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. Low-orbit Turbulence
Kane dropped his ship onto a low-orbit around the dead planet, grazing the upper reaches of the atmosphere. His ship 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 air-sensors they'd dropped. There were no signs of life, no suggestion that the two terrorists they were pursuing, Ondo Lagan and Selene Ada, had survived. The halo of orbital devices, watching the world from every angle, reported no whispers, no echoes.
He wondered, briefly, why the fugitives had gone to so much effort to reach this world. It was utterly lifeless. The very opposite of his own planet, Migdala, filled, as it was, with life and colour. 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.
It was three hours since the two fugitives had dived into the world in a desperate attempt to evade justice. They were now almost certainly 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 surely 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 at 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 been 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, track her down. 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 home world 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 ship 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 he should 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.
So, he could have destroyed the renegade's ship in the battle that had flared briefly in local space around this world; he'd been one of the attack vessels in pursuit of the Radiant Dragon when it fled at high speed out of the system in its run-up to metaspace.
