Selene watched the simulation play out, looking for flaws. She couldn't see any. “This suggests they don't know anything about the wreck at the pole, otherwise they'd have been very sure to watch it.”
“They also wouldn't have allowed me to send down the borer I despatched on a very similar trajectory on my previous visit. You can see from its telemetry that it's still active and that its sweep through the ice is complete.”
Selene studied the relevant images in her mind's eye. The path Ondo's exploratory device had taken was clear. It had wound its way down through the atmosphere, dodging detection devices, then dived into the polar sea to operate from beneath the pack ice. It had burrowed upwards to the remains of the crashed starship, following a search pattern as it tracked down fragments.
There wasn't much left of the ship: it wasn't a hulk so much as a scattered layer of debris twenty metres down in the ice. Three centuries of snowfall had buried it deeper and deeper. Another three centuries, and the remains would sink through the underlying ocean to the sea-bed. By the look of it, few of the fragments were of any significant size: no large chunks of fuselage or ship skeleton as she'd imagined. The remains of the craft were little more than a constellation of disconnected sensor hits scattered over a wide area: an oval hundreds of kilometres across, spanning the magnetic pole.
“Looks like the ship broke up in the atmosphere,” she said.
“Or it was destroyed in space and this is all that's left of the microfragments that rained down on the planet. It must have been quite a firework show for anyone near enough to see it.”
“I can't tell if the borer found anything of interest,” she said. As with all their comms, data returned from the burrowing probe was encrypted in case the broadcast was picked up by a Concordance listening device.
Again, Ondo's presence in her mind showed her how to decrypt and interpret the data. “It's here. The device has found several items of interest. See, here, and here. Three objects with a high molecular complexity that suggests some kind of storage medium. There may be nothing left on them, naturally, but we need to retrieve those fragments.”
She could sense the excitement in him at the discovery. “We go in?”
“We go in.”
They began a slow dance that Ondo was clearly well-practised in: twelve hours of creeping forwards under the Radiant Dragon's reaction drives, then a pause to study the telemetry for any hint of Concordance activity. With each step, they gained more up-to-date information about the situation around Maes Far, but also came closer to the solar mass that made any escape jump into metaspace riskier and risker. Still there was no sign of unusual activity. With each delay, she found it harder and harder to contain her frustration. Ondo's wariness had kept him alive for many years, but the slowness of it was utterly maddening. The Dragon's reaction drives could accelerate it to 10% light speed, but the constant pauses meant the journey to Maes Far would take weeks.
Finally, she could stand it no longer. “If they've seen us, they'll come for us. However their transgalactic communication system functions, it clearly does function; if a sentinel has picked us up, they'll be coming for us now. We have to make a dive for the planet while we can.”
“If we move in, we'll lose the option to jump away to safety without a significant reaction-drive acceleration period.”
“If we don't, we'll lose our chance to recover the memory fragments.”
He was torn between his desire to know and his wariness of risks. “If they see us, they may surmise that you're alive and simply wished to see your homeworld again. I don't think they'll necessarily infer there are other starship remains here.”
“But they might. Why this caution?” she said.
“Concordance technological artefacts sometimes employ a fogging technology that makes them hard to detect by normal means. It renders them highly transparent across the electromagnetic spectrum, and it also does a good job of masking the trails they've taken through metaspace. The tech isn't perfect, but it's not far off. I've been experimenting with attempting to replicate it, so far with mixed results. Spotting their ships takes time, but if you sit and look for long enough, you see the background stars being systematically dimmed. It's one reason I emerged from metaspace here, where there are lots of background objects to check against. When you have a pattern of occultations, you get some idea of what you're dealing with: size, trajectory and so forth.”
“However long we sit here, we can never be sure we're safe. We might happen not to see them. They might arrive in-system at the moment we move.”
Ondo studied her for a moment, seeing something in her that appeared to amuse him.
“Possibly I was less cautious as a younger man,” he said. “And possibly I've become too wary over the years. Very well, we'll make a run for the planet. But I wanted you to understand the safest way to approach. When you're operating alone, you'll need to know these things.”
He was still protecting her. Strange that she was starting to feel just a little grateful for that. At some point, his feelings about her had started to matter. She wanted him to trust her. She needed him to if she was going to take command of the Dragon.
“You're right, we should wait until you're absolutely ready,” she conceded. “You know best.”
“Oh, it's entirely possible I don't. I think you're right. Let's go in now; there's no sign
