She emerged into normal space without incident or attack. The Ondo in her mind requested permissions to interface with the ship's systems, use the Dragon's higher order of computational ability to begin an analysis of everything that had been found. She let him get on with it; it wouldn't impinge on her brain function, and it at least meant he was usefully occupied while she commenced the tedious jump/wait/jump sequence of the Refuge approach protocols. She busied herself pursuing her regime of physical fitness. There were still too many times when the muscles in her right leg or hip ached sharply, her natural biology struggling to keep up with her artificial.
They ran the planetoid on an artificial day/night cycle, a rhythm Ondo had adjusted to match Maes Far's to assist with her rehabilitation. It was nominally the middle of the night as she finally docked, but Ondo was waiting for her on the spaceward hangar floor as she emerged from the Dragon. By the look of his crumpled day clothes, he hadn't been asleep anyway.
She looked for a spark of wonder in his eyes, a delight that meant he already knew what she'd discovered, and therefore that she couldn't trust her inner Ondo after all. It wasn't there. She saw, mainly, relief that she had returned unharmed, a simple pleasure at the sight of her. He was either a very good actor, or it was time she started to trust him. It occurred to her that trusting him meant believing in herself, too. Ondo had rebuilt her, reformed her. If she decided he wasn't compromised by Concordance, that meant she wasn't either.
He held out his arms, uncertain of whether to hold her close or shake her hand. “Did you find anything?”
She squeezed him a greeting, his body surprisingly bony beneath his tunic. Sometimes he was so engrossed in his work he forgot to eat. He needed to look after himself more.
“Oh yeah.”
“Tell me.”
Despite the tedium of the approach, she was tired and needed to sleep. She could let her guard down now she was back at the Refuge. “I'll give you full access to your avatar in my skull. He can fill you in.”
“Are you sure? You know that will give me sight of any conversation you've had with him.”
Had she said anything she didn't want the real Ondo to know? Probably not. She wasn't sure she cared too much anymore. “It's fine. Download everything. You need to see it.”
His eyes glazed over for a few moments. He was grabbing the data there and then, dumping it from her flecks into stores in his own head for later analysis. She felt it like a prickle inside her skull, like when she ate something frozen. He studied what he'd downloaded for a few moments.
“This is incredible. You saw no sign of Concordance?”
“None at all.”
“All this time this was sitting there. Why did I never go?”
“It wouldn't have helped you. Look at my second visit. I could only get in because I had the Maes Far bead with me.”
He paused for a moment more, head tilted on one side as he sifted through the relevant records. “Yes, I see. Interesting, interesting. I need to go through everything you learned in more detail. A lot more detail. You took far too many risks, though. You initiated your metaspace translations far too close to the nearby gravity wells. Doing that will get you killed one day.”
She ignored him. “What do you make of the star? And the solar system cage?”
“The cage, if that's what it is, is remarkable. I've never encountered any construction of such size anywhere in the galaxy. But I can at least imagine how it might have been built, given an advanced technology and sufficient materials. The star, though … it just isn't possible for it to exist according to all our physical models. The universe would have to be billions or trillions of years older for one to evolve. And yet, there it is.”
“Either it isn't from our universe, or some significant stellar engineering has been performed on it.”
Ondo looked troubled by her words. “And I have no idea how either of those two things could be. I need to give this some thought.”
“And I need to get some sleep. Don't stay up too late.”
“Yes, yes, of course.” He was already bustling off, tapping out notes on the archaic longhand tablet he always carried with him for recording stray ideas.
She emerged eight hours later, eyes bleary, thoughts sluggish. She dialled up a cup of Korv, or as close as the Refuge could get to her preferred Maes Far stimulant drink, then went in search of Ondo.
It was clear he'd ignored her instruction; he was hunched over his screens in the laboratory and was wearing the same clothes he'd greeted her in. She had to step carefully through a scatter of burned-out machine components to reach him. He smelled funky, like he hadn't washed for days. Maybe he hadn't; he still hadn't adjusted from those long years with only his research for company.
He didn't notice her arrival. The bead was mounted in a pair of delicate callipers on the desk and he was shining three lasers of different wavelengths into it. She watched him work for a moment, not wanting to interrupt. He was moderating the angle the lasers fired into the bead, as if he'd worked out how to read from the device, but the screen next to the rig showed only a random stream of digits that betrayed no pattern she could discern.
Swaying on an overhanging frond, one of the jewelbugs considered the scene, fingernail-sized head cocked, leg held in mid-air as if also fearful the sound of its footfall might distract Ondo. Its multifaceted eye glistened with the laser light scattered by the bead.
She spoke quietly. “Can you make anything of it?”
It took a moment for his thoughts to swim back from where they'd been to the here-and-now. “Some things. Quite a lot of things. There
