by Simon Kewin
She stroked the silvery grey voidhull of the ship. It was completely smooth to the touch, utterly unmarked by microimpact abrasions. Only with her left hand's sensitivity tuned down to nano level could she detect any unevenness, the regular patterns of its constituent molecules. Ondo had explained that, in flight, the ship wrapped an outer energy hull around itself to fend off impacts from all but the largest chunks of space debris. Apparently all starships did the same – a fact that, once, had presumably been common knowledge.
Normally the ship was as immobile as rock, building-like, but now it hovered three millimetres above the hangar's surface. A subsonic humming came from it, imperceptible to normal hearing. The ship exuded a sense of readiness to fly, to escape the Refuge and flee through metaspace to Maes Far.
Or maybe she was projecting her own emotions onto it.
“How did you build the Dragon?” she asked. “Why didn't Concordance stop you acquiring the materials and the tech?”
Ondo studied a screen held in his hand, checking the ship's telemetry. “I didn't build the Dragon. I don't think you could really say anyone built it. Better to say it evolved over the centuries.”
“A ship can't evolve.”
“Its innermost core is old; it predates the war, certainly. A ship's Mind intertwined with a metaspace propagation drive would have been incredibly rare and valuable even in an age of regular interstellar travel. If you needed a bigger ship, or a newer ship, and you had a functioning core, it would have made sense to build around it rather than starting from scratch. So far as I can tell, that happened multiple times in the Dragon's history.”
“You don't know for sure?”
“There are so many computational layers wrapped around computational layers within its systems that its underlying architecture is a little hard to pin down.”
“You're not giving me much confidence here. How safe is this ship?”
“I know enough about it not to worry. I've been through many battles and dangers with the Radiant Dragon, and it's always comes through. The ship is psychologically complicated, perhaps, and it may well harbour secrets that are so well-hidden even it isn't aware of them, but I would trust the ship over any other. Whatever its essential core is, I know it is absolutely, incontrovertibly, benign. I would stake my life on it, as did the person who flew in it before me.”
“And who was that?”
“I'm not the first lonely renegade to devote their life to recovering the truth about Concordance. There have been many such over the centuries, and one of them made contact with me and gave me the Dragon when she was nearing the end of her road.”
She knew little about Ondo's past. She had quizzed him extensively about her father, his history as it affected her, but there was still much she didn't know about him. Possibly too much. She'd been too wrapped up in herself, just as he'd been too wrapped up in his research.
His words confirmed something she'd observed more than once: his technological and engineering skill was at a level far in excess of anything she'd witnessed or suspected possible. He'd shown her how he'd woven his engram flecks through the neurons of her brain, and he'd shown her the computational models he used to decrypt the fragmentary records he'd recovered. It was science raised to the level of something like artistry. But, while he was some kind of genius, she suspected he'd also inherited much of his miraculous technology.
“Did she give you the Refuge, too?” she asked.
“No, I built this place, using the Dragon's weaponry to bore out the passageways and then building machines to complete the excavation work. I felt I needed a base.”
“Who was she?”
“Her name was Aefrid Tau Sen. She was old when I knew her, but she recovered a great many of the flecks and datastores you've seen in the Vault, although she inherited a few from earlier renegades.” He looked up for a moment, staring into the distance as if still able to see the woman somewhere by the spaceward doors. The metal shielding had rolled back, the atmosphere within the dock protected from the void only by a shimmering energy wall “She was pretty terrifying. She was very insistent that I look after everything she'd discovered, that I made sure her life's work didn't go to waste. I've tried very hard to live up to that.”
“Just as now you plan for me to do the same.”
He focused on her, back in the present. She knew what he was going to say; it was a conversation they'd had more than once. “No one is forcing you to live this life; you can leave any time you want. Besides, I plan to be around for many years yet. There are still too many unanswered questions for me to die.”
“Are we ready to fly?”
“Everything looks good. In truth, the core components of the Dragon need little maintenance; they're self-repairing, self-maintaining systems.”
He'd mentioned similar technologies before. She had no idea that was even possible; back home, every mechanism had worn down, needing constant maintenance to keep it operational.
“That's pretty miraculous.”
“The technology needs an energy input to function, obviously, but otherwise it's self-sustaining. I believe that it was once completely normal. As I say, I don't have a complete understanding of how the ship functions. Aside from a few modifications, the Dragon is a pre-Concordance vessel, built before history was twisted backwards upon itself. I've seen evidence people used such repair technology on their biologies, too, potentially making themselves immortal if that was what they wished.”
“We've fallen a long way.”
“What matters is that we don't forget what we once were; what we're truly capable of.”
At an unspoken communication from Ondo, a triangular doorway appeared in the previously flawless flank of the Dragon. Selene had no recollection of her first journey in the ship, but she'd been inside it many times since, learning its layout, understanding how it was controlled. This would be her first flight away from the Refuge. Since her decision to join Ondo, he'd made two further reconnaissance trips to the Maes Far system, leaving behind monitoring and exploratory devices of various kinds, but she hadn't accompanied him. Now, finally, she was ready to do so.
The flecks in her mind that allowed her to interface with the ship gave her full executive control over its actions, but her connection was still imperfect, awkward. Ondo had explained it would take time for her neurons to make the necessary adjustments. Eventually, the plasticity of her brain would give her the instinctive control that Ondo enjoyed. Learning to operate the Dragon was like learning to control her new limbs: she'd started out frustratingly clumsy, but eventually, with muscle memory ingrained, she'd be able to act without her conscious mind having to think about it.
Once the Refuge had retrieved the dock's precious volume of air into its recycling systems, Ondo deactivated the energy wall and edged the Dragon down the hemispherical tunnel towards space. He was taking it slowly so she could watch and understand, the intimacy of the bond they shared with the ship allowing her to feel what he was doing to direct the craft. A flood of telemetry flowed into her brain, overwhelming at first, but slowly she began to see patterns there, make sense of the rush.
She found herself exhaling a deep breath as they emerged into the dizzying vastness of the void. She'd been contained too long. She perceived the universe both through her own senses and the Dragon's sensors. The Refuge was already a tiny fleck behind them, surrounded by the halo of bright stars strung through local space. Beyond, inconceivably huge, hung the main body of the galactic mass. Nausea washed through her at the terrible scale of it all. Planet bound, she was used to the simple truths of an up and a down. In space, she could fall for ever in any direction.
It was dizzying, but it was also glorious. All this was hers.
Ondo – the real Ondo, not her private copy – was there beside her, his voice reassuring. He knew what she was going through. “It will become easier. One more thing your brain needs to adjust to.”
She nodded in reply, not trusting herself to speak as her stoma
ch fluttered and clenched.
Ondo pulled the Dragon into a gentle arc, back towards the galactic centre, accelerating all the time. They could jump more-or-less directly into metaspace. It was one of the advantages of the Refuge's remote location: the lack of any stellar bodies nearby meant there were no gravity wells that could pull the ship off-vector during the tricky translation out of Euclidean space. In truth, it was a disadvantage as well as an advantage; the fact that they could jump without a prolonged run-up also meant an attacking force could jump inbound without warning at any time … if they knew where the Refuge was.
“We'll translate in thirty seconds,” said Ondo. “Watch carefully, feel how it works, how I control the Dragon. The ship does most of the computational work, but the direction comes from us, and without clear control the ship might attempt a malformed jump and end up somewhere disastrous. Possibly even caught between realities, unable to move onwards or backwards. That and the risk of being pulled into a star or a black hole are the main risks.”
“Oh, those are the main risks? Apart from that, it's perfectly safe?”
For once, though, she did what he said. She needed to know how to control the ship if she was going to take on Concordance. The idea of metaspace fascinated her: it was another concept that, once, must have been common knowledge. Ondo had once explained it to her using one of the ancient paper books he'd scavenged from some destroyed planet. He'd clearly been delighted with his metaphor.
“This book has tens of thousands of paragraphs, hundreds of thousands of words. You could read through it sequentially, word by word, but that would take a long time. That's why there would have been an index at the back, a much shorter summary of the main points in the text that you can traverse quickly. Find the right reference, then hop into the main text at the right page, the right word. Metaspace is like that: the gravity wells of stellar and planetary masses are there, projections of them at least, and by traversing that topography you can find the right point to emerge into real space. Flying greater distances still takes greater time, but navigation via metaspace means journeys can be made in a tiny fraction of the time it would take a subluminal ship to lumber the same distance.”
“And you're sure that travelling metaspace doesn't suck out your soul, leave it haunting the wastes of metaspace while you emerge, broken and insane, as our galactic overlords insist?”
“I'm sure. You know I've made hundreds of jumps.”
“And you're not insane?”
“I don't believe so, no.” He smiled, considering her through his multiglasses. “But perhaps that should be for you to decide.”
She forced herself to breathe slowly as the Dragon acquired more and more velocity, flinging itself forwards while its metaspace projectors prepared for the moment it would flip out of reality.
She felt the surge of it like plummeting off a high cliff. She swooped in a fall, faster and faster, nausea and delight rushing within her, sweeping her away.
Everything went grey, and the familiar universe disappeared.
7. Maes Far
They emerged into normal space a little over an hour later.
Ondo had placed them three hundred million kilometres from the stellar mass, a point perpendicular to the orbit of Maes Far. He'd explained his reasoning to her back at the Refuge. “In any system, most activity takes place in the narrow disc where planets and asteroids and even the most eccentric objects orbit. Away from the ecliptic plane, we're much less likely to be spotted.”
The Dragon sat in space and waited, drinking in telemetry from the various nanosensors Ondo had seeded throughout the system on his previous visits. In the year and a half since her rescue, his devices had watched everything taking place in the system: departures and arrivals, anything out of the ordinary. A proportion of the probes had been lost, either to natural events or Concordance activity, but he'd scattered enough around that it was impossible for all of them to be destroyed. The devices broadcast their telemetry to the universe, there for anyone to intercept if they knew the encryption keys, so that they didn't have to give away the location of the Dragon as it materialised. The data would give her and Ondo a clear idea of what they were facing.
Selene sifted through the flood of information with her flecks: images from nanosensors around Maes Far as well as those orbiting the system's unoccupied planets and the orange-yellow sun itself. There were also many streams from within the atmosphere of her home planet: scenes of unceasing, storm-blasted ruin; images cataloguing the death of her homeworld. They were muddy and indistinct; there was little electromagnetic radiation in any wavelength bathing the world to pick out detail. Only a weak light reflecting off Maes Far's two moons – nowhere near enough to sustain a viable ecosystem – provided any illumination.
It was clear that the lack of electromagnetic radiation hitting the surface had triggered complete environmental collapse on the planet. The loss of all complex plant life had destroyed food chains, eliminating populations of herbivores and then carnivores. Creatures feeding off carrion had survived, even thrived, for a time, but that had been only a short-term glut. The planet was dark, its dying atmosphere convulsing with ferocious death-throe storms, as if it were raging against its own end.
She searched in vain for signs of intelligent life, some lonely figure walking the desolation. Perhaps some unknown individual had built a bunker against an imagined Armageddon and had now emerged. She had never heard of anyone going to such lengths, certainly not in her extended family. Now, studying the streams, she could see there was no one. The only movement came as the hurricane winds scattered debris, picked at the remains of structures, whipped water into a dead fury. She still dreamed dreams of being back there, of skeletal hands clutching at her from beneath the surface. She needed to accept the fact that every person she'd ever known, everyone apart from Ondo, was gone. Only after all this time was she beginning to grasp the meaning of that simple statement, the scale of it. She still found herself speaking out loud to Falden or her father, as if they were simply on the end of a comms channel and could respond to her words.
She studied the pictures of the planet for as long as she could bring herself to.
She tore herself away. They needed to know about local space: whether ships or traps or defences had been left for them, or whether any scavenger vessels had ventured into the system. Concordance had to calculate there was a chance she was still alive, and, therefore, that she and Ondo might return.
Limited by light speed, the telemetry from the farther reaches of the system was by definition older and less reliable, but they could at least discern what had been taking place in the system in the recent past. If it looked safe, they'd creep sunwards, heading for the speck of rock that was Maes Far, watching warily all the time.
There were numerous artificial objects left in the system, their nature unknown to her. They had to be Concordance: her own culture had placed nothing into space for three hundred years. She tagged the objects with her mind's eye, drawing Ondo's attention to them. “What are these? Debris of some sort?”
“Automated sentinels. It's their standard practice: always a few in close orbit to the sun, then three or four around primitive or once-populated worlds.”
“Why are they watching the sun?”
“I don't know. They always seem fascinated by the stars in the systems they occupy. Perhaps it's a religious thing.”
“They'll see us if we go anywhere near Maes Far. And they must have nanosensors of their own that we can't detect. There are countless trillions of dust particles and any one of them could be a Concordance bug.”
“It's a risk, agreed, but we can reduce the odds of detection significantly. By the look of the activity in the system, they didn't notice either of my two most recent incursions. It should be possible to plot a course that keeps us out of line-of-sight of any of their sentinels.”
“Apart from the ones you don't know about.”
“Apart from those, yes. These incursions are a r
ace. If we go in and get out quickly, we should be able to escape before they come for us.”
Ondo sent her a mental image of the trajectory he'd plotted: a three-dimensional representation of Maes Far and local space around it. Known Concordance observation devices flashed in orbit and down in the atmosphere. The simulation of the planet moved, and a line appeared of the route Ondo intended to take: a complex spiral that wound down to the southern pole of the planet, neatly evading the observation cone of each device.
“We are lucky the crashed wreck is at the pole; as you can see, most of their monitoring stations are grouped around the once-inhabited continents. Caraleon, you'll notice, is under constant watch, but Concordance have spread themselves too thinly elsewhere. There are slight gaps between their observation arcs if you time your passage correctly, and there is a clear descent corridor over the southern polar ice-cap.”
Selene watched the simulation play out, looking for flaws. She couldn't see any. “This suggests they don't know anything about the wreck at the pole, otherwise they'd have been very sure to watch it.”
“They also wouldn't have allowed me to send down the borer I despatched on a very similar trajectory on my previous visit. You can see from its telemetry that it's still active and that its sweep through the ice is complete.”
Selene studied the relevant images in her mind's eye. The path Ondo's exploratory device had taken was clear. It had wound its way down through the atmosphere, dodging detection devices, then dived into the polar sea to operate from beneath the pack ice. It had burrowed upwards to the remains of the crashed starship, following a search pattern as it tracked down fragments.
There wasn't much left of the ship: it wasn't a hulk so much as a scattered layer of debris twenty metres down in the ice. Three centuries of snowfall had buried it deeper and deeper. Another three centuries, and the remains would sink through the underlying ocean to the sea-bed. By the look of it, few of the fragments were of any significant size: no large chunks of fuselage or ship skeleton as she'd imagined. The remains of the craft were little more than a constellation of disconnected sensor hits scattered over a wide area: an oval hundreds of kilometres across, spanning the magnetic pole.
