The comms call further eased her concern. The familiar voice of Hessia came to her. “I can sense your panic washing over me all the way up here.”
“Yeah, I thought you might be Concordance until I saw how wrecked your ship is. It's a mess.”
Hessia laughed. “You are using abrasive humour as a covert way of conveying genuine affection. Interesting. Does that ever get you into trouble when people don't get it?”
Damned empaths; it was very clear how Hessia's ancestor would have made a good negotiator. Hard to keep your motivation hidden from someone who could see your emotional state.
“It can be a problem. People have the annoying habit of interpreting a personal insult as somehow unkind. But then, I imagine you knew that as you do something similar, right?”
“Perhaps I do,” said Hessia.
“Why are you here? You said we wouldn't see you again.”
“Plans change. My attempts to find out what Concordance are up to went better than I thought for once. They're showing their hand. I know now why they were scrambling, what they were up to activating all their Cathedral ships.”
“What is it?”
“Best I show you. Have you completed your sweeps of the Dragon?”
Selene connected with the ship, queried its status. The scans had progressed well, and had found nothing. They were nearly done. It helped that Eb had finally emerged into the world, stepping from the cell he'd inhabited for so long to peer around the corners of the ship that was, in some way, his own body. With Ondo, Eb and Surtr, the Dragon had become quite a crowded ship. She almost missed the days when it was just her and the galaxy, and no one to have to make conversation with.
“We're still working on it,” said Selene. “Right now, it's impossible to be absolutely sure we're clean, but it's looking good.”
“How long?” Hessia asked.
“Two hours, and we'll be ready.”
“Can you be ready to go in one?”
“If we have to.”
“Good. I know you wanted to go back to the Refuge, but we need to act.”
An hour later, the Dragon rose from the surface of the planet. Hessia's ship, the Falling Fire, waited for them in orbit, following a lower, faster trajectory than Surtr's vessel. The Periarch's ship resembled its lander: functional, almost cobbled together. The cubic bulk of its metaspace drive unit was clearly of a different design to the spiky angles of its main housing. The lateral beam-weapon arrays looked like they'd been grafted on as an afterthought. Selene hadn't seen the ship properly at their deep space rendezvous, as Hessia had travelled in a much more impressive-looking shuttle. She understood why, now.
The three ships joined into formation and angled away from the gravitational pull of the Fenwinter star to their agreed metaspace jump point. They made no attempt to conceal their exit from the planet as they had their arrival. There'd been no sign of active Concordance monitoring of the system, and it didn't matter if their presence was spotted as they left.
They had an hour to complete the run-up to the jump point. Once all three ships were on matching vectors, Hessia made the EVA hop across the gap to the Dragon to fill everyone in on what she'd discovered. Surtr drifted over from his ship, too. Selene had the cartography deck set up as a war room, four seats arranged around a table for her, Ondo, Hessia and Eb. There were no chairs large enough for Surtr, and it stood instead, towering over the four of them. Eb looked exhausted as he entered the room. He'd taken to wearing simple, body-length robes, but the skin of his face was an ashen grey. He sat with his eyes shut, and waved his hand in a way that suggested he was okay, they should continue.
Hessia activated the imagery projectors. A high-level display of the galaxy appeared; the familiar swirl of the arms surrounding the central eye. But laid across it were the branching lines of something that might have been a vast parasite sitting across the entire structure, a many-legged arachnoid perhaps, its limbs splayed across the star-field as if it were sucking energy from all the solar systems within it.
Ondo leaned forwards, intrigued, while the display slowly rotated. “Some of those I recognize. There's the metaspace tunnels we used to travel to the dead star from Coronade, and then to leave with Surtr.”
“This is what I've been spending my time mapping,” said Hessia. Two of the lines flashed in red, intersecting at the same point in space. “You've mentioned the Gamma Spinwards and Sigma Counterspin tunnels, but I've identified a total of twenty-four such pathways, all of them providing shortcuts right across a sizeable portion of the galactic disc.”
“How have you done this?” asked Ondo.
“The same as you: piecing together scraps of data, correlating fragments of documents, scrabbling around in the dust of worlds and the asteroid fields of abandoned solar systems. It's taken me a long time to create this map.”
“I thought you'd given up trying to fight them,” said Selene.
“I'll be honest, I put together a lot of this several years ago. I've come back to it in light of your findings. I saw the recent increase in Concordance activity, but I'd been doing my best to ignore it.”
Ondo said, “When you were unearthing the data for this, were Concordance always there? One step ahead or behind?”
“Sometimes they were, very often not. I believe they don't have a reliable map, either. You must have seen the same yourself: Concordance are following their own trail, attempting to unearth the truth for themselves. On occasion, our paths cross, and we have to fight.”
“Show me Coronade on this map.” said Selene. “That's supposed to have
