“That is not my secret to relay.”
The entity was as infuriatingly oblique as the Warden had been. They had to be related in some way, and someone had gone to a lot of trouble to prevent them distributing vital information.
“At least tell me how you were able to escape the star,” she said. “That shouldn't have been possible, according to all our understanding of physics.”
“I simply traversed the quantum geography of metaspace. This skin they have wrapped around me, this ship, it is ill-designed, barely capable of free movement. Very few vessels are; it is a power only granted to those builder and scout crafts that need it. Fortunately, our mass is tiny, but even so the ship needed to be … forced to manipulate space/time in the appropriate ways. That was what I did.”
“Can we learn how to do this? Can you show me?”
The entity froze, disappeared, then faltered back into existence. “In time, but the effort of what I did has caused me a significant amount of damage. I need to recover, rebuild. You would be well-advised not to stray near any gravity wells and especially not any singularities in metaspace. I may not be able to pull us out again. This ship and its structures: they are all wrong. They are crude when they should flow like a river.”
“What the hell does that even mean?”
She got no more response, the ship's core clamming up once again, throwing a defensive shell about itself that she couldn't penetrate.
The first waypoint on her approach and decontaminate path back to the Refuge was an unimportant spot in the middle of the interstellar nowhere, a location she was supposed to remain at for a full day while running deep sweeps of the ship. Unexpectedly, Ondo was waiting there for her. Worry sparked through her at the sight of him. He was on the Aether Dragon, a battered cylinder of a ship that she had never seen flying before. It didn't look to her like it was going to get very much farther, either; even from a distance she could detect the thin jets of breathable atmosphere it was venting.
“What's happened?” she said. “Why are you out here?”
Ondo looked amused when his face appeared in her mind, sheepish. “When you left, I found I couldn't concentrate on my research. Most unlike me. Also, I had another dream about Marita, and I decided you were right.”
“Obviously I'm right. About what in particular?” She kicked the Dragon's reaction drive into a low acceleration, nudging herself towards Ondo.
“That I've become too passive, too lost in the intellectual pursuit of the truth rather than the fight against Concordance. In my dream Marita looked extremely disapproving. In the end, I got this broken-down ship working and came to meet you.”
“For what purpose? I don't get it.”
“Partly, I suppose, to make myself feel I was doing something while you took all the risks. Tell me what you found. Is the planet Coronade?”
“I think it is, for various reasons. Concordance certainly went to a lot of trouble to defend a dead planet.”
“You encountered resistance?”
“Yeah, you could say that.” She sent over visual and auditory memories of everything that had taken place, right up until her escape into metaspace. When it was done, he was silent for ten seconds as he ran through the recordings on hurry-up.
“You destroyed a Void Walker and a Cathedral ship?”
“I did.”
“I'm impressed, but the manoeuvre with the metaspace translation was extremely risky.”
“It was pretty risky for them, too. What matters is, I survived and I recovered telemetry of the surface of the planet. Can you make anything of it? The Radiant Dragon's computational abilities are impaired at the moment, and I haven't been able to run any deep analysis of the data.”
“This ship's Mind is minimal compared to the Radiant Dragon's but we might get something if the patterns are clear. Why is your ship impaired? Was it damaged in the battle?”
“Actually, no, that came later. I'll show you the rest of it.” She sent the data over the two light-second gap between the two ships: her sensory impressions of metaspace, the fall into the gravity well, her conversation with the ship's core.
“Did you have any idea this presence was inside the Dragon?” she asked.
The look of astonishment furrowing Ondo's face told her the answer before he replied. “I had no idea at all. The architecture of the ship has always been a mystery, as you know, but I've seen no evidence of a Mind of this magnitude concealed within it. The core you met seems sentient.”
“Can we trust it? Was it put there by Concordance?”
“Again, if it was, why have they left us unmolested for so long? We've been in the Radiant Dragon's power often.”
“You noticed it referred to the planet as Coronade?”
“I did.”
“Has the ship ever been drawn into a gravity well in metaspace like that before?” she asked.
“Not to my knowledge. I wonder if the modifications we made to the ship had some effect upon it, allowed you to make the breakthrough you did. Or it might be that the risk you took finally awakened a self-preservation impulse inside it that we simply had no idea was there.”
“At last you approve of my cavalier approach to metaspace jumps.”
He laughed at her words. “In this one case, perhaps. I still think that, as a general rule, you take too many risks. Tell me, what state is the Radiant Dragon in now?”
She looked around at the blank walls of the cartography deck. “Hard to say. I have navigation and life-support, obviously, and all the drives are functioning, but I can't get any response if I try and talk to the ship. It's like all the automatic systems are functioning as programmed, but anything requiring a higher degree of intellect has shut down. The Dragon is in a coma, organs functioning but closed off to outside reality. We certainly can't leave it to act on its own free-will. Right now, I'm
