The Triple Stars Trilogy

Chapter 4

Selene operated grabs to lift the device from the seabed and bring it on board. Dead-eyed fish swam in and out of the tiny arc of light. She dropped the orb into a hopper and left it there. She certainly wasn"t going to touch it for fear of activating it. Malleus had said he had to place his hands on his ship"s Augury to make it connect to Omn. That was a conversation she definitely wasn"t ready for.

“These Auguries are tough,” she said over the comms. “I can only see tiny fragments of the rest of the ship.”

The conversation was awkward at the Dragon"s three light-second distance. Each time as she waited, she had the worrying thought Ondo wasn"t going to reply; that up there beyond the moon Concordance had arrived and the Dragon had been destroyed or had jumped away. But each time, eventually, his voice came to her, untroubled, calm. “I can only assume their builders wanted to be absolutely sure they could maintain communications, whatever else happened to the ship.”

“Why did they even need them if they had tiny devices like the one we pulled from Malleus?”

“My guess is that we"re seeing different technologies from a long span of time. Perhaps the microscopic device was a much later refinement. Or perhaps very few of them were made.”

“It"s possible they had one each and took them with them when they died.”

“Perhaps.”

“Is there any way to know if the thing is active?”

“We have to assume it is. Keep it as sealed and contained as possible. We"ll study it properly back up here.”

“If it"s alive, Concordance might spot it moving. You might need to bring the Dragon nearer to pick me up.”

“We"ll be ready if they show up.”

“And if they do come, that also means they can track this orb like they did the bug inside Malleus, and, therefore, that we can"t take it with us. You do get that?”

“Yes, yes. We shall see. We"ll be very careful.”

She could hear the excitement in Ondo"s voice. Which was lovely, but she didn"t want to have to keep fighting him. With the sphere safely stowed, she accelerated the lander along the ocean floor, moving as quickly as she could in the murk.

“So, our second Concordance wreck,” she said.

“I believe they went to great lengths to annihilate any remains from their ships. They must have simply missed this one.”

Which might be because the Augury wasn"t functioning after all. She didn"t mention the thought to Ondo. “Once the Dragon has plotted a good evac route I"ll head up to you.”

“Yes, I … yes.”

He sounded distracted. He was concentrating on something else and barely paying her any attention. Something he did a lot. “Ondo, what is it?”

“Hmm?”

“What are you working on that"s suddenly so urgent?”

“Well, it"s … hmm.”

“Ondo!” The delay did nothing to make his manner any less infuriating.

“Sorry, yes. Forgive me. It suddenly occurred to me that I should scan the planet for any other Concordance artefacts. Normally I would search for anything from the Magellanic side, any flecks people have unearthed and so forth.”

“Okay, so is there anything?”

“It will take time. Come up to the ship for now.”

Once again, the Dragon plotted her a course which kept her away from the gaze of any ground stations or satellites that might see the lander as an interesting anomaly and raise frantic alarms. The ghostly green glow of the planet"s aurorae greeted her as she slipped from the northern pole of the planet. She managed not to trigger a fusion-weapon war among the inhabitants. That was always good news.

The moon wasn"t populated at all; only a few abandoned landing-sites from the inhabitants" first, fumbling attempts to leave their planet were in evidence. All were now dark. Selene skimmed around the grey, cratered satellite and docked with the Dragon, hiding in the shadows on the far side of the moon.

She left the Augury where it was in the lander"s bay and went to find Ondo. There"s been no sign of Concordance incursion into the system. Either the orb was inert, or Concordance were unaware it had been moved. Or they hadn"t turned up yet.

Ondo paid her no attention as she slumped down in one of the chairs in his laboratory, engrossed as he was in something on his screens.

“I"m back,” she said after several moments of silence.

Ondo was frowning. “Yes, yes. Good. I"ve found something most intriguing.”

“Great to see you, too. Go on, tell me about it.”

“I"ve scanned the surface for any other Concordance artefacts. If it broke up on re-entry, fragments might have hit the surface over a very large area.”

“Did you find something?”

“No, nothing at all.”

“Right, and you"re telling me all this because…?”

“Because my scans of their computer networks then did find something.”

He turned the screen to show her, clearly delighting in revealing his find. A picture of a silvery necklace, glassy beads strung upon it, filled the display.

She saw immediately what he was saying. “Your claiming these beads are like the other two we"ve retrieved.”

“They"re the same size, and they appear to shimmer in the right colour spectrum.”

“They"re glass beads, something you can find on any planet in the galaxy where the inhabitants have worked out the complexities of making fire.”

“Yes, but one of these beads, the central one, was found embedded in an ice floe three years after the Concordance ship burned up. A fisherman from a place called Iceland came across it and had the necklace fashioned for his wife.”

“That"s very sweet, but the bead could simply have been dropped by, I don"t know, another fisherman. Or he could have stolen it or bought it and made the story up because it sounds romantic. That"s no proof of anything.”

“Well, except that everything wasn"t sweetness and light between the couple, so the story attached to the necklace goes. Seven years after the find, following an argument, the fisherman"s wife took a hammer to the beads and tried to smash them. To make a point about how she felt, you see.”

“Yes, yes, I get the symbolism. Are you"re saying she couldn"t?”

“Most of them, she could – the other beads were probably replicas made to match the original – but not the central one. Not with a hammer, or a rock, or anything. Others tried and they also couldn"t smash it.”

“Okay, more interesting. So, what happened?”

“The happy news is that the couple took the indestructible bead as a sign from the gods that their marriage also couldn"t be broken. They resolved their differences and lived into contented old age. The remade necklace was passed down to their daughters and granddaughters as a family heirloom.”

“It still exists?”

“It"s in a museum. Apparently, by their calendar, it"s an interesting example of early sixteenth century glass making, which dates it to about five hundred years ago. I suspect they have the date slightly wrong.”

“You want me to go back to the planet and steal it, don"t you?”

“Yes.”

“Even if I could do that – even if I should do that – what are the chances of us being able to extract data off it without a reader like the one at the Haven?”

Ondo pursed his lips. “In truth, very small, but we know that the more objects we collect, the more chance we have of correlating data off them, as with the ship datastores. The Maes Far bead also granted you admission to the Haven: who knows what else they can do? The more we have, the better. I…”

A small square on one of Ondo"s screens began to flash red. “That"s odd,” he said.

“What is it?” She imagined Concordance ships arriving, another desperate chase through the grey wastes of metaspace.

“Movement detected in the lander.” He looked up at her, worry in his eyes. “I didn"t think to restrict his access there; the controls are all locked down in case he tries to escape.”

“Malleus.”

“Yes.”

“I left the Augury in the lander, and he knew we were retrieving it.”

“Yes.”

She raced for the door, retracing her steps. Thirty seconds later, she burst into the lander bay, blaster held at the ready to deliver another stun shot. Or, hell, maybe something a little stronger. She should have thrown him into space when she had chance.

The sight that met her stopped her. Malleus was slumped in a heap on the ground beside the lander. He was unmoving, unconscious or dead. He"d retrieved the Augury from its hopper: the glassy orb had rolled across the floor and now lay in a corner. Selene couldn"t throw the troubling thought it was watching her.

Ondo arrived, breathing hard. Selene crouched and felt for a pulse in Malleus"s neck. “He"s alive. We have to get out of this system; we have to assume he alerted Concordance.”

“Why attack him, though?” Ondo mused.

“They decided they could no longer trust him. I don"t know; it doesn"t make any difference.”

She issued instructions to the ship, putting it onto an escape vector out of the system while she carried Malleus to the medsuite. They left the orb where it was.

The med systems ran a battery of tests on Malleus, scanning his brain and nervous system for activity, checking his bones and tissues for damage, analysing his blood gases. There was no sign of physical trauma, apart from a bruise on the back of Malleus"s head, presumably where he"d fallen.

“It had to be a mental attack,” said Selene. “Something like the one they fired at you.”

“It"s possible. The brain scans do suggest a shock or trauma.”

“He was already pretty far gone; this tipped him over the edge.”

Ondo nodded his head in agreement. “There doesn"t appear to be much we can do for him right now. He"s breathing; his cerebral patterns are returning to normality. I"d say we leave him to come around naturally.”

Selene relayed instructions to the Dragon to keep Malleus mildly sedated once he began to emerge, then requested a video replay of events on the lander deck. “Let"s take a look at what happened down there.”

She and Ondo studied the imagery. Nothing moved until Malleus stepped warily inside, glancing backwards again and again, clearly afraid of being discovered. He stepped around the lander, from his exaggerated actions clearly doing his best to move silently. After a minute, he found the hopper where the lander"s grab had deposited the Augury and activated it to reveal its contents.

Gingerly, as if it were a bomb that could explode in his face, he picked up the orb and cradled it in his hand. He closed his eyes, preparing himself to commune.

Delight lit up his face. Then a flicker of alarm passed across his features and he went suddenly rigid, as if electricity were jolting through him. He dropped the orb and crumpled to the ground, just as they had found him. They watched for another thirty seconds, but nothing else happened until the arrival of her and Ondo.

Selene went back to the moment he"d touched the orb. She zoomed in on his face, slowed the pictures down. Malleus"s expression was briefly one of purest joy, an almost s****l ecstasy. Then came the change. The flicker of alarm. Slowed down, the expression was more one of confusion – even, perhaps, terror. He fell to the ground wordlessly. The hard c***k of the orb on the metal floor of the lander was clear on the feed but Malleus said nothing throughout.

“Intriguing,” said Ondo. “Clearly we need to be extremely careful when we study the orb.”

She flicked her attention over the ship"s telemetry feeds. There was no sign of Concordance. The nanosensor array was silent. They had more than twenty minutes before they reached their translation point.

She replayed the pictures from the lander deck once again, freezing the video on a frame of Malleus"s shocked face. It looked as though some huge and terrible realisation had struck him.

“He must have understood what they were about to do to him,” she said. “Nothing else makes any sense; he goes from rapture to horror in a moment.”

“While he"s asleep we should start him on those psych drugs,” said Ondo. “It"s possible he knew the object would inflict this damage on him and sought it out for that very reason. If Omn isn"t going to come to his aid, psychotherapeutic substances and resonant brain wave modulation will have to do.”

“Do you still think I should go down to the planet for the bead?”

“It may be our only chance to acquire the object, but the risk of doing so is too great.”

“I"m not convinced he even had time to send a message. The attack is almost instantaneous.”

“He held the orb for two seconds; that"s plenty of time to communicate.”

“Then why haven"t they come? We"d be seeing ships by now.”

“Which is interesting in itself,” said Ondo. “If he was in connection with someone, perhaps it wasn"t Concordance at all.”

“Who else would it be?”

Ondo shook his head for a reply.

They retrieved the Augury orb from the corner where it had rolled, Selene picking it up with the lander"s grab and dropping it into a stasis box. It didn"t attack her or make any attempt to zap her brain.

When the box was sealed, she carried it in her left hand, just in case the proximity of flesh triggered the device in some way. When they were done, there was still no sign of Concordance ship incursion. They were alone in the system apart from the oblivious inhabitants of the nearby planet. Metaspace translation was two minutes away.

“I don"t think they"re coming,” she said. She gave the Dragon the order to suspend its translation run-up.

“Is this wise?” Ondo said.

“Probably not.”

They waited for another hour, enough to completely exhaust her patience.

“Okay,” she said. “I"m going back down to the planet. Time to add burglary to my list of crimes.”