Dead Star - The Triple Stars Volume 1

1. Twenty-three Deaths

Part 1 - Planetary

1. Twenty-three DeathsSelene Ada died twenty-three times from her injuries – one death, by grim coincidence, for every year of her life.

She had only scattered recollections of her escape from her dying homeworld: the sickening moments of terror as her battered craft crumpled around her, each beam-weapon blast sending her ship lurching from its trajectory; the hard lines of the lander blurring with every hit inflicted upon it; her own screams ragged in her ears; her brain rattling around within her skull. It felt as though some god had reached down from the sky and seized her ship to shake it to pieces. There was nothing she could do but endure, the acceleration and the shuttle's restraints pinning her to the seat of her disintegrating craft.

There was also a moment, high in the atmosphere, the limbs of the planet curving away beneath her, when she thought she'd escaped unscathed. She'd climbed out of range of the ground-based planetary defence batteries. The unfamiliar lander upon which her life suddenly depended had suffered massive structural damage, alarms screaming at her from every display, but its drives continued to power her skywards and her suit's life-support systems remained viable. Against all the odds, she was going to escape the end of her world. A candle-flame of hope flickered in her mind.

Telemetry gave her a glimpse of the Cathedral ship in high orbit, ordnance blazing from its fuselage. She had never seen it so clearly before; it had been a bright light in the sky on summer evenings, moving across the sky with unnatural rapidity. Concordance had kept its form and capabilities deliberately obscure. It had been a constant presence in her life, always up there, always watching, but now she saw its true shape. It was a ship of vast and curious beauty, its twisting, sinuous lines like some coral outgrowth. It was hard to believe an object of such organic pearlescence could have been constructed from mere components. Its angles and forms were like no building, no object she'd ever seen.

Then its first salvo lanced into her. The blast sheared off the aft section of her craft, sending it spinning through the air like a maddened fly, exposing Selene to the atmosphere. She was shaken so violently that she bit a chunk from her tongue. She vomited into her helmet. Suit fans screamed to clear her airways and keep her breathing. Ground, sky, ground flashed repeatedly into view as the craft corkscrewed.

The damaged ship's random trajectory was probably what saved her. More beam-weapon fire lanced down from space, but always just behind, or just ahead of the lurching shuttle, the AI Mind of the attacking ship repeatedly miscalculating.

Then it caught up or got lucky. A solid shaft of coherent energy, one metre wide, hit her. She knew nothing about it. Ondo, later, told her how it must have been. It punched through the shuttle's thin hull, punched through Selene's body as she clung to her seat. The shot destroyed all remaining systems on the lander, evaporating them to mangled scraps. It was just fortunate that Ondo, hanging in low orbit aboard the Radiant Dragon, was close enough to capture the ruined shuttle and arc out of the planet's gravity well before the larger Concordance ship, its orbit too high, was able to intervene. Two Void Walker attack vessels pursued from the Cathedral ship but couldn't accelerate rapidly enough to reach the Dragon's velocity.

The direct hit on the lander also destroyed the biological systems of Selene's body. Beam-weaponry fire was designed to cut through the voidhulls of starships, not the soft flesh of people. Most of the left hemisphere of Selene's brain, along with one third of her skull, were burned instantly away. Ondo speculated that the intense heat, cauterizing her blood vessels, may have helped to preserve her surviving tissues for a vital few minutes. Nevertheless, death was instantaneous. Her left shoulder, her left arm, a third of her chest cavity and abdomen, half of her pelvis and her left leg were also obliterated in the same moment. Her right leg and the tissues around the centre-line of her body suffered major damage from the searing heat.

Her bones burned.

That was the first of her deaths, alone in the ruined craft, with the orbital bombardment from the Cathedral ship lancing around her, and with Ondo swooping in aboard the Dragon to rescue her and flee before any pursuing Concordance craft could catch them.

Her twenty-two other deaths she endured in Ondo's operating theatre, her body succumbing again and again to the traumas of her repair; the straightenings, the reconstructions, the graftings of flesh and nerves and bone. And often, between each end, there came moments of clarity: sensations of light and pain, glimpses of unexpected, disorientating detail. Those moments were confused, their timeline unclear: reality, nightmare and d**g-induced hallucination impossible to tell apart.

She recalled one such moment early on: a sudden emergence from a horror-filled replaying of her last day on Maes Far, of farewells hugged against distant screams and explosions. The backwash from the lander's thrusters flattened a wide circle of red blooms in the flower meadow. Her home was far enough from the town to avoid the mob, but they'd seen the ship descending, and they'd be coming. Her mother's arms around her, the whispered final message. Then her father. His lips moved as he looked at her, grief-stricken, horrified, eyes liquid with tears, but he hadn't been able to find words to say to her. Then the object he handed her as she climbed into the lander, and the simple, inadequate message he finally uttered.

Her wakening was, no doubt, chemically induced, as Ondo battled to stabilize her shattered biology. For once, mercifully, there was no agony. Specks of grit clogged her mouth, fragments of reconstructed tooth or bone. Her body tingled, the long muscles of her limbs spasming. She was aware of dull aches in her left arm, but when she tried to move it, nothing happened. Exploring with her right hand she discovered that her left arm and that whole side of her body simply weren't there. Their absence seemed almost comical, like some magician's trick. Instead of flesh and muscle, there was only an emptiness beside her on the bed, ducts and tubes and cables leading off into a battery of machinery.

She was an incomplete thing, misshapen, half not-there. Half alive.

“The planet?” she said. Her voice came out as a hoarse grunt, her severed lips and mouth and mandible unable to form the words.

The face of the man who had plucked her from the sky – it could only be Ondo Lagan, although she had never seen him before – smeared into view. His hair was wild, his appearance unkempt. As she found out later, he'd been alone for so long he'd stopped giving thought to his appearance. His eyes were bulbous through the complex lenses of his multiglasses as he studied her. Again, as he often repeated later, he could have operated on his own eyes, fixed their age-related defects, enhanced them so that he didn't need external devices to correct them. But he could never find the time, his studies and research consuming him.

He seemed to grasp what she was trying to say. “I'm sorry, Selene. Only you have survived. Those few who remain on the surface will not be alive for very much longer. The situation was deteriorating rapidly when we left.”

“No.” The fact of it was too huge to grasp; it was an ocean of dark water engulfing her, consuming her. She'd been chosen by her family as the one to be rescued. Her parents, her aunts and uncles, they'd all been insistent: she had her life ahead of her, she deserved the chance. There was an unborn sister, a surprise and unplanned late pregnancy, her mother barely showing, and perhaps two lives might have been saved aboard the tiny lander, but the risks were greater, and the decision had been made. At the end, there'd suddenly been no time to argue further. The simple calculation of it was brutal.

She'd left behind others, too: colleagues, acquaintances, friends, among whom was Falden, becoming a lover at the time of the appearance of the shroud. She felt the ghost of his grip in her left hand as he led her through the flower meadows that lawned the slopes around their home, a day of perfect, golden light and whispered promises.

“I'm sorry,” Ondo said again from beside her, as if he were to blame, as if the solar shroud had been his doing.

The moment of bright clarity faded. Perhaps Ondo had granted her d**g-induced oblivion. She slipped back into the welcome fog of unconsciousness, the faces of her dead family, her father's tears and Falden's grasp going with her into the darkness.

It was only Ondo – patient, quiet Ondo – that kept tally of her deaths as he battled again and again to pull her through, bring her back to some semblance of life. Two years later, when she'd physically recovered, he would repeat it to her often, wonder and horror in his voice. You died twenty-three times: once in the lander, then a further twenty-two times under my hand. The haunted look in his eyes as he repeated the mantra gave her some clue of the toll those days had taken on him.

At the time, she had no thought for him: no gratitude, no empathy, no insight. He was an unknown figure, her rescuer, her tormentor. There were days when she clung to him as a sick child would to a parent, sobbing from the pain, desperate for reassurance. There were days when she begged for release, all dignity gone, her useless, supine flesh bringing her only suffering. He could anaesthetize her, of course, but always there was the time when arm or leg or chest or skull had to be used, muscles flexed, bone structures tested. The pain of it became her life as she learned to repossess her own body, discovered how to wield limb and sinew.

The original and the new.

One day, nine months into her recreation, she emerged back into consciousness from the latest procedure. Spiky agonies tore through her chest cavity with each breath, as if the wrong tissues had been sutured together. The familiar quiet of the medsuite that was her permanent room lay around her. The subdued glow from the sensors that Ondo kept her hooked up to gave the room an incongruous feeling of the early evening gloaming, some late-summer day on Maes Far. A bitter, chemical taste filled her mouth.

This time he'd reconstructed her chest cavity, implanting the left lung he'd grown from her stem cells, filling in the lost fragments of her rib cage with carbon-fibre bone analogue, attaching intercostal muscles and the malleable mass of her left breast, connecting the artificial to the natural with his customary microscopic artistry and covering everything with the shimmering black dermal substrate upon which, eventually, her own skin could take root.

Ondo's face entered the frame of her vision. Her brain was still adjusting to the exotic sensory inputs her left eye now gave her, so that his features warped for a moment, multiple-wavelength representations overlaying. But of course, it could only be him. There were only the two of them there.

His voice was quiet, full of regret at what she was going through. “How does it feel?”

She had no secrets from him, no defences. He knew the workings and pumpings of her body better she did, knew her more intimately than any lover ever could, knew her from the inside out. She resented it. The pain was muffled by analgesia, but she could tell it would be huge soon enough. It would have its day, a beast that could not be contained. She wished she could stop breathing altogether and let her racked muscles rest, but she refused to show it.

“It's okay.” Her voice was a whisper, her lips cracked dry. “How long was I out this time?”

He missed a beat before replying. “There were complications that I hadn't foreseen. Integrating the bioelectronics into your nervous system is always difficult, as you know. It is a difficult procedure to carry out while rebuilding muscle tissues and blood flows. Weaving the neurons from your artificial limbs through your spinal column proved to be rather more difficult than I'd anticipated.”

“Tell me how long.”

“Twenty-seven hours. Your heart stopped twice. The second time I thought I'd lost you. You were gone for a full minute.”

She could see the weariness in his lined face. He had saved her life one more time. She couldn't stop herself saying it. She didn't want to stop herself saying it. “How many times now?”

“I don't understand.”

“How many times have I died?”

“Including the lander, twenty-two times.”

“You should have left me. I don't want this. I don't want any of this.”

“I couldn't do that, Selene.”

In her mind she was screaming, although it came out as a rough whisper. “I've had enough! I don't care what you promised my family. Let me go, Ondo. You have no f*****g right to do this. It's my choice to make, not yours.”

A part of her could see the effect her words had upon him. She didn't care. She had been through too much.

“I'm not doing this because of my friendship with your father, Selene. Nor for your family, nor for all the dead of Maes Far. I'm doing it for you. When I pulled you from the wreckage of your shuttle, resuscitated you that first time, I vowed I would save you, give you a chance at life as best I could. Too many others have died.”

“This is no f*****g life. I don't want it! Let me go, I'm begging you. I'm ordering you. You do not have the right to know what's best for me. You're controlling me just as much as Concordance did.”

That stung him. He hesitated, perhaps debating with himself whether he was doing the right thing. He reached off to one side to touch a control on one of the devices. The fog of anaesthetic filled her brain and she couldn't fight it. He wasn't giving her final oblivion; he was sending her back into unconsciousness from where she couldn't object.

“No, Ondo, don't you f*****g dare. Don't you…”

Then the fog rolled through her brain and there was nothing she could do to fight it.

Ondo sat unmoving for an hour, watching over the young woman he'd rescued, his gaze flicking between the monitor readouts and her face. Even deeply sedated, she occasionally winced with pain, her brow furrowing and her mouth half-forming a silent scream. Was he doing the right thing, keeping her alive, putting her through all this?

It was possible he was being selfish. He'd lived a lonely life – a life he'd accepted, sought out – but he'd paid the price. He'd envied Seben, Selene's father, envied the relative normality of his life, the love and family and home he'd enjoyed. Seben was dead now, of course, and he, Ondo, was alive, pursuing Concordance, following his trail. But if it led nowhere, to defeat or a dead-end, he knew he'd regret what he'd done with his time. He sometimes wondered who he might have been if he'd lived in a different age. Occasionally, he dreamt dreams of a life that had never existed: spending his days on research and on building his devices, his family and friends around him, a life peaceful and contented.

He let out a long sigh. Still. He couldn't change the past. The faces of the people in his dreams were always a blur, but now there was this young woman, viscerally real, terribly injured, alone apart from him in the whole universe. He would do what he could for her, despite the rigours of all she would have to go through. If he could, he would save her, let her try and find the sort of life he'd turned his back on. He had no idea who she really was, what she wanted to be, and perhaps she didn't either, but he could give her the chance to find out.

If she survived that long.