by Simon Kewin
She picked a gap in the sphere of attacking ships. It was contracting all the time as the vessels converged, and once they saw what she was doing they'd have time to react, attempt to plug the gap with high-g missiles, then beam-weapon fire as she flew nearer. She prepped her own arsenal of nukes, attached to high-g missiles of her own. They would give her the chance she needed to punch through the net. Or, if her plan failed, she might be able to take some of them with her.
She wondered if Kane was among the attackers. There were five Void Walker ships in the shrinking constellation around her, each far more manoeuvrable than the Cathedral battleships, but she had no way of knowing who was piloting each. She'd target any that came near, partly to protect herself, but especially in case Kane was piloting one of them.
She was one minute from Coronade perigee. Time to act. She sent instructions to the Dragon, altering its course subtly, but enough to give it the escape vector she'd selected.
Unexpectedly, the ship resisted. She sensed walls being thrown up against her, the ship's Mind severing her connection even as she attempted to lock onto it.
She was suddenly running out of time. Furiously, she burrowed deeper with her mind, diving into the inner core of the Dragon only to find, as before, that the core was itself the outer shell for another, deeper layer. She forced her way into the next kernel, and the next. She needed executive control immediately, and she clearly couldn't rely on the damaged ship to make the correct manoeuvres.
Her perceptions of exterior space faded as the galaxies inside the Radiant Dragon's core opened up around her. It appeared to her that she arrowed through a vision of negative space: instead of stars in a field of darkness, all was blinding light save for the points of black that represented nodes in the ship's mind. No way of knowing if that was an accurate representation, or simply her visualisation of what she was perceiving. Maybe the question didn't even make sense.
She found the next core: a roiling sphere of purple light, lines of light licking off it to spark connections with the black specks. Once again, she flung herself in, and once again she found herself inside another, inner galaxy, a deeper-still layer of the Dragon's mind.
A small part of her maintained its connection to external reality. She was thirty seconds from the planet. Three more Concordance craft had materialised, although the gap she'd selected was still available to her. Perhaps it was too obvious: an opening deliberately left, another trap sprung. She thrust the troubling thought away. No time to consider it now. More telemetry was streaming up from the planet, transmitted from her high-atmosphere relays. There was lots of data there. No time now to consider that, either.
The ship bucked suddenly, diverging from its prescribed path, for no reason that she could see. Was it trying to veer her onto a planetary collision course? She had to seize control, force it onto the vector she needed. Another computational core burned before her, fizzing with plasma like an unstable star on the point of collapse. With a wordless cry, she flung herself into it, batting away the defences the ship threw up against her. Then there was a wall in front of her: a block that, to her mind's eye, stretched away in all directions, unblemished and impenetrable.
She battered against it again, and again, to no avail. But she noticed that, in the brief moment after each assault, the wall ghosted into transparency. Whatever the protection was, it took a nanosecond for it to recover from each attempt to destroy it. It was an opening. She redoubled her efforts, attacking the barrier with her mind and then attacking it again even as it recoiled. On one level it was an intellectual battle, algorithm grappling algorithm, but in the metaphorical space that she perceived, she was flinging herself physically at a wall, an act of brute strength.
With a cry of effort, she threw everything she had at the barrier, pounding at it in multiple locations, the impacts coordinated in a nanosecond drumbeat. The wall flickered and she hit it again mid-recovery, then again and again, not giving it time to recycle. Under the barrage of impacts the wall wavered, flickered, then finally winked out, and she was through.
Instead of another expanse of virtual space, she found herself within a room, walls and floor and ceiling seemingly made of light. Their surfaces were hard to perceive, but she knew, somehow, that its size was limited in scope. This, finally, was the inner sanctum – or the vision of it that her mind conjured.
She turned around and saw the standing figure.
Its features were indistinct, blurred by the halo of blinding light around it. It was shaped something like her – tall, bipedal – but its head appeared unusually elongated, as if its evolving cranium had erupted outwards to contain its expanding brain. Its edges wavered as if she were perceiving the figure through the turbulent air of a heatwave.
“You are the Radiant Dragon?” she said. “Stop fighting me, I need control now, or we're both dead.”
The voice that replied echoed from great distances, slow and thoughtful. Something in its tone suggested something else, too: confusion, she thought.
“The Radiant Dragon. That is one name, although I have had others.”
“Okay, fine. Listen, you're glitching, and you need to relinquish executive control. You need to stop fighting me. You can see the fleet of attacking ships closing in on us, right?”
“The walls are strong,” the entity replied. Its response was maddeningly slow, ponderous, although she knew in a sense that didn't matter. The conversation was not taking place in normal time but to the nanosecond beat of the virtual universe. It was entirely likely she couldn't even be there, have this conversation, without the artificial computational functions integrated into her brain.
“We need to leave,” she said. There's an escape vector, but the gap is closing. I have high-g nukes that will punch the hole wider, and then we can blast through, translate into metaspace. You see the manoeuvres we have to make, right?”
The warping, indistinct figure moved nearer, although she couldn't see it walking. “Your vector is flawed. We will crash into Dyrn, the third biggest of Coronade's moons. I have over-ruled you, as your intention is clearly suicidal.”
Coronade. The name was given without her prompting it. Still, his words made no sense; the core was more damaged than she'd thought. “There is only one moon around this planet, and, otherwise, there's no orbiting chunk of rock larger than my head. See for yourself.”
“I know this world,” the figure intoned. “The taste of it, the shadows it casts in the metaspace realm. Coronade has multiple satellites.”
“Maybe it did once, but not now. Or maybe you have the wrong world. Use your senses, see.”
“I have been … locked away,” the entity said, as if by way of explanation.
The crude hack she and Ondo had found deep in the ship's systems. She said, “I don't know why someone did this to you, or whether you withdrew partly to protect your sanity, but it's time to emerge. Look at the situation we face. The vector I've plotted is our only chance to escape, and even its odds aren't that good.”
There was a pause, then a moment when it seemed to Selene that she sensed an opening up, the unfurling of a flower or the emergence of new life from its protective shell, maybe. She felt the breath of new air upon her face. This core had been locked away, deep in its sanctum sanctorum within the ship's Mind, and now it was pupating, emerging. Perceiving the galaxy as it was rather than how it should be.
“Coronade,” said the core after a moment. “It is, and yet it isn't.”
“Things change,” said Selene. “You see how the attacking ships manoeuvre? You have to let me fly.”
“The ships outnumber us by too much,” the core intoned. “They will destroy us.”
“No; there's a way.”
“There are gateways upon Coronade. The Gamma Spinwards Tunnel. We can go that way.”
“Gateways? What do you mean?”
“Coronade is a terminus on the nexus.”
The entity was confused, still struggling to come to terms with the reality it had s
hut itself off from. “Maybe it was once, but not anymore,” said Selene. “The planet's dead. And soon we will be, too, if we don't act. Just damn-well look.”
An image of the world appeared in the space between them, the sort of representation she and Ondo had used on the cartography deck. It was a world something like the original Coronade she'd seen in Ondo's first images: the same landmasses, the same violet oceans. Ships docking and undocking from permanent orbital stations. Then the images glitched, wavered, and the planet as it now was replaced it: the impenetrable muddy brown of its lifeless atmosphere.
She was about to say something, force the confused Mind to see what was before it, but something on the planet stopped her. A gap in the heavy atmosphere was opening up, a circle widening like the eye of a developing storm. It dilated until she could see a clear tunnel, walls vertical, leading down to the planet's surface. There was an island there, grey seas surrounding a circular speck of land. The broken remains of bridges radiated outwards, star-like, appearing to head away to unknown continents. Buildings or structures of some unknown sort stood upon the island, the circumference of which glowed with a blue light.
“What is this?” she said. “What are you showing me?”
“It calls to me,” said the ship. “The Gamma Spinwards Tunnel.”
“You're saying we can use this? Get away down there? That makes no sense.”
“We can go that way, through the metaspace tunnels.”
She tried to understand what it was telling her. There could be no gateway on the surface of a planet. Even if there were, the flaw was obvious: their speed was far too high to attempt such a manoeuvre. They'd closed in on the planet now; outside in the real universe they were nine seconds from closest approach. There was no way they could dump their velocity in time to attempt an atmospheric insertion. And she most definitely did not want to drive her ship at the surface of a dead planet because a broken Mind said it was a good idea.
She forced a part of her consciousness out of the virtual dimension to take in the realities of local space fully. Two, three seconds of real time ticked by, but she saw everything she needed to see. There was no hole in the planet's atmosphere; there was no escape route. The Dragon was showing her – what? – its dreams? Its memories? It didn't really matter. They still had only one shot at escaping.
She let herself be pulled back to the confrontation with the embodiment of the ship's core.
“This isn't real,” she said. “You know it. Give me control of the ship.”
The indistinct figure distorted, winding like the flames of a fire. Then, for the briefest moment, it snapped into absolute clarity, and she was looking into the face of a person. Sadness was clear in its wide eyes. Sadness and, she thought, confusion. What it was seeing did not make sense to it, and a part of it was afraid.
“Very well,” it said finally. “This is Coronade and this is also not Coronade. The galaxy turns and I have stayed still. Save us both, Selene Ada. Take us away from here.”
She thrust herself fully out of the core and back to the physical world, letting the telemetry flood into her mind. Six seconds. They were still pulling in sensor readings from the planet. It was patchy, but if they could stitch what they had together, fill in the gaps, they might be able to find something.
She focussed on the halo of Concordance craft, the looming presence of the dead world. They would brush the outer edges of its atmosphere, pick up the gravity assist. She ordered the slightest tweak to their trajectory, nudging the ship's course away from the planet by a thousandth of a degree. The ship responded perfectly. She had control.
Two seconds. One. Now. She acted, pulling the Radiant Dragon onto its new vector, curving away from the planetary plane in the opposite direction to their original trajectory. Down rather than up, as the planet-bound part of her mind still thought of it. There were Concordance ships there, closing in, but fewer of them, the net not so tight. That way lay her best chance.
A Void Walker vessel, screaming towards the planet on high-g acceleration, was the first to reach extreme weapon's range. She counted three, four more seconds then released the first nuke towards it. Like the Dragon, the simple velocity of the Walker craft would prevent it making significant vector adjustments. She laid down a ring of beam-weapon fire around it: her chances of striking the ship were small, but she hoped to restrict its manoeuvre options further, keep it in the path of her missile. The Walker ship returned fire, attempting to punch the nuke out of space with its own beam-weapons. The missile's tactical Mind responded by dodging and spiralling on its course, always aiming at the Void Walker but making its precise position at any one moment difficult to predict. The beam-weapon shots flashed nearer and nearer the nuke, but none hit, just as none of hers hit the Walker craft.
Armed only with beam-weapons, the Walker needed to get nearer to have any significant chance of hitting her. They would either pull out of their attack before the nuke posed any real threat, or they would persist and try and hit her. She guessed this one would persist; the sensible option would have been to attack in formation with the others, not take her on alone. Most likely, she was seeing the actions of an unthinking fanatic.
She guessed right: the Walker craft continued to accelerate directly at her, beam-weapons flickering. Now the pilot of the attack ship would play a delicate game: if they cut away too early, the accelerating nuke would easily adjust course to pursue them, and then, if the missile got behind them, they were doomed. They would never be able to outrun or dodge a pursuing missile except by jumping into metaspace – and they were all far too near the system's gravity wells to make that a possibility. The Walker's best chance lay in waiting until the nuke had achieved full speed and was close enough that its own manoeuvring ability was impaired, and then attempt to dodge away.
The ploy nearly worked. The nuke was only moments away when the Walker ship threw itself into an ugly, twisting dive, pulling as tight a loop as its high velocity allowed. Selene saw what was happening: the Walker was attempting to come up behind the missile, lock onto its trajectory to unleash forwards beam-weaponry of its own.
She didn't allow the Walker a chance for the plan to succeed. She sent detonation codes to the nuke, and a ball of blinding light blossomed ahead of her, blasting out high-energy radiation. If it struck the Walker ship, the energy would be dumped as heat and the ship would burn or explode. Failing that, there was a chance its control systems would fry in the shower of high-energy radiation. She manoeuvred herself onto a vector away from the worst of the blast.
She detected the Walker arrowing away as well. The attack ship had survived the explosive effects of absorbing all that energy. She nudged herself onto a parabolic approach vector, away from the nuke's radiation sphere. It also looked like she'd inflicted some damage at least: the Walker ship didn't counter-manoeuvre. The ship had power, and she had to assume the pilot was still alive, but it had lost navigation.
Her heart raced as she pulled to within beam-weapon range. She fired with a cry of joy escaping her lips. The Void Walker vessel burst into a sphere of raging light as her weapons struck it.
She'd killed one of them. She thought they'd got Kane at Maes Far, but there was no escaping this moment of destruction.
She forced herself to set her jubilation aside, take a mental step back, consider the wider battlefield. The planet was receding rapidly behind her. Her nanosensor cloud had reported no new Concordance ships on her escape vector. She was still twenty minutes from the 75% jump safety boundary, the very earliest she would dare the translation.
As she assessed the tactical situation, she picked up a narrow-beam comms stream directed at her by one of the Concordance ships, no encryption on it. The ship had a name: the Storm Gatherer. It was tempting to ignore the attempt to communicate, refuse to engage with the enemy, but maybe she'd learn something to her advantage, or at least deceive them in some way. She passed the beam through her bug-neutralizing routines in case Concordance were attempting to i
nfect the Dragon. The stream looked clean, they simply wanted to talk. She relayed the comms to the nearby wall rather than directly into her brain.
The face of a First Augur filled the wall. The metallic purple of her skin was unmistakable: Secundus Godel was here, too. A coincidence? Had the Augur simply been despatched to another trouble spot, or was she pursuing Selene? So far as she knew, Concordance didn't know she'd been on Migdala. She certainly hoped that was the case: if they'd discovered her incursion, it might mean Myrced's role had been uncovered, too. And that wasn't going to be good. Alarming visions of her lover being tortured, pulled to pieces, flashed through Selene's brain.
Focus. Selene blanked the tactical map she had on view around her to make sure Godel could learn nothing, then opened up a return comms beam so they could see and hear her. Artificial enhancements and all.
Godel looked amused at the sight of her. “I see Ondo has despatched his little whore to do his bidding rather than brave the journey himself.”
Selene kept her features neutral, considering carefully how to respond. The familiar rage boiled within her, but she forced it aside. She couldn't afford to give anything away. She was no longer controlled by her fury. The Augur's words were interesting: it appeared Godel hadn't known she was piloting the Dragon, which at least might mean the Augur wasn't pursuing her. Which in turn might mean Concordance didn't know about her presence on Migdala. So often the enemy appeared to know more than it had any right to, but they didn't know everything.
It occurred to her, also, that Godel's presence might mean the Walker she'd killed had been Kane. There had to be a chance. The possibility was delicious. While she considered, she studied the pictures from the Concordance ship, looking for some scrap of information that might prove useful, but Godel had been equally careful. All she could discern behind the Augur were blank, white walls.
Selene said, “Why have you sent so many ships to such a boring system? There's nothing here but a dead rock.”
Godel, also, kept her features blank – or maybe she simply didn't do facial expressions very well. The question was, would Godel admit her interest in the planet? Did she even know what it was, or had Primo Carious despatched her there as further punishment?
