“Could you tell which side the ship fought on?”
“It was Magellanic Alliance, not Concordance. I've found the remains of very, very few Concordance ships, I think because so few were destroyed. The ships on the other side, drawn from all the star-faring cultures of the galaxy, were apparently no match for them. It's something that makes no sense to me, even now. How did this little-known sect suddenly acquire the knowledge to build these devastating warships? And to have so many of them? It is a great puzzle.”
She was still trying to make sense of everything he'd said. Her brain was made of fog. “This ship you found had been to Coronade and it was a ship that fought in the Omnian War. That means the images must be around three hundred years old.”
“We can't say that for sure. The war was a war for the truth as well as military domination. The ships on the Magellanic side were trying to disseminate the facts of what the Magellanic Cloud encountered, and I believe that included excerpts of much older information, from hundreds of years earlier or possibly even from some prior civilisation. This is, you understand, largely guesswork based on mere fragments of data.”
“Then the images don't really tell us very much.”
“Perhaps, but they're intriguing, aren't they? I think there's another important clue in them, too, something you may not have noticed. I applied no translation routines to the audio. What you heard was the original speech of the ship's navigator and the Coronade control station. The accents and cadences were odd to our ears, but comprehensible.”
“Those people, whoever they were, spoke the same language as us.”
“Yes – which is, in truth, not that remarkable. I've travelled all across the galaxy, to many systems in the central mass and out to the edges of each spiral arm, and the language we are using now – or some variant of it – is spoken almost universally. It's hard to escape the obvious conclusion: in the past there weren't simply a few thousand isolated starfaring civilisations, but a genuinely galaxy-spanning culture. Coronade, quite possibly, was at its heart.”
“If that was true, we'd have proof of it, histories of it.”
“Concordance are clever. They isolate us, control the message, suppress the truth and give us stories that suit their own needs. Each planet knows its local history well enough, but Concordance paints the greater picture. The terrible bloodshed, the genocide, the mass destruction in the historical record: it's always somewhere else. Even everywhere else. The scraps of truth that they haven't destroyed get subverted as fairy story: Coronade and its civilisation as nothing more than childish myth. People relish their own cynicism, and the truth gets lost.”
She couldn't take it all in; her head was throbbing from exertion and the long conversation. She hadn't spoken so much since her last days on Maes Far, her farewells with her family. “But these images you have: they can't be that ancient, otherwise the language would have evolved into something we couldn't understand.”
“True. A few hundred years more of linguistic drift and we would have great difficulty making sense of the words. Recording language in flecks and books tends to slow that process, but it still happens.”
“The language could just be something Concordance imposed upon the galaxy.”
“Except, they've never claimed to have done that, and they're always very quick to trumpet their achievements. And I suspect that would be too big a lie to convince people of, even for them. They've imposed their own interpretation of historical events, but even they can't obliterate the cultural and linguistic records of every known civilisation, not without simply killing everyone.”
Selene looked away from Ondo back to the view, which had returned to visuals of the galaxy. The Diamond Road. Apart from a few nearer stars twinkling as some speck of interstellar dust eclipsed them, it looked still, frozen. Of course, that was only a matter of perspective. Everything was moving, changing, it just wasn't always possible to see it. Imperceptibly, in the few minutes since she'd entered the room, the galaxy had turned.
“I need to sleep, Ondo. I need to think about all this.”
“Of course. My apologies if I've exhausted you. I've wanted to show someone this for a long time, and I'm afraid you've suffered because of it.”
She turned and manoeuvred the chair back down the stairs. She was getting the hang of it now, but she still managed to scrape several walls along the way.
She reached her room without pitching herself onto the floor. Exhaustion washed through her, sucking her down. She heaved herself onto the bed with the last of her strength and a gasp of pain.
Visions of starships – uncountable, bizarre, exotic starships – thronged in her thoughts, their combined communications babble incomprehensible. She slipped back into unconsciousness to their troubled hubbub.
4. A World in Shadows
Slowly she became stronger, less prone to bone-heavy exhaustion. She found, as she came around from the last few operations, that her fears of pain and incapacity were being replaced by something else. Relief that she had survived; a sense of having a future, of thinking what it might hold. And something else: a growing anger at what had been done to her, to her world and to everyone she knew and loved.
As her strength grew, so did her fury.
She used it to push herself, to overcome the pain from her tortured tissues. She spent longer and longer in the Refuge's exercise room, forcing herself to build up the strength and stamina of her natural tissues. The emulated gravity in the little room was adjustable, allowing Ondo to acclimatise himself to the conditions of different worlds, and every week she bumped it up a notch to place more strain on her system. The difficulty was keeping her surviving biology and
