The clatter of Ondo's keyboard as he typed sounded strangely like heavy winter rain on the roof of her childhood home. He'd acknowledged her with a nod of his head as she'd entered, without looking up at her. It was a familiar pattern. She said nothing, letting him finishing his flow of thoughts, his fingers dancing across the mechanical keyboard as if his hands were two galloping spiders.
Eventually he stopped and looked up at her. “I've been watching the progress of the security sweep through the ship; it seems there's no evidence of Concordance bug infiltration.”
He was supposed to be resting. She let it slide. “It all looks clean so far. The Dragon locked itself down, closing off its core so nothing could get in. The contamination was superficial.”
“Eb told you that?” Selene had filled Ondo in on what they'd found hidden within the Dragon – words that Ondo had listened to with wide-eyed wonder.
“No, I thought it best to leave him to heal. Much as I assumed you were doing.”
Ondo looked about his room, as if in appreciation of the ship. “Even if the ship's core is safe, there's still the risk of a tracking bug hiding away somewhere. If it's there, it'll be subtle. We have to keep checking until we're 100% sure.”
“Obviously. Although, I was thinking that, say, 90% might be close enough?”
He was about to object when he saw that she was joking. They both understood the absolute need to keep the whereabouts of the Refuge a secret.
Selene said, “We do know that all the ship's datastores are uncontaminated. Everything's been scanned and checksummed, and no computational structures have been unexpectedly altered since the moment of the Concordance attack. As for the rest of the ship, we obviously can't strip systems down mid-flight. We need to find a safe haven for a week or two to depressurise.”
He nodded. “I have an idea of a place we can go. How is Surtr progressing with restoring the ship to full functionality?”
“It's doing what it can. I feel a bit like I've got this huge, lumbering puppy following me around. It's companionable, but it's always there, if you know what I mean.”
That seemed to amuse Ondo for some reason. “Yes, I know what you mean. Where is it now? It appears you managed to shake it off.”
“It went back to its own ship, for reasons that I didn't attempt to find out.”
“Do you think meeting Eb has triggered new memories, new behaviours in Surtr?”
She considered that. “Perhaps. It seems even more pensive at times. I'd almost say troubled.”
“At least Surtr and Eb appear to be friendly,” said Ondo. “If they'd decided they were from opposite sides in the ancient war, things might not have gone well.”
“Yeah.”
“I've been trying to find out more about something Surtr mentioned. The nanotube mesh.”
She'd forgotten all about the phrase. “We've recovered those short lengths of extremely fine filament from around the galaxy. I guess that could be called nanotube; you said there was a bore running through it on the atomic scale.”
“Yes, but mesh implies it was all joined up, does it not? And, if it was used to communicate, it implies lengths running between the stars.”
“I don't see how that's possible.”
“Neither do I. Perhaps the Tok had the means to route it through metaspace, form persistent nano-scale tunnels.”
“If this mesh survives, it might explain how Concordance are able to communicate instantaneously over transgalactic distances.”
The idea had clearly occurred to Ondo. “Which means there might be a way of tapping into it, or disrupting the communications flowing over it. We should look into it when we return to the Refuge. Oh, and speaking of datastores, you might like to see this. I pulled it from the Dragon now that it's back online.”
“Something useful?”
“When Surtr showed us its memories of that Morn attack, it reminded me of an account I unearthed eight or nine years ago. I think it's an old record, perhaps very old; I excavated it from a ruined data archive on an overheating jungle world. It's an excerpt from a ship's log, I believe. My best guess is that it's a transcription by a Coronadian astroarchaeologist of a far older text. Some of the ancient datastores appear to be able to last indefinitely, barring a cataclysmic event. This snatch was translated and then replicated onto a more modern fleck. That process may have happened multiple times, so we can't be sure how reliable the record is, but the similarities to the events Surtr described are striking.”
Data flowed into her head. “It's text rather than audio and pictures?”
“It is. Read it and tell me what you think.”
… the Void Wraiths struck the planet one bright morning in spring. A beautiful day in Dunlen Alta, hushed in mists, and then without warning the slaughter began.
How did they find us? How did they know anything about us in our isolation? Since learning of the Morn's existence, we have hidden ourselves away, avoided all contact with any other species, sent only brief scouting missions to other systems without ever communicating. They came from nowhere, the orbital defences and the city weapon arrays no obstacle to them. Nothing at all stood in their way…
…the blink of an eye and they were there. From the safety of The Solar Wind, thirty light-minutes away, I could watch and I could hear but there was nothing, nothing I could do. The screams of the adults were almost worse than those of the children. Adults and children alike became mere animals – panicking, terrified – as the horde came swarming from the heavens, a cloud blotting out the sky. Sensors revealed the cloud's true nature: billions of devices just as we had heard described, black X's moving with impossible speed, skeletal runes of death swarming and cooperating. They fell like
