Dead Star (The Triple Stars, Volume 1)

by Simon Kewin

  On the ship, it was very, very quiet.

  7. The Remains of Shattered Starships

  “You were longer than I thought,” said Ondo. “Did something happen on Migdala?”

  They were back in the medsuite, Ondo delicately picking at her artificial skin, peeling it from her substrate in long strips. The sensation was not unpleasant – once she'd switched off her pain responses across the affected areas of her body. He'd applied three separate acidic chemicals, their molecular composition very specific and none of them likely to be encountered naturally, in order to break down her bioplastic flesh. Then he used a needle-like high-pressure jet of water to wash away any residue. He worked with the utmost care, but it still felt like being stippled with a thousand pinpricks as he touched the edges of her natural skin.

  “Lots of things happened on Migdala.”

  He stopped work for a moment and considered her. His voice was slightly muffled through the white mask he wore over his mouth and nose. “Things you want to tell me about?”

  “Some of them.”

  “Then I look forward to hearing them. And then I can tell you what I've discovered while you've been away.”

  “Oh, before you start on my face, there's this.” She reached down to take the book from her backpack on the floor. “A gift. It might be of interest.”

  Ondo took it, leafed through it. “Where did you get this?”

  “That's one of the things I can't tell you. It wasn't stolen, if that's what you mean. No one will miss it.”

  “It's absolutely wonderful: a detailed account of life before the arrival of Concordance. It's incredibly rare. I'll examine it in depth later. Thank you.” He closed the book and studied her again. “And you … you took much greater care over the approach protocols. Something has changed, I think.”

  “I didn't want to get myself killed. Or you, for that matter.”

  “And, I have Myrced to thank for this?” he said. His words sent a jolt of alarm through her. She hadn't mentioned the name to him. Was he able to intrude upon her thoughts after all?

  He responded to her anxiety with an amused shake of his head. “The name is handwritten in the front of the book. For Selene, who moves the stars. Myrced.”

  Right. Damn. She hadn't thought to look. She gave him a verbal summary of everything that had occurred. She did not give him access to his alter ego inside her mind, not wanting him to have any access to her memories of Myrced, even public ones. He worked on her back as she spoke, dabbing the chemicals onto her and then peeling off more strips of flesh.

  When she was done, he said, “Are you absolutely sure it was Kane?”

  “Absolutely. Concordance must have pulled him out of the nuke blast before he was vaporised.”

  “It certainly seems to confirm that he's one of Godel's coterie.”

  “People I spoke to; they were adamant he'd been fundamentally altered by Concordance; that he wasn't the brute they claimed. He was a freedom-fighter, widely-loved, charismatic by all accounts, softly-spoken. Did you know about this?”

  “No. I assumed they simply recruited people psychologically suited to being Concordance killers. The sociopaths, the amoral.”

  “They all have that scar behind their ears. That has to be part of it.”

  “My assumption is that they embed some sort of punishment or coercion fleck into Void Walkers' brains to ensure their absolute loyalty. Maybe it goes further than that. From what you've described, Kane's personality has been fundamentally re-engineered. He's outwardly recognizable to the people of Migdala, but inside he's something else completely.”

  “They can do that?”

  “We have to assume they can. A lifetime of brutalization might have that effect on someone strong enough to survive the ordeal, but Kane was in Concordance's clutches for only a very short time before he emerged as the Void Walker we now know. If he was altered so fundamentally, it took only a few weeks at the most. His capture and anointment ceremony were broadcast to the galaxy, and then he turned up a short time later on Ossian, carrying out the atrocities I've shown you. Concordance's convenient story that the Void Walkers have already lost their souls, that they've forfeited their humanity to become the shock-troops of Omn: perhaps that isn't complete nonsense. Somewhere in that there's a speck of truth.”

  “Even if he's being mind-controlled, I'm still going to kill him,” she said.

  Ondo, working behind her back, didn't reply. When he was finished on her shoulder, he came around to consider her. “I need to do your face. You'll have to paralyze all your facial response and vocalization mechanisms.”

  She switched to brain-to-brain comms. “The sooner I can get this flesh off, the better. Can you fix my arm so I can hyperextend it to reach my back? If I'm going to put on this disguise, it'll be the only way.”

  “Your skeleton is locked in natural emulation mode, but you can deactivate that with the right thought commands. I'll show you. I wouldn't do it in public, though; it'll look like your arm is attached backwards.”

  “Handy if I get an itch I can't reach.”

  “Once your face is done, shall I leave the rest of your skin for you to remove? Your breast and your pelvis and your leg?”

  “Then you can tell me what you've discovered while I've been away.”

  “In truth, it's frustratingly little. You recovered a great deal of data, but the problem with it, still, is understanding the context. Are they random snatches of deleted information, for example? I can still identify no organising principle. It's possible the storage device is degraded, and we're seeing only fragments.”

  “You got nothing at all?”

  “I'm still correlating what you found with everything I already know. There are a couple of items that leap out, however.”

  He sent her a brief sequence of images, a series of frames depicting lines and lines of cathedral ships docked on some vast, tree-like structure. She counted them rapidly. “There are thousands of them.”

  “It's only what we already know, of course. There must be many times this number given how many systems they monitor. Still, to see them collected together … it's a troubling sight.”

  “It's a battle fleet.”

  “Yes. Consider what that many ships could do acting in concord. No force in galactic history that I'm aware of could hope to stand against them.”

  “More mysteries,” she said. “Can you work out where this is? If it's the Concordance fleet's home, this might be an image of the Omn system.”

  “I've thrown every image enhancement I can at this scene and got nothing. The local stars are invisible, their light washed out by the incipient glow from a nearby star. Or, actually, more than one star judging by the spectrum of wavelengths. I'd say it's a system with two or even three.”

  “Can you tell how old these pictures are?”

  “Not even that.”

  “I hope the other thing you found is more useful.”

  “I think it is. I decrypted some data from the flecks we picked up from the ice on Maes Far. It turns out that ship was previously involved in a significant battle on the outer edges of another system. I got some clear pictures of a number of Magellanic Alliance ships being destroyed, which gives us a narrow date range. From what I can tell, two Concordance ships were ambushed by a fleet of at least thirteen craft. Certainly, twelve were obliterated, and we know that at least one – the one from Maes Far – escaped. I also got a clear view of the background stars, which has allowed me to pinpoint the new system. It's one I've never visited, as it was low-tech at the moment of Concordance's ascension to domination and hasn't achieved FTL flight in the intervening period.”

  “So, we go there and look for hulks?”

  “There's a chance we'll find the remains of a ship that had been in contact with the Magellanic Cloud, or had received data on the whereabouts of the Omn system. We might encounter opposition too, of course, but that seems less likely: Concordance also don't bother to devote an orbital presence to pre-FT
L worlds, or much in the way of orbital monitoring. Often, it's nothing more than a few Void Walkers on the ground, undercover, keeping an eye on things.”

  “And if we can work out where the Omn world is, we attack it.”

  “We'd need to observe, gather telemetry. Understand what, exactly, we're up against; I assume their godhead system is extremely well-protected. I doubt very much that we could drop in and unleash a few nukes to finish them off.”

  “They may be unprepared, thinking they're safe because no one knows where they are.”

  “I'm not sure that's a risk I'd run.”

  “The measures we take when we return to the Refuge. The approach protocols. You must have tried something similar on them. You must have attached nanosensors and bugs to their ships in the hope of tracking them through metaspace.”

  “Many, many times. I've flooded every monitored system with probes, attempted to embed them into the structure of Cathedral ships and Void Walker vessels, but I've never heard a single response from any that jumped out-system. They clearly have protocols of their own, or else they use some bug-sweeping technology that defeats mine.”

  “Either we chase this new lead, or we go back into Dead Space and attempt to find out more from the Depository, take some of those artefacts, study the reader device. We could interrogate the broken Warden entity and persuade it forcibly to give up its secrets.”

  “I think the battlefield is our better option. There has to be a high risk of jumping into an ambush if we return quickly to the Depository system. We don't know that Concordance didn't spot you.”

  “And the longer we delay, the more time we give Concordance to unleash another Maes Far.” It was an argument they'd had more than once. The problem was that they were both right in their own ways.

  “We may only get once chance to fight them; we have to be sure we get it right,” said Ondo. “There's also the effect that the journey through Dead Space had on the Radiant Dragon. I monitored its profiles as you returned from Migdala; it does not appear to have recovered from the damage – I might even say trauma – of making the journey as fully as I thought it would. Did it report any system stress to you during the journey?”

  “It remained as irritatingly implacable as ever.”

  “I don't want to repeat the manoeuvre through Dead Space until we've properly understood the effect the last one had on the Dragon. My readings suggest that the impairment of its systems is something akin to psychological harm.”

  “I carried out a full diagnostic as we waited to approach. It's fully functional.”

  “Did you observe anything out of the ordinary in its behaviour at all?”

  She considered. “A couple of moments when it stuttered, didn't respond instantly. Like, a shudder running through it. Then it carried on without trouble.”

  Ondo considered. “I agree that the Dragon is operational for any normal run, but I don't want to expose it to Dead Space again so quickly.”

  “Have you worked anything out about that blue star?”

  “Nothing beyond the plain fact that it shouldn't exist. It was a red dwarf that has exhausted more of its hydrogen than is possible given the age of the universe. I have no idea how that happened.”

  “Maybe your astrophysical model is wrong.”

  “That's always a possibility, but this is the only such anomaly I've ever found.”

  “Don't you want to go there and study it in detail?”

  “Naturally, but I'm not convinced that will help right now. Despite what you may think, I am desperate to reach the end of the road and find some answers.”

  “The thing I can't understand is why Concordance lets Migdala have its carnivals, why it allows open dissent in the streets. They obviously have the power to put a permanent stop to that.”

  Ondo frowned as he concentrated on peeling a triangle of flesh from her left cheekbone. “The more answers we find, the more questions we uncover. We know they sometimes look for ways to maintain their grip without resorting to widespread slaughter, although that's hardly Godel's style. Even the shrouds: they're terrible weapons, of course, but wouldn't some overwhelming detonation be quicker and easier? Why don't Concordance deploy more shrouds if they want to send everyone flying through the sacred wormhole?”

  “They want to draw events out, show the galaxy the slow horror.”

  “I suppose that's all it is,” conceded Ondo.

  “You think there's more to it.”

  “I think we're witnessing factional infighting within Concordance. My suspicion is that Godel was despatched to Migdala as a warning to her, as much as anything. Primo Carious is no fool. Godel would no doubt have loved to have built a shroud or obliterated a continent or two, and I suspect Carious is exerting his control over her by stopping her from doing so. He's humiliating her.”

  “She's not going to like that.”

  “Which probably explains her overreaction at Senefore, when you were nearly killed. She will claim that she had no alternative when it came to restoring order.”

  “If I were her, being whipped into line would only make me more determined.”

  Her statement appeared to amuse Ondo, but he said nothing.

  “Do you think she's a threat to Carious?” Selene asked.

  “We simply don't know how a new leader emerges from among the First Augurs. We don't even know how many First Augurs there are, or how people become one. Publicly, they claim divine Omn appoints the person who is to be the new Primo, Omn's new interlocuter with mortal beings. I suspect that what actually happens is more mundane than that, possibly a lot bloodier than that. My guess is that Godel would go to any length to seize control of the galaxy, just as Carious did before her. But perhaps there are divisions there we can exploit.”

  He stepped back to consider her features, relaying images from his eyes into her brain for her to see. Her face was back to normal. She reactivated her facial motor controls, flexed her jaw a few times to get everything working, then spoke out loud. “Tomorrow, I'll take the Dragon to this new system and see what I can find. Are you going to drop your research for a while and come?”

  She knew what his answer would be without him needing to reply.

  She translated into the system half a billion kilometres from its sun. She caught no metaspace signatures other than her own, no indication of recent Concordance activity. She set about seeding the system with monitoring devices. Spotting the remains of shattered starships, especially after such a long period of time, was extremely difficult over a wide area. At most, there'd be only the faintest of energy traces from surviving hulks; her best hope lay in spotting unexpected patterns of background star occultation. The more viewpoints she had to correlate, the better. She jumped around the periphery of the system, dispersing nanosensors at each point.

  When that was done, she sat and waited while the Dragon analysed the telemetry streams, picking through the faint whispers and flickers of electromagnetic radiation for some unexpected signal.

  Bored after two days of finding nothing, she jumped as deep in-system as she dared to go, then powered towards the system's single inhabited planet on reaction drive. The world was advanced enough to put communications satellites into orbit and fire a few probes towards the edges of the system, but there were no orbiting ships of any significance and nothing in the electromagnetic noise that spilled off the planet to suggest the inhabitants knew anything about wider galactic affairs. This was a nascent civilisation, teetering on the brink of discovering the technology needed for metaspace travel, teetering also on the edge of environmental collapse and military conflagration. Perhaps, if Ondo's golden age really had existed, a world such as this would have been guided towards the stars, gently shown how to take the final leap. That wasn't going to happen now.

  She wasn't sure if she felt sorry for the population on the planet or if she envied them. They were locked in endless petty concerns, fighting small battles of no great significance, oblivious. But they also had no knowledg
e of Concordance, didn't know what awaited them if they did work out the technology required to traverse metaspace. They were tantalisingly close to making the breakthroughs: a few insights, some new ways of thinking from theoretical physicists and mathematicians, and they'd be there.

  It would be a moment of triumph – and disaster. They wouldn't even need to build a viable ship; the acquisition of the necessary knowledge would be enough for Concordance. The Augurs would intervene immediately, and the planet's first experience of contact with other intelligence would be one of oppression and subjugation. They, too, would become used to the sight of a Cathedral ship in orbit, and of messages and instructions and threats handed down from the sky.

  For now, they were ignorant, like children unaware of the burdens and agonies of adulthood. Except, as was clear from their broadcasts, they were not children. There was beauty and miraculous achievement there, but there was also atrocity and agony and horror. They were people like her people had been: surprising, inspiring, terrifying, sometimes all at once.

  This close, she also detected one anomaly: a halo of nanosensors in orbit around the planet. They were dark, receiving rather than transmitting, and were almost certainly undetectable to the planet's technology. They weren't Ondo's; they had to be Concordance devices, presumably for monitoring the messages of the embedded Void Walkers on the ground. From their inactivity, it appeared they had no clue she was there. Nor would the planet: the Dragon's technology was easily capable of concealing it from any watchers on the surface.

  She couldn't resist doing what she did next. She was drifting in space twenty light-seconds from the planet. Its night side was turned towards her, a spattering of artificial lights visible on high magnification. There was a high probability no one would notice: the planet had some telescopes monitoring distant stars and deep space, but they were purely scientific instruments. The people on the planet did not routinely monitor local space. Why would they?