The Triple Stars Trilogy

Chapter 6

Selene sent a call to Ondo on the Dragon as the lander powered up, relayed via the nanosensors she"d strung around the moon. “Come get us now. The hell with the locals.”

The reply came with the frustrating multi-second lag: “Are you under attack?”

“Not just at the moment. Are there ships waiting for us in local space?”

“None at all. There"s been no sign of any incursion.”

“Well, they got to the planet somehow. Rendezvous with us at the first possible intersection point and we"ll make an immediate run up to metaspace.”

“Okay. And Selene?”

“Yeah?”

“Who"s us?”

She took the lander away from the city and under the surface of the river for a mile, weaving around muddy sand banks, beneath the hulls of flat-bottomed barges. The debris of thousands of years of civilization, rotting spars of wood and unidentifiable lumps of rust, peppered the riverbed. Once they were clear of the waters, she pulled the little vessel into a vertical climb, motors screaming on full. They were still near civilisation, but she couldn"t risk any more of a delay. They"d almost certainly be tracked; the authorities on the planet would detect something. She could only hope it didn"t lead to any bad misunderstandings.

As Selene worked, Lilith was looking around with an expression of purest delight on her face. “This is so cool. How do you control the ship? Where are the screens and, you know, the levers and the buttons?”

The young woman"s enthusiasm amused Selene. “You"re thinking through the lens of your own technology. The ship flies itself; I give it instructions and it carries them out. We"re about to hit orbit and you should know there may be other ships up there. Ships that want to kill us.”

“Shouldn"t we be strapped in? How come we"re not experiencing high g with this acceleration?”

“How do you even know to ask those questions?”

“I read too much science fiction.”

It was so much easier when you could tell the locals the ship moved by sky magic. “Lilith, I can either explain the fascinating physical principles behind the ship"s operation, or I can fly us the hell away from here before we"re blasted to atoms. Your choice.”

“Oh, sure. Fly. Definitely fly.”

As they climbed into the ionosphere, Selene let the telemetry from the nanosensors fill her mind. The planet had a good cloud of artificial satellites around it, many dark, only one of any appreciable size. There was nothing that could endanger her. She couldn"t identify a lurking Concordance asset anywhere among them. Farther afield, the Dragon moved into view a short distance off the limb of the moon, heading towards them at high acceleration. No other craft were in evidence.

Lilith"s attention was consumed by the surface of the planet. As they accelerated skywards, the flat ground became a circle, then a sphere. The stars crept out from where they"d been hiding. When Lilith glanced at Selene there were tears in her eyes.

“What"s wrong?” Selene asked. She was half afraid Lilith had seen thermonuclear blasts flowering across the surface of the planet.

“It"s just … look at me. This is something I"ve dreamed about since I was a kid. I mean, I"m in space for God"s sake. This is awesome.”

“Yeah, well, at least you"ll die having fulfilled your dreams. Now, we have a few minutes before we rendezvous, so listen while I give you a brief overview of recent galactic history.”

Selene stepped from the lander, holding the necklace she"d recovered. Ondo took it and held the central bead up to the light, studying it through his multiglasses. He was clearly delighted. “Yes, yes. There"s definitely something there, isn"t there? The structure is far from random, very far from random.”

Lilith came down the ramp behind Selene, looking nervously around at the larger interior she found herself within.

“Ondo, Lilith. Lilith, Ondo.”

Instead of Ondo being irritated at the latest stray Selene had brought on board, he shook Lilith by the hand, gave her his best paternal smile. “I"m told you saved Selene"s life down there. All that tech at her disposal, and you used a brick.”

Lilith looked embarrassed. “I did what I could.”

“You have my gratitude. Selene takes too many risks.”

“I expect she could have handled herself. I got lucky.”

The Dragon accelerated onto a slingshot trajectory that would take it around the inhabited planet and away from the sun and planetary masses. No Concordance ships had appeared. It looked like they"d have a clear run into the temporary safety of metaspace. They were seeing lots of comms traffic on the planet about sightings of the lander, urgent questions and accusations flying, but it hadn"t escalated into anything worse. It looked like it would become another secret the governments down there kept to themselves.

Back in the laboratory, Ondo did his best to pay attention to Selene and Lilith, but he was clearly preoccupied by the glass sphere in the necklace.

“You speak English too,” said Lilith. “How does that work?”

“I uploaded the translations into my brain when I heard you were coming on board. My accent is probably a little odd; the flecks give you the data but not the muscle memory. Once we"ve reached the safety of metaspace, I"ll open up your skull and insert your own.”

The briefest flicker of alarm passed across the young woman"s face, as if Ondo"s words confirmed some dark fear. First Malleus and now Lilith: it seemed everyone thought Ondo was a mad vivisectionist.

Amused, Selene picked up one of Ondo"s medical devices and began to replasticize the skin and tissue on the left half of her face. The tickling sensation felt like a thousand tiny insectoids crawling across her flesh. With Lilith watching, Selene peeled her false skin and muscle away to reveal the shining electronic matrix beneath. She continued to talk even as she teased away the artificial half of her mouth. Which, okay, was showing off. “I told you I was badly hurt when I came on board. My skull was shattered and this half of my body was a mangled mess. I don"t know how I was even alive. Actually, quite a few times I wasn"t. Ondo saved what he could of me and replaced the rest.”

Lilith couldn"t take her eyes of Selene"s face, but instead of horror there was a look of purest delight on her face as she watched Selene work. This was clearly the sort of thing she"d dreamed of witnessing. “Freaking cool. That whole half your face is artificial?”

“What you see now is the real me. The false flesh was just so I didn"t scare the locals.”

“These fleck things you have in your brains: they"re like computer chips?”

“Smaller and hugely more complex,” said Ondo. “They"re semi-biological. They don"t need a power supply for one thing; they leech the tiny amounts they need from their host tissues.”

“Very cool.”

“You don"t have to have them,” said Selene as she worked. “With them in place you"ll be able to communicate with us or the ship or anyone else. You"ll be able to do a hundred new things you can"t do now. Without them, you"ll be reduced to using sign-language and grunts to get what you want, but it"s your call.”

Ondo communicated privately with Selene, brain-to-brain. He sounded amused. “You seem very trusting of this young woman. You"re normally wary of everyone.”

“For some reason I feel responsible for her,” Selene replied. “She"s harmless, and she knocked out a Walker; that"s good enough for me. Also, she reminds me a bit of me. Me as I was, I mean.”

“You"ve changed.”

“Yeah, maybe.”

Lilith was completely unaware of their conversation. “Flecks in my brain, definitely. Why wouldn"t I? You can"t, I dunno, control my actions or read my thoughts, can you?”

“Nothing like that,” said Ondo. “There are strict laws and, more importantly, strong social conventions on the usage of flecks.”

“But you are galactic renegades, right?”

Ondo looked amused at the description. “Well, yes, but you have my word I won"t insert anything psychedelic or hypersexualised into you.”

Lilith looked very slightly disappointed. “You could do that?”

“Oh yeah,” said Selene. “He could do that. Don"t worry, if he does, he"ll also add memory suppressors so you don"t know.”

There was a brief moment before Lilith worked out she was joking.

“Before we do anything, I need to scan you for Concordance technology,” said Ondo. “Selene told you about recent events?”

“She did.”

“And you"re happy for me to go ahead?”

“Sure.”

Ondo fiddled with his sensing equipment while Selene finished removing the last of her prosthetic flesh. She flexed the elastic surface of her face, relishing the feeling of being unencumbered.

Ondo passed his device over Lilith"s body. “No beads, nothing.”

“You"re sure this time?” asked Selene.

“There"s nothing like the device we pulled from Malleus, nothing at all artificial in her body apart from tooth fillings.”

“Could there be anything hidden in them?”

“Nothing I can detect.”

“Okay, good, then how the hell did Concordance know I was inside a London museum? And more to the point, why only one of them? Why haven"t any others come after us?”

“Questions I can"t answer,” said Ondo. “Perhaps it"s time we woke Malleus up and asked him.”

“He"s not going to help us.”

Ondo looked pensive, his forehead wrinkling. “He might. His brain patterns are normalizing nicely, his paranoia and anxiety will be greatly reduced. He was more traumatized than we thought, probably suffering all sorts of delusions.”

“What, like imagining the galaxy was controlled by an all-powerful entity?”

“Of course, it depends how you choose to define delusion.”

Lilith had been following the conversation with a look of concentration on her face. “So, what, you"ve cured him of some kind of religious mania?”

Ondo shook his head. “Not in the least. Even if that were possible, I wouldn"t do it. A strong belief system provides a good bedrock for sanity, almost regardless of what the belief system is. Losing Omn is the last thing Malleus needs right now.”

“There is no Omn,” said Selene.

“There is for him,” said Ondo.

They brought Malleus around slowly, letting him surface into reality in his own time. Lilith, by agreement, stayed away, studying the facts Ondo and Selene had pieced together from their salvaged records and dataflecks. The Dragon was drifting through metaspace, heading for a randomly chosen spot in interstellar space. For a moment, all was quiet and calm.

There was a purple bruise on Malleus"s forehead where, according to Ondo, he"d been deliberately harming himself by striking himself against a bulkhead. Hopefully that would now stop. She"d often felt like doing something similar, in truth, but had never reached the point of actually carrying it out. Weirdly, she found herself sympathising with the Augur. She had to remind herself who and what he was.

Malleus"s eyes flickered open. He licked his lips as he tried to speak. “I"m still on your ship?”

Had he imagined he"d be rescued by now? Did he really think Concordance would go to the trouble of saving him? Maybe he"d been somewhere else in his head completely, at one with Omn or however it worked. Then again, the drugs they"d sedated him with could have conjured all manner of visions and illusions in his mind.

“You"re still here,” said Ondo. “You"re unharmed. Do you remember what happened?”

Malleus looked from Ondo to Selene, a look of guilt in his eyes. He nodded his head. “The Augury of the First Awakening. I sought guidance.”

“Guidance on how to escape, or guidance on how to kill us?” asked Selene.

A pause, more nervous glances. “To kill you.”

“That"s the thanks we get for saving you?”

Malleus pulled himself up to a sitting position, sipped at a glass of water Ondo handed him. “You corrupted me, ripped out my soul. Now I"m like you and Kane: debased, subhuman.”

“You really need to work on your social skills,” said Selene. “Would it help if I showed you before and after encephalograms? Because I can"t see very much difference.”

Malleus waved his hand dismissively. “Machines can"t measure the soul.”

“An Augury of the First Awakening,” said Ondo. “What is that?”

Another sip of water. “When Omn first re-opened his eye, it was through such auguries that he talked, his voice a whisper in the void.”

Selene caught the look of delight in Ondo"s eye. He"d suspected something similar. “Then, later, Omn conversed via other auguries?”

“The Second and the Third Awakenings, yes. His words became louder in later days.”

“Is the device on the Angelic Gaze an Augury of the Third Awakening?” Ondo asked.

Malleus hesitated for a moment, perhaps unsure if what he was revealing was sacred knowledge. “It is. All Cathedral ships use them.”

Ondo continued to prompt him gently. “But you recognized the orb from the seabed as one of the originals?”

“I thought Omn might hear me if I spoke. You shouldn"t touch it; they"ll be able to see you. Concordance.”

“They?” said Selene. “Don"t you mean we?”

“Yes, that"s what I meant.”

“Did you get a reply?” Ondo asked.

“I did. The experience was … intense. Overwhelming. I still can"t really make sense of it.”

“Why so?” asked Ondo. “You must have communicated in this way many times.”

“This was different.”

“Different how?” asked Selene.

“I was in touch with something huge. Huge and ancient and glorious. I felt so tiny, the mind of Omn so vast and ancient. But also, I felt … loved.”

His words amused Selene. Clearly the devices could instil an intense emotional response in the receiver; it had to be a large part of how they worked. “All those times you communed with Omn on the Angelic Gaze, you do know it was really Concordance you were communicating with, right? You do know they"re just people, pulling the strings?”

Malleus didn"t reply for a moment, looking troubled. He did know – or suspected as much. “The First Augurs speak with the voice of Omn. They are one and the same.” He didn"t sound completely convinced of his own words.

“Of course they are.”

“But this was different, truly. I felt such joy, such intense delight. An almost unbearable longing. And then it was abruptly cut off.”

“Explain that,” said Ondo. “Was the conversation complete?”

“We were still conversing, and then Omn went away and I was alone once more.”

“Intriguing,” said Ondo.

“Why are you even telling us this?” said Selene. “Why should we believe anything you say?”

Malleus looked down at the water in his glass, studying it for a moment, swirling it around. “Because … because of the words I was given.”

“Which were what?”

Malleus hesitated, frowning as he battled with some confusion. “I thought I had to kill you, but I was wrong. I was told to help you. That Omn"s light shines on you, Ondo Lagan and also on you, Selene Ada. I was told to accompany you to the place you need to go for the answers you seek.”

It took Ondo a few moments to absorb Malleus"s words. “Where? Where did Omn tell you we had to go? What do we have to do?”

“To find something called the Heliolith.”

“What is that?”

“I don"t know.”

“Did Omn say anything else?” asked Selene.

“Yes.” This was clearly the thing that baffled Malleus the most. “One other thing.”

“Which was?”

“He said, "Help me".”