Dead Star (The Triple Stars, Volume 1)

by Simon Kewin

  Godel replied. “You and Ondo and the others, you waste your little lives, scrabbling away in the dust of dead planets. Your father wasted his life on his obsessions, and now you are following him. Do you really think you'll dig up the truth, learn our secrets? Do you really think you matter that much?”

  The others. Who were they? Interesting. “This world: you're saying there are secrets here? And why have you sent an entire battlefleet if none of this matters?”

  “I'm not interested in your little games, Selene Ada. You should have died upon Maes Far like the rest of your heretic rabble, but you can die here just as well. It makes little difference to Omn; he will judge all of us in the end.”

  “Where does he stand on genocide, exactly? Is that a sin in his books, or does he approve of the slow, agonizing death of billions of people?” The words were out before she could stop herself.

  Godel shrugged, a calculated motion of purest indifference. “Your people were hastened to their judgement. Omn sees no sin in that. Shall I reveal to you his great design? Shall I give you the answers to all your questions, appease your obsessive need to understand what happened three hundred years ago, what it was the Magellanic Cloud encountered? You are going to die here, but I could give you the satisfaction of that enlightenment in your last few seconds. Would you know the truth of Omn, the words revealed to Primo Vulpis? Would a vision of what lies ahead for the galaxy give you a moment of relief in your final seconds?”

  Selene withdrew from the conversation temporarily to analyse the tactical situation. It was possible the conversation was intended to distract her, nothing more. The situation hadn't changed: the Dragon and the halo of Concordance ships were converging, and little would happen until they reached weapon range.

  “Sure,” Selene said. “Tell me if it would help to get it off your chest.”

  Godel laughed a little, joyless laugh, enjoying the power she held over Selene. “Omn opened his Great Eye and despaired at a galaxy tearing itself to pieces. He summoned Primo Vulpis to his side and revealed the divine plan. Soon, very soon, you will see that plan's ultimate unfolding. Did you really think you would be able to comprehend it, scratching around in the ruins of dead worlds, the broken stones of centuries ago? No, I think I'll let you die in ignorance, not understanding what you have been fighting all along, not seeing the truth.”

  “Suit yourself,” said Selene, and severed the link.

  The halo of Concordance ships was a crumpled sphere as the enemy ships converged upon her. They massively outgunned her, but vast distances and her velocity were going to prevent most of them reaching her. Her tactical predictions were that four Void Walker attack ships would reach beam-weapon range before she could jump, and that two of the heavier, slower Cathedral ships would also reach the outer edges of their missile range. None of the other vessels would get within striking distance. She ran through several thousand predicted engagement outcomes in her head. She survived in 82% of them. So long as she could fend off or outrun the swarming Walker ships, she should survive. Her plan was going to succeed.

  Ten minutes later, she fired all but two of her nukes, sending them ahead of her and angling away in all directions. They would give her options, construct a defensive shield. She kept their velocity relatively low for manoeuvrability, fanning them out to give her as wide a screen as she dared. The four remaining Void Walker ships were attacking more sensibly, moving in concert as they angled towards her from different directions, intent on arriving at the same moment to cut off her escape vectors. She controlled her nukes with her brain, thrusting with them as she might a sword-tip, flying at this attack ship, then that one, cutting off the Void Walkers' likely inbound trajectories.

  The Walkers piloting the craft knew she could detonate the nukes if they went too near. A game of thrust and parry followed as the Walkers feinted towards her, hoping to draw off the missiles, open up a gap. Each time, she pursued them enough to keep them honest without exposing herself too much. Each second bought was vital. The 75% translation boundary was only minutes away. She'd already crossed the 50%.

  Proximity alarms blared suddenly loud in her head, and she felt a shudder run through the fabric of the Radiant Dragon. Whether this had been Concordance's plan all along, whether they'd shepherded her to this point in space deliberately, or whether it was purest bad luck, she would never know. The disturbance in space ahead of her was unmistakable: a ship translating out of metaspace directly in her path, near enough so that she had no chance of avoiding it. A second ghost translation; the odds against it were huge. How it was able to materialise, so close to the star? Perhaps Concordance had thrown many ships in-system to meet her, and this was the only one that hadn't been sucked into the sun. Whatever the truth of it, it made little difference. The ship would materialise, and then it would have long, long seconds to spot her, target her, fire. Seconds she could see no way to fill, or avoid, or shorten.

  Except…

  She didn't waste time running the idea through her tactical assessment routines. If it wasn't going to work, she'd be dead anyway. The timing of it would be extremely delicate, nanosecond fine. It was a chance, nothing more than that. It was all she had. She needed velocity, though; despite the long burn of the Dragon's reaction drives, she wasn't going fast enough. She instructed the metaspace projectors to spin up. She'd take the 50% chance, that was the least of the risks. The projectors would draw a fraction of energy away from the drives, enough to reduce her acceleration a little, but she hoped to compensate for that. Compensate and more.

  She gave the jinking halo of high-g nukes their autonomy, instructing them to maintain their defensive shield around her. She needed all her attention on herself. She angled the Dragon so that the apex of its pyramid was pointing forwards, the square of its base directed aft, then programmed the coordinated sequence of events she'd need, not trusting herself to trigger them at precisely the required instants. There could be no room for error.

  The emerging Cathedral ship was a ghost ahead of her, the background stars visible through it, but it was becoming more solid with each millisecond. It might emerge into normal space already firing. If it had been her, that's what she'd have done.

  She triggered her sequence of instructions. Events ran rapidly, several things happening in rapid succession.

  The two remaining high-g nukes, the ones she'd kept in reserve, launched, firing directly behind the Dragon.

  The energy hull she'd been maintaining around herself throughout the battle reshaped itself, all forwards and lateral protection dissipating as she amped up the aft energy wall to beyond its maximum capacity. She was relying on Ondo – or whoever had constructed that part of the ship – to have built in enough tolerance for the power overload, as least for a few seconds.

  The Dragon's beam weapon arrays fired simultaneously, blasting their energy in lashing arcs around the ship, focusing especially on the materialising Cathedral ship and any other Concordance vessels that were vaguely near. Partly it was a defence, partly a smokescreen.

  The nukes in the defensive halo detonated mid-manoeuvre, giving her a brief moment of safety from the marauding Void Walkers, further adding to the confusion.

  The two nukes she'd fired behind her also detonated, their close-range gigaton explosions coordinated to the nanosecond. The high-energy wall of particles from the two blasts slammed into the aft square of the Dragon, hitting the overdriven energy hull, transferring their momentum. The Dragon lurched forwards, throwing itself at the materialising Cathedral ship, the burst of acceleration brutal. Selene, isolated from the worst of it, still felt like she was being smeared against her seat.

  The Concordance ship was suddenly huge in front of her, vast enough to swallow the Dragon whole. The background stars, the spangle of the Diamond Road, were still visible though the enemy craft, but they were fading as the twisting, organic lines of the craft took on solidity. The fact that she'd lowered her forwards energy hull to amp up the aft ones made little difference
: a Cathedral ship this close could atomize her ship before she even had chance to scream. Her only hope lay in speed: of reaching the vessel before it fully materialised. And, if she'd timed it right, of passing through it even as it did so.

  The aft energy hull finally overloaded, and the Dragon's voidhull began to superheat. More alarms wailed as the ship's systems predicted immediate destruction.

  She hit the leading edge of the Concordance craft's voidhull. She'd reached her first objective, placed herself inside its attack range, and now she had to hope that she hadn't left her own translation too long. There was a tiny amount of residual power in the lateral energy hulls. She shunted it to the Dragon's leading edge. That was where the immediate danger lay now.

  She passed through the emerging Cathedral ship in the blink of an eye, the ship's decks and chambers and spiralling corridors and walkways briefly visible. She'd been faced with two options in her calculations: attempt a ghost translation like that at Maes Far, or trigger something altogether more dangerous, but also potentially much more destructive. She'd gone for the latter. She'd destroyed one of the small, fast Void Walker attack ships, and that had felt good, but a Cathedral ship was something else.

  In the end it came down to a delay of a mere three nanoseconds to the metaspace translation. The Dragon remained solid, real, for that extra time, the Cathedral ship completed its translation, and was suddenly solid while an extremely fast-moving bulk, the Radiant Dragon, tore through its interior like a high-velocity projectile ripping through a body. For three nanoseconds, she gouged a path of destruction through the enemy ship, then burst out of the other side, ripping the vessel open to the void.

  Her own energy hull depleted completely from the sustained series of impacts, but the unprotected voidhull, abraded and damaged, held. Barely. Behind her, the ruined Cathedral ship vented debris and oxygen, the hole she'd ploughed through it a ragged tear in its aft fuselage. Explosions bloomed through it; there was no way it could survive such overwhelming structural damage. A single figure, limbs flailing, flew free as she watched on maximum magnification. It couldn't be Godel as her broadcast had come from a different ship, and most likely it wasn't an Augur at all, just some lowly crew-member. Still it was another victory won. Two Concordance ships destroyed. She'd take that.

  The Dragon finally jumped, phasing out of normal space and into the grey void, leaving behind nuclear blasts and beam-weapon shots and exploding starships. Now it was only a matter of the 50/50 chance of the jump so close to the star. Everything, all the risks, had simplified down to those odds.

  The ship shook violently, lurched, then shook as if entering a planetary atmosphere at the wrong angle. Selene's teeth clattered in her skull from the violence of it. She was thrown to the floor, tried to rise, then thought better of it. The floor was safer while the ship sorted itself out.

  Her mind and the Radiant Dragon's were still entangled. She felt the stresses running through the bulkheads, screamed the ship's pain at the gravitational pull of the star. The structure stretched and stretched as the mass sucked them in. The odds had broken the wrong way, and all her manoeuvres and risks had been for nothing. The gravity well was pulling her down.

  At least she'd taken the Concordance ships with her. At least Ondo would now get to know the planet was what he'd thought.

  The metaspace drives roared, desperately fighting the pull of the star. They couldn't do it. Selene felt herself – the herself that was the body of the Radiant Dragon – being dragged down, down into the abyss.

  3. Metaspace

  Selene lay on the cold floor of the Radiant Dragon's deck, cheek pressed against the ship's structure, feeling the stresses pulling it to pieces as it fell. A scream rang in her mind, but whether it was hers, or the ship's, or someone else's, she couldn't tell.

  The metaspace drives finally gave in, or burned out, submitting to the ship's inevitable destruction. There was a moment of the purest calm, the struggle ended, the ship's life little more than the faintest hum against the side of her face. She let herself breathe as she studied the ship's structural data, intrigued to see how the end would come, what the effect on the ship and therefore her body would be. Intellectual curiosity combined with fury, fear, but also an acceptance in her mind. Ondo had been right, at least. She wasn't two separate identities in conflict. All of it, logic and emotion, was her.

  Metaspace was grey around her, Coronade's star a mere point of densest black, a full-stop from which there could be no escape.

  She sat up, then climbed to her feet, aware of a strange effect of the ship's collapse into the gravity well. Light ran across the walls and floor around her, through every surface, as if some impossible external Mind were scanning the ship and everything within it. She held out her hands to study them, and the light was there, too. Every minute surface and fold was illuminated by a blue fire that brought no pain, no sensation of any sort. She was about to dismiss it as an optical defect in her own sensory processing, some effect of metaspace, when she detected a change in the ship's trajectory.

  It was slowing. It couldn't be happening, but it was. She triangulated against the topographical features of the Singh Field. There was no mistake. The ship could only accelerate towards the star, nothing else made sense, but it simply was not doing so. Forwards momentum slowed to a halt and the ship hung, unmoving relative to the star, some force precisely counteracting the fall into the gravity hole.

  She reached into the Dragon's core to understand what was going on, make sense of the impossibility. She still had control of ship's nav. When she tried to use the controls, ease up power to the drives to pull away from the star, nothing happened. The drives were functioning, ticking over, but were simply not responding to her inputs.

  Gradually, the ship began to edge away from the star, gathering aft velocity as it pulled backwards. Selene let go of the controls. Whatever was happening, whoever was doing this, she wasn't going to interfere. She was aware of another presence in the Dragon's Mind, something beyond mere control systems and command response interfaces. Some unexpected aspect of the ship had taken over executive control. Lightly, she crept towards it with her own mind, intrigued but wary of distracting it, too. Inside the virtual space of the ship's mind, but outside of the protected core she had previously penetrated, the entity she had previously encountered was directing the ship, doing something to its drives and systems. She watched, fascinated, as control pathways she had never used or even glimpsed lit up. The ship responded. It was picking up velocity, accelerating away from the star.

  A few moments later they passed through the danger boundary, and were traversing metaspace in the normal way.

  “You stepped outside your protective walls,” she said.

  The entity's features remained indistinct, flickering, as if it were struggling to maintain its existence. It reminded her a little of the Warden she'd encountered at the Depository: broken and defective, its connection with reality tenuous. Somehow, though, the being before her seemed organic rather than mechanical. Despite its struggle, its voice, when it spoke, was clear.

  “You saved us both, and now I have done the same.”

  “How did you do that? Pulling back from a metaspace gravity well is not possible. The energy required is far beyond the capacity of this ship. It's far beyond any ship.”

  The entity wavered, and she thought it wasn't going to respond. But then it said, “Much that we learned has not been revealed to the galaxy. Knowledge is all we have to defeat the Great Enemy, but there is a danger in it, too.”

  “What knowledge? And who the hell is we in that sentence?” The Radiant Dragon's core sounded oddly, worryingly, like Godel, hinting at hidden truths and sacred knowledge.

  The entity said, “There is both hope and danger in full understanding.”

  “Why don't you just tell me this secret knowledge you have, and I'll decide if it's safe for me to know it or not.”

  “Not even First could see the right road to take at all junctu
res, especially so far ahead into the future.”

  “You're not going to tell me who or what First is, are you?”

  “That is not my secret to relay.”

  The entity was as infuriatingly oblique as the Warden had been. They had to be related in some way, and someone had gone to a lot of trouble to prevent them distributing vital information.

  “At least tell me how you were able to escape the star,” she said. “That shouldn't have been possible, according to all our understanding of physics.”

  “I simply traversed the quantum geography of metaspace. This skin they have wrapped around me, this ship, it is ill-designed, barely capable of free movement. Very few vessels are; it is a power only granted to those builder and scout crafts that need it. Fortunately, our mass is tiny, but even so the ship needed to be … forced to manipulate space/time in the appropriate ways. That was what I did.”

  “Can we learn how to do this? Can you show me?”

  The entity froze, disappeared, then faltered back into existence. “In time, but the effort of what I did has caused me a significant amount of damage. I need to recover, rebuild. You would be well-advised not to stray near any gravity wells and especially not any singularities in metaspace. I may not be able to pull us out again. This ship and its structures: they are all wrong. They are crude when they should flow like a river.”

  “What the hell does that even mean?”

  She got no more response, the ship's core clamming up once again, throwing a defensive shell about itself that she couldn't penetrate.

  The first waypoint on her approach and decontaminate path back to the Refuge was an unimportant spot in the middle of the interstellar nowhere, a location she was supposed to remain at for a full day while running deep sweeps of the ship. Unexpectedly, Ondo was waiting there for her. Worry sparked through her at the sight of him. He was on the Aether Dragon, a battered cylinder of a ship that she had never seen flying before. It didn't look to her like it was going to get very much farther, either; even from a distance she could detect the thin jets of breathable atmosphere it was venting.