That now did not look to be the case, but if the planet was Coronade, the enemy had certainly gone to a lot of trouble to obliterate it. And if it wasn't, she was going to a lot of trouble to extract telemetry from a very insignificant rock.
The Dragon powered away on its arc under full reaction-drive, the strain of its effort detectable as a high-frequency buzzing in its superstructure if she touched her left hand to the bulkheads. The sound of it was like a long-drawn-out, ultrasonic scream.
She put it out of her mind. She'd talk to Ondo about the Dragon once she was back at the Refuge. She had more important matters to worry about. If Concordance had spotted her incursion and were preparing a trap, even their highest-g missiles would have trouble hitting her at the speeds she would reach. Her trajectory would be easy to predict – which was the downside – but her sheer velocity meant she'd be gone from the vicinity of the planet an eye's blink after her arrival was detected. Speed would save her.
So she hoped. But as she neared the muddy, unlovely world after her slingshot loop out of the system and back in, she picked up a sudden flurry of warning blips. Then a snowstorm of them: telemetry markers coming from all points, artificial constellations of ships arriving in-system. IDs began to pop up, too: they were Cathedral ships, Void Walker attack vessels. She counted thirty of them, then forty.
Concordance had been closely monitoring the world after all. Unless they knew things they had no right to know – her discoveries at the Depository and then the details they'd discovered from the brain flecks of the dead crew of the hulk – her guess was that they hadn't come in force to capture her so much as to destroy anyone reaching this planet.
Which meant she didn't really need to study the telemetry they'd harvested from the planet's surface. The scale of the Concordance response made it clear enough: whether it was Coronade or not, the planet was clearly highly significant. All she had to do was collect the telemetry and escape the system without being obliterated by the attack ships converging upon her.
2. Inner Galaxies
She reached into the Mind of the Radiant Dragon, laying her thoughts lightly upon the controls without yet altering the ship's trajectory. She was minutes away from coming into high-g missile range. If it came to it, she needed to be able to take control, fly the ship with her own mind rather than rely on its programmed responses and strategies. It wasn't only that she could do a better job, her actions would also be an unknown quantity to the attacking sphere of Concordance vessels. They might well know how the Dragon would react given the threat it faced, but they would not know what she would do.
The velocity she'd accumulated had already thrown their calculations out: the containment sphere they'd constructed around the world was the wrong shape, too perfect. It would have ensnared an orbiting ship moving at a low velocity, but possibly not a vessel moving at 15% of light-speed. With luck, she could puncture the tightening ring they'd thrown around Coronade and escape into metaspace.
Luck was the operational word, though. Her flecks calmly informed her that her chance of succeeding was in the 20% to 40% range. Not great odds. She began to receive the first fragments of data from the atmospheric probes she'd seeded the planet with. It was clearly incomplete, not uniformly distributed across the globe, but there was something there, patterns above mere random white-noise. In case she didn't make it out-system, she made sure to broadcast all the data she recovered using Ondo's encryption routines, to be picked up by the nanosensors drifting in the outer reaches of the system. Concordance couldn't sweep them all up. If she didn't make it back to the Refuge, either the slow nanosensor network would get the data to Ondo, or Ondo could get the other ship working, drop in to pick up what she'd acquired, and then at least the truth of what she'd found would get out.
Even if she didn't.
The strategy she needed to take became clearer in her mind. She would skim past Coronade, slingshot around it to pick up a small kick of extra velocity, then fire away from the ecliptic plane. She'd have a little leeway to select a trajectory after the slingshot, although her velocity limited her choices. She'd learned much about piloting a starship under Ondo's tutelage, and the rapid calculations her flecks made gave her an edge, but she also had a natural aptitude. Ondo had said it, more than once. Her father had encouraged her to drive farm vehicles, and then pilot atmospheric vessels on Maes Far. He'd given her games and simulations of space flight that were, technically, illegal. She'd thought little of it at the time, but it struck her now that he'd been preparing her in case she needed such skills. Was that possible? No time to dwell on it, now.
She picked a gap in the sphere of attacking ships. It was contracting all the time as the vessels converged, and once they saw what she was doing they'd have time to react, attempt to plug the gap with high-g missiles, then beam-weapon fire as she flew nearer. She prepped her own arsenal of nukes, attached to high-g missiles of her own. They would give her the chance she needed to punch through the net. Or, if her plan failed, she might be able to take some of them with her.
She wondered if Kane was among
