by Simon Kewin
His speech delivered, her father stood shivering visibly, unsure why he was there. The Walker watched Selene with clear pleasure on his face. He said, “Your father spent his life unearthing forbidden knowledge, peddling vile lies about Omn, and when the end came, he passed all he'd learned onto you, planning for you to take over from him. Now you will watch what happens to him as a result, and then the same will happen to you.”
“No.”
“Tell me first, was your father a good man?”
“What?”
“Think carefully before you answer. Was he a good man?”
“Yes, he was. He is a good man. Always.” Her father, the knife to his throat, didn't respond, as if incapable of understanding what was happening.
The Void Walker appeared satisfied with her reply. “Then you should be grateful to me. An eternity of ecstasy awaits him through the sacred wormhole. I will speed his passage to the judgement of Omn and free him from the sufferings of this realm.”
The Void Walker took a fresh grip on the blade in his hand and slowly, deliberately, pushed it into her father's neck, slicing his skin and tissues open. A spray of red blood speckled the white snow and her father slumped silently to the ground, clutching at his ruined throat, trying and failing to keep the blood inside his body.
Selene stepped back, raised the blaster barrel and fired again and again, desperate to get at the Walker so she could tear him to pieces, save her father, but the energy shielding held.
“Selene.” Ondo was still looking upwards, something up there fascinating him. “We have to go.”
She turned on him in her rage. His words made no sense. “Go where? Go how? We need to save him. My father, your friend, is dying in front of our eyes. Can't you fucking see?”
“Look.” Ondo was pointing into the sky. A ring of three lights shone, like stars at dusk. She could make no sense of what they were, but they were unimportant. A few steps away from her, her father's body lay twitching upon the ice. With the right medical attention, he could still be saved.
“We have to leave,” said Ondo again. “I'm sorry, there's nothing we can do for him. If we'd known he was here, then we could have tried. The Dragon has come for us and we have to get out.”
“What are you talking about?”
“It must have triggered three of the orbital nukes I parked in orbit.”
“Nukes.”
“Fission weapons, crude but effective. They've entered the atmosphere and will detonate a kilometre above the ice. We have to leave now.”
“We can't leave. How can we leave?” Once again, she had the unpleasant sensation of her mind ripping into two. What was the Dragon thinking when she and Ondo had no means of escape?
A growing rumble ran through the ice beneath her feet, strengthening each moment, and she thought a nuke must have detonated already; that a superheated blast-wave wall would slam into them at any moment, searing their skin and tissues from their bones. Instead, impossibly, a triangle of metal or stone rose from the ice fifty metres away, like some ancient temple arising from the depths. Then she grasped what it was: the apex of the Dragon, forcing its way up through the pack ice to reach them. It had entered the atmosphere, found a safe descent vector and used the oceans to get to them undetected. Great slabs of ice were pushed up and out as the bulk of the ship forced itself free of the ice. She could feel the heat blasting off it on her face: it had used its beam-weapons to thrust its way through.
The Walker, meanwhile, was retreating into his lair. He'd seen the Dragon and the approaching nukes and had come to the same realisation of what he had to do: power up his ship and escape the planet. But he stopped for a moment to consider the body of the man on the ice in front of him. Perhaps he was making the same calculation Selene was: he could be brought back to life in the Refuge just as Selene had been. His injuries were nothing compared to those she'd suffered.
It was an act of simple malice. The Walker sent an instruction to the blaster atop the turret of his ship. A beam of light lanced down, striking her father's body, turning him to fire and then to ash. The Walker's face lit up red as the weapon played across her father's body.
Fury coiled within Selene; she would kill this Walker even if it meant sacrificing herself. But Ondo seized her by the arm and pulled her away. “If we die here, we'll never defeat them.”
The calculating part of her brain projected likely outcomes of everything that was unfolding around them: their distance from the Dragon, its optimal trajectory as it left the planet, the contrary routes of the nukes as they screamed groundward. Possible escape vectors for the Walker in his Concordance ship.
She chose. She tossed aside the blaster and lifted Ondo off the ground. He couldn't move quickly enough. She threw him across her left shoulder, then raced for the Dragon, at the same time firing instructions at the ship's control systems. Then would be no time for the usual niceties of a prep for atmospheric launch. Her natural tissues burned at the effort of running while carrying Ondo, but she ignored them, amping up her biological response with an artificial burst of adrenaline.
They fell into the Dragon's open hatch. The doorway irised shut and the ship's energy hull zapped up to full power. She felt the ship's drives powering up, shudders of suppressed energy rumbling through its superstructure. It still had to force the bulk of its pyramidal body through the pack-ice. In the sky, the nukes were three kilometres from the ground, fanning out as they arranged themselves into a pattern that would inflict maximum destruction across the polar region. She and Ondo lay in the hatchway of the Dragon, both seeing what was happening, neither able to do much more than watch and wait.
A rising whine of fury shuddered through the ship and then it burst free, firing upwards into the clear air over the pole, climbing at maximum thrust. The violence of the acceleration pinned them to the deck. Ondo blacked out and only Selene's augmentations, overriding her biology, kept her from doing the same. If she lost consciousness, and Concordance intercepted them, she might never awaken. Their escape vector angled away from the pole. There was a moment when the three nukes and the Dragon were at the same altitude, a moment of strange calm. She studied the weapons through the Dragon's sensors, their sleek, malevolent form. The Walker's ship was in the air, too, but it was lower. Maybe some of its systems had degraded during its sojourn in the ice. The Dragon needed only a few more seconds to climb high enough to escape the blast wave from the nukes and they might make it.
The light of three new suns flared in her eyes as the nukes detonated, bathing her dead world in their demonic fury. The Dragon rose, climbing a beat ahead of the atmospheric blast wave. The higher they ascended and the thinner the atmosphere, the less damaging the thermal shock would be. She saw how it would go. She felt a fresh surge shake through the Dragon, as if it had made the same calculation and was putting all its energy into the effort of escaping.
Twelve seconds later, they passed out of the stratosphere mere metres ahead of the raging heat plume.
In the violence and radiation blast of the detonations, she'd lost track of the Walker vessel. Its trajectory had been marginal; most likely it had been engulfed by the explosions and vaporised. The thought of that made her feel a little better.
She turned her attention to local space. Five Concordance ships had arrived in-system, converging on the planet from different angles. Their intention was clearly to cut off the Dragon's escape routes as it fled the stellar mass and accelerated into its metaspace jump. There were gaps in the net, but the chances were other ships would arrive – or already had arrived outside their sphere of knowledge – to plug them. With she and Ondo back on board, the Dragon ceded control back to them. Ondo instructed it to head towards one of the gaps in the attacking ship cloud.
It wasn't the one she would have picked; there were nearer exit routes.
“Why that one?” She said.
“I've studied their strategies for many years. This route gives us our best chance of escaping.”
“You can't be sure of that.”
“No.”
She didn't argue further. The immediate threat from the nukes was gone. They had a little time before any engagement with the approaching Concordance ships. She picked herself off the floor and helped Ondo to peel off his environmental suit. As she did so, she noticed her left hand was trembling, minutely but rapidly. It was almost blurred to look at. She held it up to study, intrigued. “Something's going wrong with my biomechanics.”
Ondo took both her hands and held them in his, studying them, turning them over, comparing artificial with natural.
He said, “I don't think there's anything wrong with your augmentations.”
The adrenaline was still pumping through her, like the control mechanism had spiralled out of control. “You can see the tremor.”
He let go of her hands. “Your enhanced internal senses make you more aware of it, that's all. Your right hand is doing it, too.”
“No, it isn't.” But she held her natural hand up to the light and saw that he was correct. It, too, shook.
“It's actually a sign that your systems have become well-integrated,” said Ondo. “Both halves acting in concert.”
“Then, what's wrong with me?”
“Nothing is wrong with you, at least nothing that isn't understandable. You've just seen your own father murdered minutes after discovering he was still alive. You're still recovering from what happened to you when you escaped the planet the first time. It's normal to have a reaction to all of that. Anyone would.”
“I'm not having a reaction. I'm fine.”
“You're functioning, there's a difference. You may need short-term biochemical remediation, but if we escape from this, we should talk about what you've been through at more length. It will help.”
She often felt angry at him, at his intrusions, at being given instructions. On more than one occasion during her rehabilitation she'd had to resist the urge to punch him.
“I don't need to talk,” she said. “I need to escape this damn system and never come back.”
They were on the Dragon's cartography deck now. They walked through a three-dimensional image of the Maes Far system that filled the room. Tags marked ships and satellites, while the vectors of vessels moving in-system were projected in coloured lines. Seven Concordance craft had now arrived. They were Cathedral class, resembling the ship that had punched her from the sky the first time she escaped from Maes Far. Their twisting, nacreous forms made her think of a scatter of shells on the beach, sea-washed and gleaming. Each one was easily capable of reducing the Dragon to its constituent quarks and leptons if they managed to manoeuvre within range. The two nearer ones had released high-g missiles, but they were too remote to imminently threaten the Dragon.
She studied the pattern of them, trying to understand what Concordance's plan was. “They're corralling us, cutting off escape routes.”
“It's their usual approach, but they can't plug all the holes.”
Their route into metaspace was still clear, but a ship could emerge in that direction at any moment. It was possible they were being shepherded into a trap.
They watched in nervous silence as the dance of ships and missiles unfolded. Now the display showed the countdown to their metaspace translation point. Twenty-two minutes. The Dragon accumulated velocity all the time, bringing the point nearer, by the same token making them less manoeuvrable if they needed to dodge and fight. There was a grey area when they would be far enough from the stellar mass to make the jump probably safe, and then there was a point farther out at which the manoeuvre approached 99% dependable. That was Ondo's preferred target; she'd have gone with anything above 90%. The longer they waited, the higher the chance of a Concordance ship emerging directly in their path.
She brought the Dragon's forwards weapon arrays online in readiness. There was a moment, four hundred thousand kilometres from the planet, when she held up her left hand and covered the receding disc of Maes Far with a single one of her artificial fingers, blotting it out just as the shroud had blotted out the sun. Everything she'd ever known and loved, concealed by a single fingertip.
The countdown had reached eight minutes when the Dragon calmly announced it had detected a ship-sized mass emerging from metaspace ahead of them. Another Concordance vessel, arriving on their escape vector. Ondo hesitated, waiting for more data. He was too damned analytical, too ready to observe. Like the whole universe was simply a puzzle put there for him to ponder.
She had no such hang-ups. They needed to act. The safe translation probability was at 84.5%. It would have to be good enough. She instructed the Dragon to commence its translation into metaspace. Ondo's hand moved as if he planned to override her, but he stopped himself. She felt the translation process beginning; the flutter in her stomach, the accelerating headlong rush that was a plummeting fall and a soaring high-g rush at the same time. The Dragon completed its translation calculations as it powered up its metaspace projectors.
They were half-translated out of reality when the Concordance ship arrived. Ondo had explained to her the dangers of a ghost translation, of intersecting with another ship as it dropped into normal space at the precise moment they jumped out. It was a vanishingly rare event but almost always fatal to all involved. Depending on the relative degrees of translation the ships could collide, or fuse together, or simply pull each other apart with the forces of their respective manoeuvres.
It happened now. Even as the stars of normal space faded, the lines and angles of a Concordance ship appeared around them, engulfing them, passing directly through them even as they passed through it. To each ship, the other faded as one left and one entered metaspace, but there was a moment when Selene saw the interior of the enemy vessel, its corridors and decks and mechanisms crisply clear. She saw the faces of the people on board, the crew and at least two Void Walkers, and she knew that they'd seen her, too. They watched each other as their ships momentarily intersected, almost close enough to touch but divided by the different realities they inhabited.
She caught a passing glimpse, brief but clear to her augmented vision, of the Cathedral ship's convocation. Concordance ships were controlled by an inner circle of clerical officers: a Hierarch, a Stellar Mechanic, the ship's Augur, among others. They sat in their elaborate robes at the heart of the ship, their faces an assortment of determination, calculation and alarm. Supposedly, the circles controlling each vessel were an analogue of the circle of First Augurs that sat in convocation at the God Star, directing events across the entire galaxy, translating and interpreting the will of Omn. The circles on the ships were responsible for implementing the instructions passed to them, although it was unclear how much autonomy the Hierarch wielded. Did they simply carry out the letter of Omn's instructions, passed to them by the Augur, or did they have the power to interpret and improvise? Ondo sometimes wondered if it was the ships' Augurs that wielded real authority: it was they that claimed to hear the words of Omn, and who relayed them to the Hierarch for execution.
In an instant, the glimpse of the convocation circle was gone. Miraculously, no parts of the two ships had occupied the same point in real space at the same moment. The Dragon completed its translation into metaspace, the uniform greyness of the void seizing hold of it.
There was silence for long seconds.
“That was close,” said Ondo.
“Did they survive too?”
“I'd say so, since we did.”
Had she saved them or endangered them by triggering their translation early? Hard to be sure. Ondo said nothing either way. He directed the Dragon to follow a randomised sequence of metaspace traversals to conceal their route and give them time for full-system bug scans. They could be tracked through the void for a short distance via their wake through the Singh Field – the background structure of metaspace – but the fluctuations decayed rapidly. They needed to be sure Concordance weren't on their trail. Ondo was convinced it was possible to develop technology that could detect a wake f
or a much longer period – possibly weeks or months – a fact that caused him great anxiety. As he'd explained, he had no proof it was possible, but no proof it was impossible, either.
She wanted to quiz him about everything that had happened on Maes Far, but he was already distracted, studying the flecks they'd recovered from the ice. She left him for the seclusion of her own room. Her heart was still racing, her breathing elevated, but she'd calmed a little. She held up her hands again, studying them microscopically with her left eye. The tremor had subsided a little, but it was still there.
She sat on her bed and closed her eyes. Frustrated fury coursed through her. She relived the moment of her father's death again and again, the silent sinking to the ice, the spray of red upon the pristine white. Her own inability to do anything to stop it. She sank her face into her hands and let the tears come. What horrors had her father lived through at the Void Walker's hand? They'd turned a proud, clever, witty man, a man she'd loved dearly, into that broken plaything. The cruelty of it engulfed her. She was too weak to stop Concordance. Sooner or later her own fate would be that of her father's, and she would die a broken, pointless death, and nothing in the galaxy would have changed.
No. She wouldn't succumb. Move forwards, not backwards. She would fight them. She forced her mind's attention to the ship's status and telemetry readings. Apart from the patterns of fluctuation in the Singh Field, metaspace was calm around them. No sign of pursuit. She came to a decision. She had a little time; she would talk to Ondo, the inner Ondo inside her mind. She hadn't gone near the avatar since it was implanted, hadn't communicated with it, hadn't granted it access to any of her sensory inputs, but now she would. There were things she needed to know.
“Ondo, I need you.” The words of the agreed summoning phrase sounded annoyingly, well, needy. She enunciated them as clearly as she could, then repeated them, not sure how to properly perform the summoning.