“Don't tell me,” said Selene, “he never returned. The demon in the sky ate him.”
“Oh, he returned, but he had been sorely punished for his presumption. He had been held captive for three hundred years, locked in a cursed sleep. He returned as if no time at all had passed for him, but everyone he knew on Ansider, all his friends and family, were dead and gone. He lived out his days among strangers, shunned and feared.”
“You can't believe that.”
Jalian smiled. “It is an amusing story; one we tell our children to discourage them from being too restless. But I think there might be some truth to it. It's a story I often think about as I'm sitting here.”
Selene conversed rapidly with her virtual Ondo.
“Extreme time dilation. This story is a warning, dramatizing the effects of dropping into a deep gravity well and returning to normal space.”
“Yes.”
“Calling this Tok individual a demon is interesting, too. Perhaps this entire thing is a trap. I assumed he went into the black hole so he could wait there and warn the future – us – about something, but that might not be it at all. Perhaps the other Tok imprisoned him there because of some great evil he committed. He may have been luring us in all this time.”
She could almost feel Ondo's wariness warring with his hunger to know the truth. “We still have to go,” he said. “Surely, we have to go.”
“We might be killed. Or held captive, which amounts to the same thing.” Once again, she was the one being cautious while Ondo was keen to take risks. Once again, of course, it was not the real Ondo she was conversing with, but a disembodied copy.
“This Tok has apparently gone to extraordinary lengths if that's all he's been planning,” he said. “Why bother?”
“The Gethrem individual who created your world,” she said to Jalian. “We were told he was a renegade among his kind.” Outsider was the word that Surtr had used.
“The old stories say he was the last of his kind. In some versions, he'd been kept as a prisoner, and he only freed himself long after all the other Gethrem had died out. Or, he was a betrayer, pursued by the other Gethrem because of his intention to reveal the secrets of the gods to ordinary people like us.”
“What do you think?”
“I think he was doing what he thought best.”
“And will you give the bead to us?”
“My forebears have sat in this tower, and the towers that were here before it, for millions of years. The beads have been passed from Gatekeeper to Gatekeeper for days and millennia uncounted. Handing over the last is a moment of triumph – the fulfilment of our duty – but it might also spell disaster for us.”
“You fear what may happen to your world.”
“We understand that this act will mark the end of our long solitude. How could it not? Whether this leads to our salvation or our destruction is impossible to know. You speak of your terrible enemies: how will they react when they see what we have done? I do not think it will go well for us. We have no defences other than our quiet anonymity.”
“Then, you will not show us the road we must take?”
The old man considered for a moment, and a slight smile played about his lips beneath his tangle of hair. “I think we must play the role assigned to us.”
He held the bead out, and dropped it into Selene's outstretched hand. “Take it; it is yours.”
5. The Fight at the Red Star
The surface of Ansider was falling away behind them, the lander lurching as it passed through multiple atmospheric layers, when the first alerts about ships appearing on the periphery of the system reached Selene.
Dread trickled through her as she watched more and more of them light up. A coordinated halo of ships were appearing all around the red star, clearly attempting to form a full-sphere blockade around Ansider. She knew what vessels they would be even as identification tags winked into existence on the three-dimensional visualization in her head. A mesh of Cathedral ships, then a rash of smaller traces, faster moving: Void Walker attack vessels deploying to fill the gaps between the larger vessels, then sweeping inwards on intercept courses.
She could see from the alarmed look on Hessia's face that the Periarch was seeing the same thing. Selene said, “What are your projections saying? Can you see an egress point for the Falling Fire?”
Hessia took a moment to respond, distracted as she was by the complex navigational calculations going on in her head. Her words, when they came, were chilling.
“There is none. Concordance have thrown enough at us to ensure we have no escape vectors. Our only option is to attempt to blast our way through their ships.”
“I did it once before, used a ghost translation to take one of them out.”
Hessia moved her head in a dismissive gesture. “You were incredibly lucky to make that work. This is different; this is a full battlefleet on high alert. We wouldn't get close.”
Selene cast around for some other way out of the system. Jalian, at least, had been right to fear their appearance upon Ansider. She'd condemned the planet to a terrible fate. Would it become one more Maes Far? Was she, even then, fleeing another doomed world in a lander?
She transmitted a message to Ondo, the real Ondo, somewhere on his distant loop around the star. He, at least, might be able to get away. She couldn't give him the purple bead, but she could relay everything they'd learned. Perhaps, somehow,
