A world Ondo assured her was Coronade.
“How can you possibly know?” she demanded. “There's no sign saying Welcome to the Mythical World of Coronade. There's no audio or anything even mentioning the name.”
“Yes,” he said, “but look: compare the landmasses of this world to those on the images I first showed you.”
He was right, there could be no doubt. It was the same purple-oceaned planet strewn with honey-yellow and gold-orange continents. Either this planet was an engineered twin, or it was the world Ondo had previously identified.
“We still don't know this is the Coronade.”
“Nobody has ever mentioned there being more than one world with that name.”
She considered. “We know the starting point of that metaspace jump and we can trace the route taken before arrival at this world.”
“At Coronade.”
“Okay, at Coronade. Still, we can't fix its location exactly. The stars move, and the topography of metaspace shifts with them.”
“Between us and the Refuge's computational powers, we can narrow the location down to maybe a hundred systems in a closely-defined region of space.”
He sent her brain a three-dimensional map of the area in question, with likely systems flashing. She projected it into the room around them so they could visualize it.
She was intrigued, now. It was just possible he was onto something.
“We know the type of star we're looking for from the wavelengths of the solar radiation,” she said, “and we also know there's at least one rocky planet in orbit.” She manipulated the data, dimming systems that didn't match those criteria. “A couple of the systems you or Aefrid Sen have investigated, and since you didn't find anything of interest, we can strike them off, too. We can also exclude these fifteen systems where the rocky worlds are too near their stars, or too far away, for standing water to form. We know the planet you think of as Coronade had oceans.”
Ondo nodded, considering her map floating around their heads. “Somewhere around one of these remaining twenty-three stars, we'll find it.”
“We need to study each planet in greater detail,” she said. “You're sure you've never been to any of them?”
“They're just a few among billions. Most of the galaxy is unknown to me.”
“I don't see anything remarkable about any of the remaining worlds. Why would one of these be the hub of a galaxy-spanning civilisation?”
“Perhaps a cultural movement began on this world that eventually spread throughout the galaxy. Or perhaps it was an uninhabited world, neutral ground that the Alliance worlds adopted as their home. There might be a thousand reasons. Perhaps the star had some spiritual significance for the people living in a nearby system.”
Selene considered tactical practicalities. “We have to assume Concordance are there. Vulpis must have known where Coronade was, and it's inconceivable they'd leave such a world undefended. They've gone to a lot of trouble to make sure no one finds it. Given that they claim it never existed, they're going to make damn sure no one who goes there is allowed to get away to tell the galaxy.”
Doubts of some sort clouded Ondo's features, but he left them unspoken. Instead, he said, “We'll find Coronade in this handful of stars, I'm sure of it.”
“And if we do, what then?”
“Then we're one step closer to finding Omn and answering all our questions.”
“And destroying Concordance.”
“Yes, of course. That also.”
It took Selene and the Dragon a week to seed each system with nanosensors. Ondo's preference was to drop the devices far away from each stellar mass, allowing months to go by for them to collect their telemetry of distant planets and moons. Ignoring that, Selene dashed repeatedly in-system, releasing the sensors before fleeing away. She saw no sign of Concordance activity during her momentary appearances in normal space, but she didn't wait around to look properly.
Once she was done sowing, she set about reaping: repeating the route she'd taken, harvesting the data the sensors had gathered. Each incursion this time made her more nervous; there had to be a chance Concordance had spotted something and would be waiting for her. She took care not to follow any predictable trajectory patterns and remained material for as short a time as possible.
Within another week, she had all the data they were going to get. They studied it at the Refuge, once again standing upon the cartography deck with each system imaged around them. They were able to exclude eleven rapidly enough: they lacked stable solar orbits or were seismically too active. They worked the list down to two worlds with the right proportions of ocean and land orbiting a viable star – but the shapes of the continents on neither matched what they'd seen of Coronade.
“I must have missed one,” she said. “Or else the planet simply isn't there.”
“No,” said Ondo. “It has to be there.”
“I don't see where. None of the planets are close to matching our target landmass signatures, and the only one we can't check is suffering total environmental collapse, the atmosphere so dense our sensors can't penetrate to the surface. There's no way that could ever have been an inhabited world.”
She caught the moment of excitement sparking in Ondo's eyes.
“Unless it was habitable three hundred years ago,” he said. “If someone visited Maes Far three centuries from now, they might find something similar.”
“Except there's no shroud deployed in orbit. There's nothing there, it's a completely dead world. If single-celled life ever evolved on that planet, it probably got depressed and died out millions of years ago from boredom.”
A frown had spread across Ondo's features. He was pursuing an idea in his mind.
“You're trying to think of a way this rock could be Coronade, aren't you?” she said.
“There is something odd about
