“We take a Cathedral ship by surprise, some distant backwater planet, and hit it hard.”
“It wouldn't work. We would only be getting ourselves killed. You know that's true.”
He was right, of course. She had to swallow her frustration. “There has to be a way.”
He didn't reply and she caught the hesitant look on his lined face.
“What is it?” she said. “What are you thinking?”
“It's very, very unlikely to succeed.”
“Tell me.”
“There's a place where we might – might – find the technology we need.”
“What place? Where is it?”
“I have only a set of galactic coordinates and a rumour of a collection of technological and cultural artefacts from across the galaxy.”
“Where did you hear this rumour?”
“Aefrid Sen gave me the information before she died, told me it might be useful one day.”
“You've never been?”
“Never, and nor had Aefrid, but the person who recruited her, gave her the Radiant Dragon, did claim to have made the attempt.”
“What did they find?”
“Nothing. A ruin but little else. Details are hazy, the person died soon after. Aefrid decided the story was nothing more than a myth and never risked it, and I've done the same. It's been tempting at times, but my own technological resources have always been sufficient for my needs, and the possibility of a trap is obvious. But I've never had an object like this before.”
“If you know the coordinates, Concordance will too.”
Ondo nodded his head in assent. “They may also believe it's an area of space they can't visit. A region that, in fact, no one can visit.”
That made no sense. “There is nowhere Concordance can't go.”
Ondo sent an image of the galaxy to her brain. Nine patches of space flashed red, each expansive enough to span hundreds or even thousands of star systems.
“They don't go there.”
“What are they?”
“They're areas any stellar cartographer would know to avoid. They're called Dead Space or in some records Shadow Space or Grey Space. Zones too dangerous to enter.”
“Too dangerous why?”
“I don't know. I was told no one who drops into one from metaspace ever returns.”
“Send a probe into one and see what it finds.”
“I was told not even to try, that I'd be risking myself if I did.”
“How could you be in danger sitting out here?”
“Again, I don't know, but I was warned of the peril very clearly. I had to swear I wouldn't try upon my life and upon that of everyone I've ever loved, in point of fact.”
“By Aefrid Sen.”
“Yes.”
“You believed her?”
“I believe she believed what she was saying, and she was no fool.”
“What did she think was in these mysterious zones?”
“She speculated they are areas where the normal law of physics have broken down, where material space is dangerously unstable. She thought they've been there for a long, long time, possibly dating back to the agglomeration of mass into our galaxy thirteen billion years ago.”
“The laws of physics can't break down; that just means we haven't worked out what the laws are.”
“A fair point. But if the separation between metaspace and normal space has weakened, say, then travelling there could be dangerous. Matter could get ripped apart, translated out of and into Euclidean space until it's reduced to its constituent atoms and energy waves. That was what Aefrid believed would happen.”
“I still don't get how sending in nanosensors could be any threat to us. We're a thousand light years away from the nearest patch of this Dead Space.”
“Aefrid speculated some cataclysmic rift in reality could follow the path of a probe, rip a trail back through metaspace to its origin point. She thought there was a significant chance of triggering a cascading collapse of normal space.”
“I can think of no physics that would allow that to happen.”
“Neither can I, but do you want to take the risk of finding out? There may be forces or subatomic particle fields in play that we simply don't understand. The universe is large and, in my experience, constantly surprising. I do know, from the nav maps I've recovered, that all ships on the Magellanic side of the war had the areas of Dead Space clearly marked out.”
“Which doesn't prove a damn thing.”
“No.”
“And despite all her warnings, you're saying Aefrid Sen told you one of these regions could be visited?”
Ondo nodded. In Selene's mind, one of the red zones, a misshapen bubble on the opposite side of the galactic wheel, flashed from red to black and back.
“Aefrid showed me a course leading into the middle of this zone. She said it was a highly dangerous road to follow, fatal if the slightest mistake is made in the sequence of jumps. The road is effectively a path through metaspace: a narrow, winding, complex path leading to a small island of safety in the heart of the zone.”
“It sounds like the sort of shit Concordance would invent and then force down the throats of everyone in the galaxy.”
“It does, I agree. But I have placed nanosensors on repeat-jump patterns throughout metaspace, monitoring for Concordance ships translating into one of the dead zones, and I've never seen a single one of them attempt it. Not a Cathedral ship, nor a Void Walker attack craft, nothing. It seems they fear the regions, too.”
“It seems incredible that Aefrid and you, and now I, know about this secret, but Concordance doesn't.”
“True but, I don't know, sometimes I wonder.”
“Wonder what?”
He smiled, as if amused at his own stupidity. “It's nothing.”
“Tell me.”
“It's just, sometimes I wonder if someone is helping us. An unknown figure working behind the scenes to keep us out of Concordance's clutches. Maybe they've been making sure our enemies don't get to learn the truth of what's inside this dead zone.”
His mystical trail again. “Now you sound as crazy as they are. If someone that powerful is on our side, they could do a hell of a lot more to be useful. It's wishful thinking; you're seeing patterns where there are none. You of all people must get that.”
“Perhaps you're right.”
She considered. She needed to do something, take the fight
