She removed her hand from the hull while Ondo tried to interface with the ship. She reran her scan of local space, using the lone nanosensor to look for any arriving vessels or other objects. Nothing was registering; they were still alone deep in the interstellar void. Stars blazed about them, the Diamond Road glistening like a path beneath her feet, but there were no suns nearby. Surtr's ship had moved three hundred kilometres away in case the Dragon did detonate. The bulbous ship was completely dark to her senses; she could only pick it out by the background stars it eclipsed.
After a few minutes, Surtr said, “Are you unable to access the ship?”
“Still working on it,” she said, trying hard not to sound too annoyed at the unhelpful question. “That's why we're still out here floating in space and not inside. The Dragon's hull isn't going to magically split open like your ship. We need to activate control systems – systems which appear to be completely dead – and then persuade those systems that we're friendly and that it can let us in.”
She tried for several minutes more while Ondo did the same, but neither of them could get any response from the ship. The control interfaces had stopped responding, as if they'd used up their last trickle of energy when she'd tried to talk to them. She could see from Ondo's expression that he was worried. She was, too. Without the Dragon they were badly crippled. Given a few months and Surtr's help they could maybe cobble together another viable ship from the pieces and parts that Ondo had collected at the Refuge, but it would never be as good as the Radiant Dragon even if they could make it metaspace-viable.
They worked their way around the base of the tetrahedral ship to where the lander deck door would be. They got the same result there: the Dragon was locked up, as inaccessible as a lump of rock. Whatever damage it had sustained in its flight from Coronade was serious. It appeared to be completely dead.
The realisation of that troubled her more than she would have expected: she hadn't really believed the ship had been destroyed at Coronade, she realised. She'd assumed it would escape, just as it always had in the past. Now, it appeared that doing so had come at the cost of its own existence.
She'd grown unexpectedly attached to the vessel. At first, it was simply because the Dragon's Mind was someone to talk to, someone who wasn't Ondo and whom she didn't really care about offending or upsetting. Over the course of her journeys about the galaxy, she'd revealed more of herself to the ship's Mind than she had to her rescuer – whether it be the flesh-and-blood version or the brain-analogue one. Until Myrced, there hadn't been anyone else that she could really confide in. It was an odd thought. The ship had assured her that its conversations were private, and she'd accepted it at its word. Perhaps it was because she utterly depended on the Dragon to protect her when it came to exploring the galaxy or fighting Concordance.
Then she'd picked through the fractal layers of the ship's core during the escape from Coronade to come face-to-face with its central intelligence. Even if it had only been a representation in her mind, it had been a disorientating experience. Once her triumph and relief at escaping had faded, it was her emotional reaction that had surprised her.
It was odd, perhaps, to empathise with a starship's Mind, but she found that she did. It had been locked away just as she'd been trapped on Maes Far. At least she hadn't been alone; it must have been far worse for the ship's AI. It had been far more isolated for far longer. The psychological harm of such a prolonged confinement would take its toll on anyone; she was pretty clear it would have driven her insane. Surtr was in a similar situation, as was the Warden entity. Although, the latter was more like an advanced and now failing mechanism while the Dragon's core had definitely felt like a complete individual. She'd referred to it as an AI more than once, and Ondo still did, but that didn't really seem like the correct term. It had felt like a person – and a person, moreover, doing all it could to protect her, despite the circumstances.
As with any starship, the Dragon's designers had done everything within their powers to avoid single points of failure. Every critical system was at least triplicated so that damage to one part of the vessel didn't completely impair its function. As much as possible, the synapses of an AI Mind were woven throughout the vessel that contained it – to the extent that it was a mistake to think of ship and Mind as separate entities at all. Although, of course, people often did exactly that, because they were so used to interacting with biological entities with their distinct bodies and brains. It was a conceptual mistake she often found herself making.
The Dragon, though, was unusual. It hadn't been designed from scratch so much as built upon and built upon over the years. Because its controlling intelligence was wrapped in so many layers, it wasn't properly distributed, and had that discrete, vulnerable core that she'd glimpsed. If the missile damage had penetrated that deeply, then the controlling Mind she'd encountered would be gone – a prospect that filled her with dismay.
She pulled herself out of her reverie. No point dwelling on possibilities. She felt suddenly very exposed; it was entirely possible that Concordance knew where the Dragon had gone, which meant that a fleet of Cathedral ships might arrive at any moment, might even be in the vicinity already, carefully weaving a net around their position. She needed to act. She could attempt to cut through the voidhull, although it was made from
