The blaster fire lanced down for twenty or thirty seconds, blinding impact after blinding impact, the destruction far greater than was needed. On and on it went.
When it was done, and the worst of the smoke had cleared. Kane strode to stand in front of the assembled citizens. Behind him, the pit carved out by the blasters was empty, everything and everyone that had been standing there vaporised, the bodies reduced to smoke to drift in the planet's atmosphere. Some of the adults were on their knees, some screaming uncontrollably. Others were staring in wide-eyed disbelief at what had taken place.
Kane's voice was strangely quiet after the screaming and concussions. “This horror will live on in your minds for the rest of your days. Those of you that don't kill yourselves in your grief will live withered, broken lives, the shock of it always with you. This is as it should be. Remember, on each morning when you awake and the memories hit you again, that you are to blame. You killed your own children by your actions. You sacrificed them. They needed you and you did this to them.”
The images froze for a moment, lingering on shocked and horrified faces, then ended. Selene sat in silence for a moment, eyes closed against the horrors. No doubt Concordance had broadcast those images to the galaxy, used them to set an example just as they would have done Maes Far. She wondered if her parents had seen them, had shielded her from them.
Seized by fury, by a desperate need to do something, she strode in search of Ondo again. She didn't need to ask the Refuge his whereabouts: he would be in the laboratory. He sat with his head buried in his hands when she entered. When he looked up, surprised by her sudden appearance, his hair was wild and his eyes were red. She guessed he hadn't slept much. He had some object, presumably one of the artefacts from the ice, in a molecular scanner beside him.
“Research not going well?” she asked.
“No. These artefacts are puzzling.”
“I found the Walker; his name was Kane.”
“You needed to know who he was? I'm afraid there are plenty like him.”
“Let me show you what he did on Ossian four years ago.” She transmitted what she'd learned directly to him, brain-to-brain. She sensed Ondo's revulsion as he let the images play out in his mind.
When he was done, he removed his multiglasses and polished them, something he did when searching for the right words to say. “I believe I've heard mention of him before, a few references picked up here and there. He's from Migdala, a planet in the central mass. He was a ganglord, acquiring wealth through extortion and violence until Concordance came looking for him. He's more vicious than the average Walker, takes pleasure in killing a thousand when ten might make his point. My guess is, he suffered from a complex of psychoses and sociopathies even before Concordance did their work on him. I imagine, also, he's one of Godel's coterie. He's her style.”
“You think Godel was behind Maes Far?”
“It's a distinct possibility. Of course, I have no direct feed of information from the God Star – ¬I obviously don't even know where it is – but if I read between the lines correctly, she's ambitious, will stop at nothing to seize power. I've thought for a time she might be building up her own faction of Walkers, her own loyal band of fanatics.”
“You think she'll try to depose Carious?”
Ondo waved his head from side to side as if it was a possibility. “She may be biding her time, waiting for the right moment. I think the lure of being the ultimate power in the galaxy would make some people do just about anything.”
“Then, she's the one I need to kill.”
“If you did there would be another to take her place. And another.”
“You haven't been able to find out anything useful from the flecks we retrieved from the ice?”
“Very little. From the atomic arrangements within them, I'm convinced two of them hold encrypted data structures, but I simply don't have the hardware to extract any of it. The encoding is like nothing I've seen before. I've thrown the full power of the Refuge's Mind at the problem and drawn a blank.”
“You're convinced they're from the Concordance side?”
“I am. Given time, I can generally crack any Magellanic encryption algorithm and encoding method, but these are completely beyond me.”
Which was what he might say if his perceptions had been tampered with by Concordance. Either way, there had to be a chance that there was genuinely useful data embedded on the fragments.
“We need to read them.”
“We do, but it's the glass bead that intrigues me the most; its size suggests a considerable store of data. There isn't the slightest mark of damage upon it, despite it surviving a cataclysmic starship explosion, and then burning through Maes Far's atmosphere and spending several hundred years locked in ice. It's tough. If I could access what's held on that, it might open up all sorts of secrets. Of course, it's also possible that I'm completely wrong, and the object is something else entirely.”
“You don't have the necessary Concordance machinery?”
“I have very little of their technology, and believe me, I've searched. I told you how rare a Concordance crash site is. Their ships were simply too powerful.”
“So, we go to them, go on the attack, find the device we need from one of their ships.”
“It
