Back on the Dragon, Selene ran rapid status checks on vital systems. Everything looked good. Eb returned to his sanctum to run further deep-pass scans and to put into effect their battle plan. Selene then went to find Ondo's body. He was alive when she found him, slumped in a heap on the Cartography deck floor. He was halfway to the door, as if he'd tried to crawl out and collapsed. His skin was a ghastly blue colour from the hypoxia, his lips almost purple.
She restored oxygen levels on the section of the ship they were in and picked him up to carry to the medsuite. He was beginning to stir as they got there. She secured him to the bed and instructed the suite to sedate him, keep him deep under until she had time to consider him further. She thought, briefly, that the med systems might fail to respond, that the infection went further than just Ondo's head, but they complied perfectly. He was contained, for now.
The two vessels had now separated onto their respective vectors, the Falling Fire accelerating at a forty-five degree angle from the ecliptic, heading out-system, while the Dragon headed almost directly upwards – or downwards depending on your perspective – from the plane. Almost, but not exactly; she angled the ship very slightly towards the solar mass, too. Her hope was that Concordance would spot the subtle deviation and conclude that she was on the Fire, accelerating as hard as it could away from the gravity well. Her calculation was that Eb and the Dragon could withstand the slight increase in gravitational pull that the manoeuvre implied without too much impairment.
A broadcast from one of the Void Walker attack ships – capable of higher acceleration – reached the Dragon. Selene watched it passively, not responding or acknowledging it in any way. She'd expected something similar. Concordance were hoping one of the two ships would respond so they could work out where she was.
It was Kane, the Void Walker who'd been dogging her steps, seemingly pursuing her across the galaxy. There was no sign of the Storm Gatherer in the Cathedral ship halo, but Selene had no doubt Godel was behind the attack. Kane mocked and goaded her; his familiar cruel features twisted into something like pure hatred. The temptation to respond was strong; Kane had deliberately put his ship ahead of the attack fleet, no doubt hoping to elicit a response. She refused to give him what he wanted and cut the connection. There was nothing useful to be learned from him.
Instead, she watched the ballet of starships around Ansider, checking constantly that she hadn't missed anything, hadn't miscalculated. The Walker attack ships unleashed their barrage of high-g missiles when they were within minutes of the Dragon and the Falling Fire. The Fire, as programmed, immediately responded with its own furious barrage of intercept-missile countermeasures. Beam-weaponry would kick in as the attacking missiles neared. Hessia's ship threw everything it had into the battle; as much as possible, Selene wanted it to look like she was on that vessel, desperately fighting for survival. The Dragon fired off its own fusillade, but not with the same level of overkill intensity. Another subtle attempt to mislead Concordance.
They took the bait to a degree, sixty percent of the attackers focusing their attention on the Falling Fire, but the Dragon still had no chance of defeating the ships homing in on it. It didn't matter: ten seconds from the first volley of impacts, dangerously close to the red star in normal circumstances, Selene spun up the metaspace projectors.
“Are you ready for this, Eb?”
“I am ready.”
The familiar flutter and flip in her stomach were a welcome sensation as they fled into the void, the translation executed perfectly. As the galaxy faded, the first missiles detonated in a cloud of fire around her. But they were flames that could never touch her. The projection of the Ansider star gravity well was alarmingly close in the Singh Field – she could feel the fearsome drag of it like a weight on her back – but the Dragon manoeuvred away, arcing onto its new vector.
Eb had consumed the purple-black bead just as he'd taken in the red one, and the path he had to follow was now clear. The black hole was inside another bubble of Dead Space, presumably as another way to conceal its location. It would make the journey more gruelling, more traumatic, but he'd agreed to the attempt without demur.
The Concordance vessels would be close behind – too close under normal circumstances – but, for once, she wasn't concerned. The Cathedral ships could not follow them where they were going. Perhaps they would conclude that she'd miscalculated some stunt to throw them off. It made little difference. They couldn't touch her, and while they could watch her falling into the singularity, they might not wait for the months it would take – from their perspective – for the Dragon to re-emerge. Even if they did blockade space around the black hole, Eb could jump well before she reached them upon her return, meaning that they couldn't hope to track her closely enough.
All assuming the Dragon held together that long.
They had some time before the ship's next move in its finely-calculated sequence of steps, time she used to strip away the fake flesh of her left half and restore herself to herself. It felt good to flex the unencumbered muscles of her face once she was done. She went to find Eb in his sanctum.
But Eb wasn't there. Instead, she found him on the top observation deck, staring into space. They had left metaspace briefly and were positioning for their next translation. His hands were splayed on the
