“He chose a different path. We both devoted our lives to uncovering the truth, but he wanted a normal life, too. I … turned my back on that. I've roamed the galaxy, gone where I needed to go.”
“You think he made a bad choice.”
The suggestion appeared to trouble Ondo for some reason. “Truly, no. I've often thought it was I that made the bad choice, although I had my reasons. Your father didn't want to lead the life I have. We knew space around Maes Far saw several major skirmishes in the war, and we knew there was a crash site on the planet. Your father decided to adopt the life of a local to give him the time and freedom to carry out the necessary archaeological research. We invented his identity between us, the Ada family name, all of it, and smuggled him onto the planet as a young man. It might seem a safe and provincial life to lead, but it was dangerous enough in its own way. He was brave, working out there in plain sight with no means of fleeing if they came for him. He had to be very careful not to learn too much; Concordance were always watching from orbit.”
She would never have believed such a wild claim, if not for the fact that Ondo had come to rescue her when Maes Far was destroyed. “What was his real name?”
“For what it's worth, I think his Maes Far name became the real him, but when I first knew him, he was Seben Jen Akter.”
The name meant nothing to her. Her father had done a good job of keeping his former life a secret.
Deep, heavy pains tore at her insides then, and for a moment they consumed her. She gasped, putting her hand to her breast as if to hold everything in place. The agony mounted, sharp, then dissipated. It happened, sometimes so badly she had to sedate herself back into oblivion.
“The pains again?”
She didn't need his overbearing concern. “It's nothing. Show me these images you claim are of Coronade.”
“If you're sure you're up to it.”
“Show me.”
The galaxy disappeared and, in its place, came moving pictures of a purple-oceaned planet strewn with honey-yellow and gold-orange continents. Many ships and satellites hung in orbit around the planet. The sight of them sent a jolt of alarm through her, but they were not Concordance ships. They were not any sort of ship she recognized. There were countless different shapes and configurations and sizes, functions she could only guess at. The planet's high atmosphere buzzed with activity as the vessels came and went, but everything was ordered, controlled. Somehow it was all managed without any ship colliding with any other.
On the surface, glinting in the bright sun, cities lined the coastlines, as well as ringing inland lakes and large expanses of greenery. There were habitations or some other forms of construction within the oceans, too: round islands to which, just visible, the lines of bridges threaded from the land masses.
“What makes you say it's Coronade?”
“Listen. There's audio, too.”
Voices filled the little room: a communication between the ship whose point of view they were seeing and some sort of planetary control system. The voices were clear, although heavily accented. It took Selene a few moments to make sense of the slanted vowels and pick out the words of the conversation.
“…you welcome to Coronade, Ambassador Vol Velle. The delegations from Arianas and Gogon are already on the planet and awaiting your presence. Dock at Equatorial City Seven and you will be escorted to your quarters. We assume you want to commence negotiations at your earliest convenience?”
“Thank you, Coronade Central, we will land at Equatorial City Seven within the hour. Tell me, what mood are the Gogoni in?”
(sound garbled)
“…unhappy, but in truth they seemed … no more resentful than usual. Let us hope for a mutually satisfactory outcome to your negotiations.”
“If anything can calm their warlike tendencies, it's a few weeks on Coronade. I'm in no hurry at all to conclude our negotiations. Perhaps…”
The audio cut out in a fuzz of distortion. A moment later, the images also flickered and stopped, the final, frozen frame of some bulbous, whale-like ship manoeuvring into orbit en route from an unknown star.
Selene considered what she'd seen for a moment. “It doesn't really prove anything. Just because they called it Coronade doesn't mean it was the Coronade. Lots of planets are named after mythological lands and figures, right?”
“Right,” conceded Ondo. “But the evidence is strong. This Coronade was clearly some sort of neutral ground, a place where cultures and races could meet in peace to settle their differences. I believe it was a centre of scientific and technological cooperation and research, too. You saw how many different sorts of ships there were. I've studied the images carefully and counted over two thousand distinct architectural styles to the vessels in orbit. I think this was a planet that civilisations across the galaxy came to when they needed to resolve their differences.”
She couldn't help being a little intrigued. “Were you able to identify its location?”
“There were translatable coordinates embedded in the communications stream, but I had no frame of reference to baseline them from. As you saw, there were no background stars visible to fix off.”
“Can you date the images?”
“There was chronological information embedded as well, but, again, I couldn't match it to any known calendar.”
“How did you even acquire the images?”
“I found fragments of a spaceship floating in a system's asteroid belt. The hulk was hard to spot among all the rocks and dust, but I'd learned there'd been a battle there in the Omnian War. Ships, as you may know, sometimes seek refuge in asteroid belts when they're being pursued or when they're heavily outgunned – even though, in truth, such regions of space are generally sparsely populated once you're in them. I struck lucky. There wasn't a lot left of the vessel, but I did
