by Simon Kewin
“What's happened?” she said. “Why are you out here?”
Ondo looked amused when his face appeared in her mind, sheepish. “When you left, I found I couldn't concentrate on my research. Most unlike me. Also, I had another dream about Marita, and I decided you were right.”
“Obviously I'm right. About what in particular?” She kicked the Dragon's reaction drive into a low acceleration, nudging herself towards Ondo.
“That I've become too passive, too lost in the intellectual pursuit of the truth rather than the fight against Concordance. In my dream Marita looked extremely disapproving. In the end, I got this broken-down ship working and came to meet you.”
“For what purpose? I don't get it.”
“Partly, I suppose, to make myself feel I was doing something while you took all the risks. Tell me what you found. Is the planet Coronade?”
“I think it is, for various reasons. Concordance certainly went to a lot of trouble to defend a dead planet.”
“You encountered resistance?”
“Yeah, you could say that.” She sent over visual and auditory memories of everything that had taken place, right up until her escape into metaspace. When it was done, he was silent for ten seconds as he ran through the recordings on hurry-up.
“You destroyed a Void Walker and a Cathedral ship?”
“I did.”
“I'm impressed, but the manoeuvre with the metaspace translation was extremely risky.”
“It was pretty risky for them, too. What matters is, I survived and I recovered telemetry of the surface of the planet. Can you make anything of it? The Radiant Dragon's computational abilities are impaired at the moment, and I haven't been able to run any deep analysis of the data.”
“This ship's Mind is minimal compared to the Radiant Dragon's but we might get something if the patterns are clear. Why is your ship impaired? Was it damaged in the battle?”
“Actually, no, that came later. I'll show you the rest of it.” She sent the data over the two light-second gap between the two ships: her sensory impressions of metaspace, the fall into the gravity well, her conversation with the ship's core.
“Did you have any idea this presence was inside the Dragon?” she asked.
The look of astonishment furrowing Ondo's face told her the answer before he replied. “I had no idea at all. The architecture of the ship has always been a mystery, as you know, but I've seen no evidence of a Mind of this magnitude concealed within it. The core you met seems sentient.”
“Can we trust it? Was it put there by Concordance?”
“Again, if it was, why have they left us unmolested for so long? We've been in the Radiant Dragon's power often.”
“You noticed it referred to the planet as Coronade?”
“I did.”
“Has the ship ever been drawn into a gravity well in metaspace like that before?” she asked.
“Not to my knowledge. I wonder if the modifications we made to the ship had some effect upon it, allowed you to make the breakthrough you did. Or it might be that the risk you took finally awakened a self-preservation impulse inside it that we simply had no idea was there.”
“At last you approve of my cavalier approach to metaspace jumps.”
He laughed at her words. “In this one case, perhaps. I still think that, as a general rule, you take too many risks. Tell me, what state is the Radiant Dragon in now?”
She looked around at the blank walls of the cartography deck. “Hard to say. I have navigation and life-support, obviously, and all the drives are functioning, but I can't get any response if I try and talk to the ship. It's like all the automatic systems are functioning as programmed, but anything requiring a higher degree of intellect has shut down. The Dragon is in a coma, organs functioning but closed off to outside reality. We certainly can't leave it to act on its own free-will. Right now, I'm not sure it's got any.”
“That is unfortunate,” said Ondo. “Because I rather think time is suddenly very short.”
“Why so?”
“This is the other reason I left the Refuge. Something came up.”
“You found useful information in the Depository images?”
“I'm finding a great deal of interest, but that isn't it. I started to pick up signs from the nanosensor network of a sudden flurry of Concordance activity: ships jumping out of systems they've been monitoring for years, a tenfold uptick in encrypted comms chatter, a web of metaspace trails. The sensors are programmed to cut short their circuits and report back if they see a certain level of unusual activity. I've seen mobilisations like this before, although never on this scale. My guess is that they're urgently looking for us.”
“Or it's a coincidence,” she said.
“Do you want to take that risk?”
“They could have sent many more ships to Coronade. I was outnumbered, sure, but they left holes in their net for me to escape through. That's one reason I'm following the approach protocols so carefully, in case they wanted me to believe I'd escaped.”
“I'm sure they wouldn't think twice about sacrificing Cathedral ships to track us down, so I assume they sent a fleet to a number of potential flashpoints, anticipating our arrival at one of them. Somehow, they're getting clues about what we're doing without knowing the precise details.”
“Any idea yet how they do that?”
“None.”
Selene considered, weighing up the best course of action to take. “They're going to be watching Coronade closely now; it won't be at all easy to go back there.”
“Before we do anything, we need to study the telemetry you harvested. I'm getting initial results now.”
Their ships were close, almost touching. She decelerated to pause a few hundred metres away from him.
“You should EVA over,” she said. “The Aether Dragon is not in good shape.”
“It'll hold together for a little while yet. At least its Mind isn't in a catatonic fugue.”
He sent what he was uncovering for her to study. The atmospheric probes had clearly had a lot of trouble detecting anything on the surface, blasted as they were by supersonic winds and fierce electrical storms. They'd repeatedly lost global positioning lock, meaning that what few readings of surface detail they'd picked up were sketchy, with a high degree of uncertainty.
But there was detail. By correlating the data retrieved by multiple sensors, the Aether Dragon was able to work out the likely location of coastlines, map them onto a globe to produce an approximate continental layout. When it was done, it compared what it had to the known layout of the historic Coronade seen from Ondo's original images. The match was 97%, and the chance of two planets winding up with an arrangement of tectonic plates that close by chance was effectively zero.
The planet could only be Coronade.
The sensors had picked up more than just coastlines, though. There were artificial structures, their shapes highly regular: cities, perhaps, or large buildings of a function she couldn't guess at. They were on the land and the sea: the oceanic islands were there; round and polygonal land masses, all symmetrical. There was no sign of life, no light, nothing being broadcast in the radio spectrum, not even any microbial life in the atmosphere.
“A solar shroud did this,” she said, “tipping the environment into meltdown.”
“I'm not so sure.” Ondo indicated a circular structure in the fuzzy imagery. “This circle could be a sizable impact crater, and here's another one. It looks to me like the planet was subject to bombardment on a massive scale.”
“They'd have to be seriously huge impacts to kick up enough debris to leave the planet like this.”
“They would,” said Ondo.
She thought about that. “The ship's Mind was convinced the planet had multiple moons, it talked about one being the third biggest, but there's definitely only a single body now. Were they pulled into the planet?”
“Pulled or pushed. It would be enough to explain the massive environmental breakdown, but it's hard to u
nderstand how that could happen. By definition any settled world would have achieved a high degree of gravitational and orbital stability. Anything less would make it uninhabitable.”
“Concordance did this.”
“That would be my guess,” said Ondo. “They wanted to destroy the world utterly, because it was the symbolic capital of galactic culture.”
“Or maybe there's something down there, some weapon or technology they were afraid could be turned against them. Those ships I encountered: they may have been sent simply to make sure I didn't find it.”
A set of structures in the middle of one of the larger oceans was outlined briefly in red, the Aether Dragon highlighting them for attention.
“It's spotted something,” said Ondo. “A match with a known pattern.”
The shapes on the planetary surface had been cleaned up a little, but the edges were still indistinct, gaps in them where the sensors had lost visibility or were destroyed. She could pick out a large central circle in the middle of one of the oceans, with lines radiating from it at apparently random angles, like an incomplete compass rose. Other circles, smaller, were strung out along the lines at varying distances. She could neither see nor calculate any particular pattern to the arrangement. It appeared the central circle had suffered considerable impact damage, an elongated impact crater was stamped right across it, but the smaller orbital circles looked intact.
“What is it matching on?” she asked. “Have you seen anything like this before?”
“I haven't, but you have. At the Depository, in those stasis fields, it's seeing a correlation with those land structures and one of the objects.”
The item she'd thought was jewellery, the silver talisman with slots for beads spaced along its radiating lines. She brought an image of the object to mind and overlaid it upon the telemetry. The Aether Dragon was correct; there was a clear match.
Ondo was apparently doing the same. “This is what we were supposed to find.” The excitement thrumming through him was completely clear over the comms link. “This is where the trail leads.”
She said, “We're uncovering a picture not following a path given to us. We've found this, we have free-will – which includes the freedom to go and get ourselves killed. But I concede this structure could be what Concordance are trying to stop us finding.”
“A structure they tried to destroy when they attacked the planet,” said Ondo.
She addressed the Aether Dragon directly. “The vision I got from the Radiant Dragon, the hole in the atmosphere tunnelling to the surface, can you identify where that would have been?”
The Mind of Ondo's ship took several seconds to complete the calculations before replying. “Assuming the location identified corresponded with the actual point on the surface then underneath you, the atmospheric tunnel would have terminated directly onto this large island.”
“How sure are you?”
“More than 99%.”
Good enough. “This is the gateway then?” she said to Ondo. “This Gamma Spinwards Tunnel the ship mentioned.”
“Or it was at some point. The Mind you spoke to within the core seemed to have a poor grasp of the passage of time.”
“It talked about metaspace tunnels. Is that a term you've come across before?”
“No, it makes little sense. Metaspace jumps are obviously inherently unstable near large gravitational masses. The notion of having tunnels through the void that terminate on a planet is incomprehensible according to all the physics we currently understand.”
“Except, our understanding is clearly flawed,” she said. “The Radiant Dragon proved that by pulling me out of the gravity well. Assuming there was once some sort of gateway on the planet, can you speculate where would it lead to?”
“I have no idea,” said Ondo. “But I'd love to find out. However, even if there was, once, a metaspace entry point on the planet, there's every possibility it is now inactive, given the environmental destruction.”
Selene considered their options. “The planet's atmosphere would be extremely hazardous to navigate, but it would at least offer us some cover to work under if we could reach it. The difficulty will be in getting there.”
She thought he was going to counsel caution, wait a few months or a few years for activity in the system to die down. Instead, he said, “Time may be short: the upswing in Concordance activity suggests they're acting. And now you've been seen there, there of all the places in the galaxy. If they were attempting to destroy this structure three hundred years ago, they may return now to finish the job.”
“A jump from metaspace directly into the planet's atmosphere would do it,” said Selene. “Perhaps that's something the Radiant Dragon is capable of, if the core Mind takes control of the ship.”
“It talked only about navigating metaspace topography to avoid a gravity well, not about deliberately flying into one. In any case, that Mind remains completely locked away. I've been trying to reach it, but it is unresponsive, closed off. So far as I can tell it isn't even there.”
Her own efforts had yielded the same results. “It took an imminent threat to get it to reveal itself last time. Perhaps we could engineer one, fly in-system under reaction drive and wait for Concordance to come for us.” She was joking. She was pretty sure she was joking.
“Too risky, even for you,” said Ondo. “Besides, we've been in imminent danger many times in normal space and this Mind has never shown itself. I think we have to assume its magical powers are limited to the effect you witnessed.”
“We have two ships, now,” she mused, “that could help. We use the Aether Dragon as a decoy, while we sneak in from the other direction aboard the Radiant.”
“We'll be lucky if the Aether Dragon can manage one more jump,” said Ondo.
“That's all we need. You come onto this ship and we'll send the Aether into the system, all weaponry blazing, making as much sound and fury as possible. It might buy us enough time to reach the planet.”
“We have precious few ships as it is, as you know. Losing this one, battered and broken as it is, would be a huge loss. But … perhaps it is the only way.”
“The fogging technology Concordance use. You said you were attempting to reproduce it?”
“I am, but I haven't been able to achieve anything like the effects they have. Aefrid had some fused components from the mechanism of a Concordance ship that she'd recovered, and I've been able to dig up a few more clues. They've given me some indications, but there's still much I don't understand in the functioning of the technology, especially in the way it obscures a ship's wake through metaspace.”
“Have you ever deployed the tech in the field, used it to avoid them?”
“No, it's never been ready.”
“But it's functional?”
“Barely.”
“Then, let's use it now, once we emerge from metaspace. It might give us an edge, especially if they aren't expecting it. Can you deploy it on the Radiant Dragon?”
“It's already there, I was using the ship for my experiments.”
“Then, let's go and hit Coronade before Concordance can muster the defences to stop us.”
“Yes, except, I wonder…”
“What?”
He took a few moments to respond as he worked something out. “The artefact you saw at the Depository: what if it wasn't merely decorative, but a part of a mechanism? It has to be connected somehow. If we had that with us, it might … activate the mechanism, or at least help us make sense of things. Or do something. I've uncovered mention of navigational totems over the years, along with the suggestion that they had some practical purpose. I thought maybe they were simple maps, but the presence of a bead like the one recovered from the hulk suggests to me now that the device has a computational function. At the very least it might be a datastore.”
“I got the very clear impression the Warden did not want me to take anything, and we have no clear idea what powers it has at its command,” said Selene. “And I'm not conv
inced the Radiant Dragon would be capable of making the journey again, not right now.”
Ondo's face was creased as he picked through his thoughts. “Yes, agreed, but this might be our only chance to progress. We have to think before we leap; the trail might end here if we don't make the right move. There's a time to be patient, and there's a time to act. I think we have to take the chance.”
“This is you saying this?”
Ondo actually chuckled. “This is me saying this.”
“Would Marita have approved?”
“I think she might.”
Selene replayed the images she'd recorded in the Depository. “The bead embedded in the artefact: I assumed the totem was simply incomplete, that the other beads had been lost over the years. You're suggesting that the object is, in fact, complete, and that the bead identifies the one lesser circle it is tied to. Like a key?”
“It's a possibility, isn't it? And I think, before anything, that we should upload all the data you recovered onto a nanosensor and send it out into the network, get it to the Refuge. Whatever happens, we can't lose it; it's vital proof that Concordance's version of history is wrong. If we don't survive, then hopefully someone will find it one day. We've achieved that, at least. I'll also tell the sensor to spread the data everywhere it can; get it broadcast to any worlds that are listening. We need to fight their lies with the truth.”
Selene returned her attention to the telemetry images. More detail had been filled in as the Aether Dragon overlaid the readings captured by more of the nanosensors. The radiating lines joining the circles were clearer. Insignificant as they looked, they had to be impressive structures, hundreds of kilometres long, presumably built upon the ocean floor and rising from the depths to the surface. The islands too: all were either circular or some regular polygon. Were they all artificial or had existing landmasses been repurposed? The smaller circle corresponding to the bead looked to be intact, undamaged by any meteorite impact. Which didn't mean a damn thing; there might be nothing there but a circular lump of rock lashed by tsunami waves and death-force hurricanes. But they had to find out.
