Ondo was about to object further, then stopped himself. “Perhaps you are right. She probably naturally avoids people with a negative attitude; she has abilities that make her very conscious of how others feel about her.”
“What abilities?”
“She's a Periarch.”
Selene accessed the datastores in her head to fill in the gaps in her knowledge. “She's an empath.”
“A part of the reason she's done such a good job of staying safe over the years, no doubt. She instinctively knows whom she can trust and whom she can't. Everyone from Periarch has an empathic sense to a greater or lesser degree, but she comes from a long line of Queens with a very strong genetic predisposition. The stronger ones get a synaesthetic crossover, so that they see people's emotional and intellectual states as fields around their heads, auras of colours. She told me all about it once.”
“Did you actually meet?”
“Not in the flesh.”
“She wouldn't have been able to sense anything about you from afar. Empathy is a close-range ability.”
“True, true, but I think she learned to predict who might fill her with positive energy and who would drag her down into their own misery. It's a curse of the strong empath, I believe, to be at the mercy of those around them. You can't even close the doors and lock yourself away. It must have been hard for people like her to be around when Concordance came and everyone was thrown into panic.”
Selene found it hard to be too sympathetic. “She survived. No doubt many others didn't.”
“Yes, of course.”
“She chose to live a life of solitude, away from a planet full of traumatised people. I guess I get that. There has to be a chance she's still around, just not taking calls.”
“It's worth a try.”
She was about to leave him in peace, prep for the next sequence of jumps, when a thought occurred to her. “If she is alive, I wonder how she'll react to me with my 50/50 organic brain.”
“That is a question to which I simply don't know the answer. Perhaps, if you do decide you feel the need to slaughter her, you should keep those thoughts in the left half of your brain where she might not be able to read them.”
“Thanks. I'll bear that in mind.”
7. The Periarch
The Radiant Dragon and Surtr's vessel materialized together for the forty-ninth time on their exodus through the stars. Two weeks had passed by since the recovery of the Dragon. Both ship and Ondo were repairing well. There had been no sign of Concordance pursuit, despite longer and longer waits at each terminus point in normal space.
Eb still hadn't emerged from his slumber. They'd left him alone, although Ondo visited every day, mainly to gaze in wonder and, occasionally, to shake his head in disbelief. The faraway gaze that was often on his face at such times told Selene everything she needed to know about what was going through his mind. He retained his childish wonder at the universe around him. She hoped he always would.
There'd been no word from the nanosensor array about what Concordance were up to, no useful clue about why their ships were scrambling. The network had identified three sets of coordinates where multiple Cathedral ships had been seen assembling. Selene had been on the point of jumping to one of these to find out what was going on when the message from Hessia Aperion had come through. The empath's response was extremely cautious, but she'd proposed a rendezvous in deep space, well away from any star system or previously-used muster point.
“She's intrigued,” Selene said. “She took the bait, thanks to your mention of Surtr.”
Ondo agreed. “She's picked a safe spot, far from any gravity wells so she can jump at a moment's notice. I imagine she seeded the whole area with sensors before sending her reply. It's what I would have done.”
“Are we in any danger from her?”
“Five years ago, I'd have said definitely not. Who knows what's happened to her since then? For all we know, Concordance captured her and worked their Void Walker mind-control fritz on her.”
“We have to take the risk.”
“I think we do.”
The agreed plan was to leave Ondo on the Dragon and make a fiftieth jump on Surtr's ship to the meeting point. The arrangement meant that Hessia got to see Surtr's ship; Selene's hope was that Hessia had seen nothing like it and would be suitably intrigued.
She agreed with Ondo the meeting point they'd rendezvous at afterwards – if things went according to plan – then EVA'd over to Surtr's ship. The transparent observation dome admitted her in another blaze of pearly light, and the two ships parted.
A single fragment of rock tumbled through the interstellar medium at the meeting point. It was too small to be spherical, and had no distinguishing features, gave off no energy signatures. No technological artefacts of any sort were detectable in local space, although that didn't mean they weren't there. They had no idea what technology Hessia had acquired or created for herself.
“What will you do?” Surtr asked. It stood with Selene in the observation dome again as they considering their options. She wished the Aetheral would make a few suggestions, even if they were poor ones, but it appeared to be completely at a loss. She watched the misshapen lump of rock tumbling through the void, its presence little more than a whisper in the faint light from the stars. The possibility that this was a set-up was very clear. They had no way of knowing what was in Hessia's mind – or even if she was still alive. For all they knew, Ondo had been talking to a Concordance agent all along.
After a moment's thought, she said, “We go to the rock.” There was a flattened area on one surface of the boulder according to their scans – natural as far as she could tell, the result of some
