by Simon Kewin
She and Ondo treated the recovered memories with due reverence, the two of them silent as they studied the flashes of past existences. She felt bad about how she'd treated the bodies, the lack of remorse as she'd severed their heads. It troubled her that the Selene who'd lived on Maes Far could never have done such a thing. Had she changed so much? She vowed to return to the hulk at some point, reunite heads and bodies and give the dead some sort of reverential send-off, perhaps immolate their remains in that yellow star around which they'd orbited for so long.
Finally, the images revealed something useful. One of the dead had been a navigator, the flecks in her brain closely integrated with the ship's control systems so that glimpses of flight paths and metaspace routes were visible. It was Selene that picked out the single fragment that gave them what they needed: a complete and traceable metaspace route. At one end was a region of space with its star-fields clearly visible, enough to allow an accurate galactic position to be pinpointed. At the other end was a system, and a planet.
A world Ondo assured her was Coronade.
“How can you possibly know?” she demanded. “There's no sign saying Welcome to the Mythical World of Coronade. There's no audio or anything even mentioning the name.”
“Yes,” he said, “but look: compare the landmasses of this world to those on the images I first showed you.”
He was right, there could be no doubt. It was the same purple-oceaned planet strewn with honey-yellow and gold-orange continents. Either this planet was an engineered twin, or it was the world Ondo had previously identified.
“We still don't know this is the Coronade.”
“Nobody has ever mentioned there being more than one world with that name.”
She considered. “We know the starting point of that metaspace jump and we can trace the route taken before arrival at this world.”
“At Coronade.”
“Okay, at Coronade. Still, we can't fix its location exactly. The stars move, and the topography of metaspace shifts with them.”
“Between us and the Refuge's computational powers, we can narrow the location down to maybe a hundred systems in a closely-defined region of space.”
He sent her brain a three-dimensional map of the area in question, with likely systems flashing. She projected it into the room around them so they could visualize it.
She was intrigued, now. It was just possible he was onto something.
“We know the type of star we're looking for from the wavelengths of the solar radiation,” she said, “and we also know there's at least one rocky planet in orbit.” She manipulated the data, dimming systems that didn't match those criteria. “A couple of the systems you or Aefrid Sen have investigated, and since you didn't find anything of interest, we can strike them off, too. We can also exclude these fifteen systems where the rocky worlds are too near their stars, or too far away, for standing water to form. We know the planet you think of as Coronade had oceans.”
Ondo nodded, considering her map floating around their heads. “Somewhere around one of these remaining twenty-three stars, we'll find it.”
“We need to study each planet in greater detail,” she said. “You're sure you've never been to any of them?”
“They're just a few among billions. Most of the galaxy is unknown to me.”
“I don't see anything remarkable about any of the remaining worlds. Why would one of these be the hub of a galaxy-spanning civilisation?”
“Perhaps a cultural movement began on this world that eventually spread throughout the galaxy. Or perhaps it was an uninhabited world, neutral ground that the Alliance worlds adopted as their home. There might be a thousand reasons. Perhaps the star had some spiritual significance for the people living in a nearby system.”
Selene considered tactical practicalities. “We have to assume Concordance are there. Vulpis must have known where Coronade was, and it's inconceivable they'd leave such a world undefended. They've gone to a lot of trouble to make sure no one finds it. Given that they claim it never existed, they're going to make damn sure no one who goes there is allowed to get away to tell the galaxy.”
Doubts of some sort clouded Ondo's features, but he left them unspoken. Instead, he said, “We'll find Coronade in this handful of stars, I'm sure of it.”
“And if we do, what then?”
“Then we're one step closer to finding Omn and answering all our questions.”
“And destroying Concordance.”
“Yes, of course. That also.”
It took Selene and the Dragon a week to seed each system with nanosensors. Ondo's preference was to drop the devices far away from each stellar mass, allowing months to go by for them to collect their telemetry of distant planets and moons. Ignoring that, Selene dashed repeatedly in-system, releasing the sensors before fleeing away. She saw no sign of Concordance activity during her momentary appearances in normal space, but she didn't wait around to look properly.
Once she was done sowing, she set about reaping: repeating the route she'd taken, harvesting the data the sensors had gathered. Each incursion this time made her more nervous; there had to be a chance Concordance had spotted something and would be waiting for her. She took care not to follow any predictable trajectory patterns and remained material for as short a time as possible.
Within another week, she had all the data they were going to get. They studied it at the Refuge, once again standing upon the cartography deck with each system imaged around them. They were able to exclude eleven rapidly enough: they lacked stable solar orbits or were seismically too active. They worked the list down to two worlds with the right proportions of ocean and land orbiting a viable star – but the shapes of the continents on neither matched what they'd seen of Coronade.
“I must have missed one,” she said. “Or else the planet simply isn't there.”
“No,” said Ondo. “It has to be there.”
“I don't see where. None of the planets are close to matching our target landmass signatures, and the only one we can't check is suffering total environmental collapse, the atmosphere so dense our sensors can't penetrate to the surface. There's no way that could ever have been an inhabited world.”
She caught the moment of excitement sparking in Ondo's eyes.
“Unless it was habitable three hundred years ago,” he said. “If someone visited Maes Far three centuries from now, they might find something similar.”
“Except there's no shroud deployed in orbit. There's nothing there, it's a completely dead world. If single-celled life ever evolved on that planet, it probably got depressed and died out millions of years ago from boredom.”
A frown had spread across Ondo's features. He was pursuing an idea in his mind.
“You're trying to think of a way this rock could be Coronade, aren't you?” she said.
“There is something odd about its orbit.”
She studied the data they had. “It all looks normal to me. A bit eccentric but nothing extreme.”
“It's subtle, but I think there's something there. Planets sweep paths through the dust specks filling space, the tenuous clouds of stray molecules making up the void. It looks to me like the planet's path has altered slightly in the recent past. Recent in astronomical terms, I mean.”
“That would imply a significant impact or some other shift in mass. Maybe a meteorite struck it. That's not uncommon; that's what planets are.”
“True, but there are surprisingly few rogue asteroids or comets in the system that might impact the planet. It's almost as if someone has gone to a lot of trouble to remove any such risks to this one world, cleaning up the system of potential dangers.”
“That's a hell of a reach, Ondo. You're clutching at straws, seeing what you want to see. The planet's a lifeless hell-hole scoured by hurricane-force winds, and I see no sign of any environmental terraforming. I also see no sign of Concordance defence batteries and fleets ready to atomize anyone who discovers a world they claim doesn't exist.”
&n
bsp; The frowns deepened about his eyes. Once he got hold of an idea, he wouldn't let it go. “I still think we should look closer. Drop atmospheric probes in to see if we can identify any continents, sample the atmosphere, look for clues. If this is Coronade, Concordance will have gone to a lot of trouble to obliterate it completely, scribble it out of the galaxy. But short of destroying the planet, breaking it apart, they would have left some evidence.”
“Do we have any other leads from the images retrieved at the Depository?”
“Nothing as solid as this one.”
“I'll take the Dragon out and get as close to the planet as I can,” she said.
She approached the planet warily. The stars of the galaxy shone unblinkingly, and she detected no dark bulks eclipsing them, no sign of a Concordance ship on an approach vector. Even so, she kept the Dragon's beam-weapon arrays fully powered-up, their targeting systems sweeping local space. She'd also picked up ten high-g nukes from one of the weapons caches Ondo had scattered around uninhabited corners of the galaxy. Part of her, it seemed, believed this world was what Ondo claimed.
When she was within three light-seconds of the dead world, the Dragon spoke unexpectedly. “I recognize this system. I know the taste of this star, the words spelled out by these constellations.”
The ship's words threw her; the Dragon had never offered opinions of its own before. It reacted to her commands and questions, and that was it. That was its function.
“We were here recently,” she said suspiciously. “You saw it all then. Obviously.”
The ship didn't reply. She'd noticed further glitches in its responses of late: extra microsecond pauses before it replied to her questions, stutters, as if it were reluctant to communicate. The occasional odd turn of phrase, sentences that didn't quite make sense. When she asked the ship to repeat itself, it corrected its language without comment and refused to acknowledge anything had changed.
While they approached the planet, she ran another full diagnostic assay of the Dragon's systems and the Mind controlling them. If the excursion into Dead Space had caused some trauma to the workings of the vessel, she needed to know about it. She absolutely did not need her life to be dependent on a malfunctioning ship, especially if Concordance showed up. The sweep found nothing, although in the time available it couldn't delve as deeply as she'd have liked. Sometime soon, they were going to have to strip the ship down to its components and figure out what was wrong with it.
Gazing into the ship's Mind was like zooming in on a fractal: however far you went, you saw the same patterns repeating, only the scale shifting. She had no idea if that was simply how the original, alien computational architecture worked, or if something was being deliberately concealed. The design of the ship's core remained fundamentally obscure to her. But if Concordance had done something to the ship when it was in their control, the alteration might still be embedded within it – even some impulse for betrayal or evil completely contrary to the original designers' intentions. A conflict within its core might be the cause of all the problems it was now – seemingly – suffering.
The thought did little to put her mind at rest as she edged closer to the ruined planet of maybe-Coronade. She orbited the planet five times, following a spiralling trajectory that allowed her to scatter nanosensors across the stratosphere. In the planet's storm-blasted air, the devices would rapidly scatter and drift, and the problem would be fixing their location as they swirled to the surface and began to record detail. She'd also sewed a winding thread of global positioning devices around the globe, along with powered higher-atmosphere relays to allow probes and satellites to maintain some sort of lock on each other. The network would degrade rapidly, and would have blind spots, but hopefully it would give her some idea of the outlines of the continents. If there were continents.
She put the Dragon into a four-hour trajectory that looped away from the planetary plane to reach a zenith at the 90% metaspace translation boundary before curving back to the planet and into the no-jump zone once more. She'd be able to attempt a metaspace translation for maybe a third of the time, half if she really wanted to push it. She'd also pick up velocity all the way so that on her return, she could graze the planet's atmosphere at an appreciable percentage of light-speed. She'd suck up any data that had been wrung out of the planet, then be away.
She'd caught no glimpse of any Concordance vessels. She found the fact strangely disappointing: partly she'd anticipated another chance to engage with the enemy, but also, she had to admit, she'd fostered a hope that this unpromising rock genuinely was the legendary world. Ondo probably had been alone with his obsessions for too long, but if he was right about this planet, they might genuinely be able to uncover some of Concordance's secrets. She'd even considered the possibility that this was Concordance's hidden home, their so-called Omn world.
That now did not look to be the case, but if the planet was Coronade, the enemy had certainly gone to a lot of trouble to obliterate it. And if it wasn't, she was going to a lot of trouble to extract telemetry from a very insignificant rock.
The Dragon powered away on its arc under full reaction-drive, the strain of its effort detectable as a high-frequency buzzing in its superstructure if she touched her left hand to the bulkheads. The sound of it was like a long-drawn-out, ultrasonic scream.
She put it out of her mind. She'd talk to Ondo about the Dragon once she was back at the Refuge. She had more important matters to worry about. If Concordance had spotted her incursion and were preparing a trap, even their highest-g missiles would have trouble hitting her at the speeds she would reach. Her trajectory would be easy to predict – which was the downside – but her sheer velocity meant she'd be gone from the vicinity of the planet an eye's blink after her arrival was detected. Speed would save her.
So she hoped. But as she neared the muddy, unlovely world after her slingshot loop out of the system and back in, she picked up a sudden flurry of warning blips. Then a snowstorm of them: telemetry markers coming from all points, artificial constellations of ships arriving in-system. IDs began to pop up, too: they were Cathedral ships, Void Walker attack vessels. She counted thirty of them, then forty.
Concordance had been closely monitoring the world after all. Unless they knew things they had no right to know – her discoveries at the Depository and then the details they'd discovered from the brain flecks of the dead crew of the hulk – her guess was that they hadn't come in force to capture her so much as to destroy anyone reaching this planet.
Which meant she didn't really need to study the telemetry they'd harvested from the planet's surface. The scale of the Concordance response made it clear enough: whether it was Coronade or not, the planet was clearly highly significant. All she had to do was collect the telemetry and escape the system without being obliterated by the attack ships converging upon her.
2. Inner Galaxies
She reached into the Mind of the Radiant Dragon, laying her thoughts lightly upon the controls without yet altering the ship's trajectory. She was minutes away from coming into high-g missile range. If it came to it, she needed to be able to take control, fly the ship with her own mind rather than rely on its programmed responses and strategies. It wasn't only that she could do a better job, her actions would also be an unknown quantity to the attacking sphere of Concordance vessels. They might well know how the Dragon would react given the threat it faced, but they would not know what she would do.
The velocity she'd accumulated had already thrown their calculations out: the containment sphere they'd constructed around the world was the wrong shape, too perfect. It would have ensnared an orbiting ship moving at a low velocity, but possibly not a vessel moving at 15% of light-speed. With luck, she could puncture the tightening ring they'd thrown around Coronade and escape into metaspace.
Luck was the operational word, though. Her flecks calmly informed her that her chance of succeeding was in the 20% to 40% range. Not great odds. She began to receive the first fragments of data from the
atmospheric probes she'd seeded the planet with. It was clearly incomplete, not uniformly distributed across the globe, but there was something there, patterns above mere random white-noise. In case she didn't make it out-system, she made sure to broadcast all the data she recovered using Ondo's encryption routines, to be picked up by the nanosensors drifting in the outer reaches of the system. Concordance couldn't sweep them all up. If she didn't make it back to the Refuge, either the slow nanosensor network would get the data to Ondo, or Ondo could get the other ship working, drop in to pick up what she'd acquired, and then at least the truth of what she'd found would get out.
Even if she didn't.
The strategy she needed to take became clearer in her mind. She would skim past Coronade, slingshot around it to pick up a small kick of extra velocity, then fire away from the ecliptic plane. She'd have a little leeway to select a trajectory after the slingshot, although her velocity limited her choices. She'd learned much about piloting a starship under Ondo's tutelage, and the rapid calculations her flecks made gave her an edge, but she also had a natural aptitude. Ondo had said it, more than once. Her father had encouraged her to drive farm vehicles, and then pilot atmospheric vessels on Maes Far. He'd given her games and simulations of space flight that were, technically, illegal. She'd thought little of it at the time, but it struck her now that he'd been preparing her in case she needed such skills. Was that possible? No time to dwell on it, now.