by Simon Kewin
“Can we take this?” she asked. “You'll let us walk out of here carrying it?”
“I will. The night must have a dawn.”
“How do you know you can trust us to do the right thing?”
“The ship that carries you is weak, torn by the rigours of your journeys here. Still, in its broken state, it vouches for you, croaks to me who and what you are. It tells me you should take the metakey.”
It took them both a moment to work out the meaning of the Warden's words.
“You've been in communication with the Radiant Dragon?” she asked.
“I hear him. He bleeds into the void, but still he fights for you.”
“He? Who is he?”
The Warden ignored them, and the line of plinths began to move again, streaming in the opposite direction until, in a few moments, the originals were in their former place in front of them. In seven seconds, she counted 3,212 items flying past. The doorway they'd come through slid into existence. The meaning of that was clear, too. They were to leave.
But, before they did so, Ondo turned to address the Warden once more. “This long night you talk about, how long has it been precisely?”
Spiderweb lines appeared on the Warden's body, white, dividing its surface into a series of geometric shapes. Then its hard form fractured to return to the cloud of spinning mirrors and planes, its integrity apparently unsustainable. At the same time, it reverted to talking in its vague metaphors and half-sentences. “The long night.”
Ondo tried again. “Please, the moving object, the four-legged spider. What is that?”
“The night without a morning. The eternal darkness.”
“This whole place, all these artefacts. Who placed them here, and when? And why did they do so?”
This time, instead of answering, the shards of the Warden's form swirled and glinted blue for a moment, then blinked out of existence.
“I think we've had all the help it's going to give us,” said Selene. “Do you think this eternal darkness is Concordance? A metaphor because it couldn't find the right words?”
Ondo was looking around, clearly longing to remain in the hall of artefacts. Remain and maybe never leave. “Or it was describing the weapon Vulpis encountered, some technology capable of fearsome destruction.”
“We should go.”
“Yes.”
Their visors resealed, they returned to the outer chamber and then out into the searing radiation of the blue sun. She carried the totem they'd retrieved, the metakey, in her gauntlet. Her breath rushed in her ears as they hustled back to the lander. Neither of them spoke. When they reached the safety of the Radiant Dragon, Selene placed her hand onto the airlock bulkhead for a moment, seeking the ship's core Mind. It was also, perhaps, a gesture of contact or gratitude. The entity remained locked away from her. Whatever the Warden had done to establish contact, she could not reproduce it.
But she did detect, as they rose from the planet and accelerated away from the star for metaspace translation, a sense of something like relief. Whether it was hers, or an emotion she was picking up from the ship, she couldn't say.
Ondo, meanwhile, was clearly having trouble tearing himself away from the system and its mysteries: his attention was now consumed by telemetry from the mesh that surrounded the star and its planet.
“You say you passed through the gap in the mesh last time?” he asked.
“Ten or twenty metres, no more. You see something?”
“Hard to be sure. Odd energy signatures. So far as I can tell, the gap is having a lensing effect, diffracting the radiation from outside in unusual ways. Either that or the radiation itself is unusual.”
“We do not have time to go and investigate, you do know that, don't you?”
“Yes, yes. Did you detect anything beyond the gap? Anything anomalous?”
“You saw every datum of telemetry I recovered. Why do you ask?”
“The readings are … odd.”
“Every damned thing here is odd, but whatever's out there will have to wait; we're running up to metaspace translation now.”
“We could…” But his objections were cut short as she activated the metaspace projectors, and the ship swoop-dropped out of normal space, the dizzying headlong rush of it stilling them both.
As before, the Dragon trembled and bucked as they followed the careful sequence of dance steps through the void, but it responded to her navigational inputs without deviation. Eventually, they dropped into normal space at the point where they'd left the Aether Dragon. Selene sent across her final instructions for their assault on Coronade to the other ship, then the two vessels accelerated into their translation run-ups together.
As she'd feared, Concordance activity had redoubled since her escape from the system. Beyond a certain range, it was impossible to know what was truly taking place, but they could see a bustle of activity around Coronade itself, as well as a cluster of Cathedral ships nearer the sun.
“What are they doing there?” Ondo mused as they stood within the three-dimensional model of the system. “What is this fascination with stars?”
“Who cares?” said Selene. “Some religious obsession we can't begin to understand. It's the ships near the planet we need to worry about. The question is, which will react when the Aether Dragon shows up.”
“Assuming it holds together long enough to survive the translation.”
“It has to. Without it, we have no chance of getting back to the planet.”
They didn't have to wait long. The unmanned vessel had been instructed to materialise on the opposite side of the ecliptic disc from Selene and Ondo, two hundred million kilometres farther away from the star. The first indications they picked up was the sight of a number of closer Concordance vessels reacting, breaking orbit from the planet and accelerating onto vectors that matched the Aether Dragon's assigned incursion point.
“It made it,” said Selene.
“Yes. The ship's last act.”
“Have you ever used multiple vessels before? Do Concordance know you have them?”
“I don't believe they do. They'll assume they've picked up the arrival of the Radiant Dragon. They'll realise soon enough their mistake.”
Another two Cathedral ships manoeuvred to join the attack, surrounded by an insect cloud of Void Walker attack ships. Selene itched to flare the Radiant Dragon's reaction drives, push into the system. She held back; once again the timing of it was critical. Move too soon, and the Concordance ships would return to intercept them. Move too late, and they'd be returning anyway, the Aether Dragon obliterated.
Finally, she could bear it no longer. They'd hit the earliest moment that their incursion was viable, but they didn't really know the optimal point. Always, there might be unknown Concordance ships arriving from outside their sphere of knowledge. At some point, they had to take a chance.
“Let's see how good this fogging technology of yours is,” she said.
She fired the reaction drives, pushing the Radiant Dragon onto a maximum acceleration intercept course with Coronade. Once again, the plan depended upon achieving the highest possible velocity – which, once again, increased their chances of being able to flash through the ring of Concordance defences and flee back to metaspace at the expense of tactical manoeuvrability.
She felt the fogging system kick in. Ondo had explained it was a rapid series of partial and abandoned metaspace translations, too quick for any dangerous gravitational effect to pull them in. The sensation of it was disconcerting, like being shaken violently, although to her eyes the bulkheads around her remained solid and unmoving. The ship, too, reacted; she felt unease juddering through it as they sped forwards.
They finally picked up telemetry from the Aether Dragon, speeding in-system on its allotted trajectory. It was behaving precisely as intended, drawing Concordance vessels towards it. Once it was clear it had been spotted, it powered up its beam-weapon arrays. They were puny and would do little damage to a Cathedral ship, but Concordance wou
ld pick up the energy signature change and might be pulled a little deeper into the deception.
The battle, when it came, didn't last long. All but three of the Concordance vessels peeled away before they reached weapons' range as realisation of the deception struck. The remaining ships pressed on. Beam-weaponry and missile arrays blazed. The events unfolded twenty light-minutes away, meaning that the Aether Dragon was already long-gone by the time they saw its final destruction, but it was still a sobering moment.
Selene returned her attention to the Cathedral ships that had pulled out of the attack, watching as they arced onto return vectors for Coronade, studying how they intended to slot back into the shield around the world. Here was another critical moment when everything could go wrong: if the defensive shield was reconstructed quickly enough, there might be no way through.
It wasn't good. Accelerating at maximum g even as they were, it soon became clear that the bulk of the Cathedral ships would beat them to Coronade. The pretence with the Aether Dragon hadn't fooled Concordance for long enough. The only hope she and Ondo had lay in remaining undetected until the last moment. They stayed on course, powering towards the planet and its single surviving moon. Each passing instant increased their odds by a few points, even if their overall chances of success were, by Selene's projections, poor.
There came the moment when a Concordance sensor or vessel spotted them. She saw attack ships flare into action, breaking away onto intercept trajectories. The heavier, more momentum-bound Cathedral ships followed. Now was the critical moment of the action: the vectors they adopted; the intercept points picked. The dance of starships and planet and moon.
“There,” she said, the trajectories in space and time filling her mind. “There is our window.” It was tiny, much smaller than she would have liked, but it would have to do. Their velocity meant that the reacting Concordance ships had to scramble onto vectors beyond the planet. Were they confused by the Radiant Dragon's trajectory? They had to know she couldn't possibly decelerate in time for atmospheric insertion. The hope was that Concordance would think she was skimming the planet to pick up more telemetry. It seemed they'd bought it. Which meant that, as the enemy ships manoeuvred and their spheres of awareness shifted, there was the briefest moment in the shadow of the moon when the Dragon would be unobserved. There was the chance. Free-floating nanosensors might still spot them, but they had to hope that the Cathedral ships' controlling Minds, or their convocation circles, ignored that telemetry for long enough.
Time, suddenly, was short. She and Ondo raced down the curving walkways of the Dragon to the lander bay. They strapped themselves into their seats while they checked systems were fully functional. Outside, their window of undetectability shrank even further as a Cathedral ship moved onto an unanticipated vector, but the shot was still there.
Her mind filled with the ballet of ships, she waited for the critical moment, the millisecond, when the lander could fling itself free of the Dragon.
There. She fired the commands, the brief lag of them built into her calculations. The lander fired itself out of the bay, the moon alarmingly near, and immediately flared its reaction drives, adding its own thrust to the acceleration the Dragon had given it. The high-g was gruelling, even for her. Next to her, Ondo blacked out. Her own organic brain was doing the same. As before, only her artificial self remained alert, controlling the trajectory as they grazed the surface of the moon at a speed that would mean instant annihilation if she misjudged things by a few centimetres.
Now the only question was whether Concordance would fall for this second feint. The Radiant Dragon was already light-seconds away, accelerating hard on its trajectory out-system. Once again, it would use the slight slingshot effect of the planet to move onto an unexpected vector, increasing its odds of escaping the system a little. It still didn't look to be enough. Multiple Concordance ships converged on it, from the planet and from the sun, aggressive trajectories that clearly indicated the intent to destroy the ship before it could jump.
The Radiant Dragon would escape or be obliterated. Whichever it was, half the surviving Concordance ships would return to the planet immediately afterwards. That was the window. She and Ondo had to attempt atmospheric insertion now, race for the planet in plain view and simply hope they could reach it in time.
The moon filled the lander's forwards view. She had to fight all her instincts to pull away. The ship, mercifully, was quiescent, obeying her commands. There was no high-powered Mind controlling it; it was simply a vehicle. Peeping over the limb of the moon, directly ahead, the grey smudge of Coronade was rising.
They grazed the grey, rocky surface of the moon. She nudged the lander into a valley between two hills and for a moment the outcrops of rocks were actually above them, the hard surfaces of the walls three metres from the voidhull of the lander. The slightest brushing contact would spell disaster.
Then they shot free, and the moon was behind them. The dash for the planet would take long minutes, longer because they'd have to decelerate hard as they neared. Now there was little she could do but hope. The Concordance fleet was still preoccupied with the Radiant Dragon. That much of the plan was succeeding. Two Cathedral ships had remained in orbit of Coronade, but they were over the horizon, eclipsed by the planet's bulk. Once again, each passing second improved her and Ondo's odds by a notch. A precious few percentage points, counting up impossibly slowly.
Once again, she saw the moment when Concordance became aware of them. Ondo, stirring, saw it too. “They are coming.”
Selene ran the calculations through her brain, saw how it would go. “We'll make it, but barely. We'll have to hit the atmosphere a lot harder than I'd have liked.”
She could hear the tension in his voice, his effort to remain calm. “The hull may not withstand the thermal shock.”
He was right. Nothing to be done about it. It certainly wouldn't withstand an assault from multiple Cathedral ships and Void Walkers.
She left the deceleration as long she dared, then counted three more long seconds, before firing the forwards reaction drives and killing the aft. Judders shook through the lander as it flipped from high-g acceleration to deceleration. It felt like the tiny ship was going to rattle itself into its constituent components from the stresses running through it.
Their velocity was still high, dangerously high, as they hit the first wisps of the atmosphere. At the same moment, beam-weapon shots from the nearest attack ships flickered and flickered around them.
5. Dead Star
As they crashed through the atmosphere of Coronade, it was her two ascents from Maes Far in identical landers that came back to Selene. She saw again the blinding light of the Cathedral ship's beam-weapon strike from her first ascent, the gaping gulf of air beneath her as her fuselage was cut away and she spiralled out of control. She lived again the violence of the concussions shaking through the craft, the helplessness of her situation. The wanting it to end. She saw again, also, the blinding plume of the nuke blasts from her second ascent, moments after the murder of her father.
Perhaps Ondo guessed what she was going through. He spoke directly to her, brain-to-brain. “Are you okay?”
She nodded to him, forced herself to concentrate. “They'll struggle to target us as these winds throw us around. They'll be as blind as we are.”
Their headlong plunge at least slowed them down, but they paid for the velocity they dumped in mounting thermal energy. Before jumping in-system, they'd amped-up the lander's energy hull as much as possible, routing energy from weapons-systems and anything else that could be considered non-essential.
The energy hull did what it was designed to do, shunting heat away from the planetward edges of the craft, but it simply couldn't do so rapidly enough. The shield reacted to the mounting thermal load of the raging heat by drawing more power, overdriving its propagation arrays and diminishing its ability to protect the craft. Selene watched the numbers coming from the hull as they ticked rapidly down. The degraded syste
m went into a failure cascade, its protection levels falling from 100% to 0 in 27 seconds.
After that, it was the voidhull's bare metal against the thermal shock of their entry into the atmosphere. They'd had no time to enhance the lander's physical structure in any way. It was designed to withstand hot entries, steep insertion corridors, but they were flying well beyond its operational capabilities.
Fortunately, the extreme violence of Coronade's high atmosphere came to their aid. They hit supersonic winds, denser and denser as they fell, and the rapidly-moving air streamed the heat away far more effectively than the energy hull had been able to. They reached a point where the hull's temperature peaked, then began to slide back towards the outer edges of its ideal safety levels.
Once again, they were made to pay for it, this time by the increasing violence of the turbulent atmosphere. As they dropped through the raging air streams, they were hurled around like dried peas in an empty box, rattling Selene's brain until it hurt.
They left a trail of free-floating sensors behind them, in the hope that they could triangulate off them and maintain an approximate navigational lock on the circular oceanic islands they were aiming for. Their trajectory was going to be vague as the sensors were blasted in every direction and they lost lock with those higher up in the air. At least she and Ondo were cut off from outside surveillance. Sunlight faded rapidly as they sank, until it was utterly dark across the visible electromagnetic spectrum. Twice she saw a sunburst of blinding yellow light flare in the atmosphere some way in the distance and far above them – an atmospheric nuke detonation, she guessed – but none exploded nearby.
Ondo said, “They may not even attempt to enter the atmosphere. They can just wait in orbit for us to emerge.”
“Or wait for these winds to do their work for them,” she replied.
“Or that,” agreed Ondo.
The small size of the lander was an advantage as they fell: they were swept along with the screaming wind-currents rather than being pulverized by them. Selene, piloting, put all her effort into simply staying upright as they were thrown around like a leaf in a hurricane. The main risk would be as they neared the ground; the last thing she wanted was to come so far only to be dashed into the side of a mountain or flung at the ground the wrong way up. She peered downwards using the lander's sensors, mainly in the radio wave spectrum, desperate for any indistinct detail. Atmospheric pressures suggested they were within ten kilometres of the surface, but the margin of error was wide given the air's extreme turbulence.
