Dead Star (The Triple Stars, Volume 1)

by Simon Kewin

  “Looks like the ship broke up in the atmosphere,” she said.

  “Or it was destroyed in space and this is all that's left of the microfragments that rained down on the planet. It must have been quite a firework show for anyone near enough to see it.”

  “I can't tell if the borer found anything of interest,” she said. As with all their comms, data returned from the burrowing probe was encrypted in case the broadcast was picked up by a Concordance listening device.

  Again, Ondo's presence in her mind showed her how to decrypt and interpret the data. “It's here. The device has found several items of interest. See, here, and here. Three objects with a high molecular complexity that suggests some kind of storage medium. There may be nothing left on them, naturally, but we need to retrieve those fragments.”

  She could sense the excitement in him at the discovery. “We go in?”

  “We go in.”

  They began a slow dance that Ondo was clearly well-practised in: twelve hours of creeping forwards under the Radiant Dragon's reaction drives, then a pause to study the telemetry for any hint of Concordance activity. With each step, they gained more up-to-date information about the situation around Maes Far, but also came closer to the solar mass that made any escape jump into metaspace riskier and risker. Still there was no sign of unusual activity. With each delay, she found it harder and harder to contain her frustration. Ondo's wariness had kept him alive for many years, but the slowness of it was utterly maddening. The Dragon's reaction drives could accelerate it to 10% light speed, but the constant pauses meant the journey to Maes Far would take weeks.

  Finally, she could stand it no longer. “If they've seen us, they'll come for us. However their transgalactic communication system functions, it clearly does function; if a sentinel has picked us up, they'll be coming for us now. We have to make a dive for the planet while we can.”

  “If we move in, we'll lose the option to jump away to safety without a significant reaction-drive acceleration period.”

  “If we don't, we'll lose our chance to recover the memory fragments.”

  He was torn between his desire to know and his wariness of risks. “If they see us, they may surmise that you're alive and simply wished to see your homeworld again. I don't think they'll necessarily infer there are other starship remains here.”

  “But they might. Why this caution?” she said.

  “Concordance technological artefacts sometimes employ a fogging technology that makes them hard to detect by normal means. It renders them highly transparent across the electromagnetic spectrum, and it also does a good job of masking the trails they've taken through metaspace. The tech isn't perfect, but it's not far off. I've been experimenting with attempting to replicate it, so far with mixed results. Spotting their ships takes time, but if you sit and look for long enough, you see the background stars being systematically dimmed. It's one reason I emerged from metaspace here, where there are lots of background objects to check against. When you have a pattern of occultations, you get some idea of what you're dealing with: size, trajectory and so forth.”

  “However long we sit here, we can never be sure we're safe. We might happen not to see them. They might arrive in-system at the moment we move.”

  Ondo studied her for a moment, seeing something in her that appeared to amuse him.

  “Possibly I was less cautious as a younger man,” he said. “And possibly I've become too wary over the years. Very well, we'll make a run for the planet. But I wanted you to understand the safest way to approach. When you're operating alone, you'll need to know these things.”

  He was still protecting her. Strange that she was starting to feel just a little grateful for that. At some point, his feelings about her had started to matter. She wanted him to trust her. She needed him to if she was going to take command of the Dragon.

  “You're right, we should wait until you're absolutely ready,” she conceded. “You know best.”

  “Oh, it's entirely possible I don't. I think you're right. Let's go in now; there's no sign of any Concordance activity. They may be materialising just outside our sphere of knowledge, but that's always a risk.”

  Selene spun up the reaction drives, and they surged towards a carefully calculated interception point on the orbital path of Maes Far.

  Ten hours later, they were locked into high orbit of the planet. They'd still seen no sign of any other ship arriving, no suggestion Concordance forces were approaching. From their vantage point, the disc of the shroud was an insignificant sliver of matter in the gulf of space, but because of it, the surface of the planet was dark. No cities blazed out artificial lights in the darkness. No pearlescence glowed in the atmospheric envelope as dawn approached; no terminator swept across the planet's face to turn night into day as it would on any other world.

  “We'll take a lander down,” said Ondo. “A smaller ship has more chance of being able to sneak through their observation arrays.”

  The Dragon was perfectly capable of operating in the atmosphere of a planet – or within its oceans. But its greater bulk was a risk, and the ship's shape wasn't particularly aerodynamic in high-friction environments.

  “I'll plot a holding pattern for the Dragon,” she said, “keep it orbiting away from any Concordance sweeps.” Already her control of the ship was becoming more instinctive.

  She caught Ondo's worried glance as they stepped together into the lander. He was checking to see if she was coping psychologically. She hadn't been in one since her escape from Maes Far, the identical vessel that had been blasted to pieces around her as she escaped.

  The craft was big enough for the two of them and a few cases of cargo and not much else; there was room for the two of them to pass each other in the narrow corridor between control deck and hold, but doing so involved a brief, intimate dance of embrace. The lander was a sleek ovoid designed for atmospheric insertion, but it had minimal defences and only two lateral blaster arrays for weaponry. Its low-power energy hull and tinny thin fuselage would be enough to protect them from incineration as they flared into the atmosphere, but offered little in the way of useful armour if it came to a fight. Their best defences were speed and stealth.

  She nodded to him. She was fine. More or less. Pre-flight checks would provide a welcome distraction from her memories. While they strapped themselves in, she busied herself with interfacing with the lander, checking diagnostics and plotting the course it would need to take. The thermal stresses upon the little craft would be significant, but within acceptable tolerances.

  They made a hard descent, bone-rattlingly vertical, a fast drop between Concordance observation cones directly down to the ice of the polar cap. Ondo sat unperturbed through it all, his features a blur as the ship shook. He may have been trying to smile reassurance at her, but she couldn't be sure. The exterior of the voidhull hit two thousand degrees but remained intact, the energy hull absorbing and shunting away the worst of the frictional heat. She tried to focus on monitoring the ship's status, as well as the telemetry from orbiting nanosensors, suppressing her anxiety that the lander was breaking up around her.

  At one kilometre from the polar ice, they pulled out of the drop. She could feel the stresses tearing through the ship as something like pain in her own body. She groaned from the crushing high-g weight of the manoeuvre, but whether that was because of the effect on the spars of the lander or her own tissues, she couldn't be sure. Her artificial half continued to function completely normally, unaffected by the strains. Her biology blacked out for a period of seven seconds during the worst of it, but her augmentations remained fully operational, calmly informing her what had taken place once she regained full consciousness.

  They levelled out one hundred metres above Maes Far's southern ice-cap, only a few centimetres off Ondo's target trajectory. They skimmed over a blindingly white surface, jagged peaks alarmingly near. So far south, the shroud didn't fully cover the sun: the object's size and positioning meant that 99% of the globe was in perp
etual darkness, ensuring total climatic destruction, but the two poles saw a sliver of light for the six months of their summers. It could never be enough to sustain any sort of advanced biology, but did mean that single-celled organisms and maybe primitive plants might survive in those two, small ecological niches.

  They crossed the terminator into darkness ten kilometres from the pole, then sped for twenty minutes to the edge of the ice-sheet. The lander's lights flashed across ice-plains and glaciers, with no sign of the megafauna that had once lived upon the icy continent. The ship slowed as it reached the edge of the ice before plunging into the waters of the southern ocean. It dived two hundred metres before manoeuvring in a half-circle and heading back to the pole and the rendezvous point with the borer. The pack ice was fifty metres thick at its centre, enough to shield them from casual orbital monitoring, giving them more time to operate. The lander's lights lit up the ceiling of ice above them, delicate blue in hue, and smoothed to frozen waves by the long actions of the ocean currents.

  Once, these seas had been a rich soup of swarming krill and planktonic life, and giant Southern Behemoths had grazed upon drifting, subaquatic meadows of mass-colony protozoa. That was all gone now; two kilometres down, the sea-bed was carpeted with a rich layer of decaying biomass.

  As the lander surged southwards, Ondo left a trail of sensor relays in the water behind them to ensure good visibility of the Dragon and the telemetry it was receiving from across the system. No Concordance ships had arrived during their dive to the surface. It appeared she and Ondo had successfully eluded the monitoring network their pursuers had cast around the planet.

  The machine Ondo had set to tunnelling through the ice was a two-metre cylinder, its nose a rifled cone that allowed it to drill with microscopic accuracy through to each fragment of the ancient ship buried within the ice. The three objects it had collected were now cocooned safely within its body, plucked from the ice by the borer's grabbers. Ondo manoeuvred the lander up to the ice to form a seal directly below the waiting device. A shower of ice particles and frozen water rained down as the borer emerged and Selene reached up to pull it free.

  Ondo dismantled the body of the borer carefully. The bulk of its innards was taken up by eight compartments, three of which were filled with the retrieved objects. Each was cocooned within a shimmering blue stasis field generated by a tiny propagator. Ondo picked up each fragment by their stub, holding it between his fingertips to study the object hovering within through his multiglasses. Selene, zooming in with her left eye was able to see even more detail than Ondo. There could be no doubt each object revealed complex patterns at the molecular level. There had to be some chance they were storage media of some sort. The question was, could she and Ondo read data off them, decrypt them to make their contents readable?

  The first two objects were something like the flecks she and Ondo had inside their brains: rice-grain metallic specks with a clear electromagnetic signature. Both appeared to be whole and undamaged.

  It was the third object that fascinated Ondo the most, however. This appeared to be a glass sphere perhaps half a centimetre in diameter. He stared into it for some time, moving it around in an attempt to catch the light at the right angle. The iridescence shot through the little sphere reminded Selene of staring into an eye.

  “This is a memory device?” she asked.

  He was distracted as he replied, barely hearing her. “I'm not sure what it is. There's certainly complex structure within it. The borer reported that it appeared to have resided inside the skull of one of the crew members, but there was little left of the organic remains other than an impression in the ice.”

  “Inside their skull? It's a projectile weapon shot of some kind?”

  “I suppose that's possible. It seems a strange design for a bullet though, and very crude. I'd say it's more likely this is some other design of brain-enhancement fleck.”

  “Will you be able to read anything off it?”

  “I'm really not sure. I'm not sure about any of these fragments.”

  “You have lots of scraps like these in the Vault.”

  His eyes were unnaturally large through his multiglasses. “Not like this bead. Unless I'm very much mistaken, this is not from any Magellanic ship. These remains are from the other side: a Concordance vessel crashed into the ice above us.”

  “I thought you said you don't know of any Concordance crash sites?”

  “I don't. Or at least, I didn't until now.”

  “Are you sure?”

  “Not completely. Your father's notes suggested a Concordance ship had been ambushed by a significant force of Magellanic Alliance craft over Maes Far. My guess is that this is the result. A rare victory for the side that ultimately lost the war. I really need to get these objects back to the Refuge and study them in detail.”

  They sealed the lander up again, then retraced their route through the dark waters to the edge of the ice. Surging free of the ocean, they followed the precalculated return vector across the ice-fields. They burst back into sunlight to arc upwards in an ascent directly over the pole, climbing to their rendezvous point with the Dragon locked in high orbit.

  They were one hundred metres above the surface when the lander's alarms began to scream inside Selene's mind. High-g ground-to-air harpoons were converging on the lander, impact imminent, total destruction of the ship 99% likely.

  At times of high stress since her repair, she'd often suffered the unpleasant sensation of her mind dividing into two, as if her natural tissues had not fully accepted the links to her artificial half. It was always a disturbing and sickening sensation, as if she were really two people, or as if she didn't know who or what she was. It was like that now. Part of her mind, the original part, spun into panic as visions of her previous lander journey, her escape from Maes Far, filled her. The little ship being torn apart by Concordance weaponry with her strapped inside, helpless, screaming into the void. The terror of it, the crippling pain of her injuries.

  But the other part of her brain looked calmly on, studying telemetry, assessing risks. The flaw in Concordance's monitoring network wasn't a flaw at all. The enemy had known about the fragments in the ice all along, known Ondo would eventually come for them. They had laid their traps carefully: some technology akin to the starship fogging field had concealed the bunkers from their scans. From what Ondo had said, that was new behaviour. Concordance had worked hard to kill them.

  The lander was under fire from two different installations, a ring of ground stations arrayed around the pole. Two of the harpoons would strike within three and a half seconds, then the second salvo, two more missiles, a further three seconds later. Ondo sent the lander into a series of jinking manoeuvres in an attempt to avoid the impacts. She studied the projected trajectories of the harpoons plotted against the chaotic movements of the lander, and instructed the ship to overload its energy hull in the areas where an impact was most likely.

  She knew, even as she did so, that it would make little difference. They had no defensive ordnance capable of seeking out the incoming missiles and destroying them before they struck. Their hull would never be strong enough to withstand the impact of even one of the harpoons. The organic part of her brain continued to scream and rage, while her other half looked on with detached calmness at the unfolding dance of lander and weapons.

  The first harpoon struck, punching the reaction drive array clean off the lander. The little craft went spinning helplessly out of control towards the pristine ice below.

  8. Ghost Translation

  “There's someone out there on the ice.” Her voice was strangely thin in the freezing air.

  The low curve of the sun's limb shone through a ragged hole in the fuselage, blinding her before the filters kicked in within her left eye. She was hanging upside-down by her seat-restraints, and she was still alive. How was she still alive? This time she'd lost conscious thought for a period of thirty-two seconds, the shock of the imminent crash-landing and the extreme decel
eration of the impact too much for her biology. Telemetry streaming into her brain from the ruined lander's systems and down from the array of orbital nanosensors allowed her to build up a view of what was happening. They'd crashed near the pole, brought down by the high-g harpoon strike. The weapon had been launched with no warheads; its mass and velocity were all it needed to inflict its damage on the lander.

  She sought for data streams from the Dragon, looking for a status report on local space. There might be a sky of Concordance ships up there. She got nothing, no signal from the Dragon at all. It wasn't in its orbit above Maes Far anymore. It was gone, their only way to get off-planet and out of the system.

  Fuck. Fuck fuck. Fuck.

  Her attention moved on. None of the other three missiles had struck them; one was buried a metre deep in the pack ice some seventeen kilometres away, while the other two were still in the air. Their reaction drives spent, they were plummeting harmlessly to the ground fifty-five kilometres away. It made no sense; the harpoons were far more manoeuvrable than the lander, with guidance systems easily capable of adjusting to the ship's ponderous dodging.

  She turned her attention back to the figure on the ice, glimpsed from low orbit by a drifting nanosensor. There was a ship there, a whole craft buried in the ice, once concealed but now out in the open, its camouflaging carapace of snow sloughed off. Only a turret protruded from the ice, but the fogging field that had hidden the craft was deactivated. Whoever was inside no longer needed to remain concealed; the trap had been sprung. A high-powered energy wall curved over the ship in a half-dome, shielding it. Actually, judging by the electromagnetic fields displacing around it, it was a full dome, protecting the ship against attack from above and below.