“My sphere of perception is still small, but there are some objects nearby that are not natural.”
“Ships?”
“They are too small to be vessels as I understand the word.”
“Do they look like the mines we struck as we emerged from the tunnel?”
“They appear to be monitoring or communication devices, but with the capacity to perform metaspace jumps.”
Ondo sounded suddenly animated. “Show me them.”
Images streamed into both of their brains. The nearest device was a light-second away. More or less on top of them. She saw what it was at the same moment that Ondo spoke. “They're ours, drones in the reporting network that gathers data and returns it to the Refuge. Can you give me comms access to the nearest one?”
She saw what he was planning to do. The nanosensors worked by gathering telemetry from the systems they visited, then meeting up with collector drones at predesignated locations in interstellar space. A whole hierarchy of such meetings meant that data was accumulated upwards before, eventually, being carried to the Refuge. It gave them a surprisingly good picture of what was taking place around the galaxy – except that a lot of it was days or weeks out of date.
The devices also shared all data they'd accumulated with any other devices they encountered, to ensure that data loss was minimized – although, eventually, because of the sheer volume of information, they wiped their internal memories in order to capture more. All of which meant that she and Ondo would be able to get a glimpse of wider events from these devices, depending on where they'd recently been.
Mention of the nanosensors made Selene think about Myrced. She received messages from Migdala from time to time, personal communications from Myrced whispered into the sensor ampoule that Selene had left on the planet. The first time she'd received one, it had sent alarm bells ringing through her; she'd imagined some horror or calamity unfolding around Myrced, some last, desperate message sent before the enemy closed in. That wasn't it; Myrced had simply wanted to pass on her news, tell Selene what was taking place on Migdala. Talk. The rebellion was smouldering on, but there had been no more flashpoints, no more atrocities. They would come, though, Myrced was convinced – perhaps at the following year's Carnival of Masks.
Some of the messages, in addition, were intensely intimate. Selene found she relished these and looked forward to receiving more. She couldn't respond, but it felt good to know that Myrced was alive and well and thinking about her.
“Which systems will this sensor have visited?” she asked. They were nowhere near Migdala; it was very unlikely a message from Myrced would have routed its way onto this particular device.
“There's a route of twenty systems in this region,” said Ondo. “We'll get a partial view of events in this sector, but no clear perspective on wider events. But, actually, retrieving what it knows isn't my main purpose.”
She'd already worked out what his real intentions were. She recognized that gleeful light in his eye.
“You want to transmit data to the galaxy.”
“I do.”
The drone network didn't only capture information; it disseminated it, too, where it could. He'd sent out the initial data she'd recovered from Coronade via his network, broadcasting it to anyone listening. Coverage was far-from perfect, given that Concordance went out of their way to block all such attempts at spreading information – or heretical lies as they saw them. But here and there, Ondo was able to fire off a communique that got picked up, perhaps by groups of people operating banned receiving equipment. His information reached only a small proportion of the galaxy's population, but some who heard it were able to pass it on, perhaps by word of mouth, to others.
They could never compete with the official media channels, those controlled by or sympathetic to Concordance, but Ondo was able to get his message out in a broken and imperfect way. She sometimes thought that the illegality of his broadcasts, the difficulty of making them, added to his mystique, gave his words more power. Inevitably, there were many who refused to believe his propaganda, preferring the ease of accepting what their official media outlets told them, reinforced over and over in a hundred different ways. But, sometimes, his drones picked up a broadcast from a rebel group on one world intended for a wider audience, an attempt to form bonds with insurgents on other planets. Sometimes they contained nuggets of data that Ondo had unearthed and transmitted. Ondo gleefully disseminated all such communications as far and wide as he could.
Once or twice, on a couple of worlds, he'd even managed to interrupt mainstream media broadcasts and replace their messages with his own view of what was really happening. Concordance, meanwhile, worked hard to ensure that their views, and only their views, were handed down to their populations. Inevitably, Ondo was ridiculed, and vile lies were spread about him. He didn't appear to pay any attention to what they said, although the most repellent accusations had to leave a mark. Mainly she suspected he enjoyed riling Concordance, relished the thought that each person hearing his words was another prick of annoyance to the Augurs of Omn.
She recalled a particularly gruesome news report she'd seen as a teenager back on Maes Far: an atrocity on a planet whose name she didn't remember where there'd been an explosion in a crowded public square. Hundreds of people had died, many more terribly injured. There'd been scenes of the carnage: severed limbs, children wailing in confusion, people covered in so much blood that it was hard to know where on their bodies their wounds were.
The report had calmly stated that the renegade and known terrorist Ondo Lagan was behind it. Her father normally didn't respond when such reports were broadcast, but this time he did. She recalled the waver of fury
