She was one minute from Coronade perigee. Time to act. She sent instructions to the Dragon, altering its course subtly, but enough to give it the escape vector she'd selected.
Unexpectedly, the ship resisted. She sensed walls being thrown up against her, the ship's Mind severing her connection even as she attempted to lock onto it.
She was suddenly running out of time. Furiously, she burrowed deeper with her mind, diving into the inner core of the Dragon only to find, as before, that the core was itself the outer shell for another, deeper layer. She forced her way into the next kernel, and the next. She needed executive control immediately, and she clearly couldn't rely on the damaged ship to make the correct manoeuvres.
Her perceptions of exterior space faded as the galaxies inside the Radiant Dragon's core opened up around her. It appeared to her that she arrowed through a vision of negative space: instead of stars in a field of darkness, all was blinding light save for the points of black that represented nodes in the ship's mind. No way of knowing if that was an accurate representation, or simply her visualisation of what she was perceiving. Maybe the question didn't even make sense.
She found the next core: a roiling sphere of purple light, lines of light licking off it to spark connections with the black specks. Once again, she flung herself in, and once again she found herself inside another, inner galaxy, a deeper-still layer of the Dragon's mind.
A small part of her maintained its connection to external reality. She was thirty seconds from the planet. Three more Concordance craft had materialised, although the gap she'd selected was still available to her. Perhaps it was too obvious: an opening deliberately left, another trap sprung. She thrust the troubling thought away. No time to consider it now. More telemetry was streaming up from the planet, transmitted from her high-atmosphere relays. There was lots of data there. No time now to consider that, either.
The ship bucked suddenly, diverging from its prescribed path, for no reason that she could see. Was it trying to veer her onto a planetary collision course? She had to seize control, force it onto the vector she needed. Another computational core burned before her, fizzing with plasma like an unstable star on the point of collapse. With a wordless cry, she flung herself into it, batting away the defences the ship threw up against her. Then there was a wall in front of her: a block that, to her mind's eye, stretched away in all directions, unblemished and impenetrable.
She battered against it again, and again, to no avail. But she noticed that, in the brief moment after each assault, the wall ghosted into transparency. Whatever the protection was, it took a nanosecond for it to recover from each attempt to destroy it. It was an opening. She redoubled her efforts, attacking the barrier with her mind and then attacking it again even as it recoiled. On one level it was an intellectual battle, algorithm grappling algorithm, but in the metaphorical space that she perceived, she was flinging herself physically at a wall, an act of brute strength.
With a cry of effort, she threw everything she had at the barrier, pounding at it in multiple locations, the impacts coordinated in a nanosecond drumbeat. The wall flickered and she hit it again mid-recovery, then again and again, not giving it time to recycle. Under the barrage of impacts the wall wavered, flickered, then finally winked out, and she was through.
Instead of another expanse of virtual space, she found herself within a room, walls and floor and ceiling seemingly made of light. Their surfaces were hard to perceive, but she knew, somehow, that its size was limited in scope. This, finally, was the inner sanctum – or the vision of it that her mind conjured.
She turned around and saw the standing figure.
Its features were indistinct, blurred by the halo of blinding light around it. It was shaped something like her – tall, bipedal – but its head appeared unusually elongated, as if its evolving cranium had erupted outwards to contain its expanding brain. Its edges wavered as if she were perceiving the figure through the turbulent air of a heatwave.
“You are the Radiant Dragon?” she said. “Stop fighting me, I need control now, or we're both dead.”
The voice that replied echoed from great distances, slow and thoughtful. Something in its tone suggested something else, too: confusion, she thought.
“The Radiant Dragon. That is one name, although I have had others.”
“Okay, fine. Listen, you're glitching, and you need to relinquish executive control. You need to stop fighting me. You can see the fleet of attacking ships closing in on us, right?”
“The walls are strong,” the entity replied. Its response was maddeningly slow, ponderous, although she knew in a sense that didn't matter. The conversation was not taking place in normal time but to the nanosecond beat of the virtual universe. It was entirely likely she couldn't even be there, have this conversation, without the artificial computational functions integrated into her brain.
“We need to leave,” she said. There's an escape vector, but the gap is closing. I have high-g nukes that will punch the hole wider, and then we can blast through, translate into metaspace. You see the manoeuvres we have to make, right?”
The warping, indistinct figure moved nearer, although she couldn't see it walking. “Your vector is flawed. We will crash into Dyrn, the third biggest of Coronade's moons. I have over-ruled you, as your intention is clearly suicidal.”
Coronade. The name was given without her prompting it. Still, his words made no sense; the core was more damaged than she'd
