Time, suddenly, was short. She and Ondo raced down the curving walkways of the Dragon to the lander bay. They strapped themselves into their seats while they checked systems were fully functional. Outside, their window of undetectability shrank even further as a Cathedral ship moved onto an unanticipated vector, but the shot was still there.
Her mind filled with the ballet of ships, she waited for the critical moment, the millisecond, when the lander could fling itself free of the Dragon.
There. She fired the commands, the brief lag of them built into her calculations. The lander fired itself out of the bay, the moon alarmingly near, and immediately flared its reaction drives, adding its own thrust to the acceleration the Dragon had given it. The high-g was gruelling, even for her. Next to her, Ondo blacked out. Her own organic brain was doing the same. As before, only her artificial self remained alert, controlling the trajectory as they grazed the surface of the moon at a speed that would mean instant annihilation if she misjudged things by a few centimetres.
Now the only question was whether Concordance would fall for this second feint. The Radiant Dragon was already light-seconds away, accelerating hard on its trajectory out-system. Once again, it would use the slight slingshot effect of the planet to move onto an unexpected vector, increasing its odds of escaping the system a little. It still didn't look to be enough. Multiple Concordance ships converged on it, from the planet and from the sun, aggressive trajectories that clearly indicated the intent to destroy the ship before it could jump.
The Radiant Dragon would escape or be obliterated. Whichever it was, half the surviving Concordance ships would return to the planet immediately afterwards. That was the window. She and Ondo had to attempt atmospheric insertion now, race for the planet in plain view and simply hope they could reach it in time.
The moon filled the lander's forwards view. She had to fight all her instincts to pull away. The ship, mercifully, was quiescent, obeying her commands. There was no high-powered Mind controlling it; it was simply a vehicle. Peeping over the limb of the moon, directly ahead, the grey smudge of Coronade was rising.
They grazed the grey, rocky surface of the moon. She nudged the lander into a valley between two hills and for a moment the outcrops of rocks were actually above them, the hard surfaces of the walls three metres from the voidhull of the lander. The slightest brushing contact would spell disaster.
Then they shot free, and the moon was behind them. The dash for the planet would take long minutes, longer because they'd have to decelerate hard as they neared. Now there was little she could do but hope. The Concordance fleet was still preoccupied with the Radiant Dragon. That much of the plan was succeeding. Two Cathedral ships had remained in orbit of Coronade, but they were over the horizon, eclipsed by the planet's bulk. Once again, each passing second improved her and Ondo's odds by a notch. A precious few percentage points, counting up impossibly slowly.
Once again, she saw the moment when Concordance became aware of them. Ondo, stirring, saw it too. “They are coming.”
Selene ran the calculations through her brain, saw how it would go. “We'll make it, but barely. We'll have to hit the atmosphere a lot harder than I'd have liked.”
She could hear the tension in his voice, his effort to remain calm. “The hull may not withstand the thermal shock.”
He was right. Nothing to be done about it. It certainly wouldn't withstand an assault from multiple Cathedral ships and Void Walkers.
She left the deceleration as long she dared, then counted three more long seconds, before firing the forwards reaction drives and killing the aft. Judders shook through the lander as it flipped from high-g acceleration to deceleration. It felt like the tiny ship was going to rattle itself into its constituent components from the stresses running through it.
Their velocity was still high, dangerously high, as they hit the first wisps of the atmosphere. At the same moment, beam-weapon shots from the nearest attack ships flickered and flickered around them.
5. Dead Star
As they crashed through the atmosphere of Coronade, it was her two ascents from Maes Far in identical landers that came back to Selene. She saw again the blinding light of the Cathedral ship's beam-weapon strike from her first ascent, the gaping gulf of air beneath her as her fuselage was cut away and she spiralled out of control. She lived again the violence of the concussions shaking through the craft, the helplessness of her situation. The wanting it to end. She saw again, also, the blinding plume of the nuke blasts from her second ascent, moments after the murder of her father.
Perhaps Ondo guessed what she was going through. He spoke directly to her, brain-to-brain. “Are you okay?”
She nodded to him, forced herself to concentrate. “They'll struggle to target us as these winds throw us around. They'll be as blind as we are.”
Their headlong plunge at least slowed them down, but they paid for the velocity they dumped in mounting thermal energy. Before jumping in-system, they'd amped-up the
