“Surtr, I never thanked you for rescuing me, for saving both of our lives at the dead star. I'm sorry I mistrusted you. The Tok may or may not have been the enlightened paragons you see in your mind, but they must have had some good in them to have created a being like you. I wish you could have stayed around.”
They spoke no more. They jumped to the rendezvous point with the Dragon. Back on board her own ship, she explained to Ondo in a few curt words what Surtr intended to do. Ondo was oddly unsurprised, as if he'd guessed what the Aetheral's intentions might be. The two of them stood in silence as the Aetheral flew back to its own vessel, to the larger part of its body. The glow of light blazed briefly as it entered the observation dome, then was gone. Surtr manoeuvred and accelerated away from the system, while Selene put the Dragon onto its own escape vector, taking it onto a run-up to metaspace translation.
The jump she flew was brief, positioning the Dragon a light-hour from the vast device. There, she and Ondo waited in the cold silence of interstellar space, watching the constellations, their eyes always returning to the point where the distant Concordance fleet was massed. Eb emerged from his cell to stand with them but didn't speak.
The flash of light, when it eventually came, was blue-white and beautiful in its own way. A brief flowering in the void. This was what Concordance had planned, except that they'd intended there to be a whole field of blooms, one for each star.
She had destroyed a single Cathedral ship, and it had felt like a great victory. Surtr's act had wiped out a hundred of them, and saved the lives of everyone on Periarch – and, doubtless, other planets. She didn't feel in any mood to celebrate, though.
The three of them watched for several minutes before she turned away and manoeuvred the Dragon onto its next jump trajectory.
10. Convocation
Secundus Godel sat in the throne of the Storm Gatherer's convocation circle, working hard to maintain her impassive demeanour. Her Void Walkers would arrive on the ship to detail their failings very soon. She needed to be ready for them.
She had to control the fury simmering inside her; if she pushed the Walkers too far, there was always the troubling possibility that they might turn against her and refuse to follow her orders. She required their absolute loyalty in everything that was to come. The normal conversion process that the Walkers went through was, naturally, intended to ensure such unquestioning devotion to Concordance and all the First Augurs. They became the children of Omn. She had simply made a few adjustments to the process, altering the implanted engrams of her own private coterie, giving them the need to be loyal to her above everything else.
She couldn't, in truth, be absolutely sure that she had always succeeded – more than once, she'd had reasons to doubt the faithfulness of her Walkers, especially when the orders she gave meant many deaths, many liberated souls sent flying through the wormhole. It wasn't just a problem with her Walkers; it was a trait she'd noticed in all of them. Some residual trace of their original psyches lingered in their brains, and on occasion it appeared to fight back, reassert itself. It had never reached the point where they'd failed to obey her commands, but sometimes, in their eyes, there was a look of revulsion at what they were being made to do. Or so she thought. Even a fiercely loyal and subjugated pet could turn on its owner if pushed too far. She had to balance the punishments she meted out with praise for what they achieved.
Five Void Walker vessels, all that remained of her fleet that had attempted to activate the stellar mass engine, were approaching the Storm Gatherer. She transmitted orders for them to approach. Kane was among them, she noted. That was good. Of all her Walkers, he was the one that troubled her the least. His loyalty was always unquestioning.
They would be alone when she told them what they were now to do. She had despatched the other clerical officers of the circle to their duties: the Hierarch, the Stellar Mechanic and especially the Augur. She did not know that she could trust any of them. What came to their ears, Carious and the God Star would inevitably hear, too. There would be a time for that, but it wasn't yet.
She shifted in her chair, trying to dislodge the knot of anxiety that had settled within her. She felt as if she had swallowed some indigestible metal weight, a weight that fizzed with electricity. How could it be that her plans to use the engine and the metaspace tunnel network to burst the star of Periarch had failed so utterly? That was what they were for; that was why Omn had given them to her. It was inconceivable that the structures were there by chance, inconceivable that she wasn't supposed to use them to begin the great emptying of the galaxy that she longed for. In one stroke she could have made such a start! The destruction of the first star should have been the first of many such detonations, the first step taken towards her final solution. The means by which she would send everyone to their moment of judgement.
Hadn't Omn whispered his instructions into her mind as she lay alone in the darkness? The sweetness of the design was so clear to her, so obvious, and yet she'd been thwarted. How could that be? How was it that she had lost one hundred ships in the process?
It was inconceivable, baffling. She studied the back of her hands. Instead of purple, her skin was a mottled, sallow blue. A reflection of her inner turmoil. It would not do. She willed her skin to return to its proper hue; the purple
