by Simon Kewin
Ondo didn't have to know anything about it. First, she needed to check with the Dragon.
“How much of what I do does Ondo get to hear about?”
“As much or as little as you wish. You are in command.”
“What I'm about to do, it's best he doesn't hear of it.”
“I understand. What are your orders?”
It was a small thing. She'd been thinking about all the people down there, billions and billions of them, living out their little lives. “I want to send a signal to the planet. Nothing overt, nothing that gives anything away. But a clue. A series of flashes in the visible spectrum that follows a sequence any civilisation will recognize. Let's use numbers where each is the sum of the previous two, up to, say, thirteen. Then we'll repeat the whole thing once.”
She thought the Dragon would refuse, but instead it said, “How bright?”
“Enough to be visible to the naked eye should anyone happening to be looking at our precise point in the sky but dim enough to not attract wider attention.”
“Can I ask the purpose?”
“An acknowledgement. A connection. I don't know. Planets like this have lost so much too, in their own way.”
When it was done, they resumed their stuttering dance around the periphery of the system to pick up nanosensor telemetry.
It took her a week to detect the anomaly, and, in the end, she nearly missed it. It was the briefest dimming of light of the background stars, but it was no simple off/on. It was a complex pattern, as if some intervening object were tumbling through space. It was probably nothing: a ghostly object haunting the Oort cloud, the extended region of lumpy rock and ice on the outer edges of the system. Most likely, she'd witnessed the chance event of multiple objects eclipsing a star. Still, with nothing else to try, and bored with monitoring the broadcast output of the closed-off world, she went to investigate.
It rapidly became clear as she homed in on the coordinates she'd calculated that it was no mere lump of primordial rock. The shattered skeleton of a starship tumbled through the void, two-thirds of its structure sheared away, only the nose section and part of the lateral fuselage surviving. Some devastating force had burst it open, spilling its crew into the vacuum. It was certainly no Concordance ship; there was no weirdly twisting form to the ship, just the clean lines of an Alliance vessel. It was a Magellanic craft: a ship from the losing side of the Omnian War. There were multiple smaller fragments, too, scattered over a sphere perhaps one light-minute across. The conclusion was clear: this had, indeed, been the site of a battle. Why here? On the outer edges of this low-tech system? Impossible to know for sure: perhaps an ambush had been set by the Alliance side as Concordance came to investigate the system, completing their census of inhabited worlds.
She approached warily, keeping the Dragon's sensors on full-spectrum scan, streaming the telemetry into her own brain. Inevitably, there was a chance this was another lure left by Concordance. At least there were no significant masses nearby to block an emergency jump into metaspace: the local sun was a distant spark of light. Ondo's preferred protocol was to watch and listen for a day when approaching an unknown object. In the end, she lasted an hour before instructing the Dragon to move in under reaction drive.
The hulk seemed to grow as she neared it, swelling to dwarf the Radiant Dragon. A cargo vessel? A warship? Perhaps it had been both: some interstellar craft repurposed when Concordance commenced their attacks upon galactic culture. From the lines of its nose, she thought she'd seen something similar in the brief video Ondo had shown her: the whale-like ship breaking orbit from the planet he claimed was Coronade. Had it been this vessel, jumping off to meets its end in a battle on the edges of this backwater system? She would never know.
She scanned the wreck and picked up nothing: the ship was dark, no energy patterns running through it. Its drive sections were gone; it would have had no power for three hundred years. It was dead metal and carbon, little different to the tenuous cloud of rocks and snowballs it drifted among. There were a few decks and bulkheads left, gaping open like mouths of jagged teeth, so it was conceivable some localized system might retain a memory chip or fleck she could salvage.
She nuzzled the Dragon as close to the hulk as she dared, then shrugged on her EVA suit to investigate in person. One of the suit's monitor circuits refused to synch with her flecks the first time, suggesting a malfunction, but the second time it locked on. She would know if any enemy ships appeared.
Her left eye and her suit had lights, but it could be awkward to keep them pointing in the right direction while she worked. “Shine a light onto the wreck,” she said to the ship. “Manoeuvre around it so I'm not working in the dark.”
“Understood.”
“Same orders as usual: if you're attacked and there's no time for me to get back, run for metaspace. I'll stay hidden for you to pick me up later.”
“You have oxygen for four hours, perhaps double that if you drop into artificial torpor. I might not be able to return in that time if Concordance come.”
“Just do what you have to do. You know the score: it's better that you get back to Ondo with something than us both getting killed.”
“Understood.”
She paused at the outer airlock door, scanning local space once again for possible threats. All she got from the void was white noise. She pushed herself off towards the hulk, an observation port in its hull like a single round eye, watching her warily as she neared. Her control of the suit's thrusters was good, now: she could manoeuvre where she needed to go without thinking about it. She passed across the smooth voidhull of the ship and pulled herself through a ragged rip to reach what had once been the ship's interior. She began to study the bulkheads using her suit's faint directional light. After thirty seconds, the Dragon manoeuvred around to bathe her in its illumination, and she saw what had been hovering near her in the darkness while she worked.
The head of a dead crew-member lolled above her, little more than a mass of ice-crystals, its mouth open wide in a scream that would last until the end of the universe. This far from any heat, a body exposed to the void might well not decay, sterilized of its microbes by the vacuum and extreme temperature. She panned around and picked out five of them, hanging by their seat harnesses like weird fruit from some alien tree. They'd been operating the craft, controlling its systems, when it was blasted into fragments. Most likely it would have been a quick end, although they must also have known, as the Concordance ships bore down on them, that they were going to be destroyed. She wondered who they were, what worlds they were from, what sights their eyes had witnessed.
Trying her best to ignore them, she spent the next five hours pressing probes and sensors into whatever fragmentary remains of ship's mechanism she could find: shattered comms arrays and the entrails of nav control systems. It was all dead. She'd hoped there might be some residual ghost image of a control message frozen within the ducts of the fuselage, but there was nothing.
More than once, she had to close her eyes to let the nausea that flooded through her subside. It wasn't just the corpses, although they weren't helping: it was also the disorientation of moving through three-dimensional space. Born and raised on a planet, she was still learning to handle not having gravity to hold her in place. She was still fundamentally a two-dimensional being. Her current location didn't help much, either. She turned to consider the gulfs of space opening out in front of her. The Dragon was temporarily distant, arching around to give her light. For a few seconds, it was only her and the endless void, the staring stars impossibly distant.
Ondo had warned her about the psychological effects of prolonged time spent within the vacuum, the sense of panic or despair that could overwhelm you. Void psychosis, he'd called it. She'd shrugged off his warnings, assuring him she'd be fine, but now she at least understood what he meant. To be faced with those endless gulfs of nothingness: it would take its toll after a while.
She clung to the scrap of fuselage with her left gau
ntlet, its solidity reassuring. She longed in that moment for Myrced, for her touch, the anchoring strength of her embrace. Had she, Selene, been right to leave Migdala? In truth, she still wasn't sure. It probably wasn't healthy to let her burning need for revenge consume her life – but she couldn't deny that need was there within her. She doubted that there would ever be an afterwards, a happy ending, but the possibility of one, at least, was appealing. And that was surely a sign that she wasn't completely consumed by her decision to rid the galaxy of Concordance.
Shaking her head in her suit as if to shake these thoughts free, she resumed her search of the ruin, although she was rapidly coming to the conclusion that there was nothing much of interest to be found. It was one more blind alley, and they were no nearer finding the Omn homeworld.
She was about to give up, return to the Dragon, when the thought occurred to her. She'd scoured the skeleton of the broken starship, picked through its shattered fragments, but there was one place she hadn't looked. Quite possibly, she'd been putting off attempting it in the hope of finding something else. Now, there was no alternative.
In total, there were seventeen bodies within the wreck. Once, there would have been many more, but only those firmly strapped to this section of the ship had remained. The rest were scattered to the void along with the rest of the ship – or immolated by the explosions that had ripped through the vessel. The Dragon had been scanning local space constantly while she worked but had identified no other fragments of interest. There was only one thing for it.
She set about probing the craniums of the dead crew members. Advanced brain flecks were rare in the modern world, another technology suppressed by Concordance, but from what Ondo had said they were once common: neural augmentations and data storage devices enhancing natural biology. There had to be a chance some of these frozen and lifeless brains had flecks embedded within them.
She found three: all were inert, but all were clearly artificial devices interfacing with their hosts' cerebella. The problem was how to extract them. Her own flecks were entwined around her biological structures, making them almost impossible to disentangle. Removing these flecks would be a similarly delicate procedure – one that could easily destroy any data held upon them.
She could think of only one approach to take, and her air supply was running low. Her suit was equipped with the cutting tools she would need. They were there for carrying out maintenance tasks on the ship, but she could turn them to another purpose.
She found herself apologizing to each dead person as she set about slicing their heads from their torsos. At least the fact that they were frozen rigid made the process easier. When she had her harvest of three heads, holding each by the severed ends of their spinal cords, she flew the short hop back to the Dragon. Before she entered the airlock, she activated the external stasis compartment and placed the heads inside. They could be dissected under controlled conditions back at the Refuge.
When she was done, her suit removed, she collapsed onto a couch while the Dragon began its run-up to metaspace translation.
8. Things Written in the Stars
The sight of the stars from her bedroom window were an unexpected source of wonder for Lilith Jones.
They'd always been there, of course, but the telescope she'd been bought for her thirteenth birthday had opened up new worlds: landscapes and possibilities that had drifted overhead her entire life without her knowing. The moon had been her first fascination, its craters and seas starkly clear as they drifted past her eyepiece, the edges of the moon wavering and burning with the turbulence of the Earth's intervening atmosphere. The dead world looked alive to her: she imagined cities and civilisations up there, people of wisdom far-removed from those she spent her days among on the Earth.
She wasn't supposed to use the telescope during the week, on school nights, but if the sky was clear she couldn't stop herself. Her friends might be secretly conversing on their phones, but for Lilith the worlds revealed by her telescope were more interesting. Why had no one told her until now what was out there? She didn't admit to anyone what it was that was consuming her. Life held many intriguing possibilities, some only dimly perceived, but already, too, she had a sense that it was finite, fundamentally limited to the size of the world. And that, she began to see, was the tiniest fraction of all that there was. There were only so many places she could go before she'd seen it all.
Beyond the moon there were the planets, little more than fuzzy smudges with her telescope, but she saw the crescent of Venus hanging above the sunset like the moon in miniature. She saw the four tiny specks of light around Jupiter that the books said were its largest moons, and she saw the elongated oval of Saturn, all that her small telescope could make of the gas giant and its halo of rings.
The books led her on, farther and farther out. Beyond the planets were the stars, but there was unexpected variety there, too. She pored for hours over the glorious beauty of the pictures of nebulae, her fingers caressing their jewel colours. Through her telescope she could only see one or two of them, blurry patches of grey, but that was enough: they were out there. Clusters too: the sparkling Pleiades, in which she counted many more than seven stars, seemed always to be visible in the corner of her eye. There were binary stars and triple stars, and even stars that were, so the books said, actually whole galaxies, the light of billions of suns combined.
The scale of it took her breath away, and she would scan the heavens until the cold stopped her fingers working and sleep finally pulled her down into dreams of travelling among those endless worlds.
So it was, one frosty night, that she saw a star that happened to be in her eyepiece flashing in puzzling ways. She was used to their random twinkling: the effect, she'd read, of motes of dust in the Earth's atmosphere, light that had travelled unhindered across the universe for countless years being briefly blotted out by the tiniest fragment of dirt a little way above her head. But this was different. A clear flash, like the lights of an aeroplane or a satellite, except not moving. Something stationary up there was sending her a message.
She counted to herself the pauses between the flashes. At first, they appeared random, the intervals increasing, but then they repeated, following precisely the same pattern. Then they stopped. Intrigued, she scribbled the numbers down before she forgot them. Perhaps she could make sense of them, work out the puzzle being given to her. She watched for ten minutes more, twenty, but saw nothing else unusual.
In the morning, slightly to her surprise, the numbers were still there in her notebook. She hadn't dreamt them. She stared at them for long hours, trying to understand what they might mean.
Part 3 - Galactic
1. Artificial Constellations
“Coronade, Ondo? That again?”
Ondo considered her through his multiglasses, their intelligent lenses making his eyes bulge as they reshaped themselves from microscope mode. Refracted light from one of his laboratory's trickling waterfalls sparkled in their glass.
“I told you it wasn't a myth, however much Concordance might claim it was,” he said. “It existed and now we know how to get to it.”
They'd spent days picking over the fragmentary memories contained within the brain flecks of the dead crew-members of the unknown Alliance ship. Selene had worked until her own brain was exhausted, correlating scraps of data streaming through her augmentations, looking for patterns, picking out potential traces of useful information. The datastores they'd recovered had been badly degraded by three centuries of exposure to the high-energy protons and ionizing radiation of the background cosmic rays. Inevitably, there'd been some damage during the flecks' retrieval, too, careful as they were with the grim surgery. The neural augmentations were designed to be impossible to extract data from, given that their contents were intrinsically intimate.
“Even if we can get data off them, how do we decrypt it?” she'd asked.
“I have some experience with Omnian War-era flecks; it's those designs which I adapted to create the
devices we both carry in our heads. Ours are more secure, if I may say so. My impression is that the golden age galactic culture had a strong social taboo about intruding on the artificially-stored memories of others and that their approach to security was rather less paranoid as a result.”
She snorted at that. “I don't believe it. You're claiming they were universally benign and considerate? Billions of individuals across countless worlds?”
“Of course not. Their devices had security, strong protection, but they were designed to be easier to open up, extend to others. Openness was their default. This was a culture based on trust and mutuality, and their technology reflected that. We, in our age, have no such luxury. The sudden rise of Concordance must have been an existential shock to them. I believe they'd lived in harmony for hundreds, perhaps thousands, of years.”
She couldn't resist asking. “You can hack their brain flecks, but you can't hack mine even though you designed them?”
He was always patient, always ready to reassure her. “Our flecks are locked-down by default. If I could dissect your brain, I could eventually recover the encryption keys your augmentations have generated, it's true, but doing so would trigger self-destruct signals to fry the data stored upon them. Also, my encryption is time-limited: the entire artificial store re-encrypts itself using a freshly-generated key every time you sleep, meaning that even if I could disable the self-destruct, I'd have to work impossibly fast. You've seen the schematics, Selene, you know this is true. It's one reason I entangle the artificial and natural neurons so closely. If Concordance catch either of us, I want to be extremely sure that they can't recover the location of the Refuge.”
The data they'd extracted was, for the most part, disappointingly mundane. Mostly it was glimpses of lost lives: grinning family faces; snatches of mountainous scenery; the throng of colourful crowds; the beauty of planet after planet seen from orbit. All of it was without context or explanation. Whoever these people were, however they'd lived their lives, this was all that was left of them: fragments of lives long-over, locations she couldn't identify. What struck Selene more than anything was how normal the images were. These were people like her, living in different times. Their lives, like hers, had been turned upside-down, blasted unexpectedly into fragments by the intrusion of galactic events.
