It was good enough.
Of course, she'd thought they were safe when they landed on Maes Far. It was entirely possible she was following the trail Concordance wished her to follow.
She was helped by unfolding events on the ground. Inter-ship Concordance comms traffic was encrypted using algorithms Ondo had never been able to crack, but the sheer scale of them flying up from assets on the surface or in the atmosphere told their own story. Wide-scale events of great concern to the trio of watching Cathedral ships were unfolding. Selene could see a lot of it for herself: her own sensors showed mass population movements across the planet's six continents as crowds converged on major population centres for the celebrations.
She was halfway between the third planet and Migdala, no astronomical bodies shielding her from the Concordance ships two light minutes away, when the Dragon intercepted an unencrypted message stream.
“It's being broadcast to the entire planet,” said the Dragon's voice. “It's clear Concordance wants everyone to see it.”
“Show me.”
Images filled her mind's eye: a First Augur, a member of Concordance's high priesthood, was on board one of the ships. Two grey-robed Void Walkers stood behind her, their faces expressionless. Selene's flecks identified the woman quickly enough: Secundus Godel. A knot tightened somewhere within Selene's chest. She would kill them all, but this one especially. The one who had directed Kane in his acts of barbarity.
Godel was young, surprisingly young, or so her appearance suggested. Her skin was a deep, storm cloud purple, a metallic shimmer to it. A native of A'chtion, her flecks whispered to her. A world where people change skin colour in accordance with social rank. Purple suggests the highest status of all, although the distinction will probably be lost on most people. She is using her colour display to claim dominance that she should be, or considers herself to be, Primo. A subtle but also not very subtle challenge to Carious. Whether he understands this, and simply chooses to ignore it, is unclear.
First Augurs rarely appeared in public; normally they were hidden away in the secret enclaves of Omn, controlling galactic events from afar. Godel's words were Mind-translated into local dialects and idioms as she spoke. Selene's flecks translated them back into galactic common.
“Greetings, and the peace of Omn shine upon you, citizens of Migdala. The festivities of the Carnival of Masks are nearly upon us, and I bid you all to reflect on the true meaning of the celebrations as revealed by the priests and sages of the Revelation Temples. This is a time for pleasure and for family, but also for calm reflection and devotion. A period of peaceful celebration of Omn in his two guises: the loving parent who forgives past transgressions, and the judge who punishes those straying from the path. Think on these deeper spiritual meanings as you celebrate the turning of the year with your loved ones. May Omn watch over you and guide you.”
From the cultural data she'd downloaded, Selene knew the Revelation Temples were a global sect that was, effectively, a front for Concordance on Migdala. The Temples long-predated the rise of Concordance; Vulpis's followers had simply subsumed the sect, adapted it to their own ends rather than destroying it, and imposed their own vision upon it. Slowly, over the years, they'd altered the ecclesiastical underpinnings of the Temples until their teachings aligned with worship of Omn and subjugation to Concordance. It was a radically different approach to the one she was more familiar with: the imposition of order backed up by extreme violence.
Intrigued, Selene switched to sampling the video feeds streaming from the surface, looking down upon the lines of people thronging the seven bridges that led to the centre of Senefore. The crowds contained many revellers already in their colourful and outlandish masks, but there were nearly as many devotees of the Temples: people not wearing masks, but clad in red robes of various designs. Some wore only a splash of red, perhaps to demonstrate their allegiance. It seemed to her there was a wariness between the two sets of people: they walked in their own groups and didn't acknowledge each other. There were also a large number of soldiers watching the crowds from low-altitude observation platforms. From afar it was hard to be sure, but she read a mixed atmosphere down on the planet: a mounting excitement at the celebrations to come, but also a tension. Children ran excitedly around, only to be called back and held close by their parents.
The message from Godel to the planet began to broadcast again. Selene switched the feed off and prepped for atmospheric insertion. She'd toyed with the idea of launching some sort of suicide attack on the three Cathedral ships, take Godel down with her, but she suppressed it. Time for that another day, perhaps.
There was a scatter of lone-wolf asteroids on eccentric orbits between the third and fourth planets, the ancient remains of a planet whose debris hadn't yet been sucked up by the remaining bodies. She manoeuvred the Dragon onto the surface of one of them, positioning the vessel in the shadow of a peak of grey rock that would conceal it from Migdala for 75% of the small planetoid's spin. She would take a lander the rest of the way; it was a tiny sliver of metal that, hopefully, Concordance monitoring wouldn't notice.
Ondo's analysis had shown where gaps in Concordance's planetary monitoring network would open and close briefly, as sweeps from different sensors brushed past each other. They were tiny, transient blind spots, the traversing of which involved a carefully choreographed speed/stop/speed sequence of movements, like hopping from rock to rock across a
