She clung to the scrap of fuselage with her left gauntlet, its solidity reassuring. She longed in that moment for Myrced, for her touch, the anchoring strength of her embrace. Had she, Selene, been right to leave Migdala? In truth, she still wasn't sure. It probably wasn't healthy to let her burning need for revenge consume her life – but she couldn't deny that need was there within her. She doubted that there would ever be an afterwards, a happy ending, but the possibility of one, at least, was appealing. And that was surely a sign that she wasn't completely consumed by her decision to rid the galaxy of Concordance.
Shaking her head in her suit as if to shake these thoughts free, she resumed her search of the ruin, although she was rapidly coming to the conclusion that there was nothing much of interest to be found. It was one more blind alley, and they were no nearer finding the Omn homeworld.
She was about to give up, return to the Dragon, when the thought occurred to her. She'd scoured the skeleton of the broken starship, picked through its shattered fragments, but there was one place she hadn't looked. Quite possibly, she'd been putting off attempting it in the hope of finding something else. Now, there was no alternative.
In total, there were seventeen bodies within the wreck. Once, there would have been many more, but only those firmly strapped to this section of the ship had remained. The rest were scattered to the void along with the rest of the ship – or immolated by the explosions that had ripped through the vessel. The Dragon had been scanning local space constantly while she worked but had identified no other fragments of interest. There was only one thing for it.
She set about probing the craniums of the dead crew members. Advanced brain flecks were rare in the modern world, another technology suppressed by Concordance, but from what Ondo had said they were once common: neural augmentations and data storage devices enhancing natural biology. There had to be a chance some of these frozen and lifeless brains had flecks embedded within them.
She found three: all were inert, but all were clearly artificial devices interfacing with their hosts' cerebella. The problem was how to extract them. Her own flecks were entwined around her biological structures, making them almost impossible to disentangle. Removing these flecks would be a similarly delicate procedure – one that could easily destroy any data held upon them.
She could think of only one approach to take, and her air supply was running low. Her suit was equipped with the cutting tools she would need. They were there for carrying out maintenance tasks on the ship, but she could turn them to another purpose.
She found herself apologizing to each dead person as she set about slicing their heads from their torsos. At least the fact that they were frozen rigid made the process easier. When she had her harvest of three heads, holding each by the severed ends of their spinal cords, she flew the short hop back to the Dragon. Before she entered the airlock, she activated the external stasis compartment and placed the heads inside. They could be dissected under controlled conditions back at the Refuge.
When she was done, her suit removed, she collapsed onto a couch while the Dragon began its run-up to metaspace translation.
8. Things Written in the Stars
The sight of the stars from her bedroom window were an unexpected source of wonder for Lilith Jones.
They'd always been there, of course, but the telescope she'd been bought for her thirteenth birthday had opened up new worlds: landscapes and possibilities that had drifted overhead her entire life without her knowing. The moon had been her first fascination, its craters and seas starkly clear as they drifted past her eyepiece, the edges of the moon wavering and burning with the turbulence of the Earth's intervening atmosphere. The dead world looked alive to her: she imagined cities and civilisations up there, people of wisdom far-removed from those she spent her days among on the Earth.
She wasn't supposed to use the telescope during the week, on school nights, but if the sky was clear she couldn't stop herself. Her friends might be secretly conversing on their phones, but for Lilith the worlds revealed by her telescope were more interesting. Why had no one told her until now what was out there? She didn't admit to anyone what it was that was consuming her. Life held many intriguing possibilities, some only dimly perceived, but already, too, she had a sense that it was finite, fundamentally limited to the size of the world. And that, she began to see, was the tiniest fraction of all that there was. There were only so many places she could go before she'd seen it all.
Beyond the moon there were the planets, little more than fuzzy smudges with her telescope, but she saw the crescent of Venus hanging above the sunset like the moon in miniature. She saw the four tiny specks of light around Jupiter that the books said were its largest moons, and she saw the elongated oval of Saturn, all that her small telescope could make of the gas giant and its halo of rings.
The books led her on, farther and farther out. Beyond the planets were the stars, but there was unexpected variety there, too. She pored for hours over the glorious beauty of the pictures of nebulae, her fingers caressing their jewel colours. Through her telescope she could only see one or two of them, blurry patches of grey, but that was enough: they were out there. Clusters too: the sparkling Pleiades, in which she counted many more than seven stars, seemed always to be visible in the
