Dead Star - The Triple Stars Volume 1 E-Book

Simon Kewin

• Herausgeber: Simon Kewin
• Kategorie: Fantasy und Science-Fiction
• Sprache: Englisch

Veröffentlichungsjahr: 2020

Beschreibung

A hidden trail among the stars

The galaxy is in flames under the harsh theocratic rule of Concordance, the culture that once thrived among the stars reduced to scattered fragments. Selene Ada, last survivor of an obliterated planet, joins forces with the mysterious renegade, Ondo Lagan.

Together they attempt to unravel the mystery of Concordance’s rapid rise to galactic domination. They follow a trail of shattered starship hulks and ancient alien ruins, with the ships of the enemy always one step behind.

But it’s only when they find the mythical planet of Coronade that they uncover the true scale of the destruction Concordance is capable of unleashing…

Leseprobe

For refugees and emigrants and immigrants everywhere

Table of Contents

Prologue - The Magellanic Heresies

Planetary

Twenty-three Deaths

A Slow Cruelty

Coronade

A World in Shadows

Primo

Leavings

Maes Far

Ghost Translation

Sidereal

Kane

Dead Space

The Depository

Masks

Migdala

The Unmoving Stars

The Remains of Shattered Starships

Things Written in the Stars

Galactic

Artificial Constellations

Inner Galaxies

Metaspace

The Metakey

Dead Star

Landmarks

Table of Contents

Cover

Copyright Page

Title Page

Body Matter

Prologue - The Magellanic Heresies

Fragments recovered from the journal of Semion Achybe, astrophysicist of the deep space exploratory vessel Magellanic Cloud, as reassembled and translated by Ondo Ynwa Lagan from discoveries made on the (now extinct) planet Maes Far.

Warning: These fragments form part of the Magellanic Heresies as proscribed by Concordance. Ownership or propagation of these documents is considered an act of extreme heresy against Omn. Read or distribute at your own risk.

…and while triple sun systems aren't rare in the galaxy, this one was intriguing given the regularity of the three stars' movements around each other. The patterns of their orbits are complex – but there definitely are patterns. In most ternary systems, the motions of the stellar bodies are so unpredictable over time that they are essentially chaotic. It was the curiously clock-like regularity of the stellar trajectories we observed in this system that persuaded us to divert the Magellanic Cloud from its itinerary to visit the system in the first place…

…while the highly regular movements of the suns are intriguing, it is the rocky bodies in the system – both the planets and their satellites – that have proved to be more fascinating. At this point in time, we have no good explanations for the orbital movements observed. The planetary moons, in particular, do not conform to any of the predictions made by our computational models; their orbits simply should not be stable or regular. Each moon should have spiralled down onto a planetary collision trajectory long ago in galactic history.

Setting aside some of the wilder speculations among the crew, it is clear that our models must be wrong. Something is going on in this system that we do not understand…

Part 1 - Planetary

1. Twenty-three Deaths

Selene Ada died twenty-three times from her injuries – one death, by grim coincidence, for every year of her life.

She had only scattered recollections of her escape from her dying homeworld: the sickening moments of terror as her battered craft crumpled around her, each beam-weapon blast sending her ship lurching from its trajectory; the hard lines of the lander blurring with every hit inflicted upon it; her own screams ragged in her ears; her brain rattling around within her skull. It felt as though some god had reached down from the sky and seized her ship to shake it to pieces. There was nothing she could do but endure, the acceleration and the shuttle's restraints pinning her to the seat of her disintegrating craft.

There was also a moment, high in the atmosphere, the limbs of the planet curving away beneath her, when she thought she'd escaped unscathed. She'd climbed out of range of the ground-based planetary defence batteries. The unfamiliar lander upon which her life suddenly depended had suffered massive structural damage, alarms screaming at her from every display, but its drives continued to power her skywards and her suit's life-support systems remained viable. Against all the odds, she was going to escape the end of her world. A candle-flame of hope flickered in her mind.

Telemetry gave her a glimpse of the Cathedral ship in high orbit, ordnance blazing from its fuselage. She had never seen it so clearly before; it had been a bright light in the sky on summer evenings, moving across the sky with unnatural rapidity. Concordance had kept its form and capabilities deliberately obscure. It had been a constant presence in her life, always up there, always watching, but now she saw its true shape. It was a ship of vast and curious beauty, its twisting, sinuous lines like some coral outgrowth. It was hard to believe an object of such organic pearlescence could have been constructed from mere components. Its angles and forms were like no building, no object she'd ever seen.

Then its first salvo lanced into her. The blast sheared off the aft section of her craft, sending it spinning through the air like a maddened fly, exposing Selene to the atmosphere. She was shaken so violently that she bit a chunk from her tongue. She vomited into her helmet. Suit fans screamed to clear her airways and keep her breathing. Ground, sky, ground flashed repeatedly into view as the craft corkscrewed.

The damaged ship's random trajectory was probably what saved her. More beam-weapon fire lanced down from space, but always just behind, or just ahead of the lurching shuttle, the AI Mind of the attacking ship repeatedly miscalculating.

Then it caught up or got lucky. A solid shaft of coherent energy, one metre wide, hit her. She knew nothing about it. Ondo, later, told her how it must have been. It punched through the shuttle's thin hull, punched through Selene's body as she clung to her seat. The shot destroyed all remaining systems on the lander, evaporating them to mangled scraps. It was just fortunate that Ondo, hanging in low orbit aboard the Radiant Dragon, was close enough to capture the ruined shuttle and arc out of the planet's gravity well before the larger Concordance ship, its orbit too high, was able to intervene. Two Void Walker attack vessels pursued from the Cathedral ship but couldn't accelerate rapidly enough to reach the Dragon's velocity.

The direct hit on the lander also destroyed the biological systems of Selene's body. Beam-weaponry fire was designed to cut through the voidhulls of starships, not the soft flesh of people. Most of the left hemisphere of Selene's brain, along with one third of her skull, were burned instantly away. Ondo speculated that the intense heat, cauterizing her blood vessels, may have helped to preserve her surviving tissues for a vital few minutes. Nevertheless, death was instantaneous. Her left shoulder, her left arm, a third of her chest cavity and abdomen, half of her pelvis and her left leg were also obliterated in the same moment. Her right leg and the tissues around the centre-line of her body suffered major damage from the searing heat.

Her bones burned.

That was the first of her deaths, alone in the ruined craft, with the orbital bombardment from the Cathedral ship lancing around her, and with Ondo swooping in aboard the Dragon to rescue her and flee before any pursuing Concordance craft could catch them.

Her twenty-two other deaths she endured in Ondo's operating theatre, her body succumbing again and again to the traumas of her repair; the straightenings, the reconstructions, the graftings of flesh and nerves and bone. And often, between each end, there came moments of clarity: sensations of light and pain, glimpses of unexpected, disorientating detail. Those moments were confused, their timeline unclear: reality, nightmare and drug-induced hallucination impossible to tell apart.

She recalled one such moment early on: a sudden emergence from a horror-filled replaying of her last day on Maes Far, of farewells hugged against distant screams and explosions. The backwash from the lander's thrusters flattened a wide circle of red blooms in the flower meadow. Her home was far enough from the town to avoid the mob, but they'd seen the ship descending, and they'd be coming. Her mother's arms around her, the whispered final message. Then her father. His lips moved as he looked at her, grief-stricken, horrified, eyes liquid with tears, but he hadn't been able to find words to say to her. Then the object he handed her as she climbed into the lander, and the simple, inadequate message he finally uttered.

Her wakening was, no doubt, chemically induced, as Ondo battled to stabilize her shattered biology. For once, mercifully, there was no agony. Specks of grit clogged her mouth, fragments of reconstructed tooth or bone. Her body tingled, the long muscles of her limbs spasming. She was aware of dull aches in her left arm, but when she tried to move it, nothing happened. Exploring with her right hand she discovered that her left arm and that whole side of her body simply weren't there. Their absence seemed almost comical, like some magician's trick. Instead of flesh and muscle, there was only an emptiness beside her on the bed, ducts and tubes and cables leading off into a battery of machinery.

She was an incomplete thing, misshapen, half not-there. Half alive.

“The planet?” she said. Her voice came out as a hoarse grunt, her severed lips and mouth and mandible unable to form the words.

The face of the man who had plucked her from the sky – it could only be Ondo Lagan, although she had never seen him before – smeared into view. His hair was wild, his appearance unkempt. As she found out later, he'd been alone for so long he'd stopped giving thought to his appearance. His eyes were bulbous through the complex lenses of his multiglasses as he studied her. Again, as he often repeated later, he could have operated on his own eyes, fixed their age-related defects, enhanced them so that he didn't need external devices to correct them. But he could never find the time, his studies and research consuming him.

He seemed to grasp what she was trying to say. “I'm sorry, Selene. Only you have survived. Those few who remain on the surface will not be alive for very much longer. The situation was deteriorating rapidly when we left.”

“No.” The fact of it was too huge to grasp; it was an ocean of dark water engulfing her, consuming her. She'd been chosen by her family as the one to be rescued. Her parents, her aunts and uncles, they'd all been insistent: she had her life ahead of her, she deserved the chance. There was an unborn sister, a surprise and unplanned late pregnancy, her mother barely showing, and perhaps two lives might have been saved aboard the tiny lander, but the risks were greater, and the decision had been made. At the end, there'd suddenly been no time to argue further. The simple calculation of it was brutal.

She'd left behind others, too: colleagues, acquaintances, friends, among whom was Falden, becoming a lover at the time of the appearance of the shroud. She felt the ghost of his grip in her left hand as he led her through the flower meadows that lawned the slopes around their home, a day of perfect, golden light and whispered promises.

“I'm sorry,” Ondo said again from beside her, as if he were to blame, as if the solar shroud had been his doing.

The moment of bright clarity faded. Perhaps Ondo had granted her drug-induced oblivion. She slipped back into the welcome fog of unconsciousness, the faces of her dead family, her father's tears and Falden's grasp going with her into the darkness.

It was only Ondo – patient, quiet Ondo – that kept tally of her deaths as he battled again and again to pull her through, bring her back to some semblance of life. Two years later, when she'd physically recovered, he would repeat it to her often, wonder and horror in his voice. You died twenty-three times: once in the lander, then a further twenty-two times under my hand. The haunted look in his eyes as he repeated the mantra gave her some clue of the toll those days had taken on him.

At the time, she had no thought for him: no gratitude, no empathy, no insight. He was an unknown figure, her rescuer, her tormentor. There were days when she clung to him as a sick child would to a parent, sobbing from the pain, desperate for reassurance. There were days when she begged for release, all dignity gone, her useless, supine flesh bringing her only suffering. He could anaesthetize her, of course, but always there was the time when arm or leg or chest or skull had to be used, muscles flexed, bone structures tested. The pain of it became her life as she learned to repossess her own body, discovered how to wield limb and sinew.

The original and the new.

One day, nine months into her recreation, she emerged back into consciousness from the latest procedure. Spiky agonies tore through her chest cavity with each breath, as if the wrong tissues had been sutured together. The familiar quiet of the medsuite that was her permanent room lay around her. The subdued glow from the sensors that Ondo kept her hooked up to gave the room an incongruous feeling of the early evening gloaming, some late-summer day on Maes Far. A bitter, chemical taste filled her mouth.

This time he'd reconstructed her chest cavity, implanting the left lung he'd grown from her stem cells, filling in the lost fragments of her rib cage with carbon-fibre bone analogue, attaching intercostal muscles and the malleable mass of her left breast, connecting the artificial to the natural with his customary microscopic artistry and covering everything with the shimmering black dermal substrate upon which, eventually, her own skin could take root.

Ondo's face entered the frame of her vision. Her brain was still adjusting to the exotic sensory inputs her left eye now gave her, so that his features warped for a moment, multiple-wavelength representations overlaying. But of course, it could only be him. There were only the two of them there.

His voice was quiet, full of regret at what she was going through. “How does it feel?”

She had no secrets from him, no defences. He knew the workings and pumpings of her body better she did, knew her more intimately than any lover ever could, knew her from the inside out. She resented it. The pain was muffled by analgesia, but she could tell it would be huge soon enough. It would have its day, a beast that could not be contained. She wished she could stop breathing altogether and let her racked muscles rest, but she refused to show it.

“It's okay.” Her voice was a whisper, her lips cracked dry. “How long was I out this time?”

He missed a beat before replying. “There were complications that I hadn't foreseen. Integrating the bioelectronics into your nervous system is always difficult, as you know. It is a difficult procedure to carry out while rebuilding muscle tissues and blood flows. Weaving the neurons from your artificial limbs through your spinal column proved to be rather more difficult than I'd anticipated.”

“Tell me how long.”

“Twenty-seven hours. Your heart stopped twice. The second time I thought I'd lost you. You were gone for a full minute.”

She could see the weariness in his lined face. He had saved her life one more time. She couldn't stop herself saying it. She didn't want to stop herself saying it. “How many times now?”

“I don't understand.”

“How many times have I died?”

“Including the lander, twenty-two times.”

“You should have left me. I don't want this. I don't want any of this.”

“I couldn't do that, Selene.”

In her mind she was screaming, although it came out as a rough whisper. “I've had enough! I don't care what you promised my family. Let me go, Ondo. You have no fucking right to do this. It's my choice to make, not yours.”

A part of her could see the effect her words had upon him. She didn't care. She had been through too much.

“I'm not doing this because of my friendship with your father, Selene. Nor for your family, nor for all the dead of Maes Far. I'm doing it for you. When I pulled you from the wreckage of your shuttle, resuscitated you that first time, I vowed I would save you, give you a chance at life as best I could. Too many others have died.”

“This is no fucking life. I don't want it! Let me go, I'm begging you. I'm ordering you. You do not have the right to know what's best for me. You're controlling me just as much as Concordance did.”

That stung him. He hesitated, perhaps debating with himself whether he was doing the right thing. He reached off to one side to touch a control on one of the devices. The fog of anaesthetic filled her brain and she couldn't fight it. He wasn't giving her final oblivion; he was sending her back into unconsciousness from where she couldn't object.

“No, Ondo, don't you fucking dare. Don't you…”

Then the fog rolled through her brain and there was nothing she could do to fight it.

Ondo sat unmoving for an hour, watching over the young woman he'd rescued, his gaze flicking between the monitor readouts and her face. Even deeply sedated, she occasionally winced with pain, her brow furrowing and her mouth half-forming a silent scream. Was he doing the right thing, keeping her alive, putting her through all this?

It was possible he was being selfish. He'd lived a lonely life – a life he'd accepted, sought out – but he'd paid the price. He'd envied Seben, Selene's father, envied the relative normality of his life, the love and family and home he'd enjoyed. Seben was dead now, of course, and he, Ondo, was alive, pursuing Concordance, following his trail. But if it led nowhere, to defeat or a dead-end, he knew he'd regret what he'd done with his time. He sometimes wondered who he might have been if he'd lived in a different age. Occasionally, he dreamt dreams of a life that had never existed: spending his days on research and on building his devices, his family and friends around him, a life peaceful and contented.

He let out a long sigh. Still. He couldn't change the past. The faces of the people in his dreams were always a blur, but now there was this young woman, viscerally real, terribly injured, alone apart from him in the whole universe. He would do what he could for her, despite the rigours of all she would have to go through. If he could, he would save her, let her try and find the sort of life he'd turned his back on. He had no idea who she really was, what she wanted to be, and perhaps she didn't either, but he could give her the chance to find out.

If she survived that long.

2. A Slow Cruelty

She had no idea how much time had elapsed when she came round. The memories of her conversation with Ondo seemed years distant, but it might only have been a few hours, a few days. The tugging pain in her chest was gone, a warmth filling her whole body. Chemically induced, no doubt. She licked her cracked lips, tried to flex the distant reaches of her body: her fingers and her toes. Dimly, they answered. The reconstructed half of her felt different, somehow; her left hand responded immediately when she galloped her fingers, but it also felt like an … emulation of how it should feel. Still, the integration of Ondo's additions had advanced apace. How long had she been out?

As if he could read her thoughts, Ondo spoke from his customary position of the chair beside her. “It's ten days since our last conversation. I needed to keep you in a coma while your natural and artificial neural networks intertwined, but the process is sufficiently advanced now. You should be able to breathe normally, and you will start to gain fine motor control of your new limbs. You should know that in normal use your left arm and leg will behave just as your right ones do, but you must learn to control them. Both are capable of far greater feats of strength and speed: so much so that you could shatter what remains of your natural skeleton if you aren't careful.”

She twisted her creaking neck to find him. “I told you to stop. I told you to let me go.”

“I know. And truly, if that is what you wish, I will respect it. But I also know the way we think about things can change. A different perspective, a little time, and what once seemed intolerable is suddenly small, a minor annoyance. Forgive me, but there are things I would like you to see before you decide you've had enough.”

She had the impression it was a prepared speech, something he'd run through again and again as he watched over her. “Right. This is where you show me a mirror to persuade me I'm not the ruined freak I think I am.”

She saw that wasn't it from the brief look of puzzlement on his face. Maybe the idea hadn't occurred to him. She didn't really know anything about this man. She knew the name, of course. Ondo the heretic, the outlaw, pursued for years across the galaxy by Concordance, always evading capture aboard his ship known simply as the Refuge. She barely understood why he was even with her, what connection there was between them, how it was that Ondo Lagan had been a friend of her father.

“We can do that,” he said, “if it would help.”

She considered. No, not yet, she wasn't ready for that. Her body was mostly reconstructed, although her artificial skin hadn't been implanted yet, her left half still gleaming black substrate. She wasn't ready yet to see what he'd done with her face.

“What is it you want me to see?”

“I'd like you to come up to one of the observation domes. You haven't left this room since the day you arrived, and now I think it's time. This chair will carry you anywhere you wish to go on the Refuge, until your limbs and body are strong enough to bear you.”

“I'll walk, thanks.”

He stood to manoeuvre the hovering chair so that it was beside her bed. “You're not ready for that. Let me help you.”

“I said, I'll walk!” Her anger flared into life from nowhere. The room lurched around her as she sat upright. She ignored it and forced herself to stand.

Her left leg buckled beneath her immediately, a useless column of flesh that could never support her weight. She flopped to the smooth floor, bashing her forehead before she could persuade her left hand to move and protect her.

She lay there for a moment, cursing Ondo, cursing everything. “What have you done to me? These new limbs don't work. My body doesn't work.”

He knelt to offer her a hand. “You will get stronger. Your tissues are still combining, learning to work together. It will take months, but you will be better, I promise you.”

After a moment, she took his hand and allowed herself to be hauled up and deposited in the chair. Her fury had already burned itself out. She hated to be so weak. She didn't even have the energy to remain angry.

When her breathing had calmed, she looked up at the man standing over her.

“Why did they do it?” she rasped. “Why did they build their shroud and blot out our sun? Why this atrocity? Why such a slow cruelty?”

Her nightmares had been full of the scenes she'd witnessed as the light faded from her planet and it fell into savagery. They could have destroyed intelligent life on Maes Far in a few moments, but they'd chosen to draw out the agony. Loss overwhelmed her, and she felt tears brimming in her right eye. The right, but not the left. The vision of her artificial eye remained unclouded.

Ondo took his time to respond, a troubled expression crossing his features. He sat on the bed so that their heads were on the same level. “There has long been a catastrophist tradition within Concordance, these days led by Secundus Godel. Maes Far may be down to her.”

“I have no idea what that means.”

He seemed content to sit and talk to her at length. He probably didn't get the chance very often. “It's the 'end of days' approach to religious conversion. From what little I know of the founding sect, they believed that the soul flies through a sacred wormhole when a person dies, passing into either a paradise universe or a hellish one, depending upon the individual's actions in life. Omn sits in judgement at the gateway to the wormhole, deflecting each approaching soul into one reality or the other. One tradition within the faith devotes itself to encouraging people to live good lives, and by doing so attain their eternity in the paradise universe. It's a familiar-enough theme in religious belief. But another school – that of Vulpis and now Godel – teaches that people fundamentally can't change, and therefore that their judgement day should be hastened along by all means available. Put simply, Godel wants to wipe out all intelligent life in the galaxy and let Omn decide who is worthy and who isn't. The good get to go to paradise and the bad to their eternal torment. You have to admire its simplicity; it's a convenient way of short-circuiting a whole range of ethical dilemmas.”

Of course, she was familiar with Concordance theology from her upbringing on Maes Far, their teachings and strictures, but she'd never heard their ideas set out so plainly. “You don't seriously believe they could do that?”

“No, I don't, but that doesn't mean they aren't going to try. Partly, also, I think the shroud above your planet was a statement to the rest of the galaxy. A warning. Leave the path and this will be the outcome. Pictures of what is taking place upon the surface of Maes Far are being transmitted to every planet controlled by Concordance. The whole galaxy has watched your people tear themselves to pieces, watched them fight for dwindling supplies of food and water. They've watched, fascinated and horrified, as your civilisation unwinds into barbarity.”

“Maes Far was hardly some wild, rebellious world. It was peaceful. It was dull.”

Ondo nodded. He was trying to work out the best way to tell her something. There was too much she didn't know – about him and about the wider galaxy. Why did she get the feeling he was keeping secrets from her?

“It goes without saying that the people of Maes Far have done nothing to warrant such a terrible fate,” he said. “The shroud wouldn't be justified whatever your people had done. It is a weapon of the cruellest genocide.”

“You're suggesting the planet was chosen at random from all the inhabited planets in the galaxy?”

“No, no, I don't think that either.”

“Then what?”

“Tell me, how much did you know of your father's research?”

What did that have to do with anything? “Not much. He spent his spare time digging around in the ruins of the crashed starship in the mountains. It was what he did. I resented him not being around when I was younger, begrudged the time he spent with his work, but later I stopped paying it much attention. Sometimes I hiked up there to help him, dig alongside him. We never seemed to unearth anything of great interest.”

“Which I think was exactly as he wanted. I think he probably did everything he could to protect you from what he was really doing on Maes Far.”

What did that mean? “He was living his life, raising his family. Existing. You make it sound like he wasn't even from the planet.”

“He never told you? Perhaps that was for the best.”

“Told me what?”

Ondo considered her for a moment, still debating with himself what he could tell her. “I suppose the secret doesn't matter anymore. The truth is, your father wasn't from Maes Far. Your mother was, but both your father and I grew up on a planet called Sintorus, a long way from your homeworld. He and I, and that starship ruin he spent his time excavating, we're all a part of the reason Concordance put their shroud into orbit around your world to blot out your star. Partly, we are to blame.”

“That makes no sense.”

“I will explain as best I can, I promise. You deserve to know everything that I do. But first, can I show you the things I wanted you to see? It isn't far. There will be plenty of time to talk further.”

“I can control the chair without your help?”

“I've taken the liberty of embedding control flecks into your skull. A little practice and you should find you can control the chair with your thoughts.”

“You put wiring in my brain?”

“Some were essential, to control the additions I've made to your body. Some are useful but non-essential. Forgive me, I should have asked your permission for all the alterations I've made, but without many of them you wouldn't have survived to be asked. When you have recovered, we can discuss which, if any, you'd like me to remove.”

She wanted to object but found she didn't have the strength. “Show me the way, and I'll follow as best I can.”

It took several frustrating minutes of jerking backwards and forwards, steering into walls and machinery, before she got the hang of directing the chair. Ondo, always, watched patiently, telling her that she nearly had it each time, saying try again until she wanted to scream. Eventually, she managed to make it through the doorway without snagging the sides. It seemed like a major achievement. The walls of the passageway she found herself in surprised her. When she crashed into them, trying and utterly failing to move in a straight line, she discovered they were hard stone. “We're on a planet? I assumed the Refuge was a ship. The Radiant Dragon's mother ship.”

“That's a story I've fostered, but we're actually in a hollowed-out lone-wolf asteroid.”

“Then, where are we?”

“Again, it's probably best I show you.”

A spiral ramp, the chair gliding up it once she got the right degree of turn, brought them to a round, domed room, the walls and ceiling of which had an opaque greyness. Selene juddered her way around the room. “It's not very impressive. You think this will give me a cause to cling to life?” Her voice echoed with stone hollowness in the enclosed space.

“Before I show you,” said Ondo, “I want to be sure you understand the truth about superluminal travel.”

His words made her suspicious. There were things she and her family had talked about in the safety of their own house that no one ever said in public, and certainly not to a stranger. Maes Far had been a liberal world compared to many, but still the risks of being overheard and having their words relayed to Concordance, watching from orbit, were great.

“What truth?”

Ondo, used to his solitude, was unconcerned about the risks. “I'm talking about the true nature of the universe and the lies people live their lives by. You know what I mean, I think. The notion that moving faster than the light barrier rips your soul from your body is a small lie in the grand scheme of things, perhaps, but it is insidious. These days we have alternative lies, equivalent scientific stories. You've heard them. Moving through metaspace degrades the synapses, causing the brain to malfunction. The different physical constants of the metaspace domain are inimical to our biologies, causing cancers and premature senescence. They're the same lies, so very useful to Concordance, keeping people in their place, keeping them apart, preventing them from learning the truth or combining their ships into fleets. Most people in the galaxy know you can't travel faster than the speed of light and remain yourself. They know it absolutely, even though it is demonstrably untrue.”

Was he testing her? She was suddenly past caring; she had already lost everything. “The ship you rescued me in, it's capable of FTL travel?”

“I've made metaspace jumps in the Radiant Dragon many, many times. And now you've made several, too. As you'll be aware, your mind is still your own, your soul hasn't been ripped screaming from your body.”

Did she know that? She felt like a very different person from the young woman who'd lived on Maes Far just a few months earlier. The thoughts that dripped through her mind in quiet moments often seemed unfamiliar, alien, like they were intruding from outside. Was she the same? Of course, she didn't believe any of the stories about bodies and souls separating if forced to travel at speeds above the light barrier, but that didn't mean she was still herself. She no longer knew what that meant.

“You're telling me we're not in the Maes Far system anymore.”

Ondo nodded his agreement. “The Refuge is a long way from any system, a long way from any place that Concordance might think to come looking for me.”

“Can't they follow your trail?”

“They try; I take steps to make sure they don't succeed. Multiple metaspace hops to be certain no one is following before I come anywhere near and very careful quarantining before I approach. It's kept me safe for the thirty years I've lived here.”

She'd assumed he'd wanted to show her Maes Far, images of how it now was. The solar shroud would be complete: an opaque, orbiting disk that moved with finely-calculated exactness to stay precisely in front of the sun relative to the planet's surface, cutting off all heat, all light except for the flaring corona. A dark sun to replace the light. But that wasn't it.

“Show me what you brought me up here to see.”

He made no movement, some control fleck of his own sending instructions to the Refuge. In an instant, the walls and domed ceiling of the little room turned transparent. There, above and around her, filling one half of the sky, lay the sparkling mass of the galaxy.

It was a familiar-enough sight, of course. On dark nights on Maes Far it stretched overhead, a shimmering and meandering pathway. Her ancestors had called it the Diamond Road, imagined it as a path you could walk to reach the gods. She knew well the truth of what it was, but still, as a girl, she'd liked to stare up at it and dream about taking that journey.

The galaxy seen from Maes Far was nothing compared to its appearance from the Refuge. Her planet lay in the galactic plane, as almost all systems did, making the stars appear as the shimmering, dust-occluded line across the night sky that she knew so well. The Refuge, however, clearly lay far outside the plane. The entire disc of the galaxy lay tilted before Selene's eyes, with very few stars nearby and its structure clear: the spiralling arms and the bright glow of the central mass.

The sight of it sparkled on her retinas. She studied it for long moments with both her natural right eye, and then with her enhanced left eye, picking out different wavelengths of radiation, the different spectra of the stars, the glowing clouds of nebulae. From the angle they were at, the whole thing looked curiously like an eye itself: the ovoid shape, the rainbow hues and the glowing central mass as the pupil.

“Where is Maes Far?”

Part-way along one of the spiral arms, towards the central mass, a star began to flash. There was nothing remarkable or special about it. Her homeworld's sun was insignificant: one star among billions. She knew well the scale of the galaxy, but the sight of the whole thing laid out before her took her breath away. When you were inside it you couldn't see the entirety.

Her life had been so small. Briefly, she felt the tug of an unfamiliar emotion: a wonder at what all those stars were, at who and what was to be found there.

“And Sintorus?”

Another insignificant light flashed, farther out along the same arm.

Turning away for a moment, she saw that on the opposite side of the dome, away from the galactic mass, there was only darkness. There was the deep void of intergalactic space, with only other galaxies, other islands in the emptiness, to provide any illumination. In its own way that was beautiful, too. Light and dark. With her left eye, she could peer farther and farther into the void, deeper and deeper into time. Wherever she looked there were more galaxies, and more, and more. Distant places she would never and could never visit.

Ondo was still looking at the swirl of their galaxy. “Concordance control almost all of it, their Cathedral ships in orbit around every technologically-advanced planet. Somewhere in that central mass lives Omn, if they are to be believed. The God Star; the Light at the Heart of the Galaxy, attended and served by Primo Carious and Secundus Godel and the rest of the Augurs. Of course, it is a place no one can go, a being no one may approach. No one can go anywhere without the Cathedral ships and the Void Walkers intervening to stop them. They cannot allow truth to trouble their mystique. You grasp the scale of what they are, now? How they dominate and belittle us?”

She didn't need his patronising words. He thought she was ignorant of galactic affairs, brought up on her backwater world, but that wasn't how it was. “I've always known what they are; I was raised to understand exactly that. What can you do in the face of such power? The galaxy is beautiful, but the sight of it changes nothing. Concordance are all-powerful and I'm a broken cripple despite all your efforts. You thought showing me this would somehow change my mind? Fill me with some zeal to fight back? I'm fucking exhausted just coming up here, and I'm in a chair that does all the moving for me. My bones hurt.”

He held up his hands as if to fend off her fury. “I wanted you to see this because it's a glorious sight, that's all. I often come up here myself to think; I find it gives me a welcome sense of perspective. I'm sorry if my words offended you.”

He wasn't being intentionally condescending. He wasn't used to talking to people.

“Forget it,” she said.

After a moment, Ondo continued. “We barely know each other, but I knew your father and I see some of him in you. You're still so ill and weak and you've been through a terrible ordeal. You've lost everything you knew and loved, and you've barely survived. It's natural you feel beaten down, defeated. I understand that, truly. But I wanted you also to know that after the sunset comes always the sunrise. One day you will be stronger, and you will be yourself again. Changed, yes, but you. Maybe you won't want to join me in my struggle – I'm not asking that – but I believe that, eventually, you will be glad you survived. That there will be good days.”

“You're saying you won't give me the release I asked for?”

He turned to consider her, frowns wrinkling his face. “I've done everything I can to save you, mend your body, keep you alive. But if you die on the operating table once more, I will let you go if that is truly what you want.”

Was it what she wanted? The thought of release was tempting. All her loss and physical agony would be over. And yet, and yet. That small voice inside her did want to fight Concordance, however ridiculous that notion was. Perhaps it didn't matter that you couldn't possibly win; perhaps there was sense and reason in simply trying. The swirl of the galaxy hung before her, promising countless worlds she could visit, marvels and wonders she could explore. Ondo had given her that possibility. She'd assumed she'd spend the rest of her life on Maes Far but now there was all that waiting for her.

The galaxy, and the Concordance ships that would pursue her relentlessly.

“It's hopeless,” she said. “They're so powerful and you're old and weak and powerless. What can you do?”

He looked amused rather than offended. “There are days when I despair, it is true. Days when continuing to fight seems ridiculous. But I pull myself together and tell myself the darkest hour is before the dawn, and other such platitudes, and I carry on with it, because what else is there? The physicist in me wonders whether Concordance rule is something like a chaotic system: superficially stable, but prone to violent transformations with relatively little input.”

“They don't seem very vulnerable to me.”

Ondo nodded his head in agreement. “The question is, how much is that a façade and how much the reality? I think we can agree, at least, that Omn and his church are not all-powerful, or else we wouldn't be here having this conversation. Godel's brand of madness is one thing, but I genuinely think there's a secret, a reason for everything that's happened. Or at least, something that makes sense of it. I see hope in that.”

“You sound delusional to me.”

“I like to think of it as optimistic.”

She asked her next question quietly. “And how many more operations do I have to go through? If that's what I want to do.”

“At most, four or five. Your skeletal structure, your musculature and your nervous systems are complete, as is your blood circulation. Your lymphatic system, your endocrine glands and your digestive tract are nearing a normal operational profile. Your reproductive organs are fully functional. There are some brain fleck enhancements that still need to be made and then, of course, there is your skin: once I have grown sufficient amount of dermis from your cells, I'll have to graft it across your left half. That will be raw for a time, and sore, but the worst of it is over, I promise you.”

“And what right did you have to do any of it? What right did you have to shape me as you saw fit? Maybe I wanted to stay as I was. Broken.”

He nodded, conceding it was a fair question. “I remade you in your own image, as much as I could. I strove for symmetry in the reconstruction of your body, and where that didn't help, I aimed as far as possible for some sort of body form norm. I'm aware that is a cultural construction as much as anything. You may have preferred some radically different biology. I may have got everything very wrong. I reconstructed you to be biologically female, capable of bearing new life, as that is how you were. I may have got that wrong, too; you may prefer to be reproductively male, or asexual, or some other arrangement. I had no access to your self-perceptions, of how you understand yourself. I did what I could, and in truth a lot of it could be undone or reconfigured or added to if you wish, although that would mean a much greater number of procedures. I did give you considerable artificial augmentation: you are capable of much greater feats of strength, speed, dexterity and computational prowess than you once were. Again, I may have done that mistakenly. You may prefer to be as close as possible to your former level of function.”

In his own flawed way, he had tried. Maybe that was all anyone could do. The anger that had flared through her subsided, a little. She would think about the options he'd given her. “If I did live, where would I go? What would I do?”

“You'd be able to fit in with the populations of many worlds. We can invent you an identity, go there in secret, just as your father did. I can alter your appearance within a wide set of parameters, and you can live your life. You get to choose your existence; which world will be your home. It is a possibility few are granted these days.”

She didn't take her eyes off the galaxy as she considered his words, trying to make sense of them.

“There is one more thing I would like you to see, if you have the strength,” he said. “Something smaller. There are wonders in the galaxy as well as horrors. Or there could be.”

“What wonders?”

He looked a little uncomfortable, as if he wasn't sure how she'd react. “You've heard of Coronade?”

His words threw her. Her mind was spinning; she needed to think about everything he'd said, and suddenly he was talking about fairy tales. Had he quietly lost his grip on sanity at some point over the years?

She answered warily. “Who hasn't? Every child grows up with stories of it. The golden planet where all is peace and happiness. What of it?”

“That is what I wish to show you. I've discovered Coronade isn't just a child's story. It's a planet in the galaxy. I know it is real.”

“That's nonsense. How can you know such a thing?”

He couldn't keep the delight from his features. “Because three years ago, I found the proof. I recovered images of the mythical planet of Coronade.”

3. Coronade

“You brought me up here to talk about fairy stories?” His words poured doubt through her. He was crazy. Being pursued so relentlessly by the forces of Concordance had made him paranoid.

“Please,” he said, “tell me which version of the story you know.”

She thought about claiming exhaustion – the short ride in the chair had drained her – but she wanted to know more about him, where his lonely thoughts had taken him. She'd play his game a little longer. “Coronade is a myth, a planet where everything is beautiful and peaceful. All cultures and religions have ideas like it: an idealised place where life makes sense, and everyone is happy.”

“And what do you say to my claim that it is real?”

“I don't believe you.”

“Why?”

Her voice was hoarse from so much talking, her throat rough, but she kept on. “Because … because reality isn't like that. There is no paradise you can simply visit. Things aren't so simple. Life is cruel. Do I have to spell that out? Look at me.”

He moved his head from side-to-side, in a way that suggested she was only half-wrong, that it was more complex than that. “The truth may have been embellished with myths and wishful thinking, but the images I've seen prove Coronade is real.”

“Is real? Even if a planet of that name once existed, Concordance would have destroyed it.”

“Perhaps. You're right, I can only prove that it did exist, not that it still does. Concordance go to great lengths to root out any hints of their Golden Age Heresy. In their version of history, all interplanetary contact was characterised by genocide and bloodshed until they arose to impose the order of Omn. But there is much that doesn't make sense about that, and we can't be completely sure what Concordance would do to Coronade. They may not even know where it is.”

“They know everything.”

“Do they? They don't appear to know where we are. But Coronade definitely did exist, and it's clear it was some sort of beacon or celebration of hope for the galaxy.”

“How do you know this? How can you have these images?” It was like claiming he had photographs of heaven.

“It's what I've devoted my life to doing: piecing together scattered scraps of information in an attempt to put the truth back together. Something bad happened to the galaxy three hundred years ago, and I don't just mean the devastation of the Omnian War. Galactic civilisation was shattered, and since then Concordance have gone to great efforts to wipe out all evidence of our real histories. They are very thorough, but the war left ruins and hulks scattered across the galaxy, and even Concordance hasn't been able to track all of them down in the three centuries since. Every now and then I find one, and if I'm lucky I unearth some fragment of the truth from the mangled ruins. That's what I do, and that's what your father was doing on Maes Far. And, possibly, he was getting too near some truth that Concordance did not wish to be revealed. Often it is a race: we to reveal, they to destroy.”

She was having trouble absorbing all the information he was throwing at her, as if her brain no longer had the capacity for so many ideas. “My father didn't travel the galaxy being pursued by Void Walkers. He didn't have all the forces of Concordance attempting to find him and kill him.”

“He chose a different path. We both devoted our lives to uncovering the truth, but he wanted a normal life, too. I … turned my back on that. I've roamed the galaxy, gone where I needed to go.”

“You think he made a bad choice.”

The suggestion appeared to trouble Ondo for some reason. “Truly, no. I've often thought it was I that made the bad choice, although I had my reasons. Your father didn't want to lead the life I have. We knew space around Maes Far saw several major skirmishes in the war, and we knew there was a crash site on the planet. Your father decided to adopt the life of a local to give him the time and freedom to carry out the necessary archaeological research. We invented his identity between us, the Ada family name, all of it, and smuggled him onto the planet as a young man. It might seem a safe and provincial life to lead, but it was dangerous enough in its own way. He was brave, working out there in plain sight with no means of fleeing if they came for him. He had to be very careful not to learn too much; Concordance were always watching from orbit.”

She would never have believed such a wild claim, if not for the fact that Ondo had come to rescue her when Maes Far was destroyed. “What was his real name?”

“For what it's worth, I think his Maes Far name became the real him, but when I first knew him, he was Seben Jen Akter.”

The name meant nothing to her. Her father had done a good job of keeping his former life a secret.