The Triple Stars Trilogy

Chapter 10-2

Her analysis of the hull"s curvature confirmed what she"d suspected; the ship was upside-down. It had evidently fallen to the ground out of control, rolling over at least once before it slammed into the sand. It was hard to imagine the violence of that impact in a desert now so still.

Her pit was amidships, somewhere over a series of cavernous cargo chambers or hangers built into this class of vessel. When she cut into the hull, she wanted to hit open space, not some interior bulkhead. In the end, she picked her spot by walking around and using her eye to decide the ideal point. Irrational, no doubt, but it had paid off well enough before.

She relayed instructions to her cutting machines to begin burning open a one-metre circle in the dead ship"s voidhull.

The hatch took two days to cut. The old ships were incredibly tough, their armour all-but impervious to even her modern machinery. When the small incision was made, she prepared herself for exploration. Delving into the carcass of a buried starship was like exploring a cave system beneath the ground. Just as tricky, just as dangerous. It was possible there would still be active defensive systems even after all this time. There would certainly be deep falls down shafts or across large chambers, as well as jagged metal bulkheads from the explosions that must have ripped through the ship.

Fortunately, there was no more news about the orbiting Concordance vessel. There"d been a moment of pounding alarm that morning when the Dragon reported a small ship leaving the Angelic Gaze for the planet. If the Void Walker was coming to the surface, perhaps they were coming to find Selene. But the lander passed high overhead, aerobraking on a trajectory that suggested distant Zandia was its objective. More encouragingly, the Dragon reported that the Void Walker"s FTL ship was still active, manoeuvring between the second moon and the deployed satellite doing … whatever the hell it was doing.

Concordance, it seemed, were unaware of her presence. So far, so good.

A tripod erected over the entrance hole cut into the hull allowed her to lower herself into the ship"s interior. She was fully suited, as she would be if adventuring outside her ship in space rather than inside one on the ground. Partly her gear was for protection and to guarantee a good supply of breathable air. Partly, also, it was to keep the stench from her nose. Even after so long a time, the remains of several hundred people decaying in a more or less closed system would not be pleasant.

She had a good swarm of self-powered glowbes to light her way. They tiny spheres would communicate with themselves and ensure that, wherever she went in the hulk, her quickest route back to the surface was marked in a line of bright red lights. Other than that, they would follow her, move ahead to illuminate everything in front of her. They would also relay her comms to the lander and so to the Dragon in orbit. She would know the moment there was any sign of trouble from Concordance, or if a sandstorm threatened to whip up and bury her.

It took three weeks of scrambling and climbing, of lowering herself into seemingly-bottomless pits, to find the core of the ship"s systems where the datastores were connected. She"d walked across vast, empty halls, the glowbes doing little to dispel the depths of the shadows around her. She"d worked around huge, ragged ruptures in the ship"s hull, dunes of sand encroaching through the cracks from the surrounding desert. She"d mapped it all, cross-referencing with the known layout of the class of vessel in order to find her way through the maze.

She"d found many bodies. Most of the dead wore vacuum suits, suggesting the crew of the ship had been given some warning about violent depressurisation. There"d been a battle in orbit, although perhaps only a brief one. Other figures had clearly been caught unaware and were now little more than tattered scraps of clothing over white bones. She found one still sitting at its station, monitoring dark screens for some signal or warning it would never see, as if determined to stay at its post until given more orders. In a way, the sight was encouraging. If the figure hadn"t been hurled against the bulkheads by the overwhelming force of the impact it was likely the ship"s displacement fields were still operational at the moment of collision with the planet.

She scanned each corpse, but none had viable flecks within their brains, the data on them dying at the moment their hosts did – a fact she was almost grateful for. She left the dead alone and crept through the silent darkness, seeking the datastores upon which records of those lost days might survive. This ship had been there at the beginning, encountering the anomaly at the heart of the galaxy that had been the start of everything.

But the crunch of shattered glass beneath her boots as she stepped into the once-sealed system core sent dismay seeping through her. The damage was substantial, some explosion smashing the delicate systems into fragments and shards. The flecks upon which many Magellanic ships permanently stored their data – needle-like slivers of glass etched at the molecular level – had been thrown around with huge force, and it was clear that extreme heat had raged through the room, fusing and melting the specks until fire-suppressant systems or a lack of oxygen had killed the flames.

She picked up the splinters, hoping there might be some scrap of information readable on them, although she knew from experience it was unlikely. Then, kneeling on the floor, a glimmer of light caught her eye within the workings of a machine. She stood and crossed to study the mechanism. A single intact fleck was secured in the mounting of a laser scanner, as if someone had been reading it as the ship crashed. Using her left hand to avoid any shaking, she picked up the glass needle with a pair of soft-ended tweezers. It looked unfractured, hard edges unmarred by extreme heat. When she held it up to the nearest glowbe, zoomed in on it, it shimmered like a rainbow.

“You beauty. You absolute beauty.”

She placed the fleck carefully into a cushioned and armoured box, moving with infinite care is if it were some nanobomb that might blow off her head at any moment. When she was done, she found that she"d been holding her breath.

She exhaled. Perhaps the fleck would be useless, a log of the ship"s engine data or some private entertainment stream. But maybe, just maybe, it would tell her what she needed to know. Find the light at the heart of the galaxy, Toruk had told her – vital knowledge that had been cut from his own brain by his fellow Tok to keep their secrets safe. Perhaps this fleck would give her the clues she needed.

She spent the rest of the day painstakingly picking up the remaining shards of glass in the core. When she was done, she followed the line of red glowbes back up to the real world. She placed the circle of hull in place and secured it – as she did every night – with waterproof, airproof, hopefully sand proof sealant. Tomorrow, she"d instruct the machines to fill in the shaft she"d dug, and she could leave. Once the next sandstorm swept through, scribbling out the marks she and the machines had made on the sand, no one would ever know she"d been there.

That evening, as she was picking through her treasures, the lander"s voice addressed her suddenly, making her jump and almost drop the sliver of glass she was studying through her left eye.

She really had to reprogram the system not to do that.

“A figure is approaching across the desert.” The ship"s voice was calm. Sometimes she wished it sounded more anxious when it said such things. Its indifference to danger could be damned irritating.

“Someone from Concordance? Is it the Void Walker? Show me.”

A distant black figure appeared on the screen. It walked from the east, out of the sun that was now dipping towards the horizon. The figure wavered in the heat haze rising from the sands, warping and shifting, feet appearing not to touch the ground. A solitary person, slowly growing larger, walking directly towards Selene"s canopied ship.

“Is there any other activity evident?” she asked. “Any ships in the area, in orbit?”

“There is nothing.”

She was about to give the order for an emergency evac of the planet. She had what she"d come for. But something about the sight of the solitary figure coming openly across the sands stayed her. Would Concordance really approach her like that? Surely, they"d just unleash overwhelming killfire and be done with it?

“Can you identify them?” she asked the ship. “Are they armed?”

“I can"t tell.”

Ondo, I need you. She gave mental voice to the command that invoked the ghost of Ondo she carried in her brain. It was never something she did lightly. “This figure approaching: do you have any idea who it might be?”

Allowed access to her mind, Ondo saw what she saw. “It appears to be one of the nomadic people who inhabit the Golden Sea. The Surrisi. My assays of the planet identified the existence of a population living within the sands. Their numbers are unknown, perhaps only a few thousand, so scattered that the chances of encountering one of them by coincidence are remote.”

“Are they dangerous? Are they in league with Concordance?”

“I don"t believe they are in touch with anyone, not even those in the nearby cities. Whatever this one wants, I"d say there is no immediate threat.”

“Okay, good. Now, back in your box. I need to think.”

Quite how anyone survived in the desert escaped her. Presumably there were oases or water-holes somewhere within the burning wastes. She"d caught glimpses of a few small animals – the skitter of a lizard, the occasional buzzing insect – but no plant-life.

“Shall I prevent them approaching?” the lander asked.

“No,” said Selene. “Let them come.”

The figure walked in a straight line, never slowing, occasionally disappearing in the dip of a dune before materialising at the top. A figure dressed head-to-toe in a black, loose-fitting robe, only their face exposed to the sun. The nomad walked directly under the canopy erected over the excavation site. They glanced once down the pit and then, apparently uninterested, turned to gaze at Selene"s lander.

Selene found a drinking beaker. Water had to be the most precious of gifts in such a culture and she guessed offering the nomad a drink would be the surest way of extending a welcome. She half-filled the beaker. She had plenty to spare and could have offered gallons but, somehow, she knew that would be inappropriate. It would be like showering a visitor with a fortune in gold, a gift that could never be returned or repaid.

Selene walked down the ramp of the lander to the sand, her gift of water held out. The robed figure unhooked the swathe of cloth that covered their face. Selene lacked local anthropological knowledge, but from the square jaw she guessed the desert-dweller was a man. Chains of gold were strung between his ear and nose – some mark of rank, perhaps. His eyes were shadowed by a deep blue pigment as he studied Selene without fear.

She offered the water to the figure. The nomad took it, sipped once, then drained the beaker and returned it with a slight nod of his head. He began to speak in a flowing tongue that Selene didn"t understand a word of. She"d added all the major local languages and dialects to her flecks but had clearly missed this one. She shook her head, explained in all the Borian languages she did know that she didn"t understand.

Eventually, they found a tongue that Selene could understand and which the nomad knew a few words of. The desert-dweller spoke a word that translated as skyship or starship, pointing to the wide shaft Selene"s machines had cut into the sand.

Clearly the nomads knew all about the crash site. She"d have saved herself a lot of trouble by asking them where it was in the first place. She nodded. Her worry was that the nomad had come to challenge her for digging down to the crashed ship, that she"d committed some terrible act of cultural or religious desecration. But the stranger didn"t appear to be angry.

“There is water?” he asked.

The search for drinking water had to be an overriding concern for these people. Possibly the nomads could see no other reason for Selene"s activity in the desert. She wondered how long they"d been aware of her presence in the sands, watching.

Selene nodded. “Yes. Water.” She hadn"t looked but there was a good chance at least some of the ship"s tanks had survived unruptured. The wreck had to be a huge potential reservoir of vital resources. Well, they were welcome to it. She wondered if the stranger"s forebears had raided it when it first crashed, before the wind-blown sands covered it.

The visitor turned to look back at Selene. There was a flicker of something like sorrow or doubt on his face, although it was also possible Selene, lacking the cultural insight, was misinterpreting.

“Too late,” the nomad said.

What did that mean? Why was it too late? Selene shook her head, explaining that once again she didn"t follow.

“You leave,” said the stranger, although there was no hint of menace or threat to that quiet voice. It was more of a … plea. “Leave now.”

“Why?” said Selene, “why should I leave?”

For a reply, the man stepped out of the shadow of the canopy, beckoning Selene to follow. The setting sun was low in the east, the dusty atmosphere turning the star"s usual orange to blood-red, warping and flattening its roundness so that it appeared to be melting into the distant horizon. The air was a little cooler, although the heat absorbed by the sands during the day kept everything cooking.

The visitor pointed at the sunset. “See.”

Puzzled, Selene closed her right eye and peered through her left, letting it automatically filter out dangerous radiation from the star. What was she supposed to be seeing? It was a normal sun, red surface peppered with sunspots, nothing more.

“See,” said the visitor again. “You leave.”

“I don"t understand, what am I looking for?”

But then she did see it, and understanding clicked into place in her mind. An understanding that was part-memory of her own past: the Void Walker, the satellite, the moon; it all made sense. She had a sensation of gaping pits opening beneath her feet. How could she have been so stupid? How could she not have seen?

There were sunspots, but one of them was far too regular. A clean dot, right in the centre of the disk. She knew what it was and, therefore, what Concordance were doing up there in orbit.

“f**k,” she said.

“Yes, you see it,” said the visitor. “You must leave. There is a hole in the sun.”