The Triple Stars Trilogy

Chapter 2-1

The clock embedded in the biomechanical hemisphere of Selene Ada"s brain whispered the countdown to her death.

Oxygen supply 2.5% - 13 minutes remaining

Strange how the responses in the two halves of her body had become merged, indistinguishable. The agonies in her oxygen-starved natural tissues, the urgent override alerts in her artificial: they had become indistinguishable. The irony of it was amusing. She"d made such good progress.

She sat with her back against the column of the archway upon the fragment of planetary rock. The nearby dead star, barely three kilometres across, bathed them in its hard gamma rays. Ondo lay beside her, his body ricked awkwardly where he"d slumped among the scattered rocks. His features were indistinct through his suit visor, but it was long minutes since he"d moved. She instructed his helmet lights to come on for a moment. He didn"t respond, no flicker in his eyes. His heart rate continued to fall steadily, and the blue tinge to his lips was unmistakable.

She queried the flecks embedded in his cerebellum one more time. There was only the faintest flutter of life within his body. Oxygen levels within his bloodstream were critical, and hypoxia was causing tissue damage at an increasing rate. Even if, by some miracle, the two of them found a way out, he wouldn"t make it alive; his brain cells were already too impaired.

She could rouse him, instruct his control flecks to amp up his metabolism enough to return him to consciousness, but she let him be. Best to leave him in the peace of oblivion. Soon he"d die, and then the only version of him left in the universe would be the engram copy she carried within her own head. And then, when she finally succumbed, they"d both be gone in the same moment.

She wished she"d been able to protect him, dissuade him from coming to Coronade. If he were still at the Refuge, then there"d be hope. On her lone visits to other worlds, she"d sometimes thought of him as a low, flickering candle-flame in a huge night, a glow of promise on the edge of the galaxy. Now the flame was sputtering out.

They could perhaps have retraced their steps through the archways and the metaspace tunnels to return to the ruins of Coronade, but they"d agreed in Ondo"s last few minutes of consciousness not to do so, not to place themselves in the hands of Concordance. This lonely death was better than any drawn-out end their pursuers might choose to give them. Better that their secrets died with them than having their knowledge ripped from their minds by the Augurs of Omn. The Refuge with its recovered scraps of history was safely hidden. Perhaps some unknown traveller would find it one day, and bring the memories back to life.

Conscious thought slipped away from Selene for a moment, and there was only the blazing cloud of ionized gas and plasma from the destroyed star to fill her eyes. Strange how something so violently destructive could create something so beautiful. The fragment of rock, crowned by its archway, spun rapidly, tumbling through space from the blast of the sun"s explosion. As a result, its tumbling day was short, but there was no separation of light and darkness. A blur of fulgent light surrounded her. The colours were dazzling; she felt them filling her universe, pulling her in, promising to draw her to themselves. The thought was comforting. It would be so easy to let go, let the light absorb her. Let Concordance win.

No. She fought back, forcing herself to kick for the surface, out of the depths and back to awareness. Her biomechanical side reacted to her conscious instruction, pushing more adrenaline through her blood vessels, giving her another burst of life.

The irony was that her artificial tissues could easily have been made to survive a zero-oxygen environment – except that she"d insisted on having them fully integrated with what remained of her biology during her reconstruction. Ondo had given her the choice early on; her flesh could be an adjunct, sustained and maintained as long as it was viable, then discarded, placenta-like. He"d offered her that immortality, but she"d recoiled in horror. If all of the cells and tissues of her original body were gone, then who was she? In what sense was she still Selene Ada?

It was one of the last things he"d said to her, before his eyes closed: “I should have insisted.”

“I wouldn"t have let you.”

He"d actually smiled. “I should have done it anyway, and not told you until now.”

“Did you?”

“Regrettably, no. I"m sorry. I"m sorry for all of this. I should have made you lead a normal life, safe on a planet somewhere.”

“And I told you, that life would never have worked for me. Not after Maes Far.”

Her two halves were inextricably intertwined, just as she"d demanded, and that meant she was doomed. The blast wave from the stellar extinction event had stripped away its planets" atmospheric envelopes, turning viable biosphere into bare rock, and the only breathable air she and Ondo had was that which they"d brought with them. She"d consumed less of her suit"s oxygen than Ondo had, but in the end, it wasn"t going to make any difference.

Still she fought. She would go back to Coronade, face down Concordance. Time to stop following the trails left by others and force a new one of her own. Since she"d started travelling in the Radiant Dragon, Ondo had often accused her of taking crazy risks, and to herself she admitted that he was probably right: her fury and desire for revenge did make her take unnecessary chances. Sometimes it felt like her own survival didn"t matter much anymore. Why should she get to live when everyone she"d grown up with had not? It was survivor"s guilt; she should have died alongside them. She wasn"t always rational. If she was going to fight Concordance, she needed to be more controlled. There was a time to unleash her anger, but she needed to be patient, pick the right moment. To win a war, you sometimes had to lose a battle, or refuse to fight it at all.

Could she reopen the Coronade entrance using the metakey they"d been given by the Warden? Perhaps. The archway had clearly been designed to ensure people couldn"t easily move from Coronade to the dead star system, and perhaps prevent them from returning at all. It was a puzzling fact if you accepted Ondo"s view of the golden age culture. Why go to such lengths to construct miraculous passageways among the stars, and then prevent their use? Ondo had to be wrong; the Coronade civilisation had been radically different to the one he"d imagined.

In any case, she would try to make the return journey. Ondo would know nothing of her actions; he was too far gone for it to matter. She would return through the tunnels, attempt to reopen the archway and fight their pursuers. She would have no chance – they would drop more atmospheric nukes or unleash beam-weapon fire and she"d be vaporised – but perhaps, somehow, she could get to them first, take some of them with her.

She forced herself to her knees, then to her feet. She retched, her mouth filling with bitter-sour liquid. She swallowed it back down. Vomiting inside a sealed suit was never a good thing. Stars swirled in her vision and the galaxy threatened to blackout completely, but she willed herself to remain upright and conscious. She took a step forwards, and then another, leaving Ondo"s body where it was on the ground.

She stepped through the archway, taking the short, featureless tunnel that led to the outer planet they"d first arrived at. If the tunnels had ever had breathable atmosphere, it was long-gone now; whatever form of energy walls the archways propagated hadn"t prevented any air from leeching away. Perhaps the builders simply hadn"t considered the possibility of the atmosphere at one end of the tunnel being torn away. She and Ondo had tried and failed to find some sort of control mechanism that might restore air-pressure but hadn"t found any.

She talked to him, the copy in her head at least, as she battled forwards. Partly it was to take her mind off what she was doing, partly to hear his voice. Also, it felt right for him to know everything that had happened.

He absorbed her news without comment, whatever sense of loss he might be feeling left unexpressed. She wondered whether he thought he was dying, or whether it was someone else, just a different Ondo.

“Do you still think there"s a trail?” she asked. “That we were led here for a reason?”

He paused very briefly before replying. “Perhaps some of your innate scepticism has leeched into my thoughts from your brain, but I still think we have a purpose. There are fragments of the picture here.”

“It"s hard to see a picture if you"re dead,” she said. “You said this supernova was engineered, an anomaly, but maybe you were wrong. Even my enhanced senses give us only crude readings. This could have been a completely natural disaster, nothing more. A star exploding after its core collapsed unexpectedly.”

“This was clearly a technological society; you"ve seen the scale of the ruins. From the similarities in the architecture, I"d say this was the same culture spread across multiple worlds: the three that we"ve glimpsed, and perhaps others. There"s no way a society that advanced wouldn"t know its star was close to catastrophic explosion. And you"ve studied the readings; the mass of stellar material is at odds with what we can calculate from the planets" original orbits. My view is still that someone did this: triggered solar collapse and wiped out these worlds in a moment of galactic time. Even the farthermost planet would have been devastated within a few minutes. If there was no warning, no chance to evacuate, billions of people must have died. Billions of lives and much that was unique and glorious, all gone. We have to accept that"s the most likely explanation.”

Walking was an effort, an act of will. Her muscles were cramping and her brain threatened repeatedly to succumb to the darkness. Her breathing was rapid, panicky. She forced herself to keep moving and talking. “Then, perhaps there was some end-of-days cult going on; the people chose to live close to the edge of destruction, knowing the end could come at any moment. People do things like that, right? Perhaps they embraced catastrophe like Concordance do.”

“It seems so unlikely. From what I can tell of the ruins, the buildings must have been quite beautiful.”

“What the hell does that have to do with anything?”

“I suppose I can"t believe that a people capable of such marvels would embrace death to that extent.”

“Concordance ships are beautiful. You"re projecting how you think about the universe onto unknown cultures.”

“Concordance are anomalous, and I don"t believe they are responsible for creating the wonders they wield.”

“Who is, then?”

“That, of course, we don"t know. But it"s clear Concordance aren"t fully in control of the technology at their disposal. For one thing, they"re not here. If they knew about the tunnels and the archways, they"d have come for us. They"d have been waiting for us. I don"t believe they know where we are and I don"t believe they understand how the metaspace pathways function.”

“It"s not a lesson we can put to any use, given how near to dying I am.”

“How close are you?”

She granted him access to her internal status. “That close.”

“There isn"t much time left,” he said after a moment.