“That is unfortunate,” said Ondo. “Because I rather think time is suddenly very short.”
“Why so?”
“This is the other reason I left the Refuge. Something came up.”
“You found useful information in the Depository images?”
“I'm finding a great deal of interest, but that isn't it. I started to pick up signs from the nanosensor network of a sudden flurry of Concordance activity: ships jumping out of systems they've been monitoring for years, a tenfold uptick in encrypted comms chatter, a web of metaspace trails. The sensors are programmed to cut short their circuits and report back if they see a certain level of unusual activity. I've seen mobilisations like this before, although never on this scale. My guess is that they're urgently looking for us.”
“Or it's a coincidence,” she said.
“Do you want to take that risk?”
“They could have sent many more ships to Coronade. I was outnumbered, sure, but they left holes in their net for me to escape through. That's one reason I'm following the approach protocols so carefully, in case they wanted me to believe I'd escaped.”
“I'm sure they wouldn't think twice about sacrificing Cathedral ships to track us down, so I assume they sent a fleet to a number of potential flashpoints, anticipating our arrival at one of them. Somehow, they're getting clues about what we're doing without knowing the precise details.”
“Any idea yet how they do that?”
“None.”
Selene considered, weighing up the best course of action to take. “They're going to be watching Coronade closely now; it won't be at all easy to go back there.”
“Before we do anything, we need to study the telemetry you harvested. I'm getting initial results now.”
Their ships were close, almost touching. She decelerated to pause a few hundred metres away from him.
“You should EVA over,” she said. “The Aether Dragon is not in good shape.”
“It'll hold together for a little while yet. At least its Mind isn't in a catatonic fugue.”
He sent what he was uncovering for her to study. The atmospheric probes had clearly had a lot of trouble detecting anything on the surface, blasted as they were by supersonic winds and fierce electrical storms. They'd repeatedly lost global positioning lock, meaning that what few readings of surface detail they'd picked up were sketchy, with a high degree of uncertainty.
But there was detail. By correlating the data retrieved by multiple sensors, the Aether Dragon was able to work out the likely location of coastlines, map them onto a globe to produce an approximate continental layout. When it was done, it compared what it had to the known layout of the historic Coronade seen from Ondo's original images. The match was 97%, and the chance of two planets winding up with an arrangement of tectonic plates that close by chance was effectively zero.
The planet could only be Coronade.
The sensors had picked up more than just coastlines, though. There were artificial structures, their shapes highly regular: cities, perhaps, or large buildings of a function she couldn't guess at. They were on the land and the sea: the oceanic islands were there; round and polygonal land masses, all symmetrical. There was no sign of life, no light, nothing being broadcast in the radio spectrum, not even any microbial life in the atmosphere.
“A solar shroud did this,” she said, “tipping the environment into meltdown.”
“I'm not so sure.” Ondo indicated a circular structure in the fuzzy imagery. “This circle could be a sizable impact crater, and here's another one. It looks to me like the planet was subject to bombardment on a massive scale.”
“They'd have to be seriously huge impacts to kick up enough debris to leave the planet like this.”
“They would,” said Ondo.
She thought about that. “The ship's Mind was convinced the planet had multiple moons, it talked about one being the third biggest, but there's definitely only a single body now. Were they pulled into the planet?”
“Pulled or pushed. It would be enough to explain the massive environmental breakdown, but it's hard to understand how that could happen. By definition any settled world would have achieved a high degree of gravitational and orbital stability. Anything less would make it uninhabitable.”
“Concordance did this.”
“That would be my guess,” said Ondo. “They wanted to destroy the world utterly, because it was the symbolic capital of galactic culture.”
“Or maybe there's something down there, some weapon or technology they were afraid could be turned against them. Those ships I encountered: they may have been sent simply to make sure I didn't find it.”
A set of structures in the middle of one of the larger oceans was outlined briefly in red, the Aether Dragon highlighting them for attention.
“It's spotted something,” said Ondo. “A match with a known pattern.”
The shapes on the planetary surface had been cleaned up a little, but the edges were still indistinct, gaps in them where the sensors had lost visibility or were destroyed. She could pick out a large central circle in the middle of one of the oceans, with lines radiating from it at apparently random angles, like an incomplete compass rose. Other circles, smaller, were strung out along the lines at varying distances. She could neither see nor calculate any particular pattern to the arrangement. It appeared the central circle had suffered considerable impact damage, an elongated impact crater was stamped right across it, but the smaller orbital circles looked intact.
“What is it matching on?” she asked. “Have you seen anything like this before?”
“I haven't, but you have. At the Depository, in those stasis fields, it's seeing a correlation with those land structures and one of the objects.”
The item she'd thought was jewellery, the silver talisman with slots for beads spaced along its radiating lines. She brought an image of the object to mind and overlaid it upon the telemetry. The Aether Dragon was correct; there was a clear match.
Ondo was apparently doing the same. “This is what we were supposed to find.” The excitement thrumming through him was completely clear over the comms link. “This is where the trail leads.”
She
