She felt the surge of it like plummeting off a high cliff. She swooped in a fall, faster and faster, nausea and delight rushing within her, sweeping her away.
Everything went grey, and the familiar universe disappeared.
7. Maes Far
They emerged into normal space a little over an hour later.
Ondo had placed them three hundred million kilometres from the stellar mass, a point perpendicular to the orbit of Maes Far. He'd explained his reasoning to her back at the Refuge. “In any system, most activity takes place in the narrow disc where planets and asteroids and even the most eccentric objects orbit. Away from the ecliptic plane, we're much less likely to be spotted.”
The Dragon sat in space and waited, drinking in telemetry from the various nanosensors Ondo had seeded throughout the system on his previous visits. In the year and a half since her rescue, his devices had watched everything taking place in the system: departures and arrivals, anything out of the ordinary. A proportion of the probes had been lost, either to natural events or Concordance activity, but he'd scattered enough around that it was impossible for all of them to be destroyed. The devices broadcast their telemetry to the universe, there for anyone to intercept if they knew the encryption keys, so that they didn't have to give away the location of the Dragon as it materialised. The data would give her and Ondo a clear idea of what they were facing.
Selene sifted through the flood of information with her flecks: images from nanosensors around Maes Far as well as those orbiting the system's unoccupied planets and the orange-yellow sun itself. There were also many streams from within the atmosphere of her home planet: scenes of unceasing, storm-blasted ruin; images cataloguing the death of her homeworld. They were muddy and indistinct; there was little electromagnetic radiation in any wavelength bathing the world to pick out detail. Only a weak light reflecting off Maes Far's two moons – nowhere near enough to sustain a viable ecosystem – provided any illumination.
It was clear that the lack of electromagnetic radiation hitting the surface had triggered complete environmental collapse on the planet. The loss of all complex plant life had destroyed food chains, eliminating populations of herbivores and then carnivores. Creatures feeding off carrion had survived, even thrived, for a time, but that had been only a short-term glut. The planet was dark, its dying atmosphere convulsing with ferocious death-throe storms, as if it were raging against its own end.
She searched in vain for signs of intelligent life, some lonely figure walking the desolation. Perhaps some unknown individual had built a bunker against an imagined Armageddon and had now emerged. She had never heard of anyone going to such lengths, certainly not in her extended family. Now, studying the streams, she could see there was no one. The only movement came as the hurricane winds scattered debris, picked at the remains of structures, whipped water into a dead fury. She still dreamed dreams of being back there, of skeletal hands clutching at her from beneath the surface. She needed to accept the fact that every person she'd ever known, everyone apart from Ondo, was gone. Only after all this time was she beginning to grasp the meaning of that simple statement, the scale of it. She still found herself speaking out loud to Falden or her father, as if they were simply on the end of a comms channel and could respond to her words.
She studied the pictures of the planet for as long as she could bring herself to.
She tore herself away. They needed to know about local space: whether ships or traps or defences had been left for them, or whether any scavenger vessels had ventured into the system. Concordance had to calculate there was a chance she was still alive, and, therefore, that she and Ondo might return.
Limited by light speed, the telemetry from the farther reaches of the system was by definition older and less reliable, but they could at least discern what had been taking place in the system in the recent past. If it looked safe, they'd creep sunwards, heading for the speck of rock that was Maes Far, watching warily all the time.
There were numerous artificial objects left in the system, their nature unknown to her. They had to be Concordance: her own culture had placed nothing into space for three hundred years. She tagged the objects with her mind's eye, drawing Ondo's attention to them. “What are these? Debris of some sort?”
“Automated sentinels. It's their standard practice: always a few in close orbit to the sun, then three or four around primitive or once-populated worlds.”
“Why are they watching the sun?”
“I don't know. They always seem fascinated by the stars in the systems they occupy. Perhaps it's a religious thing.”
“They'll see us if we go anywhere near Maes Far. And they must have nanosensors of their own that we can't detect. There are countless trillions of dust particles and any one of them could be a Concordance bug.”
“It's a risk, agreed, but we can reduce the odds of detection significantly. By the look of the activity in the system, they didn't notice either of my two most recent incursions. It should be possible to plot a course that keeps us out of line-of-sight of any of their sentinels.”
“Apart from the ones you don't know about.”
“Apart from those, yes. These incursions are a race. If we go in and get out quickly, we should be able to escape before they come for us.”
Ondo sent her a mental image of the trajectory he'd plotted: a three-dimensional representation of Maes Far and local space around it. Known Concordance observation devices flashed in orbit and down in the atmosphere. The simulation of the planet moved, and a line appeared of the route Ondo intended to take: a complex spiral that wound down to the southern pole of the planet, neatly evading the observation cone of each device.
“We are
