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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
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
