“The Tok destroyed huge numbers of the Morn. What do words like evil and good mean there? If the Tok are evil as you mean it, then I assume I must be, too, since they made me.”
“There are lots of reasons for killing,” said Selene. “Some are justifiable and some are not. A galaxy of enlightened pacifism would be a lovely place to live, but right now we're going to have to fight to bring that into being. What matters at this moment is that we don't get killed.”
She queried the ship's control interfaces. There was still no sign of the core Mind, but life-support, nav and the metaspace projectors were fully functional. Surtr's accelerated damage-reversal tech was working well; full structural integrity had been restored. The voidhull was unblemished once more, and they even had a low-power energy hull.
The incursion AI was still there, but it had been fenced off and was being wiped. The image of the Augur on the display was glitching badly. Good. Once they'd removed the ghost of Godel from the comms pathways, they could jump into metaspace and be gone. Selene flipped back the visor of her helmet so she could breathe the relatively sweet air of the deck, pulling in welcome lungfuls of it. After a moment, seeing her, Ondo did the same.
She was about to agree a rendezvous-point with Surtr so that they could follow separate metaspace jump patterns and meet up afterwards, when the face of Godel flicked back into perfect clarity. The smile that spread across the Augur's face was a mixture of cruelty and delight. The sight stopped Selene; the avatar of Godel was clearly happy about something. Which could not be a good sign.
She called to Ondo to get away from the display, but it was too late. A blinding light flared from the arrays that the ship used to fill the room with its three-dimensional projections. Normally they were low-level, broadcast from multiple tiny lenses so that the images were coherent from every direction. This time, every lens operated at maximum capacity, focusing their light into the eyes of her and Ondo in intense beams.
She reacted quickly enough, her artificial eye registering the energy spike and closing itself down while instructing her natural eye to do the same. Ondo wasn't so lucky. The jags of coherent light hit him squarely in the face. He gave a single whimper, oddly quiet, and crumpled to the floor.
Unable to reach him in time, she knelt to him while turning her anger on the image of Godel on the wall. “What was that? What did you do?”
But the Augur spoke no more. The image of her glitched one more time and was gone.
5. Eb
She was overriding the access controls of Ondo's EVA suit, getting him out so she could examine him properly, when Surtr arrived on the cartography deck. The Dragon's doorways were far too tall for the Aetheral, the ship designed on a more human scale, and it had to crawl through the entrance on all fours. It looked more than ever like some predator coming for her, a robotic beast, its snouted head thrust forwards as it raced towards her.
But its words in her mind were as gentle as ever. “What happened to Ondo?”
“The bug incursion,” said Selene. “It struck him before you shut it down. Used the projectors to focus a crude beam-weapon strike into his eyes.”
Surtr considered Ondo, tilting its head to try and understand what it was seeing. “Do you believe it inflicted damage on his brain?”
She queried the flecks in Ondo's head to get his biological status. His heart was beating and he was respirating. He was alive but deeply unconscious. The light-blast had done something to his brain, but she couldn't tell what. Couldn't tell if it had damaged his tissues or if his augmentation flecks were glitching out. Right now, he was only responding on a mechanical level, with no higher brain-function apparent.
“Let's get him to the medsuite. Have you fully removed the contamination from the Dragon?”
“I believe so, although this ship has many layers and additions, not all of them containing the structural encoding that the entropy-spirals require in order to operate. All aspects of the ship that can be restored are functional.”
“Get back to your vessel; we need to jump out of here in case Concordance come.”
“I can help to repair Ondo.”
“There'll be time for that later; we can't take the risk of Concordance finding us. If that bug was broadcasting until we showed up, they might get suspicious about why it's suddenly stopped and come looking.”
“I don't believe that they know where we are. I explained that I blocked all their messages. Moreover, when we first materialized at this point, your ship was not communicating in any way. If it had been, we might have noticed it and fled. It was only our entry into it that triggered the communication attempts.”
“I don't care!” She was shouting now. She was surprised at how light Ondo was as she lifted him. Partly it was the boosted power of her artificial half – and the fact that her natural biology had itself strengthened considerably in order to keep up – but also it was the adrenalin pumping around her veins. Ondo might be dying in her arms. “We don't know what Concordance are capable of, or what they did to the Dragon. We need to leave now.”
She sent Surtr a random set of galactic coordinates, another location far from any star. “Get to there. Make multiple jumps along the way, and stop at least twice to check you aren't being followed. Understood? Be there in twelve standard hours. I'll tend to Ondo, put him into stasis for the time being if I need to.”
“I understand.”
“You know how to interpret the coordinates and how long twelve standard hours are?”
“Yes.”
“Good. I'll see you at the other end.”
She carried Ondo to the Dragon's medsuite while the Aetheral
