The Triple Stars Trilogy

Chapter 12-1

Secundus Godel smiled at the shackled figure standing in front of her. “Now, tell me all that you know about the location of the object.”

The man – Harjan Roach – was another renegade, but nothing like Ondo Lagan. Roach was not motivated by intellectual curiosity or a desire to overthrow Concordance. He was concerned only with accruing personal wealth and living a life free from the control of others. She knew of a few like him here and there in the galaxy: outlaws and pirates dodging authority, making a living buying and selling illicit technology left over from the degenerate culture that Concordance had swept away. She kept an eye on them. Her researches had opened out to her the surprising age of galactic civilisation, and occasionally people like Roach discovered something far more interesting, a truly ancient artefact.

Such was the case now.

He looked amused rather than terrified as he replied. He seemed to be enjoying himself. “Oh, I"d prefer not to tell you anything if that"s acceptable to you, but if you wish to buy the information, then I"m sure we can come to an arrangement.”

The man"s arrogance riled her. She could obviously pay him, however outlandish the sum of money he came up with, but she did not treat with people such as Harjan Roach. She took what she wanted from them. He was not her equal.

She sighed as if bored. “I can inflict agonies upon you that will break you. I can keep your body alive for years while your nerves burn. Do I need to go to all that trouble?”

Roach simply grinned. Blood ran freely from the cuts to his face he"d received during his retrieval by her Walkers. “Inflict your tortures; I can switch my pain responses off. You don"t frighten me, purpleskin.”

He was probably telling her the truth: the scans suggested all manner of f*******n technological enhancements riddling his brain and body. Nevertheless, she tested him out. She directed a focussed attack into his nervous system, using an energy intensity that would be enough to incapacitate any normal person from the sheer searing agony.

Roach immediately screamed and collapsed to the floor, his body writhing and his limbs flailing as the t*****e raged through him. That was satisfying; he wasn"t immune to her apparatuses after all. But then, unaccountably, he stopped thrashing and peered up at her with nothing more than an amused grin on his face.

He was toying with her.

“Ouch,” he said.

She amped up the attack even more, taking it to borderline-fatal intensity. Roach winced, as if mildly discomforted. There was a clear tremor in his legs as his nerves glitched out, but he clearly wasn"t feeling any of it.

Godel forced herself to smile, as if she were enjoying the game. “Then, perhaps it would be easier to kill you.”

“And throw away all chance of learning the whereabouts of the object? I don"t think so. Even if you do, that"s fine. I"ve lived my life free. That"s all I ever wanted.”

She believed he was telling the truth there, too. People like him revelled in their lawlessness, their outsider status. She"d lost three Walkers in the fight to pluck him from the backwater world he"d lurked upon and bring him aboard the Storm Gatherer.

“Then I need to exert influence upon you in another way.” Godel waved a hand, and one wall revealed live images of Roach"s homeworld, Terios, transmitted directly from the Watchful Presence, the Cathedral ship in attendance of the system.

Roach climbed to his feet. His hair plastered his face as he looked at her, and there was something approaching madness in his impudent grin. “If you think threatening to destroy the planet I was born on troubles me, then you know nothing about me. I hate Terios. It"s so peaceful, so nice. Please, feel free to destroy it. Send phalanxes of Void Walkers through its cities with their blasters blazing. Unfurl another of your damned shrouds; it can only improve the place.”

“You have family there.”

Roach shrugged. “None that I care about.”

He really was too easy to play. He still hadn"t worked out what she was threatening him with. “Life on Terios is well-ordered, and no one is allowed to step out of line. The slightest misdemeanour is harshly punished.”

“I know. Why do you think I fled as soon as I could…”

He tailed off. He had worked out what she was proposing. It was to his credit that he switched his strategy immediately. “Let"s talk about this. We can come to some arrangement, yes?”

“We will return you to the surface, inform your loving family, monitor you closely from orbit to ensure that you don"t leave. Your people may have to restrain you to ensure that you don"t attempt to take your own life, but I believe they are very proficient at providing such … care. Once your augmentations are cut from you, there will be little you can do to resist. After a decade or two, you should become resigned to your new station.”

He looked from the planet back to her, and she could see in his eyes that he knew he was beaten. All he could do was to salvage what he could. The right buyer – if one could be found – would have paid a fortune for his discovery, and that possibility had slipped through his fingers in a moment.

“If I tell you what I found, will you let me return to my old life?”

“Living outside the loving gaze of Omn?”

“I could be useful to you. Inform you if I hear anything else that might be of interest.”

She pretended to consider his words for several moments. “Very well, tell me where the device is. If your information is reliable, we can come to an arrangement.”

He hesitated for only a few moments, searching in vain for another strategy. He had none. He sent her the coordinates of the mysterious object that he"d found deep in interstellar space.

“Very good,” she said.

She despatched a Walker to jump to the location to confirm the truth. Finally, it seemed, her plans were coming together. Roach"s discovery of the ancient device was something approaching a miracle – a very welcome miracle. She"d worked tirelessly for years, without the approval or even the knowledge of the Primo, attempting to map out the metaspace pathways criss-crossing the galaxy. The routes of most remained a mystery; there was simply no way of knowing which gateways connected to which, a fact that infuriated and frustrated her in equal measure. She didn"t know where the entrances on Coronade led to – or even if they led anywhere, as Lagan and Ada appeared to believe. She didn"t know where in the galaxy the renegades might emerge – if they ever did.

The records had been left deliberately incomplete, and she probably only knew where a fraction of the gateways even were. But, the glory of it was that she"d identified seventeen gateways lurking beneath the surfaces of seemingly-normal stars. The ancient records she"d uncovered from the ruined temple on Toronsay, sun-baked and sand-blasted, were irrefutable, although it had taken her three years to interpret them correctly and map the stars identified onto the present-day galaxy. Seventeen systems connected by tunnels built through the void, joining one star system to another, or to seemingly insignificant patches of interstellar vacuum. Seventeen systems, and no fewer than seven with inhabited planets orbiting them. The figure was a wonder to Godel. There had to be a reason for them being there. Seven galactic civilisations whose stars were connected to a network that could be used to destroy them.

False believers like Carious talked only of triads in their apostasy. The triple stars, the three aspects of Omn, the three divine attendants that wait upon him. But she knew the older scriptures, and in those seven was the number that recurred again and again. The seven eyes of Omn, the seven galaxies, the seven sacred roads. And, of course, there were the seventeen sevens of the sacred tally. The significance of that could not be denied; the numbers did not lie. How glorious the sight of them had been over the surface of Fenwinter.

It had troubled her that some of the tunnels she"d identified opened into regions of space that the Cathedral ships refused to fly into. The Walkers" ships, also, had been incapable of making the journey, at least at first. Something in their navigational systems had simply refused to pass through the void to the designated areas. She"d wondered if some unseen hand was acting against her, attempting to thwart her plans. Omnian theology described hosts of malignant entities that would delight in sending the righteous off the true path. She"d overcome the limitations of the technology by forcing the ships to fly where she wanted them to go. Doing so had involved crippling the machines, delving into their workings and excising certain components from them. She"d lost a total of eleven Cathedral ships during her attempts to force the ships to fly where she wanted. It was almost as if the vessels were fighting her.

But, of course, no one could explain to her why the regions of f*******n space even existed. Her suspicion was that they were nothing more than an attempt to hide the truth about the star systems set aside for supernova. Metaspace ships built in recent times – including all those on the opposing side in the Omnian War three centuries previously, most of which had been destroyed – had not had the limitation. Very few metaspace ships had been constructed since those days, as Concordance made sure, although those that had often retained the aversion. That appeared to be superstition among stellar cartographers: a copying of ancient designs, there for no good reason that she could see.

It didn"t matter. She now knew enough of the topography of the metaspace tunnels to make use of at least some of them, and uncovering the whereabouts of the mass engine was the final piece of the puzzle. She had uncovered allusions to the devices in the records, but had never been able to discover the location of one – until now. With such a device under her command, she could produce something truly glorious. She had never succeeded in opening a single gateway, but it was clear from the records that the mass engines, once docked into a suitable entrance, would automatically do exactly that.

An urgent demand from the First Augurs intruded into her thoughts at that moment. The convocation circle was sitting in session at the God Star, demanding her presence. What did they want now? They seemed to delight in interrupting her. Could they not leave her in peace to work?

She couldn"t afford to antagonise them further, though, not yet.

“Stay there,” she said to Roach – although he obviously had no choice, bound as he was to the pillar in the centre of the room. She sealed the room behind her as well, in case the man had augmentations that allowed him to break free. He wasn"t going anywhere.

She ambled to the Storm Gatherer"s Augury sphere, deliberately taking her time. They could not summon her like a pet. She bowed her head in feigned subservience as she opened up the connection to the other First Augurs.

Carious wasted no time in launching his attack. The orb brought the images and words across the galaxy, allowing them to converse as if they were in the room together. “Welcome, Secundus Godel. It is most unfortunate that you are unable to attend the convocation in person.”