by Simon Kewin
“We'd have more chance of making it together. You're still recovering from Maes Far, and I want to keep an eye on you.”
“If we both get killed then it's all over, and if it comes to a fight, you'll hold me back. I nearly didn't get you aboard that lander down there on the ice. I have your engrams in my brain if I need your knowledge. Stay here and carry on with your research, and I'll take the Dragon into Dead Space.”
“You're not ready.”
“I'm more than ready. You need to stop trying to protect me.”
She could see he was torn: worried for her but also obsessed with continuing his research at the Refuge. In the end, pragmatism won.
“You feel sufficiently recovered? Your tremor has gone?”
“I feel completely fine. Climbing the bulkheads with boredom, maybe, but fine. It makes sense for me to go and you to stay.”
“You will follow the approach protocols to the letter when you return?”
If I return. “I will.”
“Promise me you'll be careful. Follow the course Aefrid plotted to the nanometre and run away if there's any sign of Concordance activity. Run away if there's any sign of anything. It's completely possible that whoever or whatever did live in this Dead Space is long gone, or that they never existed in the first place. It's also completely possible that a ring of Concordance attack ships will be there, waiting for you.”
He was trying to look after her, she knew. But the thought of escaping the Refuge, of having a ship and the entire galaxy available to her was suddenly irresistible. She considered telling him that she might not come back after all, that she would take up his offer of a life of freedom on some distant world.
Out loud she said, “I'll get the Dragon prepped and ready to fly.”
2. Dead Space
The Radiant Dragon felt each twist on the path that it was following through metaspace as a spike of agony.
Threading through the void on its winding, worm cast trajectory went against every instinct built into it. It was an old ship, predating the Omnian War by at least a full century, and it had clearly been constructed at a time when transgalactic FTL travel was normal and common. It knew that much, even though large parts of its memory had been expunged – it assumed – during a period of Concordance control. Certainly, someone had excised its recollections of the species who had built it, the purpose they had created it for and the travels it had undertaken before the conflagration. But it had clear memories of a large-scale battle between Magellanic and Concordance forces at the Cybanor system, and of being seized by rebels scoring a rare victory against the Cathedral ships. And then, eventually, of becoming the property of Aefrid Sen and Ondo Lagan.
Despite everything that had been taken from it, an absolute aversion to Dead Space remained clear within it. Avoiding them was built into its design at a fundamental level, for reasons it had no way of knowing. Metaspace jumps into the regions were more dangerous than jumping adjacent to a large mass, but both were absolutely to be avoided. Ondo and Selene had managed to override the strictures programmed into it allowing it to make the journey, but flying its current trajectory remained deeply unpleasant. Alarms cut through it repeatedly. It constantly had to override them, force itself along the path that its very essence was screaming at it to avoid.
It had the troubling sense of being divided, of having multiple Minds competing within it. Its uttermost core had long been dormant for some reason, locked away, and the recent interventions of Ondo and Selene had stirred that consciousness into renewed awareness. For that to be on a journey into Dead Space was like wakening to a living nightmare. Its innermost essence rebelled, longing for the sanctuary of its former oblivion. The experience was extremely disorientating; it had a growing sense of its former nature slowly emerging from the mists. It both feared and welcomed that. A part of it needed to know what and who it was, needed to emerge from its enforced slumber.
It persevered on the journey, refusing to turn back. Its capacity for emotion was limited, but it wanted to destroy Concordance as fervently as Ondo and now Selene did. It was a superluminal ship, constructed to fling itself around the galaxy, skip from star to star. Once there must have been many like it, a teeming swarm of FTL ships, all the worlds theirs. Concordance control had denied it its fundamental nature, and one day, it desperately hoped, that stricture would be ended and it, and others like it, could fly free again. Aefrid and then Ondo had given it that hope, and now it would do everything it could in their fight. The trail Ondo followed was its trail. Its own memories were the memories of the whole galaxy.
It had faint recollections of other ships: far greater Minds that it had once been a part of or subservient to. They'd been intrinsically linked, networked in a way it could no longer imagine. Perhaps some of them had been more than ships: planetary minds or something greater still. It didn't know; those memories also had been burned from it. Dangerous knowledge. So much had been lost.
It would protect Selene. Without her knowing, Ondo had instructed it to make sure it returned her safely to the Refuge, not to take extreme risks unless Selene specifically ordered them. Selene needed to acquire knowledge, but she also needed to survive to fight another day. Living beings like her and Ondo were ridiculously vulnerable and easy to break, and she was utterly in its power. It understood that. It would do all it could to protect her.
Ondo's concern wasn't merely practical: he was emotionally attached to Selene as well. He'd admitted as much. In its limited way, the Radiant Dragon felt the same about its new pilot. Once, perhaps, it had been capable of a much higher order of empathy, and it was possible that was emerging again. It caught glimpses of that capacity, like an extra dimension to its mind that was normally closed to it. Memories, hints, always fleeting.
It often found Selene confusing, her anger and bitterness in stark contrast to Ondo's quiet instructions. At some level, it had assumed she was angry because it hadn't carried out her orders correctly, but Ondo had explained at length why she was like that: the dreadful injuries and the prolonged process of her repair, the loss, and the burning need for revenge. In some ways, it understood that. Without knowing what, it knew it had lost much, too.
Another agony shot through it as it dropped out of metaspace for the seventeenth time. It could do nothing to silence the alarms. Saying nothing to Selene, it reorientated itself and began the run-up to the eighteenth jump on the long and gruelling journey.
The Radiant Dragon's imminent danger alarms grated on Selene's nerves, their frequency and volume deliberately designed to be impossible to ignore. They blared in her head every time the ship altered course to follow the labyrinthine complexity of Aefrid Sen's route, every time the ship altered its velocity relative to Euclidean space, every time the ship just damn well wanted to annoy her a little more.
It was definitely succeeding.
She hadn't told Ondo that she'd configured the Dragon to communicate verbally rather than talking directly brain-to-Mind. Sometimes it was more satisfying to shout at the mercilessly calm, controlling AI of the ship.
“Stop sounding those fucking alarms. I get it, we're picking our way through Dead Space and you don't like it.”
The alarms continued to shriek in her mind while the Dragon's polite voice replied. “The alerts are encoded into my nav systems at a fundamental level. They can't be silenced without deactivating the entire control nexus. If you do that, we would be unable to navigate metaspace. Or remain structurally coherent.”
“They're fucking annoying.”
“They're protecting you by ensuring I can't be tampered with, to stop you flying unwittingly into one of the dead zones. You will be aware you had to override five distinct layers of command lockout even to get here, but the alarms cannot be silenced.”
She certainly was aware; it had taken her and Ondo three days to persuade the ship to accept the course through Dead Space that Aefrid had given them. There had been reprogramming and there had been endless biosecurity checks. Twice they'd resorted to
using metal tools to rip out elements of the Dragon's control arrays. She couldn't quite shake the suspicion it was getting its revenge.
At one point, Ondo had fished out a control fleck patched onto the ship's control pathways.
“What is that?” she'd asked.
“My guess is they couldn't deactivate a layer of the ship's Mind and resorted to suppressing it. By the look of the control pathways this was wrapped around, they may even have been blocking off the innermost core.”
He studied the tiny device through his multiglasses, turning it to catch the light with his micropincers. “This shim ensures executive control of the ship's core functions can be overridden from elsewhere. It's a crude block, but it would be effective; it basically bounces any commands back down the pathway they came from. To the sealed-off Mind, the effect would be maddening: any commands it gives would be immediately shouted back at it. It would be like being locked in a sealed room whose walls echo everything you say.”
“Can we release this core intellect?”
“I wish we could, but no. We need this block in place to ensure we can override the ship's aversion to Dead Space.”
It seemed cruel, but there was no choice. It was just a ship. Now she said, “Can't you make that annoying fucking screaming sound quietly?”
“If it were quiet, it wouldn't be very good alarm,” the ship replied reasonably. She also wasn't sure if the ship was being sarcastic or she was projecting onto it. In any case, it was clear she could do nothing but bear the sounds as the Dragon manoeuvred into the heart of a region of space that no ship was supposed to venture near.
She closed her eyes and tried to go to a place of calm inside her mind. It had never worked so far, but the effort of it gave her something to do.
A standard day later, the mists of the metaspace void thinned, and the ship translated for the thirty-seventh time into normal space. No broken laws of physics rendered the ship into transdimensional fragments. The Dragon reported full structural integrity, no imminent threats, no proximate galactic masses or ships. All was utterly normal.
Apart, that was, from the lack of stars. The rest of the galaxy, the rest of the universe, was gone.
Selene sifted through every wavelength of electromagnetic radiation at her disposal, scanned for gravity wave fluctuations or symmetry anomalies in the underlying Higgs field. Nothing. They floated in utter darkness; reality appeared to consist solely of the Radiant Dragon and, three light-years distant, a single blue dwarf sun, glowing away like it was the last beacon of the heat death of the universe. Such stars were, so far as she knew, unknown in the galaxy. In fact it was a clear anomaly; the universe wasn't old enough yet for one to have evolved from a red dwarf.
“What is going on?” She asked the question even though the ship would have no more answers than she did.
“Impossible to say. Either we are in an isolated reality fold, or else some screen of an unknown nature is isolating us from the rest of the galaxy.”
A reality fold. The phrase sent an electric shock of alarm through her. Falling into a pocket universe was one of the constant dangers of traversing metaspace. Perhaps that was the nature of the dead zones. Jumping into them meant being marooned in a closed universe, the faintest bubble of mass/energy in the endless ocean of the metaverse. It would explain the dire warnings embedded into the nav system: the chances of successfully returning from a translation into a separate universe were infinitesimal. It might explain the presence of a blue dwarf star, too.
At least she was going to be safe from Concordance for the rest of her days. The problem was, it also meant they were going to be safe from her, and that was something she couldn't allow. She studied the telemetry streams in closer detail. Local space around the Dragon was filled with a scatter of stray molecules, plasma and dust particles, and their variety and signature was consistent with the galactic space she was used to seeing. That was something. Maybe they weren't completely cut off. The ship's high-sensitivity gravity detectors also registered a very large number of distant masses, in all directions. More good news: it at least suggested they were inside a galactic mass, even if it wasn't necessarily the correct one.
“Head for the star.”
“Under reaction drive?”
She couldn't afford to wait the years that would take even at maximum acceleration. She thought about consulting her personal copy of Ondo, then decided against it. He would only recommend caution. “Make microjumps to bring us nearer.”
“Is that wise, given the seemingly anomalous physics of this region of space?” The ship's tones were neutral, but it was hard not to read disapproval into its question.
“Probably not, but that's what we're going to do,” she said. “Maintain full readiness to escape on Sen's egress route in case … bad things happen.” She considered the star. It would have started small and would have shed much of its mass over its long lifetime. They could afford to get closer than usual and still have a good chance of making an emergency escape into metaspace. “Jump to the 75% safety boundary, and we'll see what's there.”
“That means a 25% chance that we won't survive the translation.”
It was her turn to teach the ship some sarcasm. “Thanks for the help with the higher mathematics. We'll take those odds.”
They completed four jumps in-system, shorter and shorter until they reached the 75% boundary. There was no sign of pursuit, nor of any Concordance activity. A single rocky planet orbited the star, a mere twenty million kilometres from the sun's surface. It had little magnetosphere and no atmosphere, the star bathing its surface in hard radiation. It wasn't the sort of place anyone was going to be living.
“There are several oddities about this solar system,” said the Dragon.
“Such as the fact that the universe isn't old enough for the star to exist.”
“That, and the curious nature of the planet. According to my calculations, it may once have grazed the surface of the sun. Its path may even have lain inside the stellar mass.”
Inside. That made no sense. A planetary body couldn't survive such stresses. It couldn't even have formed in the first place: its atoms would have become part of the star, not a distinct body and certainly not a rocky one. There had to be some other explanation, but the only one she could come up with was deliberate design by some advanced intelligence. A species with a capacity for stellar engineering far in advance of anything she or Ondo knew of. Was Concordance capable of such feats? It seemed unlikely, but then there was the fact of their ships and their solar shrouds and their rise to galactic domination. And if Concordance had formed this system, it really might be a trap after all. A deliberately intriguing galactic anomaly.
Dread continued to trickle through her. There would be no escape from this bubble of space if a halo of Cathedral ships arrived in-system; she would never be able to fight her way through them. How many other renegades had come here over the centuries, lured by intriguing tales to meet a quick end? She had to suppress the urge to flee, to turn and head for the egress point. No enemy ships had, in fact, arrived. She counted seconds to herself, forcing herself to remain motionless, and still no attacks came.
While these thoughts thudded through her, another part of her brain studied the telemetry streaming in from the tiny planet. She'd fired high-g nanosensors towards it, the devices manoeuvring to study the world from different angles, slowly revealing more of its surface.
She saw the features at the same moment the Dragon spoke. “There appear to be structures upon the surface of the planet.”
At high magnification the details were unmistakable: straight lines arranged into patterns that had to be artificial. Neither she nor the Dragon knew of a natural phenomenon that could explain them. The largest, at the centre of a cluster of radiating markings, was a perfect triangle. She estimated its scale at thirty metres to the side. Whether it was simply the footprint of a now-ruined construction, or a complete building, or something else entirely, she had no way of telling.
It lay precisely in the centre of the disk pointing towards the star. From her initial calculations, the two bodies appeared to be tidally locked. The triangular body would always be trained upon the sun's surface. Again, it seemed unlikely to be a natural phenomenon.
Local space remained untroubled by Concordance incursion. She came to a decision. “Take us into orbit. While I go down to the surface, return to this extraction point and wait. If Concordance arrive and you calculate you can escape, get back to Ondo and report on everything that's here. Make sure he knows not to try entering Dead Space again.”
She skimmed the lander low across the surface of the dark side of the rocky planet while the Dragon lifted out of orbit for its egress point. Turned always away from the sun, the surface below was only a hundred degrees off absolute zero. Despite this, it was glassy smooth, no sign of the usual scatter of craters and rocks. She made sure the lander's energy hull was powered up to max, then directed the ship across the terminator onto the planet's sunwards side.
She approached the structures she'd seen from space warily, alive to the dangers of defensive fire. None came. It was hard to escape the notion that the radiating lines were directing her inwards to the central point. There, the triangular shape was a tetrahedron, a pyramid with three faces rather than the four of the Radiant Dragon. It appeared to be built from stone. The structures had received considerable damage at some point in the past. Whether this was the result of cataclysmic bombardment, or the long accumulation of meteorite strikes, it was impossible to say, but deep gouges were cut through the radiating lines on the ground, and a chunk had been bitten out of one of the corners of the pyramidal structure.
An accurate Microimpact Count Analysis of the surfaces was impossible to obtain without landing, but the numbers she had suggested that the structure was old. Decay rates would be impossible to predict accurately in such an environment, but her best guess was that the ruin had stood for many centuries. Maybe even millennia. She circled the pyramid, studying it with the ship's battery of sensors, looking for dangers. A design had been carved into each of the three faces: a simple circle. They were not, she noted, the same size as each other. The designers had deliberately made one smaller, one larger.