It often found Selene confusing, her anger and bitterness in stark contrast to Ondo's quiet instructions. At some level, it had assumed she was angry because it hadn't carried out her orders correctly, but Ondo had explained at length why she was like that: the dreadful injuries and the prolonged process of her repair, the loss, and the burning need for revenge. In some ways, it understood that. Without knowing what, it knew it had lost much, too.
Another agony shot through it as it dropped out of metaspace for the seventeenth time. It could do nothing to silence the alarms. Saying nothing to Selene, it reorientated itself and began the run-up to the eighteenth jump on the long and gruelling journey.
The Radiant Dragon's imminent danger alarms grated on Selene's nerves, their frequency and volume deliberately designed to be impossible to ignore. They blared in her head every time the ship altered course to follow the labyrinthine complexity of Aefrid Sen's route, every time the ship altered its velocity relative to Euclidean space, every time the ship just damn well wanted to annoy her a little more.
It was definitely succeeding.
She hadn't told Ondo that she'd configured the Dragon to communicate verbally rather than talking directly brain-to-Mind. Sometimes it was more satisfying to shout at the mercilessly calm, controlling AI of the ship.
“Stop sounding those fucking alarms. I get it, we're picking our way through Dead Space and you don't like it.”
The alarms continued to shriek in her mind while the Dragon's polite voice replied. “The alerts are encoded into my nav systems at a fundamental level. They can't be silenced without deactivating the entire control nexus. If you do that, we would be unable to navigate metaspace. Or remain structurally coherent.”
“They're fucking annoying.”
“They're protecting you by ensuring I can't be tampered with, to stop you flying unwittingly into one of the dead zones. You will be aware you had to override five distinct layers of command lockout even to get here, but the alarms cannot be silenced.”
She certainly was aware; it had taken her and Ondo three days to persuade the ship to accept the course through Dead Space that Aefrid had given them. There had been reprogramming and there had been endless biosecurity checks. Twice they'd resorted to using metal tools to rip out elements of the Dragon's control arrays. She couldn't quite shake the suspicion it was getting its revenge.
At one point, Ondo had fished out a control fleck patched onto the ship's control pathways.
“What is that?” she'd asked.
“My guess is they couldn't deactivate a layer of the ship's Mind and resorted to suppressing it. By the look of the control pathways this was wrapped around, they may even have been blocking off the innermost core.”
He studied the tiny device through his multiglasses, turning it to catch the light with his micropincers. “This shim ensures executive control of the ship's core functions can be overridden from elsewhere. It's a crude block, but it would be effective; it basically bounces any commands back down the pathway they came from. To the sealed-off Mind, the effect would be maddening: any commands it gives would be immediately shouted back at it. It would be like being locked in a sealed room whose walls echo everything you say.”
“Can we release this core intellect?”
“I wish we could, but no. We need this block in place to ensure we can override the ship's aversion to Dead Space.”
It seemed cruel, but there was no choice. It was just a ship. Now she said, “Can't you make that annoying fucking screaming sound quietly?”
“If it were quiet, it wouldn't be very good alarm,” the ship replied reasonably. She also wasn't sure if the ship was being sarcastic or she was projecting onto it. In any case, it was clear she could do nothing but bear the sounds as the Dragon manoeuvred into the heart of a region of space that no ship was supposed to venture near.
She closed her eyes and tried to go to a place of calm inside her mind. It had never worked so far, but the effort of it gave her something to do.
A standard day later, the mists of the metaspace void thinned, and the ship translated for the thirty-seventh time into normal space. No broken laws of physics rendered the ship into transdimensional fragments. The Dragon reported full structural integrity, no imminent threats, no proximate galactic masses or ships. All was utterly normal.
Apart, that was, from the lack of stars. The rest of the galaxy, the rest of the universe, was gone.
Selene sifted through every wavelength of electromagnetic radiation at her disposal, scanned for gravity wave fluctuations or symmetry anomalies in the underlying Higgs field. Nothing. They floated in utter darkness; reality appeared to consist solely of the Radiant Dragon and, three light-years distant, a single blue dwarf sun, glowing away like it was the last beacon of the heat death of the universe. Such stars were, so far as she knew, unknown in the galaxy. In fact it was a clear anomaly; the universe wasn't old enough yet for one to have evolved from a red dwarf.
“What is going on?” She asked the question even though the ship would have no more answers than she did.
“Impossible to say. Either we are in an isolated reality fold, or else some screen of an unknown nature is isolating us from the rest of the galaxy.”
A reality fold. The phrase sent an electric shock of alarm through her. Falling into a pocket universe was one of the constant dangers of traversing metaspace. Perhaps that was the nature of the dead zones.
