions, the galaxy sometimes visible, sometimes hidden behind the Refuge's misshapen grey mass. She discovered the spaceward hangar where the pyramidal bulk of the Radiant Dragon was berthed. Other ships were there, too, but they seemed unused, in various states of disrepair, cannibalized for spares. There were sleeping rooms: four or five of them, as if Ondo had planned for a larger population. Only hers and Ondo's were used.

  She found a storeroom where he had racks of clothing, scavenged from many different worlds by the look of their disparate styles and colours and fabrics. Perhaps they were disguises, or a part of some abandoned plan to have more people at the Refuge. She picked out items that were better-fitting and decidedly more feminine than the baggy medical gowns she'd been wearing since her reconstruction. She wouldn't have been seen dead in them back home, but it felt good to smooth their close-fitting lines over her anatomy, gave her some small sense of control over her appearance. Studying herself from all angles in a mirror, she was a little bit a person once more, rather than simply a patient, a problem.

  She also found many rooms given over to Ondo's experiments and research, rooms containing contraptions she could make no sense of, perhaps salvaged from around the galaxy for him to reassemble at some point.

  He was often away, travelling the galaxy aboard the Dragon, following his trails, and at those times she had the Refuge to herself. The quiet of it was welcome, healing. There appeared to be no restrictions on where she could go or what she could do, and she spent her days exploring her miniature new world. The lack of any planetary-defence batteries had surprised her, until Ondo explained their only hope for survival lay in absolute secrecy. If their whereabouts became known, they'd have no chance against their Concordance overlords, however much firepower they could muster to defend the Refuge. Still, she couldn't help thinking Ondo had weaponry of some description somewhere. He had a great deal of dazzling technology at his fingertips: some of it acquired from his journeys around the galaxy over the decades, but much of it, seemingly, of his own invention.

  She found, at the end of an inconsequential rock passageway at the foot of a twisting, narrow stairwell, a small vault where he stored all the precious scraps of data he'd scavenged across the galaxy. The door to the room was blast-proof carbon-steel, half a metre thick, but it swung open silently to her touch. Inside were all of Ondo's treasures. There wer
e, in truth, precious few of them; Concordance had done a good job of destroying the facts they didn't want the galaxy to know, of erasing its collected memories. As well as starships' dataflecks, there were discs and cubes, and other storage devices she didn't recognize. There were fragments of complete machines, the data presumably stored within them, as well as paper books with hand-written words. Everything looked singed, or broken, or degraded, but each was held in a blue stasis field, cocooned and protected as carefully as any priceless jewel or revered religious artefact. The scattered and fractured memories of the galactic mind.

  She wondered how much Concordance would give for access to the room. If they could destroy the memories it contained, those and any others still strewn around the galaxy, then the past they wished to eliminate effectively wouldn't exist anymore.

  He returned after a week away without any announcement or greeting. Only a subsonic rumble through the stone walls told her that a ship had decelerated to dock. She wanted to ask him about the flecks and discs and books, as well as give voice to the many other questions that jostled in her brain. She found him in his laboratory, hunched over his latest discoveries. The room was one of the larger atria, and from the map she'd built in her mind, it had to be right at the heart of the asteroid, directly above the data storage room and maybe five hundred metres in every direction from vacuum.

  He didn't hear her approach. He was often engrossed in his work, attempting to decrypt the incomplete records he'd retrieved from his crash sites. The laboratory was a strange jumble of humming machinery and lush plant life. Ondo liked to be surrounded by greenery; he'd explained that Sintorus had been abundant in flowering plants and he found the greenery conducive to his work. There was also running water in the laboratory: channelled along a network of open gullies, partly to provide irrigation for the plants, and partly to fill the air with their white-noise tinkling.

  She stepped up behind him, wary of interrupting him. She imagined the interior of his mind was something like the Vault: a strong room, well protected, full of ancient mysteries and secrets, but also open to her if she chose to explore it. He'd grown used to his long solitude, but he was willing to share what he knew and suspected. She had only to pick this fragment off a shelf, or this one, and ask about it, and he would tell her.

  A large rig set across two benches held both ends of a ten-metre length of a microscopic filament, something he often experimented with, sending electromagnetic radiation of various wavelengths through it. He'd explained to her that its purpose and function remained a mystery to him, but that he'd recovered lengths of it in many different star systems.

  A jewelbug, an iridescent insectoid apparently made of knotted strings of beads, had stopped in its foray upon the tip of a nearby leaf, one foot held warily in the air over the plummet to the ground. A stab of pain cut through her, then passed. She ignored it. She had more important things to concern herself with: what was going on, what she should do.

  She held out her left hand to the jewelbug which, warily, after a few moments, stepped into her palm. She could feel the patterns of the microscopic hairs covering its pin feet upon her artificial flesh. She held it to her eye, studying the beautiful dazzle of its multifaceted eyes, then set it down at the base of a cluster of lush, rubbery fronds where it might find more to eat.

  Ondo insisted on using old-fashioned screens and manual keyboard controls for his work. It was hugely inefficient, but he claimed that having to type slowly and deliberately helped him to lay out his thoughts methodically. His screen depicted some planetary landscape. There were the ruins of old buildings, but they were blackened and blasted by fire or explosion, scoured by screaming winds. Many were little more than piled rubble. The entire scene was one of utmost desolation, some ancient scene of planetary destruction. The images were two-tone: infra-red, perhaps. This was the planet at night-time.

  Her control over her lips and facial muscles was improving; her words were less and less slurrily sibilant each day. “Is this where you've just been?”

  He turned in surprise, completely unaware she was there, too wrapped up in studying his latest treasures. Perhaps he'd completely forgotten she was even on the Refuge. He peered at her through his elaborate multiglasses. “Selene! Yes, this is where I've come from. You don't recognize it?”

  “Should I? You forget I lived my whole life on Maes Far.”

  His reply was strangely quiet. “I didn't forget that.”

  She grasped what he meant a moment later. This was Maes Far. Her homeworld looked as though it had been desolate for centuries. Her voice was shaky when she spoke again, some of her muscle control gone. “You went back?”

  “I left nanosensors in the atmosphere and in orbit, and I've been there to harvest their recordings. I was going to ask you whether you wanted to see them. It would be understandable if you didn't.”

  “Are there any signs of life?”

  “I'm sorry, but I've seen none, other than a few small insectoids scurrying in the shadows. Microscopic life survives too, no doubt, but there is nothing of any great size or complexity.”

  “No people?”

  “None that I've been able to find, although I haven't been down to the surface. Perhaps there might be one or two holed up somewhere, eking out dwindling supplies, but I doubt it. It's been nearly a year since your escape and the planet's biosphere was already at a tipping point when you left. It also appears some areas of the surface have been scoured by Concordance planetary destruction weaponry: seismic devices and air-burst nukes.”

  “Which areas?”

  “Specifically, the ship crash site your father was excavating. That's been utterly demolished.”

  Now that she studied the pictures, she could see that it was, indeed, her home. They were looking at Caraleon, the capital city, streets and plazas she knew well. If she tried, she could overlay the shattered ruins with memories of the soaring architecture she'd loved. A ragged ruin in the centre of the screen had to be all that was left of the central Sunrise Campanile, the tower that had chimed the hours across the city for over 250 years.

  It chimed no more. She turned away. She didn't want to see what Maes Far had become. She turned to the questions she'd been saving up to ask him. “How did you know Maes Far was under attack? Were you in contact with my father?”

  He took his glasses off so he could converse with her properly. “It was luck, really. It would have been too dangerous to maintain a regular communication, for either of us. The arrangement was that I would send an automated drone into the system every few years to harvest any interesting data he'd unearthed, and then disappear. There were nanosensors in orbit that picked up and stored any broadcasts whose wavelengths followed a very specific pattern of modulations.

  “Normally, I acquired only drawings and images of what your father had unearthed from the ruins he was excavating. Occasionally, there was a personal message, but there was never any great detail. Of course, he had to be careful to walk the line that all historians and archaeologists across the galaxy have to walk. If they get too close to the truth or find out anything genuinely useful, Concordance starts paying attention. This time, when the Dragon returned, he'd sent an urgent plea for help. The Dragon also identified what the increased Concordance activity meant as it arrived in-system: by that time the shroud was already a third built.”

  She recalled it well. The sun had become like a malevolent eye peering down at them from the sky, its black pupil growing wider and wider, its glow colder each day. She'd hated it more than she'd hated anything in her life. “You came up with the plan to send down the lander and save who you could?”

  “It was all I could do. I took the risk of broadcasting instructions using the same modulation patterns to your father, not knowing if he would receive them. Fortunately, he did. Originally, I'd thought of sending the shuttle down again and again to save as many of your family as I could. It soon become obvious we'd only get one chance, and that was when you had to choose who would be
saved. I wish I could have done more, saved everyone, stopped Concordance building their terrible device, but I could not.”

  “No. I know.” There'd been so many people on her planet, and only she was left. So many funny and smart and beautiful people. And, sure, so many stupid and irritating ones, too. The burden of losing all of them was unbearable. How could she hope to live up to all their dreams, their expectations? How could she ever repay their sacrifice? The weight of that would drag her to the ground if she let it.

  Her mother had foreseen how it would be for her at their parting. Selene recalled the light shining in her mother's golden hair as she held her close, the reassuring strength of her embrace. These were her final words: “Go out there and live, Selene. Don't blame yourself when we're gone. This is not your fault; you have done nothing wrong. You must live. We all want you to live. Go with our love and our blessing.” Her words had made little difference. In Selene's nightmares, the people of Maes Far were still alive, watching her from the surface of the ruined planet, crying out to her for help.

  She tried, as she always did, to put the recollections out of her mind. Sometimes she wished that part of her brain had been blasted away, the memories cut from her, so she didn't have to live with them.

  “Did my father ever unearth any useful information about Concordance?” she asked.

  “I suspected he was getting close to something, but it's only in the last few weeks that it's become clear how much he'd learned. He'd been very busy, working away in secret. Partly that was to hide everything from the Cathedral ship, but I think he also didn't want to tell me everything until he had his findings catalogued and corroborated. He was always the rigorous scientist. Then, when he knew the end was coming, he sent everything he'd found, desperate it shouldn't be lost. As well as getting you off the planet it was all he could do, the only salvation he could find.”