by Simon Kewin
“You are sure of this?”
“Completely sure. Eventually you won't notice any imagined divide.”
She didn't believe him, but she thanked him for his reassurance with a squeeze of his forearm.
Despite all their precautions and delays, she half-expected the Refuge to be a cloud of dust and shattered rock when they arrived, a Concordance fleet lying in wait for them with primed weaponry. But the lone asteroid was as they'd left it: seemingly an inconsequential lump of misshapen rock tumbling through the void in the outer reaches of the galaxy. It gave off no electromagnetic signatures, no clue at all that it was hollowed out and occupied. They approached from the dark side, the planetoid visible only as a silhouette blotting out the blaze of the galaxy. The proximity of the Radiant Dragon awoke close-range sensors and the Refuge's space doors slid back, its energy wall powering down to grant them access.
She left him to his studies and retreated to her own quarters. The Dragon was a large enough ship compared to the lander, but she and Ondo still bumped into each other constantly, and she longed for some time on her own. The arrangement appeared to suit Ondo, too. During her convalescence, days had gone by without them seeing each other. In the Refuge they could almost live separate lives if they preferred.
She returned to the question of whether she could really trust him. As he'd admitted, he might be under control of Concordance, or at least monitored by them, without even knowing. She could scan him, sift through the folds and membranes of his tissues for some sign of tampering, but she knew she wouldn't find anything. He'd given her all her enhanced abilities, built the artificial half of her body, meaning she might be compromised too. She could only trust her natural side: her human senses, her intellect, her intuition. And what was that saying? That she wanted to trust him, sure, but that she didn't do so yet, not completely.
She'd watch him, and she'd watch herself as well. Unexpected or puzzling behaviour from either of them might mean something odd was going on.
Her augmentations recorded everything she saw and felt, capturing input from her biological and artificial senses with complete fidelity, and she spent a lot of time replaying events on the ice. Maybe it was an unhealthy thing to do, but she did it anyway. She lingered over her father, studying him, watching the way he cowered and looked constantly to the Void Walker to see if he had done wrong. She wished she'd known who and what he really was when she was growing up, wished they could have sat down together and talked about his secrets. She wondered how much of the truth her mother had known.
She studied the Walker, too, imagining herself taking her revenge on him, the two of them facing each other without an energy wall to protect him. It could never be – the nuke blasts had consumed him – but those who had given him his orders were still out there. They would pay for what they had done.
The Refuge had a large store of telemetry harvested from across the galaxy, thanks to Ondo's nanosensors monitoring worlds where Concordance was known to be active. She also scanned those archives looking for some other glimpse of the Walker they'd encountered, seeking some explanation of why he'd done what he'd done, who had directed him. She knew it was futile, that he was simply a tool of Concordance, but she did it anyway.
She soon found a match to his facial features: images from four years previously, a time when she was living her peaceful life on Maes Far, largely oblivious to wider events. The Walker had been on a planet called Ossian – Oscend IV – where there'd been an attempted overthrow of the Concordance-backed Empress Gersell.
The planet had erupted into open revolt, with coordinated attacks on government buildings in all major conurbations. There was clearly a significant amount of coordination among disparate opposition groups. Concordance scrambled to react but looked rattled, local troops under Cathedral ship control unable to keep a lid on events. Perhaps Concordance hadn't been paying close enough attention to events on the ground. With the revolt in full swing, they sent in a phalanx of Void Walkers to suppress the uprising. They arrived in ground-attack ships that the locals' weaponry was powerless to damage. The ships swept backwards and forwards above crowds of demonstrators and rioters, unleashing wide blasts of beam-weapon death.
She watched a scene involving the Walker from the ice. Smoke drifted across a wide square flanked by tall, honey-coloured walls. Three of the gunships hovered over the scene, brute and menacing, their weaponry trained on the ground. Below, in the square, a portion of the local populace had been rounded up. The adults, maybe a hundred of them, had been separated from their children, many of whom were too young to understand what was happening. Sobbing and wailing, they tried to reach their parents but were pushed back each time by the local troops under command of the Walkers.
The one who had killed her father was apparently in charge. Ondo's nanosensors had captured his address to the crowd. She heard one of the other Walkers refer to him by his name.
Kane.
“The House of Gerl has been restored to its rightful position. All across the planet, rebels and those who harboured them are paying the price for what has been done. You turned your faces from the light of Concordance and by doing so threatened everyone and everything. Now you, too, must be punished.”
Weaponry on the landers twitched and swivelled, picking out targets. Couples among the adults clutched each other, as if the flesh and bone of arms could shield the one they loved from what was to come. But then, at a nod from Kane, the guns rotated. To cries of anguish, they unleashed white-hot death upon the gaggle of children. Smoke and dust filled the air, lit up by the red blooms of blaster impact. Several adults, screaming, raced into the conflagration, only to be picked off by the hovering machines before they could get near. Others had to be restrained, forcibly held back from running to save their children.
The blaster fire lanced down for twenty or thirty seconds, blinding impact after blinding impact, the destruction far greater than was needed. On and on it went.
When it was done, and the worst of the smoke had cleared. Kane strode to stand in front of the assembled citizens. Behind him, the pit carved out by the blasters was empty, everything and everyone that had been standing there vaporised, the bodies reduced to smoke to drift in the planet's atmosphere. Some of the adults were on their knees, some screaming uncontrollably. Others were staring in wide-eyed disbelief at what had taken place.
Kane's voice was strangely quiet after the screaming and concussions. “This horror will live on in your minds for the rest of your days. Those of you that don't kill yourselves in your grief will live withered, broken lives, the shock of it always with you. This is as it should be. Remember, on each morning when you awake and the memories hit you again, that you are to blame. You killed your own children by your actions. You sacrificed them. They needed you and you did this to them.”
The images froze for a moment, lingering on shocked and horrified faces, then ended. Selene sat in silence for a moment, eyes closed against the horrors. No doubt Concordance had broadcast those images to the galaxy, used them to set an example just as they would have done Maes Far. She wondered if her parents had seen them, had shielded her from them.
Seized by fury, by a desperate need to do something, she strode in search of Ondo again. She didn't need to ask the Refuge his whereabouts: he would be in the laboratory. He sat with his head buried in his hands when she entered. When he looked up, surprised by her sudden appearance, his hair was wild and his eyes were red. She guessed he hadn't slept much. He had some object, presumably one of the artefacts from the ice, in a molecular scanner beside him.
“Research not going well?” she asked.
“No. These artefacts are puzzling.”
“I found the Walker; his name was Kane.”
“You needed to know who he was? I'm afraid there are plenty like him.”
“Let me show you what he did on Ossian four years ago.” She transmitted what she'd learned directly to him, brain-to-brain. She sensed Ondo's revulsion as he let the i
mages play out in his mind.
When he was done, he removed his multiglasses and polished them, something he did when searching for the right words to say. “I believe I've heard mention of him before, a few references picked up here and there. He's from Migdala, a planet in the central mass. He was a ganglord, acquiring wealth through extortion and violence until Concordance came looking for him. He's more vicious than the average Walker, takes pleasure in killing a thousand when ten might make his point. My guess is, he suffered from a complex of psychoses and sociopathies even before Concordance did their work on him. I imagine, also, he's one of Godel's coterie. He's her style.”
“You think Godel was behind Maes Far?”
“It's a distinct possibility. Of course, I have no direct feed of information from the God Star – ¬I obviously don't even know where it is – but if I read between the lines correctly, she's ambitious, will stop at nothing to seize power. I've thought for a time she might be building up her own faction of Walkers, her own loyal band of fanatics.”
“You think she'll try to depose Carious?”
Ondo waved his head from side to side as if it was a possibility. “She may be biding her time, waiting for the right moment. I think the lure of being the ultimate power in the galaxy would make some people do just about anything.”
“Then, she's the one I need to kill.”
“If you did there would be another to take her place. And another.”
“You haven't been able to find out anything useful from the flecks we retrieved from the ice?”
“Very little. From the atomic arrangements within them, I'm convinced two of them hold encrypted data structures, but I simply don't have the hardware to extract any of it. The encoding is like nothing I've seen before. I've thrown the full power of the Refuge's Mind at the problem and drawn a blank.”
“You're convinced they're from the Concordance side?”
“I am. Given time, I can generally crack any Magellanic encryption algorithm and encoding method, but these are completely beyond me.”
Which was what he might say if his perceptions had been tampered with by Concordance. Either way, there had to be a chance that there was genuinely useful data embedded on the fragments.
“We need to read them.”
“We do, but it's the glass bead that intrigues me the most; its size suggests a considerable store of data. There isn't the slightest mark of damage upon it, despite it surviving a cataclysmic starship explosion, and then burning through Maes Far's atmosphere and spending several hundred years locked in ice. It's tough. If I could access what's held on that, it might open up all sorts of secrets. Of course, it's also possible that I'm completely wrong, and the object is something else entirely.”
“You don't have the necessary Concordance machinery?”
“I have very little of their technology, and believe me, I've searched. I told you how rare a Concordance crash site is. Their ships were simply too powerful.”
“So, we go to them, go on the attack, find the device we need from one of their ships.”
“It would be suicide.”
“We take a Cathedral ship by surprise, some distant backwater planet, and hit it hard.”
“It wouldn't work. We would only be getting ourselves killed. You know that's true.”
He was right, of course. She had to swallow her frustration. “There has to be a way.”
He didn't reply and she caught the hesitant look on his lined face.
“What is it?” she said. “What are you thinking?”
“It's very, very unlikely to succeed.”
“Tell me.”
“There's a place where we might – might – find the technology we need.”
“What place? Where is it?”
“I have only a set of galactic coordinates and a rumour of a collection of technological and cultural artefacts from across the galaxy.”
“Where did you hear this rumour?”
“Aefrid Sen gave me the information before she died, told me it might be useful one day.”
“You've never been?”
“Never, and nor had Aefrid, but the person who recruited her, gave her the Radiant Dragon, did claim to have made the attempt.”
“What did they find?”
“Nothing. A ruin but little else. Details are hazy, the person died soon after. Aefrid decided the story was nothing more than a myth and never risked it, and I've done the same. It's been tempting at times, but my own technological resources have always been sufficient for my needs, and the possibility of a trap is obvious. But I've never had an object like this before.”
“If you know the coordinates, Concordance will too.”
Ondo nodded his head in assent. “They may also believe it's an area of space they can't visit. A region that, in fact, no one can visit.”
That made no sense. “There is nowhere Concordance can't go.”
Ondo sent an image of the galaxy to her brain. Nine patches of space flashed red, each expansive enough to span hundreds or even thousands of star systems.
“They don't go there.”
“What are they?”
“They're areas any stellar cartographer would know to avoid. They're called Dead Space or in some records Shadow Space or Grey Space. Zones too dangerous to enter.”
“Too dangerous why?”
“I don't know. I was told no one who drops into one from metaspace ever returns.”
“Send a probe into one and see what it finds.”
“I was told not even to try, that I'd be risking myself if I did.”
“How could you be in danger sitting out here?”
“Again, I don't know, but I was warned of the peril very clearly. I had to swear I wouldn't try upon my life and upon that of everyone I've ever loved, in point of fact.”
“By Aefrid Sen.”
“Yes.”
“You believed her?”
“I believe she believed what she was saying, and she was no fool.”
“What did she think was in these mysterious zones?”
“She speculated they are areas where the normal law of physics have broken down, where material space is dangerously unstable. She thought they've been there for a long, long time, possibly dating back to the agglomeration of mass into our galaxy thirteen billion years ago.”
“The laws of physics can't break down; that just means we haven't worked out what the laws are.”
“A fair point. But if the separation between metaspace and normal space has weakened, say, then travelling there could be dangerous. Matter could get ripped apart, translated out of and into Euclidean space until it's reduced to its constituent atoms and energy waves. That was what Aefrid believed would happen.”
“I still don't get how sending in nanosensors could be any threat to us. We're a thousand light years away from the nearest patch of this Dead Space.”
“Aefrid speculated some cataclysmic rift in reality could follow the path of a probe, rip a trail back through metaspace to its origin point. She thought there was a significant chance of triggering a cascading collapse of normal space.”
“I can think of no physics that would allow that to happen.”
“Neither can I, but do you want to take the risk of finding out? There may be forces or subatomic particle fields in play that we simply don't understand. The universe is large and, in my experience, constantly surprising. I do know, from the nav maps I've recovered, that all ships on the Magellanic side of the war had the areas of Dead Space clearly marked out.”
“Which doesn't prove a damn thing.”
“No.”
“And despite all her warnings, you're saying Aefrid Sen told you one of these regions could be visited?”
Ondo nodded. In Selene's mind, one of the red zones, a misshapen bubble on the opposite side of the galactic wheel, flashed from red to black and back.
“Aefrid showed me a course leading into the middle of this zone. She said it was a highly dangerous road to f
ollow, fatal if the slightest mistake is made in the sequence of jumps. The road is effectively a path through metaspace: a narrow, winding, complex path leading to a small island of safety in the heart of the zone.”
“It sounds like the sort of shit Concordance would invent and then force down the throats of everyone in the galaxy.”
“It does, I agree. But I have placed nanosensors on repeat-jump patterns throughout metaspace, monitoring for Concordance ships translating into one of the dead zones, and I've never seen a single one of them attempt it. Not a Cathedral ship, nor a Void Walker attack craft, nothing. It seems they fear the regions, too.”
“It seems incredible that Aefrid and you, and now I, know about this secret, but Concordance doesn't.”
“True but, I don't know, sometimes I wonder.”
“Wonder what?”
He smiled, as if amused at his own stupidity. “It's nothing.”
“Tell me.”
“It's just, sometimes I wonder if someone is helping us. An unknown figure working behind the scenes to keep us out of Concordance's clutches. Maybe they've been making sure our enemies don't get to learn the truth of what's inside this dead zone.”
His mystical trail again. “Now you sound as crazy as they are. If someone that powerful is on our side, they could do a hell of a lot more to be useful. It's wishful thinking; you're seeing patterns where there are none. You of all people must get that.”
“Perhaps you're right.”
She considered. She needed to do something, take the fight to them in some way, and she couldn't see any other way.
“I'll go to this zone, follow the metaspace trail.”
