Red Star - The Triple Stars Volume 2 - Simon Kewin - E-Book

Red Star - The Triple Stars Volume 2 E-Book

Simon Kewin

0,0
3,49 €

oder
-100%
Sammeln Sie Punkte in unserem Gutscheinprogramm und kaufen Sie E-Books und Hörbücher mit bis zu 100% Rabatt.
Mehr erfahren.
Beschreibung

The return of an ancient galactic threat

Selene and Ondo piece together the secrets of Concordance’s ascension to galactic domination, and the truth of what it was Vulpis encountered at the heart of the galaxy three hundred years previously.

They uncover an ancient threat to all life – a threat that Concordance seems intent on reawakening to complete its genocidal aims. But they also follow another trail – one left for them by someone or something unknown, a hidden intelligence seemingly guiding them to hopes of a possible salvation.

But each time they unearth a new fragment of the puzzle, Concordance are waiting, its ships and miraculous technology unleashed against them…

Das E-Book können Sie in Legimi-Apps oder einer beliebigen App lesen, die das folgende Format unterstützen:

EPUB
Bewertungen
0,0
0
0
0
0
0
Mehr Informationen
Mehr Informationen
Legimi prüft nicht, ob Rezensionen von Nutzern stammen, die den betreffenden Titel tatsächlich gekauft oder gelesen/gehört haben. Wir entfernen aber gefälschte Rezensionen.



For all those who fight the power

Table of Contents

Prologue - The Magellanic Heresies

Diurnal

The Moving Stars

The Mass Engine

The Dust of Shattered Worlds

Aetheral

The Teeming Death

Alien Megastructures

The Neverkey

Sigma Counterspin

Millennial

Evils

Communication

Radiance

Contamination

Eb

Void Wraiths

The Periarch

Fenwinter

Detonation

Convocation

Epochal

Aevus

The Seer Stone

Ansider

Labyrinthine

The Fight at the Red Star

Toruk

Landmarks

Table of Contents

Cover

Copyright Page

Title Page

Body Matter

Prologue - The Magellanic Heresies

Fragments recovered from the journal of Senjen Vorst, planetologist 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.

 

 

…the three stellar masses meant that we were forced to translate from metaspace at a much greater distance from the centre of the system than normal. Frustrating! It will take many weeks to reach the planet. Telemetry is, however, slowly giving us a more complete picture of the stars and their single world…

 

…we now observe small degrees of orbital perturbation in the movements of the three suns. Frankly, it's a relief. The wilder theories of some of the crew can now be discounted; these are not artificially engineered stars, as if such things were even possible. Their motions are remarkably regular, but that appears to be a natural phenomenon, the chance arrangement of gravitational influences holding them in their patterns of movement about each other. Eventually, as they lose mass through normal stellar radiation, this regularity will fail, and it is conceivable that two or even three of the stars will collide or fuse…

 

…so much for the suns, but what of the planet and its moons? Some on the ship are convinced significant terraforming has taken place on this world, but they are unable to explain how that could be achieved – or why anyone would go to such lengths. The number of viable planets in the galaxy far outweighs the number of cultures requiring relocation or room for expansion, and this must always have been the case. This planet, especially, with no land masses upon it, is hardly a good candidate for occupation…

 

…a strange conversation with one of the chemists on board, Dragonel Vulpis. He wanted me to support his view that the planet is anomalous, unnatural in some way. He actually used the term supernatural. He more or less pinned me to the bulkhead as he spoke, his eyes wide, unblinking. The man used to amuse me, but he becomes more and more alarming. Something has broken inside his brain. I explained that the apparent regularity of the planetary and lunar motions is an illusion caused by our lack of time perspective; that the orbital patterns are in constant flux, and we've simply arrived at a galactic moment when everything appears to be in clockwork equilibrium. We don't live long enough to see the pattern.

He wouldn't have it and grew angry. I must talk to the officers about him before he causes more trouble; the long voyage appears to have taken a psychological toll upon him. A single, disturbed crew-member can have a hugely destructive effect upon a ship…

Three hours after Selene and Ondo's arrival at the dead star…

Part 1 - Diurnal

1. The Moving Stars

The clock embedded in the biomechanical hemisphere of Selene Ada's brain whispered the countdown to her death.

Oxygen supply 2.5% - 13 minutes remaining

Strange how the responses in the two halves of her body had become merged, indistinguishable. The agonies in her oxygen-starved natural tissues, the urgent override alerts in her artificial: they had become indistinguishable. The irony of it was amusing. She'd made such good progress.

She sat with her back against the column of the archway upon the fragment of planetary rock. The nearby dead star, barely three kilometres across, bathed them in its hard gamma rays. Ondo lay beside her, his body ricked awkwardly where he'd slumped among the scattered rocks. His features were indistinct through his suit visor, but it was long minutes since he'd moved. She instructed his helmet lights to come on for a moment. He didn't respond, no flicker in his eyes. His heart rate continued to fall steadily, and the blue tinge to his lips was unmistakable.

She queried the flecks embedded in his cerebellum one more time. There was only the faintest flutter of life within his body. Oxygen levels within his bloodstream were critical, and hypoxia was causing tissue damage at an increasing rate. Even if, by some miracle, the two of them found a way out, he wouldn't make it alive; his brain cells were already too impaired.

She could rouse him, instruct his control flecks to amp up his metabolism enough to return him to consciousness, but she let him be. Best to leave him in the peace of oblivion. Soon he'd die, and then the only version of him left in the universe would be the engram copy she carried within her own head. And then, when she finally succumbed, they'd both be gone in the same moment.

She wished she'd been able to protect him, dissuade him from coming to Coronade. If he were still at the Refuge, then there'd be hope. On her lone visits to other worlds, she'd sometimes thought of him as a low, flickering candle-flame in a huge night, a glow of promise on the edge of the galaxy. Now the flame was sputtering out.

They could perhaps have retraced their steps through the archways and the metaspace tunnels to return to the ruins of Coronade, but they'd agreed in Ondo's last few minutes of consciousness not to do so, not to place themselves in the hands of Concordance. This lonely death was better than any drawn-out end their pursuers might choose to give them. Better that their secrets died with them than having their knowledge ripped from their minds by the Augurs of Omn. The Refuge with its recovered scraps of history was safely hidden. Perhaps some unknown traveller would find it one day, and bring the memories back to life.

Conscious thought slipped away from Selene for a moment, and there was only the blazing cloud of ionized gas and plasma from the destroyed star to fill her eyes. Strange how something so violently destructive could create something so beautiful. The fragment of rock, crowned by its archway, spun rapidly, tumbling through space from the blast of the sun's explosion. As a result, its tumbling day was short, but there was no separation of light and darkness. A blur of fulgent light surrounded her. The colours were dazzling; she felt them filling her universe, pulling her in, promising to draw her to themselves. The thought was comforting. It would be so easy to let go, let the light absorb her. Let Concordance win.

No. She fought back, forcing herself to kick for the surface, out of the depths and back to awareness. Her biomechanical side reacted to her conscious instruction, pushing more adrenaline through her blood vessels, giving her another burst of life.

The irony was that her artificial tissues could easily have been made to survive a zero-oxygen environment – except that she'd insisted on having them fully integrated with what remained of her biology during her reconstruction. Ondo had given her the choice early on; her flesh could be an adjunct, sustained and maintained as long as it was viable, then discarded, placenta-like. He'd offered her that immortality, but she'd recoiled in horror. If all of the cells and tissues of her original body were gone, then who was she? In what sense was she still Selene Ada?

It was one of the last things he'd said to her, before his eyes closed: “I should have insisted.”

“I wouldn't have let you.”

He'd actually smiled. “I should have done it anyway, and not told you until now.”

“Did you?”

“Regrettably, no. I'm sorry. I'm sorry for all of this. I should have made you lead a normal life, safe on a planet somewhere.”

“And I told you, that life would never have worked for me. Not after Maes Far.”

Her two halves were inextricably intertwined, just as she'd demanded, and that meant she was doomed. The blast wave from the stellar extinction event had stripped away its planets' atmospheric envelopes, turning viable biosphere into bare rock, and the only breathable air she and Ondo had was that which they'd brought with them. She'd consumed less of her suit's oxygen than Ondo had, but in the end, it wasn't going to make any difference.

Still she fought. She would go back to Coronade, face down Concordance. Time to stop following the trails left by others and force a new one of her own. Since she'd started travelling in the Radiant Dragon, Ondo had often accused her of taking crazy risks, and to herself she admitted that he was probably right: her fury and desire for revenge did make her take unnecessary chances. Sometimes it felt like her own survival didn't matter much anymore. Why should she get to live when everyone she'd grown up with had not? It was survivor's guilt; she should have died alongside them. She wasn't always rational. If she was going to fight Concordance, she needed to be more controlled. There was a time to unleash her anger, but she needed to be patient, pick the right moment. To win a war, you sometimes had to lose a battle, or refuse to fight it at all.

Could she reopen the Coronade entrance using the metakey they'd been given by the Warden? Perhaps. The archway had clearly been designed to ensure people couldn't easily move from Coronade to the dead star system, and perhaps prevent them from returning at all. It was a puzzling fact if you accepted Ondo's view of the golden age culture. Why go to such lengths to construct miraculous passageways among the stars, and then prevent their use? Ondo had to be wrong; the Coronade civilisation had been radically different to the one he'd imagined.

In any case, she would try to make the return journey. Ondo would know nothing of her actions; he was too far gone for it to matter. She would return through the tunnels, attempt to reopen the archway and fight their pursuers. She would have no chance – they would drop more atmospheric nukes or unleash beam-weapon fire and she'd be vaporised – but perhaps, somehow, she could get to them first, take some of them with her.

She forced herself to her knees, then to her feet. She retched, her mouth filling with bitter-sour liquid. She swallowed it back down. Vomiting inside a sealed suit was never a good thing. Stars swirled in her vision and the galaxy threatened to blackout completely, but she willed herself to remain upright and conscious. She took a step forwards, and then another, leaving Ondo's body where it was on the ground.

She stepped through the archway, taking the short, featureless tunnel that led to the outer planet they'd first arrived at. If the tunnels had ever had breathable atmosphere, it was long-gone now; whatever form of energy walls the archways propagated hadn't prevented any air from leeching away. Perhaps the builders simply hadn't considered the possibility of the atmosphere at one end of the tunnel being torn away. She and Ondo had tried and failed to find some sort of control mechanism that might restore air-pressure but hadn't found any.

She talked to him, the copy in her head at least, as she battled forwards. Partly it was to take her mind off what she was doing, partly to hear his voice. Also, it felt right for him to know everything that had happened.

He absorbed her news without comment, whatever sense of loss he might be feeling left unexpressed. She wondered whether he thought he was dying, or whether it was someone else, just a different Ondo.

“Do you still think there's a trail?” she asked. “That we were led here for a reason?”

He paused very briefly before replying. “Perhaps some of your innate scepticism has leeched into my thoughts from your brain, but I still think we have a purpose. There are fragments of the picture here.”

“It's hard to see a picture if you're dead,” she said. “You said this supernova was engineered, an anomaly, but maybe you were wrong. Even my enhanced senses give us only crude readings. This could have been a completely natural disaster, nothing more. A star exploding after its core collapsed unexpectedly.”

“This was clearly a technological society; you've seen the scale of the ruins. From the similarities in the architecture, I'd say this was the same culture spread across multiple worlds: the three that we've glimpsed, and perhaps others. There's no way a society that advanced wouldn't know its star was close to catastrophic explosion. And you've studied the readings; the mass of stellar material is at odds with what we can calculate from the planets' original orbits. My view is still that someone did this: triggered solar collapse and wiped out these worlds in a moment of galactic time. Even the farthermost planet would have been devastated within a few minutes. If there was no warning, no chance to evacuate, billions of people must have died. Billions of lives and much that was unique and glorious, all gone. We have to accept that's the most likely explanation.”

Walking was an effort, an act of will. Her muscles were cramping and her brain threatened repeatedly to succumb to the darkness. Her breathing was rapid, panicky. She forced herself to keep moving and talking. “Then, perhaps there was some end-of-days cult going on; the people chose to live close to the edge of destruction, knowing the end could come at any moment. People do things like that, right? Perhaps they embraced catastrophe like Concordance do.”

“It seems so unlikely. From what I can tell of the ruins, the buildings must have been quite beautiful.”

“What the hell does that have to do with anything?”

“I suppose I can't believe that a people capable of such marvels would embrace death to that extent.”

“Concordance ships are beautiful. You're projecting how you think about the universe onto unknown cultures.”

“Concordance are anomalous, and I don't believe they are responsible for creating the wonders they wield.”

“Who is, then?”

“That, of course, we don't know. But it's clear Concordance aren't fully in control of the technology at their disposal. For one thing, they're not here. If they knew about the tunnels and the archways, they'd have come for us. They'd have been waiting for us. I don't believe they know where we are and I don't believe they understand how the metaspace pathways function.”

“It's not a lesson we can put to any use, given how near to dying I am.”

“How close are you?”

She granted him access to her internal status. “That close.”

“There isn't much time left,” he said after a moment.

“No. I noticed that.”

She emerged at the circle of three archways, stumbling to the ground as she did so. She was on her back, confused about how she'd got there. The ruined domes and archways of the planet crowded around her peripheral vision. Like people standing silently around a deathbed, peering in at her.

The glowing plasma blotted out the stars above her. She thought about the times she'd looked at the galaxy from the Refuge, imagining it as something like a brain. And, again, on Migdala, sitting with Myrced upon the roof of her house, that sweet interlude in her recent life. She, Selene, had said then that the stars move, that things changed, but sometimes so slowly you couldn't see it. The stars turned, yes, but they moved in other ways, too: forming and dying. She wished she could tell Myrced that. Change was possible. Change was inevitable. And, it wasn't only a natural process: stars could be created and destroyed in acts of stellar engineering. What seemed constant, untouchable, could be swept away. Perhaps that meant Concordance could be swept away.

With a grunt of effort, she forced herself onto her side. A glint of light in the dust of the ruins caught her eye, down at ground-level, reflecting the glow in the sky. What was that? They'd explored briefly upon first arriving and had found nothing but debris and destruction among the ruined walls and domes. The spark was dim; her natural eye wouldn't have been able to detect it. She moved her head from side-to-side a little and the mote of light disappeared, reappeared, disappeared. It was only visible from the one spot she happened to have fallen in. Some shard of glass perhaps? Hard to know how far away it was, but she guessed it was relatively small and near judging by the tiny movements needed to affect it.

The archway that would take her back across the galaxy to Coronade was a few paces away, but the speck of light intrigued her. Another tiny glow in a sea of darkness. She would find out what it was. She deactivated her inner Ondo – she didn't want to give him any explanations of what she was doing – and worked her way to her knees, her feet. She could no longer see the light, the angle of the reflection wrong. She knelt back down and by positioning her head just so, saw it again.

Very well, she would crawl. It was about all she had energy left to do anyway.

She toiled forwards, eyes fixed on her target. This world hadn't been blown to fragments by the nova, and it still rotated in a ghost of its day and night cycle. That meant the mysterious light might shift at any moment, wink out. Its life was tenuous, brief. She suddenly had to get to it, as if it held all the answers she sought.

The floor of the archway circle was smooth stone, protected somehow from the drifting powder of the ruins all around, but once she moved off it, her hands and knees sank into a dense layer that was more like volcanic ash than dust from collapsed buildings. It weighed her down, clogging her movements. Three times she knelt on some buried fragment of sharp rock. Her suit cushioned her, but alarm cut through her that a puncture would vent all her remaining oxygen. Then she would only have moments.

The clock in her brain chose that point to give her an update, sounding annoyingly calm.

Oxygen supply 0.8% - 4 minutes remaining

The mote of light glinted to her through a ragged hole in the side of one of the ruined buildings. The gap at ground level was too small; she'd have to climb through an opening a metre up. The effort of it nearly broke her, sent nausea and panic washing through her. Her heart rate was a desperate flutter. Her enhanced half was dragging her oxygen-starved biology along. She hauled herself though the gap and half-fell back to the ground on the other side, the surface-layer of dust engulfing her.

Oxygen supply 0.2% - 1 minute remaining

She'd lost awareness; minutes had slipped by unnoticed. Once again, she forced herself to act, flipping herself over to wade on hands and knees through the carpet of ash and dust. Her tissues screamed their alarm, sending more adrenaline through her. She gulped deep breaths but she might have been inhaling sand.

Gloriously, she saw the light again, brighter now, glinting close-by. She willed herself towards it, refusing to be beaten.

A skull protruded from the dust layer, on its side, one eye socket staring at her. They hadn't found many biological remains, and at first had hoped that the planets had been abandoned before the nova event. A brief chemical analysis of the detritus layer suggested otherwise: there was a widespread concentration of what appeared to be organic markers: bone-calcium and protein strands. They'd also unearthed a few visible fragments of skeleton. Many people had died there.

The skull was elongated in shape, reminding her of something she could no longer recall. A ragged hole had been punched into it from some crushing injury, filling it with the glow of the plasma. The light she'd seen twinkled through the eye socket, refracting through something inside the cranium.

She reached out with a gauntleted hand, scrabbling with her fingertips to snag the skull. She caught it, pulled it towards her. A glass bead, half a centimetre in diameter, fell out through the open floor of the bone cavity, disappearing into the dust layer. A glass bead inside a skull: that triggered a memory. They'd found one just like it somewhere. Thinking was hard work, the thoughts emerging from a sluggish fog. It came back to her: the ice cap on Maes Far, her own world. The borer that Ondo had released had found a bead and reported that it appeared to have come from inside a skull cavity from the impressions left behind in the ice. A memory bead or some augmentation fleck, but not like any now in use. The bead she'd taken to the Depository and activated using the Warden's machine to retrieve a stream of baffling, confused images. She recalled looking into its depths, the feeling that she was staring into an eye.

Desperately, she dug through the dust to find this new one. It wasn't going to save her, but it seemed suddenly important. A connection made.

She couldn't find it, her gauntlets too clumsy. She sent unlock codes to her left one, exposing her artificial hand to the void, to the near-absolute-zero temperature and hard radiation, then began to search with her augmented fingertips for the elusive object.

Finally, she found it, pincered it between two fingers to lift into her eyeline. It clearly was another bead like the one from Maes Far, the same iridescence in its depths. How had it come to be here, in the ancient ruins of a lost civilisation on the other side of the galaxy? She wished, desperately, hopelessly, that she could tell Ondo of her discovery.

Her fingers closed, clutching the bead in her fist. Then a wave of exhaustion overwhelmed her, an unstoppable tide, and she sank beneath its drowning depths.

2. The Mass Engine

Secundus Godel smiled at the shackled figure standing in front of her. “Now, tell me all that you know about the location of the object.”

The man – Harjan Roach – was another renegade, but nothing like Ondo Lagan. Roach was not motivated by intellectual curiosity or a desire to overthrow Concordance. He was concerned only with accruing personal wealth and living a life free from the control of others. She knew of a few like him here and there in the galaxy: outlaws and pirates dodging authority, making a living buying and selling illicit technology left over from the degenerate culture that Concordance had swept away. She kept an eye on them. Her researches had opened out to her the surprising age of galactic civilisation, and occasionally people like Roach discovered something far more interesting, a truly ancient artefact.

Such was the case now.

He looked amused rather than terrified as he replied. He seemed to be enjoying himself. “Oh, I'd prefer not to tell you anything if that's acceptable to you, but if you wish to buy the information, then I'm sure we can come to an arrangement.”

The man's arrogance riled her. She could obviously pay him, however outlandish the sum of money he came up with, but she did not treat with people such as Harjan Roach. She took what she wanted from them. He was not her equal.

She sighed as if bored. “I can inflict agonies upon you that will break you. I can keep your body alive for years while your nerves burn. Do I need to go to all that trouble?”

Roach simply grinned. Blood ran freely from the cuts to his face he'd received during his retrieval by her Walkers. “Inflict your tortures; I can switch my pain responses off. You don't frighten me, purpleskin.”

He was probably telling her the truth: the scans suggested all manner of forbidden technological enhancements riddling his brain and body. Nevertheless, she tested him out. She directed a focussed attack into his nervous system, using an energy intensity that would be enough to incapacitate any normal person from the sheer searing agony.

Roach immediately screamed and collapsed to the floor, his body writhing and his limbs flailing as the torture raged through him. That was satisfying; he wasn't immune to her apparatuses after all. But then, unaccountably, he stopped thrashing and peered up at her with nothing more than an amused grin on his face.

He was toying with her.

“Ouch,” he said.

She amped up the attack even more, taking it to borderline-fatal intensity. Roach winced, as if mildly discomforted. There was a clear tremor in his legs as his nerves glitched out, but he clearly wasn't feeling any of it.

Godel forced herself to smile, as if she were enjoying the game. “Then, perhaps it would be easier to kill you.”

“And throw away all chance of learning the whereabouts of the object? I don't think so. Even if you do, that's fine. I've lived my life free. That's all I ever wanted.”

She believed he was telling the truth there, too. People like him revelled in their lawlessness, their outsider status. She'd lost three Walkers in the fight to pluck him from the backwater world he'd lurked upon and bring him aboard the Storm Gatherer.

“Then I need to exert influence upon you in another way.” Godel waved a hand, and one wall revealed live images of Roach's homeworld, Terios, transmitted directly from the Watchful Presence, the Cathedral ship in attendance of the system.

Roach climbed to his feet. His hair plastered his face as he looked at her, and there was something approaching madness in his impudent grin. “If you think threatening to destroy the planet I was born on troubles me, then you know nothing about me. I hate Terios. It's so peaceful, so nice. Please, feel free to destroy it. Send phalanxes of Void Walkers through its cities with their blasters blazing. Unfurl another of your damned shrouds; it can only improve the place.”

“You have family there.”

Roach shrugged. “None that I care about.”

He really was too easy to play. He still hadn't worked out what she was threatening him with. “Life on Terios is well-ordered, and no one is allowed to step out of line. The slightest misdemeanour is harshly punished.”

“I know. Why do you think I fled as soon as I could…”

He tailed off. He had worked out what she was proposing. It was to his credit that he switched his strategy immediately. “Let's talk about this. We can come to some arrangement, yes?”

“We will return you to the surface, inform your loving family, monitor you closely from orbit to ensure that you don't leave. Your people may have to restrain you to ensure that you don't attempt to take your own life, but I believe they are very proficient at providing such … care. Once your augmentations are cut from you, there will be little you can do to resist. After a decade or two, you should become resigned to your new station.”

He looked from the planet back to her, and she could see in his eyes that he knew he was beaten. All he could do was to salvage what he could. The right buyer – if one could be found – would have paid a fortune for his discovery, and that possibility had slipped through his fingers in a moment.

“If I tell you what I found, will you let me return to my old life?”

“Living outside the loving gaze of Omn?”

“I could be useful to you. Inform you if I hear anything else that might be of interest.”

She pretended to consider his words for several moments. “Very well, tell me where the device is. If your information is reliable, we can come to an arrangement.”

He hesitated for only a few moments, searching in vain for another strategy. He had none. He sent her the coordinates of the mysterious object that he'd found deep in interstellar space.

“Very good,” she said.

She despatched a Walker to jump to the location to confirm the truth. Finally, it seemed, her plans were coming together. Roach's discovery of the ancient device was something approaching a miracle – a very welcome miracle. She'd worked tirelessly for years, without the approval or even the knowledge of the Primo, attempting to map out the metaspace pathways criss-crossing the galaxy. The routes of most remained a mystery; there was simply no way of knowing which gateways connected to which, a fact that infuriated and frustrated her in equal measure. She didn't know where the entrances on Coronade led to – or even if they led anywhere, as Lagan and Ada appeared to believe. She didn't know where in the galaxy the renegades might emerge – if they ever did.

The records had been left deliberately incomplete, and she probably only knew where a fraction of the gateways even were. But, the glory of it was that she'd identified seventeen gateways lurking beneath the surfaces of seemingly-normal stars. The ancient records she'd uncovered from the ruined temple on Toronsay, sun-baked and sand-blasted, were irrefutable, although it had taken her three years to interpret them correctly and map the stars identified onto the present-day galaxy. Seventeen systems connected by tunnels built through the void, joining one star system to another, or to seemingly insignificant patches of interstellar vacuum. Seventeen systems, and no fewer than seven with inhabited planets orbiting them. The figure was a wonder to Godel. There had to be a reason for them being there. Seven galactic civilisations whose stars were connected to a network that could be used to destroy them.

False believers like Carious talked only of triads in their apostasy. The triple stars, the three aspects of Omn, the three divine attendants that wait upon him. But she knew the older scriptures, and in those seven was the number that recurred again and again. The seven eyes of Omn, the seven galaxies, the seven sacred roads. And, of course, there were the seventeen sevens of the sacred tally. The significance of that could not be denied; the numbers did not lie. How glorious the sight of them had been over the surface of Fenwinter.

It had troubled her that some of the tunnels she'd identified opened into regions of space that the Cathedral ships refused to fly into. The Walkers' ships, also, had been incapable of making the journey, at least at first. Something in their navigational systems had simply refused to pass through the void to the designated areas. She'd wondered if some unseen hand was acting against her, attempting to thwart her plans. Omnian theology described hosts of malignant entities that would delight in sending the righteous off the true path. She'd overcome the limitations of the technology by forcing the ships to fly where she wanted them to go. Doing so had involved crippling the machines, delving into their workings and excising certain components from them. She'd lost a total of eleven Cathedral ships during her attempts to force the ships to fly where she wanted. It was almost as if the vessels were fighting her.

But, of course, no one could explain to her why the regions of forbidden space even existed. Her suspicion was that they were nothing more than an attempt to hide the truth about the star systems set aside for supernova. Metaspace ships built in recent times – including all those on the opposing side in the Omnian War three centuries previously, most of which had been destroyed – had not had the limitation. Very few metaspace ships had been constructed since those days, as Concordance made sure, although those that had often retained the aversion. That appeared to be superstition among stellar cartographers: a copying of ancient designs, there for no good reason that she could see.

It didn't matter. She now knew enough of the topography of the metaspace tunnels to make use of at least some of them, and uncovering the whereabouts of the mass engine was the final piece of the puzzle. She had uncovered allusions to the devices in the records, but had never been able to discover the location of one – until now. With such a device under her command, she could produce something truly glorious. She had never succeeded in opening a single gateway, but it was clear from the records that the mass engines, once docked into a suitable entrance, would automatically do exactly that.

An urgent demand from the First Augurs intruded into her thoughts at that moment. The convocation circle was sitting in session at the God Star, demanding her presence. What did they want now? They seemed to delight in interrupting her. Could they not leave her in peace to work?

She couldn't afford to antagonise them further, though, not yet.

“Stay there,” she said to Roach – although he obviously had no choice, bound as he was to the pillar in the centre of the room. She sealed the room behind her as well, in case the man had augmentations that allowed him to break free. He wasn't going anywhere.

She ambled to the Storm Gatherer's Augury sphere, deliberately taking her time. They could not summon her like a pet. She bowed her head in feigned subservience as she opened up the connection to the other First Augurs.

Carious wasted no time in launching his attack. The orb brought the images and words across the galaxy, allowing them to converse as if they were in the room together. “Welcome, Secundus Godel. It is most unfortunate that you are unable to attend the convocation in person.”

“My apologies, Primo, but there are matters here that I had to attend to. You bade me pursue the heretics Ondo Lagan and Selene Ada.” Which was true, although she was privately more concerned with extracting knowledge from them than with bringing them to the light of Omn.

“And how is that proceeding?”

“We believe both are now dead. Their ship entered the atmosphere of a planet utterly inimical to life, and has not reappeared.”

“You have promised me their death before.”

“This time I am sure of it.”

“It is to be hoped that you are not also engineering another Fenwinter.”

So, they had finally caught up on that. That was their urgent concern. It had taken them months to discover the truth of the pathogen she'd released. They really were out of touch, hiding away at the God Star.

“Secundus Godel?” Carious prompted her, demanding her response. Godel had to resist the urge to laugh in their faces. The high and mighty rulers of the galaxy: they were ridiculous. They were such small people, utterly at odds with the public face they presented. The galaxy saw titans, but she knew them as they were: small-minded fools, hiding away behind the miraculous devices they had been given. They gave themselves impressive titles – Augur, Hierarch, Lore Lord, Stellar Mechanic, even Secundus – but the words were all part of the act, whether they admitted it to themselves or not. In truth only one designation mattered: that of Primo. Only the Primo received the unfettered word of Omn, which meant that no one else knew whether each command given had truly come from the godhead … or had been thought up by the Primo.

Carious was, at least, intelligent, but the others could barely muster an original thought between them. Valomar, Catterbron, Mezzovain and Xinthe appeared to understand the essential futility of their lives, but the other two First Augurs – Brein Ha and Mekley – lacked even that insight. Their contribution to any debate was to regard her with pin prick eyes and to mouth empty platitudes, seemingly at random. The unspoken truth was that they were all there filling time, waiting for the day when one of them might need to pull on Carious's white robes and continue the line of Primos.

It was useful in many ways: she alone spent her days uncovering the truths hidden in the God Star's archives or scattered in ruins around the galaxy. She alone knew, for instance, that there were beads and flecks that could be embedded into the brain to allow individuals to communicate across the galaxy, as she did with Kane and the others. Once, perhaps, that had been the norm, and an incomprehensible babble of words had been flung around the galaxy without any oversight. Now, only the ships could communicate with the God Star via their Augury spheres, and conversations were properly controlled – apart from the orders she gave to the Void Walkers loyal to her.

The First Augurs' docility was useful, but it also meant that they occasionally liked to hold her to account, burden her with their own resentments and failings. Attempt to pin her back, keep her in her place. The summons to the convocation was one such effort. She grew tired of her subservience. Much was moving in the galaxy, and she didn't need the distraction of another delay.

She answered, seeing no reason to deny what she had done. “It is true that I brought the people of Fenwinter into Omn's light. Is that not our purpose?”

It was the utterly loyal Xinthe who replied, speaking, no doubt, with the words of Carious. “This convocation does not share your belief in the doctrinal force of the sacred tally, let alone your calculation that the number has been reached.”

She had to play along for now, pretend she was loyal to them. The texts she had drawn on were vague, perhaps, but they gave her enough of a grey area in which to operate. “My apologies, but the writings I made use of are very clear, and the calculations cannot be denied.”

“Nevertheless,” said Carious, speaking before Xinthe could reply, “while we obviously approve of your zeal, we demand that such actions be taken only with the approval of the convocation in the future.”

Mekley chose that moment to throw in one of his random interjections. “In the light of Omn.” Everyone ignored him.

She couldn't push them too far, not yet. “I believed I was acting in an approved manner.”

“You were not. There must be no more Fenwinters unless we all agree.”

He meant unless he agreed. “Of course. I give you my word.” Agreeing was no hardship; she had already moved on from that approach. Uncovering the truth of the mass engines gave her much greater scope for action, in ways that they were too ignorant to understand.

“Return to the God Star as soon as you are able,” said Carious.

“I will,” she said, dipping her head again as she closed the connection.

 

Deep in thought, she returned to her interrogation of Roach. But, as she walked, a message came in from Kane, one that she had been waiting for. There were so many demands on her time.

“Secundus Godel, I have the Radiant Dragon within missile range. Shall I destroy it? Its energy hull is completely depleted.”

She could sense his hunger to destroy the renegades' vessel. “Is there any sign of Lagan or Ada?”

“None. They have not emerged from the atmosphere of the planet.”

“Their ship is running up to metaspace translation?”

“It is.”

“Very well. Do no destroy it. Hit it with the AI incursion device that you are armed with, then let it go. Their ship intrigues me; it appears to have capabilities we do not understand. Follow your orders, then return to the planet to watch for the heretics in case they do re-emerge.”

There was a moment, perhaps, when Kane hesitated to follow her command. Maybe it was only the slight delay of communicating across the galaxy.

“Yes, Secundus,” he said eventually.

“Inform me of any developments.”

“Yes, Secundus.”

She closed the connection as another communication vied for her attention. Sometimes everything seemed to happen at once. It was the Walker she had despatched to Roach's coordinates.

“Well?”

“It is here. It is … vast.”

“Does it look operational?”

“I can detect no damage to it.”

“Very good. Stay there. Guard it. I will send reinforcements.”

The sly grin on Roach's face riled her more than she could say as she returned to the chamber where she held him. He knew well enough what she'd found.

“Impressive, isn't it?” he said.

“It is as I expected it to be.”

“Then, we have a deal. The device in exchange for my freedom?”

She didn't reply. She studied him as the hope drained out of his face. Despite all his claims, it appeared that he did value his life after all.

She walked up close to him, whispering into his ear. “There is no deal. I have all that I want from you.”

“But…”

He spoke no more. This time, the bolt of energy through his synapses was enough to burn away his cerebral cortex in a heart's beat. His body slumped to the floor. The faintest wisp of burning flesh came to her nostrils. Wrinkling her nose in disgust, she strode away from the room, instructing one of her underlings to eject the renegade's body from the ship.

 

Kane wondered, briefly, what it was that Godel hoped to learn from the Radiant Dragon. The location of the Refuge? They had searched in vain for Lagan's hideaway. It puzzled him why the Augurs were going to so much trouble: if the Refuge was that important, why had Omn chosen not to reveal its location? It made little sense to Kane, and a strange surge of anger trickled through him. But, immediately, it defocussed and slipped away, and he returned to following his orders.

Back at the planet, he dropped his ship onto a low-orbit around the dead planet, grazing the upper reaches of the atmosphere. The vessel rattled and boomed as it bounced off the fringes of the planet's storm-wracked skies. He continued to monitor the scraps of telemetry from the sensors they'd dropped. There were no signs of life, no suggestion that the two they were pursuing had survived. The halo of orbital devices, watching the world from every angle, reported no whispers, no echoes.

Why had the fugitives gone to so much effort to reach this world? It was utterly lifeless; the very opposite of his own planet. It made no sense. The question ebbed away in his mind as soon as it occurred to him, a twist of smoke that he couldn't seize hold of. It troubled him no more. But the two were surely dead: if their plunge through the hurricane-force winds hadn't torn their meagre vessel to pieces, the orbital nukes he and the other Concordance forces had dropped would have struck them. It was a fitting end: he'd almost died at Maes Far, barely escaping the raging plume of Lagan's own atmospheric detonations.

He'd almost caught up with Ada on Migdala. Her presence on the world had been a surprise to him, although perhaps the Augurs in their infinite wisdom, Secundus Godel in particular, had known she'd be there and had sent him to intercept her. After the battle at the Temple she'd fled, as she always did, and he'd longed to pursue her. But it appeared Ada had been harboured by some contact on the planet. He could have discovered who that was eventually; learning the truth was simply a matter of imposing enough suffering on people until they cracked. He could have scorched the world with his fury until the truth was told, but his duties elsewhere had taken priority, and Ada had escaped.

Returning to his homeworld had triggered a series of odd feelings in Kane's mind. He tried to force the troublesome thoughts aside, but he found they kept returning, creeping up on him when he least expected them. He'd been happy there as a boy, hadn't he? The world was filled with evil, that was clear, but he'd loved it, nevertheless. It must have altered fundamentally at some point in the recent past. That had to be it.

The memories of his youth were hard to tie down, though, glimpsed as they were through a thick haze of cloud that filled his thoughts. His recollections were little more than brief flashes – places, faces – but they were there: Migdala with its mountains and its forests, its wide beaches and its carnivals. The heady scents of the blooms in the midsummer flower processions. The taste of freshly-caught fish cooked upon a crackling beach fire. In his mind's eye, in his dreams, people whose names he couldn't recall spoke to him, although he could never hear their words. Their mouths moved, but there was no sound. He wondered what they were trying to tell him.

It didn't matter. They were demons trying to tempt him. False memories. They were lies, and he saw the truth. His world was so much bigger now. The vessel he spent so much of his time in was small, yes, but he could go anywhere in it, travel to whichever corner of the galaxy Secundus Godel instructed him to visit. The visions in his head from the past meant nothing. He could ignore them. He had to ignore them.

The First Augurs would tell him what to do, and he would carry out their instructions. There was comfort in accepting their words, for they spoke with the wisdom of Omn. The doubts that occasionally shot through him were echoes of his own failings, the sin-filled heretic that he'd once been. Their words were a bright flame that burned through the fog in his head, directing him onto the right path to take.