The Triple Stars Trilogy

Chapter 10-1

Selene Ada cursed in six different languages.

Why, by all that was sweet and pure in the galaxy, why the goddamn f**k, did people have to go around crashing starships into deserts? The ocean floor would have been preferable; at least the site would have been easy to identify, and deep water was a hell of a lot easier to lower equipment into than shifting sand. A vast swathe of southern Borial was covered by forest; even a crash site among the towering ironoaks would have been preferable. Okay, maybe the ship – whatever it was – would have suffered more destruction on impact, and its components might have been scattered far and wide, but at least she"d have been able to find the remains in solid ground and move on with her life.

She paused at the bottom of the well her drill rig had gouged into the yellow sands, shoring up the sides with interlocking semi-circular plates as it went. She gulped down another mouthful of water, unpleasantly warm in the stifling air. She tasted grit. The sand got everywhere; her scalp itched with it, her joints were rubbed raw with it. It was in her ears and her nostrils and every other orifice. She wiped sweat from her brow and succeeded only in rubbing more grit into her eyes.

Above her, Borial"s sun blazed down, yellow-orange and unrelenting. She should have built a canopy over the shaft. She should have worn a hat. Anything to blot out the searing heat would have been welcome. Her augmented half could compensate easily enough, but her natural flesh would suffer from exposure to so much solar radiation. She wore a pair of dark glasses against the blinding glare from the sand, side-shielded to keep the dust out. Her left eye didn"t need either protection: it could react to bright light more efficiently than her natural eye and wasn"t prone to damage from grains of sand.

She crouched to study the layer at her feet. She picked up a handful of sand and let it pour through her fingers. There were specks of grey, white, black, brown in it, as if the sands only became yellow by averaging out all the other colours. By zooming in close, she could see that many of the grains were, in fact, white and red fragments of shell. The remains of billions of aeons-old sea creatures from an age when the Golden Sea really was ocean floor. She thought about her father and the years he"d spent in solitude excavating the crash site on Maes Far.

She scraped the grains away in search of the hard surface that her sensors had identified. It was impossible to date buried objects from their location in the shifting sands. The Golden Sea was, in a way, still an ocean: vast, slow dunes like freeze-frame waves washing backwards and forwards over the land, taking decades rather than seconds to ebb and flow. Any attempt to identify archaeological layers was impossible.

There was a ship down there, that was almost certain from the images returned by her radio and seismic sweeps. It was also about the right size. She could even, by squinting and using her imagination, discern the rough shape of the ship she was seeking in the ghostly echoes the scans had revealed: the swelling engine clusters at the rear and the smooth, tapering, ocean-predator fuselage.

Well, yeah, maybe. The problem was, it might just as easily be a ten-year old water-tanker, brought down by a sandstorm en route to a city like Zandia or Blue Oasis. It might be all sorts of crashed or ruined craft, could even be a natural response from some seam of metallic ore cruelly arranging itself into the vague arrangement of a starship.

It had happened before. More than once.

Or maybe, just maybe, she"d unearth one more piece of the puzzle that she"d devoted her life to solving.

She took another swig of water, thinking about letting the machines loose again to scoop out more desert and blast it away from the site. But she couldn"t risk it. The blades and scoops and grabs she had at her control were microcontrolled and surgeon-delicate when they needed to be. In theory, they could differentiate between this grain of sand and that one. She didn"t trust them at all.

For that reason, she"d stopped them short of the response layers the sensors had identified. She"d dig the rest by hand, only letting the machines suck up the loose sand she scraped away. She couldn"t risk any possibility of damaging the fragile flecks of glass she sought. They were supposed to be indestructible, but their creators probably hadn"t factored in having to survive the seismic forces generated by an interstellar ship slamming into a rocky planet. Sure, the impact might have vaporized or shattered the fragments, but there was always a chance they"d survived.

Of course, the other possibility was that they"d been thrown clear by the impact and that she was seeking tiny flecks of glass hidden within a million cubic kilometres of burning sand. That was a prospect she"d decided not to think about.

Nine more centimetres of careful excavation and she hit something solid. It extended in all directions as she scraped more sand away. The surface was artificial, almost certainly a ship"s hull. She focused a chromatograph probe on it to identify its composition and age.

The results came back a moment later, relayed directly to the control fleck nestling in her cerebellum. The analysis made her heart pound and fluttery insects dance within her digestive system.

Omnian War cruiser; hull microstructure degraded 30% by thermal shock

She waited, barely breathing, while the device scanned the structure more deeply, correlating its molecular composition with the fingerprints of known vessels from that time. The result took a full standard minute to appear.

Ship identity confirmed with 96% certainty

Name: The Magellanic Coud

She"d actually found what she"d come looking for. Toruk had been right, about this at least. She stroked the dead starship"s smooth voidhull with her fingertips. “Okay, my beauty. Let"s see what secrets you"re hiding, shall we?”

She climbed the rungs built into the shaft wall and reprogrammed the drill rigs to open up a much wider pit: ten metres by ten, once again stopping just short of the hull. When the sand was cleared, she"d be ready to begin cutting her careful incision into the body of the ship.

The interior of the lander was blessedly cool as she sat and watched the machinery work. A plume of sand arched out of the pit, blasting into the air to land two hundred metres away. She was glad, now, that the crash site was in such a remote area. Zandia, the nearest city, was three hundred kilometres to the north. So long as a passing skyship didn"t spot what she was up to, there was every possibility she could complete her expedition without being noticed.

Of course, if the forces of Concordance spotted her, found out what she was up to, their reaction would be swift and overwhelming. Their orbital bombardments would fuse the sand for kilometres around into radioactive glass, with her neatly vitrified for the rest of time in the middle of it.

She was almost completely sure she"d evaded the gaze of the Cathedral ship prowling the planets and moons of the system, but she"d learned from experience to remain wary. The steps she and Concordance danced were complex and subtle: she racing to track down the clues she sought; her enemies attempting to eradicate those clues from the historical record and eradicate her while they went about it. They"d pursued her all the more relentlessly since her escape from the black hole where she"d conversed with Toruk. Concordance had watched her dive in and emerge, five years having passed by in normal space, and they"d thrown everything at her. Well, so far, they hadn"t caught her. She"d feared the time she"d lost would be too much, that Concordance"s final plan for galactic g******e would already be unfolding, but there was no sign of it yet. There was also no sign of Godel – which either meant that Carious had finally acted against his troublesome deputy, confining her to the God Star, maybe even despatching her prematurely to Omn, or else that she was busy preparing for what was to come. Selene may have lost a lot of time, but there was still hope.

She had to believe there was still hope.

As her machines worked on the sands of the Golden Sea, Selene communicated with the Dragon. It would stay directly overhead if it could, but would manoeuvre if necessary to keep the mass of the planet between it and the Concordance ship. Selene had deployed a necklace of nanosensors in orbit around the planet, little more than grains of sand themselves, and these gave her full visibility of local space. Which was sweet and lovely so long as Concordance ships didn"t spot them and come investigating.

The ship responded immediately when she requested a status update. “Concordance appear to have no knowledge of our presence in the system. However, they have moved into proximity with the inner of the two moons, and to avoid them I will disappear over your horizon in approximately thirty-three minutes.” The Dragon spoke with a female voice; she"d deliberately changed it after the death of Eb. Without the transbiological Tok entity at its core, the Dragon was now, as Eb had said, just a ship.

“Are they surveying in any sort of seek pattern?”

“It appears not. However, there are two things to report. Six hours ago, a small FTL ship docked with the Angelic Gaze.”

That sent her heart back into overdrive. It could only be a Void Walker attack ship. “Monitor it closely. If it makes any sign of coming nearer, come pick me up even if it means showing yourself.”

“Understood.”

“And the other thing?”

“The Angelic Gaze deployed a new satellite into orbit around three hours ago.”

Was it possible they knew she was there and were sweeping the surface for her whereabouts? But if they did know about her, their response would surely be more … energetic. “Can you tell its function?”

“So far, no. It appears to be inert, no communications traffic to it or from it.”

That was odd. Perhaps they were simply having trouble getting the device to function. But the two events had to be connected; it was surely very likely the satellite had been deployed at the order of the Void Walker.

She didn"t like it, but she couldn"t see any immediate cause to give up on her mission. “Stay out of line-of-sight with all of them, ships, satellites, everything. Hide behind the other moon if you have to.”

“Have you found something of interest on the planet?”

“Looks like it. We just have to hope we can remain unnoticed long enough to complete the work.”

Outside the lander, the machines continued to open and shore up the wide shaft in the sands. It would be a hell of a lot easier to spot that hole from orbit than the tiny test bore she"d dug. She instructed another of the lander"s machines to begin drilling eight anchor points in a wide circle around the whole site. When they were secure, she"d stretch a sand-coloured canopy over the excavation and the lander. It wouldn"t fool a detailed scan, but might be enough to hide her from a casual sweep.

Plus, it would blot out that damned sun while she got to work.

When a circle of hull was finally exposed, she deployed laser scanners to map its contours. It was fortunate that ships from the era were so elegantly curved; it was often possible to identify an exact point on one of them by mapping its gradients. Of course, the collision with the planet would have sent huge shock-waves through the fabric of the ship, stresses bending and warping its superstructure. But she might be able to get something. She walked across the smooth surface – always a strange experience in itself – wondering what lay within, what had happened to this mighty ship three centuries previously.