“We've fallen a long way.”
“What matters is that we don't forget what we once were; what we're truly capable of.”
At an unspoken communication from Ondo, a triangular doorway appeared in the previously flawless flank of the Dragon. Selene had no recollection of her first journey in the ship, but she'd been inside it many times since, learning its layout, understanding how it was controlled. This would be her first flight away from the Refuge. Since her decision to join Ondo, he'd made two further reconnaissance trips to the Maes Far system, leaving behind monitoring and exploratory devices of various kinds, but she hadn't accompanied him. Now, finally, she was ready to do so.
The flecks in her mind that allowed her to interface with the ship gave her full executive control over its actions, but her connection was still imperfect, awkward. Ondo had explained it would take time for her neurons to make the necessary adjustments. Eventually, the plasticity of her brain would give her the instinctive control that Ondo enjoyed. Learning to operate the Dragon was like learning to control her new limbs: she'd started out frustratingly clumsy, but eventually, with muscle memory ingrained, she'd be able to act without her conscious mind having to think about it.
Once the Refuge had retrieved the dock's precious volume of air into its recycling systems, Ondo deactivated the energy wall and edged the Dragon down the hemispherical tunnel towards space. He was taking it slowly so she could watch and understand, the intimacy of the bond they shared with the ship allowing her to feel what he was doing to direct the craft. A flood of telemetry flowed into her brain, overwhelming at first, but slowly she began to see patterns there, make sense of the rush.
She found herself exhaling a deep breath as they emerged into the dizzying vastness of the void. She'd been contained too long. She perceived the universe both through her own senses and the Dragon's sensors. The Refuge was already a tiny fleck behind them, surrounded by the halo of bright stars strung through local space. Beyond, inconceivably huge, hung the main body of the galactic mass. Nausea washed through her at the terrible scale of it all. Planet bound, she was used to the simple truths of an up and a down. In space, she could fall for ever in any direction.
It was dizzying, but it was also glorious. All this was hers.
Ondo – the real Ondo, not her private copy – was there beside her, his voice reassuring. He knew what she was going through. “It will become easier. One more thing your brain needs to adjust to.”
She nodded in reply, not trusting herself to speak as her stomach fluttered and clenched.
Ondo pulled the Dragon into a gentle arc, back towards the galactic centre, accelerating all the time. They could jump more-or-less directly into metaspace. It was one of the advantages of the Refuge's remote location: the lack of any stellar bodies nearby meant there were no gravity wells that could pull the ship off-vector during the tricky translation out of Euclidean space. In truth, it was a disadvantage as well as an advantage; the fact that they could jump without a prolonged run-up also meant an attacking force could jump inbound without warning at any time … if they knew where the Refuge was.
“We'll translate in thirty seconds,” said Ondo. “Watch carefully, feel how it works, how I control the Dragon. The ship does most of the computational work, but the direction comes from us, and without clear control the ship might attempt a malformed jump and end up somewhere disastrous. Possibly even caught between realities, unable to move onwards or backwards. That and the risk of being pulled into a star or a black hole are the main risks.”
“Oh, those are the main risks? Apart from that, it's perfectly safe?”
For once, though, she did what he said. She needed to know how to control the ship if she was going to take on Concordance. The idea of metaspace fascinated her: it was another concept that, once, must have been common knowledge. Ondo had once explained it to her using one of the ancient paper books he'd scavenged from some destroyed planet. He'd clearly been delighted with his metaphor.
“This book has tens of thousands of paragraphs, hundreds of thousands of words. You could read through it sequentially, word by word, but that would take a long time. That's why there would have been an index at the back, a much shorter summary of the main points in the text that you can traverse quickly. Find the right reference, then hop into the main text at the right page, the right word. Metaspace is like that: the gravity wells of stellar and planetary masses are there, projections of them at least, and by traversing that topography you can find the right point to emerge into real space. Flying greater distances still takes greater time, but navigation via metaspace means journeys can be made in a tiny fraction of the time it would take a subluminal ship to lumber the same distance.”
“And you're sure that travelling metaspace doesn't suck out your soul, leave it haunting the wastes of metaspace while you emerge, broken and insane, as our galactic overlords insist?”
“I'm sure. You know I've made hundreds of jumps.”
“And you're not insane?”
“I don't believe so, no.” He smiled, considering her through his multiglasses. “But perhaps that should be for you to decide.”
She forced herself to breathe slowly as the Dragon acquired more and more velocity, flinging itself forwards while its metaspace projectors prepared for the moment it would flip out of
