“You said they were pursuing the two of you. Why are they doing that?”
“It's a long story,” said Selene.
“May I hear it?”
They had time before the next translation point. She gave Surtr a brief summary of her life since the day the first, unnaturally symmetrical black spot appeared on the face of Maes Far's sun.
When she'd finished, Surtr, whose triple eyes had been focused on her throughout, unblinking, now looked away to the void outside.
“It is hard to understand why they would do such things,” it said eventually. “As well as the destruction involved, it involves such a huge effort for little or no gain. I do not understand what they are achieving.”
“I'm having a certain amount of trouble coming to terms with that myself,” said Selene, “but is it really so different to what your creators did to the Morn?”
“The Tok did not attempt to eliminate everyone. This seems so … arbitrary.”
“If you ask me, Concordance are simply high on authority. Strip away all their quasi-spiritual cant, and what you have is a ruthless power-grab. They control the galaxy because they can, and they work hard to ensure that never changes. Maybe some of them believe they are on a divine mission, but that's because they've started to believe their own lies. Which makes them truly dangerous.”
“There is so much that I don't understand,” said Surtr.
Ondo needed no more prompting to spend the next ten minutes giving the entity a summary of recent galactic history as he saw it: the Coronadian golden age, the sudden emergence of Concordance, the subsequent atomization of interstellar civilisation.
When he'd finished, Surtr said, “It is your view that they are wiping out the galaxy's collective memory and replacing it with stories and ideas of their own.”
“Yes,” Ondo said. “That's what they're trying to do, at least.”
“There is a word in your minds that I mapped onto the Morn in my attempts to understand you, but I think I see now that it is a wider concept, and that it could be applied to Concordance, too.”
“What is the word?” Ondo asked.
“Evil,” said Surtr. “These acts you describe cause suffering and death for no reason that I can identify. Does that not sound like evil?”
“It does,” said Selene. “That's exactly what it is.” She caught Ondo's look. His raised eyebrow indicated a certain level of surprise at Surtr's sentiments. She shrugged. Clearly the race that had made the Aetheral had not infected it with their own genocidal tendencies. Or, if they had, Surtr was now questioning them. She had to hope it came up with the right answers in the end.
They left Surtr to steer the ship and headed back to their living quarters to find food and drink. They were adjacent to the transparent bulkhead as they completed the current jump. Ondo paused to take in the sight as they emerged into normal space.
Selene said, “What did you work out back there while I was busy saving our lives?”
“Ah, yes, that. There was no star, and it made me wonder why a tunnel gateway was in the area. Then I saw – via your senses – that the interstellar medium was denser than normal. There was, especially, a relatively high concentration of hydrogen.”
“Regions of space vary.”
“And they even out over time. The question still remains, why put a tunnel entrance there?”
She saw what he was driving at. “You're saying something was there, once. The mechanism sucked away a whole star or a nebula.”
He nodded. “I don't understand how they were able to blast matter through the tunnels in high enough volumes, though. It can't have been a slow process if they were using the mechanism as a surprise weapon.”
The scale of it was hard to grasp. It was engineering on a galactic scale. She wondered how often the weapon had been used; how many stars had been triggered into cataclysmic explosion, wiping out the civilisations around them. It was a terrible weapon of war – although, like many such technologies, one that could be used for benign purposes, too. Maybe stars could be engineered by similar means to make them more capable of supporting life. They had no way of knowing how widespread such stellaforming had been.
They performed a total of nine jumps before they called a halt to their flight around the galactic wheel. The last hop deposited them in the outer reaches of a binary solar system, with a string of rocky bodies and gas giants surrounding the solar twins. As before, Selene pinpointed their location by triangulating off the background stars. They were thirty thousand light years from the nebula and the dead star. There was no sign of pursuit. They watched for an hour, ready to jump again if any Concordance vessels showed up, but none did.
2. Communication
“I know this system,” said Ondo as she relayed her navigational calculations of their location. He looked pensive as he accessed the records he carried in his head. “It's Eketian, an inhabited system, one that I monitor.”
“So, Concordance are here?” Selene asked, instinctively looking to pull in telemetry of local space via the ship and – as before – getting nothing.
Ondo didn't look too concerned. “It's the normal arrangement: a single Cathedral ship and the occasional visit by a Void Walker or some delegation from the God Star. The occasional lander going down to the surface and a swarm of sensors around the sun. I've never detected any unusual activity here. There is a population on the second planet, thirty billion people or so, but either they aren't particularly rebellious, or they're very effectively suppressed.”
“Or they love their galactic overlords with an unwavering devotion.”
“Or that, yes.”
“Is a ship like those that attacked us within this system?” Surtr asked.
“Somewhere near the planet,” said Selene. She relayed to the Aetheral her maps of the system, along with
