The ship shook violently, lurched, then shook as if entering a planetary atmosphere at the wrong angle. Selene's teeth clattered in her skull from the violence of it. She was thrown to the floor, tried to rise, then thought better of it. The floor was safer while the ship sorted itself out.
Her mind and the Radiant Dragon's were still entangled. She felt the stresses running through the bulkheads, screamed the ship's pain at the gravitational pull of the star. The structure stretched and stretched as the mass sucked them in. The odds had broken the wrong way, and all her manoeuvres and risks had been for nothing. The gravity well was pulling her down.
At least she'd taken the Concordance ships with her. At least Ondo would now get to know the planet was what he'd thought.
The metaspace drives roared, desperately fighting the pull of the star. They couldn't do it. Selene felt herself – the herself that was the body of the Radiant Dragon – being dragged down, down into the abyss.
3. Metaspace
Selene lay on the cold floor of the Radiant Dragon's deck, cheek pressed against the ship's structure, feeling the stresses pulling it to pieces as it fell. A scream rang in her mind, but whether it was hers, or the ship's, or someone else's, she couldn't tell.
The metaspace drives finally gave in, or burned out, submitting to the ship's inevitable destruction. There was a moment of the purest calm, the struggle ended, the ship's life little more than the faintest hum against the side of her face. She let herself breathe as she studied the ship's structural data, intrigued to see how the end would come, what the effect on the ship and therefore her body would be. Intellectual curiosity combined with fury, fear, but also an acceptance in her mind. Ondo had been right, at least. She wasn't two separate identities in conflict. All of it, logic and emotion, was her.
Metaspace was grey around her, Coronade's star a mere point of densest black, a full-stop from which there could be no escape.
She sat up, then climbed to her feet, aware of a strange effect of the ship's collapse into the gravity well. Light ran across the walls and floor around her, through every surface, as if some impossible external Mind were scanning the ship and everything within it. She held out her hands to study them, and the light was there, too. Every minute surface and fold was illuminated by a blue fire that brought no pain, no sensation of any sort. She was about to dismiss it as an optical defect in her own sensory processing, some effect of metaspace, when she detected a change in the ship's trajectory.
It was slowing. It couldn't be happening, but it was. She triangulated against the topographical features of the Singh Field. There was no mistake. The ship could only accelerate towards the star, nothing else made sense, but it simply was not doing so. Forwards momentum slowed to a halt and the ship hung, unmoving relative to the star, some force precisely counteracting the fall into the gravity hole.
She reached into the Dragon's core to understand what was going on, make sense of the impossibility. She still had control of ship's nav. When she tried to use the controls, ease up power to the drives to pull away from the star, nothing happened. The drives were functioning, ticking over, but were simply not responding to her inputs.
Gradually, the ship began to edge away from the star, gathering aft velocity as it pulled backwards. Selene let go of the controls. Whatever was happening, whoever was doing this, she wasn't going to interfere. She was aware of another presence in the Dragon's Mind, something beyond mere control systems and command response interfaces. Some unexpected aspect of the ship had taken over executive control. Lightly, she crept towards it with her own mind, intrigued but wary of distracting it, too. Inside the virtual space of the ship's mind, but outside of the protected core she had previously penetrated, the entity she had previously encountered was directing the ship, doing something to its drives and systems. She watched, fascinated, as control pathways she had never used or even glimpsed lit up. The ship responded. It was picking up velocity, accelerating away from the star.
A few moments later they passed through the danger boundary, and were traversing metaspace in the normal way.
“You stepped outside your protective walls,” she said.
The entity's features remained indistinct, flickering, as if it were struggling to maintain its existence. It reminded her a little of the Warden she'd encountered at the Depository: broken and defective, its connection with reality tenuous. Somehow, though, the being before her seemed organic rather than mechanical. Despite its struggle, its voice, when it spoke, was clear.
“You saved us both, and now I have done the same.”
“How did you do that? Pulling back from a metaspace gravity well is not possible. The energy required is far beyond the capacity of this ship. It's far beyond any ship.”
The entity wavered, and she thought it wasn't going to respond. But then it said, “Much that we learned has not been revealed to the galaxy. Knowledge is all we have to defeat the Great Enemy, but there is a danger in it, too.”
“What knowledge? And who the hell is we in that sentence?” The Radiant Dragon's core sounded oddly, worryingly, like Godel, hinting at hidden truths and sacred knowledge.
The entity said, “There is both hope and danger in full understanding.”
“Why don't you just tell me this secret knowledge you have, and I'll decide if it's safe for me to know it or not.”
“Not even First could see the right road to take at all junctures, especially so far ahead into the future.”
“You're not going to tell me who or
