She studied the data they had. “It all looks normal to me. A bit eccentric but nothing extreme.”
“It's subtle, but I think there's something there. Planets sweep paths through the dust specks filling space, the tenuous clouds of stray molecules making up the void. It looks to me like the planet's path has altered slightly in the recent past. Recent in astronomical terms, I mean.”
“That would imply a significant impact or some other shift in mass. Maybe a meteorite struck it. That's not uncommon; that's what planets are.”
“True, but there are surprisingly few rogue asteroids or comets in the system that might impact the planet. It's almost as if someone has gone to a lot of trouble to remove any such risks to this one world, cleaning up the system of potential dangers.”
“That's a hell of a reach, Ondo. You're clutching at straws, seeing what you want to see. The planet's a lifeless hell-hole scoured by hurricane-force winds, and I see no sign of any environmental terraforming. I also see no sign of Concordance defence batteries and fleets ready to atomize anyone who discovers a world they claim doesn't exist.”
The frowns deepened about his eyes. Once he got hold of an idea, he wouldn't let it go. “I still think we should look closer. Drop atmospheric probes in to see if we can identify any continents, sample the atmosphere, look for clues. If this is Coronade, Concordance will have gone to a lot of trouble to obliterate it completely, scribble it out of the galaxy. But short of destroying the planet, breaking it apart, they would have left some evidence.”
“Do we have any other leads from the images retrieved at the Depository?”
“Nothing as solid as this one.”
“I'll take the Dragon out and get as close to the planet as I can,” she said.
She approached the planet warily. The stars of the galaxy shone unblinkingly, and she detected no dark bulks eclipsing them, no sign of a Concordance ship on an approach vector. Even so, she kept the Dragon's beam-weapon arrays fully powered-up, their targeting systems sweeping local space. She'd also picked up ten high-g nukes from one of the weapons caches Ondo had scattered around uninhabited corners of the galaxy. Part of her, it seemed, believed this world was what Ondo claimed.
When she was within three light-seconds of the dead world, the Dragon spoke unexpectedly. “I recognize this system. I know the taste of this star, the words spelled out by these constellations.”
The ship's words threw her; the Dragon had never offered opinions of its own before. It reacted to her commands and questions, and that was it. That was its function.
“We were here recently,” she said suspiciously. “You saw it all then. Obviously.”
The ship didn't reply. She'd noticed further glitches in its responses of late: extra microsecond pauses before it replied to her questions, stutters, as if it were reluctant to communicate. The occasional odd turn of phrase, sentences that didn't quite make sense. When she asked the ship to repeat itself, it corrected its language without comment and refused to acknowledge anything had changed.
While they approached the planet, she ran another full diagnostic assay of the Dragon's systems and the Mind controlling them. If the excursion into Dead Space had caused some trauma to the workings of the vessel, she needed to know about it. She absolutely did not need her life to be dependent on a malfunctioning ship, especially if Concordance showed up. The sweep found nothing, although in the time available it couldn't delve as deeply as she'd have liked. Sometime soon, they were going to have to strip the ship down to its components and figure out what was wrong with it.
Gazing into the ship's Mind was like zooming in on a fractal: however far you went, you saw the same patterns repeating, only the scale shifting. She had no idea if that was simply how the original, alien computational architecture worked, or if something was being deliberately concealed. The design of the ship's core remained fundamentally obscure to her. But if Concordance had done something to the ship when it was in their control, the alteration might still be embedded within it – even some impulse for betrayal or evil completely contrary to the original designers' intentions. A conflict within its core might be the cause of all the problems it was now – seemingly – suffering.
The thought did little to put her mind at rest as she edged closer to the ruined planet of maybe-Coronade. She orbited the planet five times, following a spiralling trajectory that allowed her to scatter nanosensors across the stratosphere. In the planet's storm-blasted air, the devices would rapidly scatter and drift, and the problem would be fixing their location as they swirled to the surface and began to record detail. She'd also sewed a winding thread of global positioning devices around the globe, along with powered higher-atmosphere relays to allow probes and satellites to maintain some sort of lock on each other. The network would degrade rapidly, and would have blind spots, but hopefully it would give her some idea of the outlines of the continents. If there were continents.
She put the Dragon into a four-hour trajectory that looped away from the planetary plane to reach a zenith at the 90% metaspace translation boundary before curving back to the planet and into the no-jump zone once more. She'd be able to attempt a metaspace translation for maybe a third of the time, half if she really wanted to push it. She'd also pick up velocity all the way so that on her return, she could graze the planet's atmosphere at an appreciable percentage of light-speed. She'd suck up any data that had been wrung out of the planet, then be away.
She'd caught no glimpse of any Concordance vessels. She found the fact strangely disappointing: partly she'd anticipated another chance to engage with the enemy, but also, she had to admit, she'd fostered a hope that this
