When she was done, he said, “Are you absolutely sure it was Kane?”
“Absolutely. Concordance must have pulled him out of the nuke blast before he was vaporised.”
“It certainly seems to confirm that he's one of Godel's coterie.”
“People I spoke to; they were adamant he'd been fundamentally altered by Concordance; that he wasn't the brute they claimed. He was a freedom-fighter, widely-loved, charismatic by all accounts, softly-spoken. Did you know about this?”
“No. I assumed they simply recruited people psychologically suited to being Concordance killers. The sociopaths, the amoral.”
“They all have that scar behind their ears. That has to be part of it.”
“My assumption is that they embed some sort of punishment or coercion fleck into Void Walkers' brains to ensure their absolute loyalty. Maybe it goes further than that. From what you've described, Kane's personality has been fundamentally re-engineered. He's outwardly recognizable to the people of Migdala, but inside he's something else completely.”
“They can do that?”
“We have to assume they can. A lifetime of brutalization might have that effect on someone strong enough to survive the ordeal, but Kane was in Concordance's clutches for only a very short time before he emerged as the Void Walker we now know. If he was altered so fundamentally, it took only a few weeks at the most. His capture and anointment ceremony were broadcast to the galaxy, and then he turned up a short time later on Ossian, carrying out the atrocities I've shown you. Concordance's convenient story that the Void Walkers have already lost their souls, that they've forfeited their humanity to become the shock-troops of Omn: perhaps that isn't complete nonsense. Somewhere in that there's a speck of truth.”
“Even if he's being mind-controlled, I'm still going to kill him,” she said.
Ondo, working behind her back, didn't reply. When he was finished on her shoulder, he came around to consider her. “I need to do your face. You'll have to paralyze all your facial response and vocalization mechanisms.”
She switched to brain-to-brain comms. “The sooner I can get this flesh off, the better. Can you fix my arm so I can hyperextend it to reach my back? If I'm going to put on this disguise, it'll be the only way.”
“Your skeleton is locked in natural emulation mode, but you can deactivate that with the right thought commands. I'll show you. I wouldn't do it in public, though; it'll look like your arm is attached backwards.”
“Handy if I get an itch I can't reach.”
“Once your face is done, shall I leave the rest of your skin for you to remove? Your breast and your pelvis and your leg?”
“Then you can tell me what you've discovered while I've been away.”
“In truth, it's frustratingly little. You recovered a great deal of data, but the problem with it, still, is understanding the context. Are they random snatches of deleted information, for example? I can still identify no organising principle. It's possible the storage device is degraded, and we're seeing only fragments.”
“You got nothing at all?”
“I'm still correlating what you found with everything I already know. There are a couple of items that leap out, however.”
He sent her a brief sequence of images, a series of frames depicting lines and lines of cathedral ships docked on some vast, tree-like structure. She counted them rapidly. “There are thousands of them.”
“It's only what we already know, of course. There must be many times this number given how many systems they monitor. Still, to see them collected together … it's a troubling sight.”
“It's a battle fleet.”
“Yes. Consider what that many ships could do acting in concord. No force in galactic history that I'm aware of could hope to stand against them.”
“More mysteries,” she said. “Can you work out where this is? If it's the Concordance fleet's home, this might be an image of the Omn system.”
“I've thrown every image enhancement I can at this scene and got nothing. The local stars are invisible, their light washed out by the incipient glow from a nearby star. Or, actually, more than one star judging by the spectrum of wavelengths. I'd say it's a system with two or even three.”
“Can you tell how old these pictures are?”
“Not even that.”
“I hope the other thing you found is more useful.”
“I think it is. I decrypted some data from the flecks we picked up from the ice on Maes Far. It turns out that ship was previously involved in a significant battle on the outer edges of another system. I got some clear pictures of a number of Magellanic Alliance ships being destroyed, which gives us a narrow date range. From what I can tell, two Concordance ships were ambushed by a fleet of at least thirteen craft. Certainly, twelve were obliterated, and we know that at least one – the one from Maes Far – escaped. I also got a clear view of the background stars, which has allowed me to pinpoint the new system. It's one I've never visited, as it was low-tech at the moment of Concordance's ascension to domination and hasn't achieved FTL flight in the intervening period.”
“So, we go there and look for hulks?”
“There's a chance we'll find the remains of a ship that had been in contact with the Magellanic Cloud, or had received data on the whereabouts of the Omn system. We might encounter opposition too, of course, but that seems less likely: Concordance also don't bother to devote an orbital presence to pre-FTL worlds, or much in the way of orbital monitoring. Often, it's nothing more than a few Void Walkers on the ground, undercover, keeping an eye on things.”
“And if we can work out where the Omn world is, we attack it.”
“We'd need to observe, gather telemetry. Understand what, exactly, we're up against; I assume their godhead system is extremely well-protected. I doubt very much that we could drop in and unleash a few nukes to finish them off.”
“They may be unprepared, thinking they're safe because no one
