“We do not have time to go and investigate, you do know that, don't you?”
“Yes, yes. Did you detect anything beyond the gap? Anything anomalous?”
“You saw every datum of telemetry I recovered. Why do you ask?”
“The readings are … odd.”
“Every damned thing here is odd, but whatever's out there will have to wait; we're running up to metaspace translation now.”
“We could…” But his objections were cut short as she activated the metaspace projectors, and the ship swoop-dropped out of normal space, the dizzying headlong rush of it stilling them both.
As before, the Dragon trembled and bucked as they followed the careful sequence of dance steps through the void, but it responded to her navigational inputs without deviation. Eventually, they dropped into normal space at the point where they'd left the Aether Dragon. Selene sent across her final instructions for their assault on Coronade to the other ship, then the two vessels accelerated into their translation run-ups together.
As she'd feared, Concordance activity had redoubled since her escape from the system. Beyond a certain range, it was impossible to know what was truly taking place, but they could see a bustle of activity around Coronade itself, as well as a cluster of Cathedral ships nearer the sun.
“What are they doing there?” Ondo mused as they stood within the three-dimensional model of the system. “What is this fascination with stars?”
“Who cares?” said Selene. “Some religious obsession we can't begin to understand. It's the ships near the planet we need to worry about. The question is, which will react when the Aether Dragon shows up.”
“Assuming it holds together long enough to survive the translation.”
“It has to. Without it, we have no chance of getting back to the planet.”
They didn't have to wait long. The unmanned vessel had been instructed to materialise on the opposite side of the ecliptic disc from Selene and Ondo, two hundred million kilometres farther away from the star. The first indications they picked up was the sight of a number of closer Concordance vessels reacting, breaking orbit from the planet and accelerating onto vectors that matched the Aether Dragon's assigned incursion point.
“It made it,” said Selene.
“Yes. The ship's last act.”
“Have you ever used multiple vessels before? Do Concordance know you have them?”
“I don't believe they do. They'll assume they've picked up the arrival of the Radiant Dragon. They'll realise soon enough their mistake.”
Another two Cathedral ships manoeuvred to join the attack, surrounded by an insect cloud of Void Walker attack ships. Selene itched to flare the Radiant Dragon's reaction drives, push into the system. She held back; once again the timing of it was critical. Move too soon, and the Concordance ships would return to intercept them. Move too late, and they'd be returning anyway, the Aether Dragon obliterated.
Finally, she could bear it no longer. They'd hit the earliest moment that their incursion was viable, but they didn't really know the optimal point. Always, there might be unknown Concordance ships arriving from outside their sphere of knowledge. At some point, they had to take a chance.
“Let's see how good this fogging technology of yours is,” she said.
She fired the reaction drives, pushing the Radiant Dragon onto a maximum acceleration intercept course with Coronade. Once again, the plan depended upon achieving the highest possible velocity – which, once again, increased their chances of being able to flash through the ring of Concordance defences and flee back to metaspace at the expense of tactical manoeuvrability.
She felt the fogging system kick in. Ondo had explained it was a rapid series of partial and abandoned metaspace translations, too quick for any dangerous gravitational effect to pull them in. The sensation of it was disconcerting, like being shaken violently, although to her eyes the bulkheads around her remained solid and unmoving. The ship, too, reacted; she felt unease juddering through it as they sped forwards.
They finally picked up telemetry from the Aether Dragon, speeding in-system on its allotted trajectory. It was behaving precisely as intended, drawing Concordance vessels towards it. Once it was clear it had been spotted, it powered up its beam-weapon arrays. They were puny and would do little damage to a Cathedral ship, but Concordance would pick up the energy signature change and might be pulled a little deeper into the deception.
The battle, when it came, didn't last long. All but three of the Concordance vessels peeled away before they reached weapons' range as realisation of the deception struck. The remaining ships pressed on. Beam-weaponry and missile arrays blazed. The events unfolded twenty light-minutes away, meaning that the Aether Dragon was already long-gone by the time they saw its final destruction, but it was still a sobering moment.
Selene returned her attention to the Cathedral ships that had pulled out of the attack, watching as they arced onto return vectors for Coronade, studying how they intended to slot back into the shield around the world. Here was another critical moment when everything could go wrong: if the defensive shield was reconstructed quickly enough, there might be no way through.
It wasn't good. Accelerating at maximum g even as they were, it soon became clear that the bulk of the Cathedral ships would beat them to Coronade. The pretence with the Aether Dragon hadn't fooled Concordance for long enough. The only hope she and Ondo had lay in remaining undetected until the last moment. They stayed on course, powering towards the planet and its single surviving moon. Each passing instant increased their odds by a few points, even if their overall chances of success were, by Selene's projections, poor.
There came the moment when a Concordance sensor or vessel spotted them. She saw attack ships flare into action, breaking away onto intercept trajectories. The heavier, more momentum-bound Cathedral ships followed. Now was the critical moment of the action: the vectors they adopted; the intercept points picked. The dance of starships and planet and moon.
“There,” she said, the trajectories in space and time filling her mind. “There is our window.” It
