Selene spun up the reaction drives, and they surged towards a carefully calculated interception point on the orbital path of Maes Far.
Ten hours later, they were locked into high orbit of the planet. They'd still seen no sign of any other ship arriving, no suggestion Concordance forces were approaching. From their vantage point, the disc of the shroud was an insignificant sliver of matter in the gulf of space, but because of it, the surface of the planet was dark. No cities blazed out artificial lights in the darkness. No pearlescence glowed in the atmospheric envelope as dawn approached; no terminator swept across the planet's face to turn night into day as it would on any other world.
“We'll take a lander down,” said Ondo. “A smaller ship has more chance of being able to sneak through their observation arrays.”
The Dragon was perfectly capable of operating in the atmosphere of a planet – or within its oceans. But its greater bulk was a risk, and the ship's shape wasn't particularly aerodynamic in high-friction environments.
“I'll plot a holding pattern for the Dragon,” she said, “keep it orbiting away from any Concordance sweeps.” Already her control of the ship was becoming more instinctive.
She caught Ondo's worried glance as they stepped together into the lander. He was checking to see if she was coping psychologically. She hadn't been in one since her escape from Maes Far, the identical vessel that had been blasted to pieces around her as she escaped.
The craft was big enough for the two of them and a few cases of cargo and not much else; there was room for the two of them to pass each other in the narrow corridor between control deck and hold, but doing so involved a brief, intimate dance of embrace. The lander was a sleek ovoid designed for atmospheric insertion, but it had minimal defences and only two lateral blaster arrays for weaponry. Its low-power energy hull and tinny thin fuselage would be enough to protect them from incineration as they flared into the atmosphere, but offered little in the way of useful armour if it came to a fight. Their best defences were speed and stealth.
She nodded to him. She was fine. More or less. Pre-flight checks would provide a welcome distraction from her memories. While they strapped themselves in, she busied herself with interfacing with the lander, checking diagnostics and plotting the course it would need to take. The thermal stresses upon the little craft would be significant, but within acceptable tolerances.
They made a hard descent, bone-rattlingly vertical, a fast drop between Concordance observation cones directly down to the ice of the polar cap. Ondo sat unperturbed through it all, his features a blur as the ship shook. He may have been trying to smile reassurance at her, but she couldn't be sure. The exterior of the voidhull hit two thousand degrees but remained intact, the energy hull absorbing and shunting away the worst of the frictional heat. She tried to focus on monitoring the ship's status, as well as the telemetry from orbiting nanosensors, suppressing her anxiety that the lander was breaking up around her.
At one kilometre from the polar ice, they pulled out of the drop. She could feel the stresses tearing through the ship as something like pain in her own body. She groaned from the crushing high-g weight of the manoeuvre, but whether that was because of the effect on the spars of the lander or her own tissues, she couldn't be sure. Her artificial half continued to function completely normally, unaffected by the strains. Her biology blacked out for a period of seven seconds during the worst of it, but her augmentations remained fully operational, calmly informing her what had taken place once she regained full consciousness.
They levelled out one hundred metres above Maes Far's southern ice-cap, only a few centimetres off Ondo's target trajectory. They skimmed over a blindingly white surface, jagged peaks alarmingly near. So far south, the shroud didn't fully cover the sun: the object's size and positioning meant that 99% of the globe was in perpetual darkness, ensuring total climatic destruction, but the two poles saw a sliver of light for the six months of their summers. It could never be enough to sustain any sort of advanced biology, but did mean that single-celled organisms and maybe primitive plants might survive in those two, small ecological niches.
They crossed the terminator into darkness ten kilometres from the pole, then sped for twenty minutes to the edge of the ice-sheet. The lander's lights flashed across ice-plains and glaciers, with no sign of the megafauna that had once lived upon the icy continent. The ship slowed as it reached the edge of the ice before plunging into the waters of the southern ocean. It dived two hundred metres before manoeuvring in a half-circle and heading back to the pole and the rendezvous point with the borer. The pack ice was fifty metres thick at its centre, enough to shield them from casual orbital monitoring, giving them more time to operate. The lander's lights lit up the ceiling of ice above them, delicate blue in hue, and smoothed to frozen waves by the long actions of the ocean currents.
Once, these seas had been a rich soup of swarming krill and planktonic life, and giant Southern Behemoths had grazed upon drifting, subaquatic meadows of mass-colony protozoa. That was all gone now; two kilometres down, the sea-bed was carpeted with a rich layer of decaying biomass.
As the lander surged southwards, Ondo left a trail of sensor relays in the water behind them to ensure good visibility of the Dragon and the telemetry it was receiving from across the system. No Concordance ships had arrived during their dive to the surface. It appeared she and Ondo had successfully eluded the monitoring network their pursuers had cast around the planet.
The machine Ondo
