He was going to reply, to object, but she saw the moment when he decided not to.
Four months later, the two of them stood beside the pyramid of the Radiant Dragon in the Refuge's space dock. The apex of the tetrahedral craft was some one hundred metres above her, its four triangular walls unblemished by any flaw or marking. She had little to compare the ship to, but the sight of low-atmosphere vessels had been common enough on Maes Far: whining, roaring machines with reaction drives of one sort or another, blasting out superheated exhaust in their wake. The Dragon appeared to need none of that.
She stroked the silvery grey voidhull of the ship. It was completely smooth to the touch, utterly unmarked by microimpact abrasions. Only with her left hand's sensitivity tuned down to nano level could she detect any unevenness, the regular patterns of its constituent molecules. Ondo had explained that, in flight, the ship wrapped an outer energy hull around itself to fend off impacts from all but the largest chunks of space debris. Apparently all starships did the same – a fact that, once, had presumably been common knowledge.
Normally the ship was as immobile as rock, building-like, but now it hovered three millimetres above the hangar's surface. A subsonic humming came from it, imperceptible to normal hearing. The ship exuded a sense of readiness to fly, to escape the Refuge and flee through metaspace to Maes Far.
Or maybe she was projecting her own emotions onto it.
“How did you build the Dragon?” she asked. “Why didn't Concordance stop you acquiring the materials and the tech?”
Ondo studied a screen held in his hand, checking the ship's telemetry. “I didn't build the Dragon. I don't think you could really say anyone built it. Better to say it evolved over the centuries.”
“A ship can't evolve.”
“Its innermost core is old; it predates the war, certainly. A ship's Mind intertwined with a metaspace propagation drive would have been incredibly rare and valuable even in an age of regular interstellar travel. If you needed a bigger ship, or a newer ship, and you had a functioning core, it would have made sense to build around it rather than starting from scratch. So far as I can tell, that happened multiple times in the Dragon's history.”
“You don't know for sure?”
“There are so many computational layers wrapped around computational layers within its systems that its underlying architecture is a little hard to pin down.”
“You're not giving me much confidence here. How safe is this ship?”
“I know enough about it not to worry. I've been through many battles and dangers with the Radiant Dragon, and it's always comes through. The ship is psychologically complicated, perhaps, and it may well harbour secrets that are so well-hidden even it isn't aware of them, but I would trust the ship over any other. Whatever its essential core is, I know it is absolutely, incontrovertibly, benign. I would stake my life on it, as did the person who flew in it before me.”
“And who was that?”
“I'm not the first lonely renegade to devote their life to recovering the truth about Concordance. There have been many such over the centuries, and one of them made contact with me and gave me the Dragon when she was nearing the end of her road.”
She knew little about Ondo's past. She had quizzed him extensively about her father, his history as it affected her, but there was still much she didn't know about him. Possibly too much. She'd been too wrapped up in herself, just as he'd been too wrapped up in his research.
His words confirmed something she'd observed more than once: his technological and engineering skill was at a level far in excess of anything she'd witnessed or suspected possible. He'd shown her how he'd woven his engram flecks through the neurons of her brain, and he'd shown her the computational models he used to decrypt the fragmentary records he'd recovered. It was science raised to the level of something like artistry. But, while he was some kind of genius, she suspected he'd also inherited much of his miraculous technology.
“Did she give you the Refuge, too?” she asked.
“No, I built this place, using the Dragon's weaponry to bore out the passageways and then building machines to complete the excavation work. I felt I needed a base.”
“Who was she?”
“Her name was Aefrid Tau Sen. She was old when I knew her, but she recovered a great many of the flecks and datastores you've seen in the Vault, although she inherited a few from earlier renegades.” He looked up for a moment, staring into the distance as if still able to see the woman somewhere by the spaceward doors. The metal shielding had rolled back, the atmosphere within the dock protected from the void only by a shimmering energy wall “She was pretty terrifying. She was very insistent that I look after everything she'd discovered, that I made sure her life's work didn't go to waste. I've tried very hard to live up to that.”
“Just as now you plan for me to do the same.”
He focused on her, back in the present. She knew what he was going to say; it was a conversation they'd had more than once. “No one is forcing you to live this life; you can leave any time you want. Besides, I plan to be around for many years yet. There are still too many unanswered questions for me to die.”
“Are we ready to fly?”
“Everything looks good. In truth, the core components of the Dragon need little maintenance; they're self-repairing, self-maintaining systems.”
He'd mentioned similar technologies before. She had no idea that was even possible; back home, every mechanism had worn down, needing constant maintenance to keep it operational.
“That's pretty miraculous.”
“The technology needs an energy input to function, obviously, but otherwise it's self-sustaining. I believe that it was
