He took his glasses off so he could converse with her properly. “It was luck, really. It would have been too dangerous to maintain a regular communication, for either of us. The arrangement was that I would send an automated drone into the system every few years to harvest any interesting data he'd unearthed, and then disappear. There were nanosensors in orbit that picked up and stored any broadcasts whose wavelengths followed a very specific pattern of modulations.
“Normally, I acquired only drawings and images of what your father had unearthed from the ruins he was excavating. Occasionally, there was a personal message, but there was never any great detail. Of course, he had to be careful to walk the line that all historians and archaeologists across the galaxy have to walk. If they get too close to the truth or find out anything genuinely useful, Concordance starts paying attention. This time, when the Dragon returned, he'd sent an urgent plea for help. The Dragon also identified what the increased Concordance activity meant as it arrived in-system: by that time the shroud was already a third built.”
She recalled it well. The sun had become like a malevolent eye peering down at them from the sky, its black pupil growing wider and wider, its glow colder each day. She'd hated it more than she'd hated anything in her life. “You came up with the plan to send down the lander and save who you could?”
“It was all I could do. I took the risk of broadcasting instructions using the same modulation patterns to your father, not knowing if he would receive them. Fortunately, he did. Originally, I'd thought of sending the shuttle down again and again to save as many of your family as I could. It soon become obvious we'd only get one chance, and that was when you had to choose who would be saved. I wish I could have done more, saved everyone, stopped Concordance building their terrible device, but I could not.”
“No. I know.” There'd been so many people on her planet, and only she was left. So many funny and smart and beautiful people. And, sure, so many stupid and irritating ones, too. The burden of losing all of them was unbearable. How could she hope to live up to all their dreams, their expectations? How could she ever repay their sacrifice? The weight of that would drag her to the ground if she let it.
Her mother had foreseen how it would be for her at their parting. Selene recalled the light shining in her mother's golden hair as she held her close, the reassuring strength of her embrace. These were her final words: “Go out there and live, Selene. Don't blame yourself when we're gone. This is not your fault; you have done nothing wrong. You must live. We all want you to live. Go with our love and our blessing.” Her words had made little difference. In Selene's nightmares, the people of Maes Far were still alive, watching her from the surface of the ruined planet, crying out to her for help.
She tried, as she always did, to put the recollections out of her mind. Sometimes she wished that part of her brain had been blasted away, the memories cut from her, so she didn't have to live with them.
“Did my father ever unearth any useful information about Concordance?” she asked.
“I suspected he was getting close to something, but it's only in the last few weeks that it's become clear how much he'd learned. He'd been very busy, working away in secret. Partly that was to hide everything from the Cathedral ship, but I think he also didn't want to tell me everything until he had his findings catalogued and corroborated. He was always the rigorous scientist. Then, when he knew the end was coming, he sent everything he'd found, desperate it shouldn't be lost. As well as getting you off the planet it was all he could do, the only salvation he could find.”
“The data fleck he gave me when we parted.” Her father had handed it to her as she climbed into the lander, told her to take it to Ondo. Confused, she'd asked him what it was, but he hadn't been able to explain. He'd wanted to, a jumble of thoughts forming in his mind, but there hadn't been time.
Ondo held up the tiny rectangle of glass in a pair of electronically-controlled micropincers. “We were incredibly lucky it wasn't destroyed or lost. You dropped it, of course, but I found it wedged within the wreckage. I search everything in the minutest detail before I allow it near the Refuge, in case Concordance attempt to infiltrate my defences with some tracking device.”
“Was there anything about me on there?” She imagined fond farewell letters, fatherly advice to take with her on her travels.
“It contained only his notes and the data he'd captured from the site, sorry.”
“And what did he find?”
“I'm still working on it; there are some flecks he couldn't decrypt but which I may be able to. There are some logs from the crew of the Magellanic Cloud that I've never seen before, including some fascinating entries from the ship's astrophysicist, planetologist and xenobiologist. There's nothing concrete, yet, but they all hint at the discovery of something truly remarkable.”
“What?”
“It's best I don't speculate until I have more evidence.”
“But you must have a best guess. Or what have you been doing all this time?”
Ondo considered for a moment, staring into space as if considering his long years of research and thought.
“You remember we talked about lies. What I've learned is that there are much, much bigger ones.”
“Like suppressing the idea that there was ever a golden age.”
“I think that's a part of it.”
“You're talking about Omn? You think the Magellanic Cloud did encounter a divine entity?”
Ondo
