Ondo dismantled the body of the borer carefully. The bulk of its innards was taken up by eight compartments, three of which were filled with the retrieved objects. Each was cocooned within a shimmering blue stasis field generated by a tiny propagator. Ondo picked up each fragment by their stub, holding it between his fingertips to study the object hovering within through his multiglasses. Selene, zooming in with her left eye was able to see even more detail than Ondo. There could be no doubt each object revealed complex patterns at the molecular level. There had to be some chance they were storage media of some sort. The question was, could she and Ondo read data off them, decrypt them to make their contents readable?
The first two objects were something like the flecks she and Ondo had inside their brains: rice-grain metallic specks with a clear electromagnetic signature. Both appeared to be whole and undamaged.
It was the third object that fascinated Ondo the most, however. This appeared to be a glass sphere perhaps half a centimetre in diameter. He stared into it for some time, moving it around in an attempt to catch the light at the right angle. The iridescence shot through the little sphere reminded Selene of staring into an eye.
“This is a memory device?” she asked.
He was distracted as he replied, barely hearing her. “I'm not sure what it is. There's certainly complex structure within it. The borer reported that it appeared to have resided inside the skull of one of the crew members, but there was little left of the organic remains other than an impression in the ice.”
“Inside their skull? It's a projectile weapon shot of some kind?”
“I suppose that's possible. It seems a strange design for a bullet though, and very crude. I'd say it's more likely this is some other design of brain-enhancement fleck.”
“Will you be able to read anything off it?”
“I'm really not sure. I'm not sure about any of these fragments.”
“You have lots of scraps like these in the Vault.”
His eyes were unnaturally large through his multiglasses. “Not like this bead. Unless I'm very much mistaken, this is not from any Magellanic ship. These remains are from the other side: a Concordance vessel crashed into the ice above us.”
“I thought you said you don't know of any Concordance crash sites?”
“I don't. Or at least, I didn't until now.”
“Are you sure?”
“Not completely. Your father's notes suggested a Concordance ship had been ambushed by a significant force of Magellanic Alliance craft over Maes Far. My guess is that this is the result. A rare victory for the side that ultimately lost the war. I really need to get these objects back to the Refuge and study them in detail.”
They sealed the lander up again, then retraced their route through the dark waters to the edge of the ice. Surging free of the ocean, they followed the precalculated return vector across the ice-fields. They burst back into sunlight to arc upwards in an ascent directly over the pole, climbing to their rendezvous point with the Dragon locked in high orbit.
They were one hundred metres above the surface when the lander's alarms began to scream inside Selene's mind. High-g ground-to-air harpoons were converging on the lander, impact imminent, total destruction of the ship 99% likely.
At times of high stress since her repair, she'd often suffered the unpleasant sensation of her mind dividing into two, as if her natural tissues had not fully accepted the links to her artificial half. It was always a disturbing and sickening sensation, as if she were really two people, or as if she didn't know who or what she was. It was like that now. Part of her mind, the original part, spun into panic as visions of her previous lander journey, her escape from Maes Far, filled her. The little ship being torn apart by Concordance weaponry with her strapped inside, helpless, screaming into the void. The terror of it, the crippling pain of her injuries.
But the other part of her brain looked calmly on, studying telemetry, assessing risks. The flaw in Concordance's monitoring network wasn't a flaw at all. The enemy had known about the fragments in the ice all along, known Ondo would eventually come for them. They had laid their traps carefully: some technology akin to the starship fogging field had concealed the bunkers from their scans. From what Ondo had said, that was new behaviour. Concordance had worked hard to kill them.
The lander was under fire from two different installations, a ring of ground stations arrayed around the pole. Two of the harpoons would strike within three and a half seconds, then the second salvo, two more missiles, a further three seconds later. Ondo sent the lander into a series of jinking manoeuvres in an attempt to avoid the impacts. She studied the projected trajectories of the harpoons plotted against the chaotic movements of the lander, and instructed the ship to overload its energy hull in the areas where an impact was most likely.
She knew, even as she did so, that it would make little difference. They had no defensive ordnance capable of seeking out the incoming missiles and destroying them before they struck. Their hull would never be strong enough to withstand the impact of even one of the harpoons. The organic part of her brain continued to scream and rage, while her other half looked on with detached
