It happened now. Even as the stars of normal space faded, the lines and angles of a Concordance ship appeared around them, engulfing them, passing directly through them even as they passed through it. To each ship, the other faded as one left and one entered metaspace, but there was a moment when Selene saw the interior of the enemy vessel, its corridors and decks and mechanisms crisply clear. She saw the faces of the people on board, the crew and at least two Void Walkers, and she knew that they'd seen her, too. They watched each other as their ships momentarily intersected, almost close enough to touch but divided by the different realities they inhabited.
She caught a passing glimpse, brief but clear to her augmented vision, of the Cathedral ship's convocation. Concordance ships were controlled by an inner circle of clerical officers: a Hierarch, a Stellar Mechanic, the ship's Augur, among others. They sat in their elaborate robes at the heart of the ship, their faces an assortment of determination, calculation and alarm. Supposedly, the circles controlling each vessel were an analogue of the circle of First Augurs that sat in convocation at the God Star, directing events across the entire galaxy, translating and interpreting the will of Omn. The circles on the ships were responsible for implementing the instructions passed to them, although it was unclear how much autonomy the Hierarch wielded. Did they simply carry out the letter of Omn's instructions, passed to them by the Augur, or did they have the power to interpret and improvise? Ondo sometimes wondered if it was the ships' Augurs that wielded real authority: it was they that claimed to hear the words of Omn, and who relayed them to the Hierarch for execution.
In an instant, the glimpse of the convocation circle was gone. Miraculously, no parts of the two ships had occupied the same point in real space at the same moment. The Dragon completed its translation into metaspace, the uniform greyness of the void seizing hold of it.
There was silence for long seconds.
“That was close,” said Ondo.
“Did they survive too?”
“I'd say so, since we did.”
Had she saved them or endangered them by triggering their translation early? Hard to be sure. Ondo said nothing either way. He directed the Dragon to follow a randomised sequence of metaspace traversals to conceal their route and give them time for full-system bug scans. They could be tracked through the void for a short distance via their wake through the Singh Field – the background structure of metaspace – but the fluctuations decayed rapidly. They needed to be sure Concordance weren't on their trail. Ondo was convinced it was possible to develop technology that could detect a wake for a much longer period – possibly weeks or months – a fact that caused him great anxiety. As he'd explained, he had no proof it was possible, but no proof it was impossible, either.
She wanted to quiz him about everything that had happened on Maes Far, but he was already distracted, studying the flecks they'd recovered from the ice. She left him for the seclusion of her own room. Her heart was still racing, her breathing elevated, but she'd calmed a little. She held up her hands again, studying them microscopically with her left eye. The tremor had subsided a little, but it was still there.
She sat on her bed and closed her eyes. Frustrated fury coursed through her. She relived the moment of her father's death again and again, the silent sinking to the ice, the spray of red upon the pristine white. Her own inability to do anything to stop it. She sank her face into her hands and let the tears come. What horrors had her father lived through at the Void Walker's hand? They'd turned a proud, clever, witty man, a man she'd loved dearly, into that broken plaything. The cruelty of it engulfed her. She was too weak to stop Concordance. Sooner or later her own fate would be that of her father's, and she would die a broken, pointless death, and nothing in the galaxy would have changed.
No. She wouldn't succumb. Move forwards, not backwards. She would fight them. She forced her mind's attention to the ship's status and telemetry readings. Apart from the patterns of fluctuation in the Singh Field, metaspace was calm around them. No sign of pursuit. She came to a decision. She had a little time; she would talk to Ondo, the inner Ondo inside her mind. She hadn't gone near the avatar since it was implanted, hadn't communicated with it, hadn't granted it access to any of her sensory inputs, but now she would. There were things she needed to know.
“Ondo, I need you.” The words of the agreed summoning phrase sounded annoyingly, well, needy. She enunciated them as clearly as she could, then repeated them, not sure how to properly perform the summoning.
The voice inside her head spoke with complete clarity, as if it were the flesh-and-blood man communicating with her through her flecks.
“Hello, Selene.” She caught a glimpse of a room filled with hazy light, the ghost of Ondo standing in the middle, but when she looked directly at him, he disappeared. He'd said it would take practice to establish clear communication with the avatar.
“Firstly,” she said, “are you absolutely promising me the real Ondo won't get to hear what we discuss?”
“Upon my love for your father and upon my life, you have my word. The physical Ondo only gets to know if you tell him, otherwise this conversation remains firmly inside your head. I can be updated from the real Ondo's engrams, but no data can flow the other way, from your mind or my neural analogue into the real world. The single exception is the engram expulsion mechanism I explained, but that is completely under your control. You may banish
