She still suffered bouts of searing agony, but she learned to ignore them. Her body was adjusting. Day by day, slowly, they became less and less frequent.
She'd played a musical instrument at home on Maes Far, a qurang, a simple device that had variations throughout the galaxy: a resonating acoustic box with taut strings whose length could be altered to produce different notes. Her father had played, showed her the basic hand-shapes required to get the different chords. She had no great skill, but playing had been a source of pleasure on Maes Far when the anxieties of life overwhelmed her. A simple, creative task she could fill her mind with. Ondo had nothing exactly the same, but he'd given her the closest he had, smaller and with eight strings rather than the six she was used to. She was teaching herself to play. It required a high degree of manual dexterity, but it also required complete coordination, both hands working as one as she plucked and strummed with her right hand and formed chords and shaped effects with her left.
It was working, she could play the unfamiliar instrument – but it was also completely wrong. Her artificial fingers moved with astonishing speed, speeding up and down the fret like a scampering spider, never missing a note, but it was always too perfect, too mechanistic. She sounded like a person and a machine trying to play a duet: one expressive, emotive, the other clockwork and precise. In the end, always, she threw the instrument down in disgust.
She explored the Refuge, first in the chair and then, for longer periods, on foot. It was larger than she'd first imagined, its paths winding without any apparent pattern. The two cold fusion reactors at its core powered a thriving hydroponic agricultural system, as well as caverns given over to greenery just because, apparently, Ondo wanted them to be there. They served no obvious survival purpose. There was running water: the asteroid had a large reserve of ice locked away beneath its surface, and Ondo had constructed the sort of water cycling system commonly found on starships so that the supply was, more or less, inexhaustible.
A lot of the passageways and hollows in the rock were natural – presumably another reason Ondo had chosen the asteroid – but at some point in the past, he'd extended and connected the natural caverns to form an interconnecting warren. She found several observation points, granting views in all directions, the galaxy sometimes visible, sometimes hidden behind the Refuge's misshapen grey mass. She discovered the spaceward hangar where the pyramidal bulk of the Radiant Dragon was berthed. Other ships were there, too, but they seemed unused, in various states of disrepair, cannibalized for spares. There were sleeping rooms: four or five of them, as if Ondo had planned for a larger population. Only hers and Ondo's were used.
She found a storeroom where he had racks of clothing, scavenged from many different worlds by the look of their disparate styles and colours and fabrics. Perhaps they were disguises, or a part of some abandoned plan to have more people at the Refuge. She picked out items that were better-fitting and decidedly more feminine than the baggy medical gowns she'd been wearing since her reconstruction. She wouldn't have been seen dead in them back home, but it felt good to smooth their close-fitting lines over her anatomy, gave her some small sense of control over her appearance. Studying herself from all angles in a mirror, she was a little bit a person once more, rather than simply a patient, a problem.
She also found many rooms given over to Ondo's experiments and research, rooms containing contraptions she could make no sense of, perhaps salvaged from around the galaxy for him to reassemble at some point.
He was often away, travelling the galaxy aboard the Dragon, following his trails, and at those times she had the Refuge to herself. The quiet of it was welcome, healing. There appeared to be no restrictions on where she could go or what she could do, and she spent her days exploring her miniature new world. The lack of any planetary-defence batteries had surprised her, until Ondo explained their only hope for survival lay in absolute secrecy. If their whereabouts became known, they'd have no chance against their Concordance overlords, however much firepower they could muster to defend the Refuge. Still, she couldn't help thinking Ondo had weaponry of some description somewhere. He had a great deal of dazzling technology at his fingertips: some of it acquired from his journeys around the galaxy over the decades, but much of it, seemingly, of his own invention.
She found, at the end of an inconsequential rock passageway at the foot of a twisting, narrow stairwell, a small vault where he stored all the precious scraps of data he'd scavenged across the galaxy. The door to the room was blast-proof carbon-steel, half a metre thick, but it swung open silently to her touch. Inside were all of Ondo's treasures. There were, in truth, precious few of them; Concordance had done a good job of destroying the facts they didn't want the galaxy to know, of erasing its collected memories. As well as starships' dataflecks, there were discs and cubes, and other storage devices she didn't recognize. There were fragments of complete machines, the data presumably stored within them, as well as paper books with hand-written words. Everything looked singed, or broken, or degraded, but each was held in a blue stasis field, cocooned and protected as carefully as any priceless jewel or revered religious artefact. The
