Red Star

The Moving Stars

1. The Moving StarsThe clock embedded in the biomechanical hemisphere of Selene Ada's brain whispered the countdown to her death.

Oxygen supply 2.5% - 13 minutes remaining

Strange how the responses in the two halves of her body had become merged, indistinguishable. The agonies in her oxygen-starved natural tissues, the urgent override alerts in her artificial: they had become indistinguishable. The irony of it was amusing. She'd made such good progress.

She sat with her back against the column of the archway upon the fragment of planetary rock. The nearby dead star, barely three kilometres across, bathed them in its hard gamma rays. Ondo lay beside her, his body ricked awkwardly where he'd slumped among the scattered rocks. His features were indistinct through his suit visor, but it was long minutes since he'd moved. She instructed his helmet lights to come on for a moment. He didn't respond, no flicker in his eyes. His heart rate continued to fall steadily, and the blue tinge to his lips was unmistakable.

She queried the flecks embedded in his cerebellum one more time. There was only the faintest flutter of life within his body. Oxygen levels within his bloodstream were critical, and hypoxia was causing tissue damage at an increasing rate. Even if, by some miracle, the two of them found a way out, he wouldn't make it alive; his brain cells were already too impaired.

She could rouse him, instruct his control flecks to amp up his metabolism enough to return him to consciousness, but she let him be. Best to leave him in the peace of oblivion. Soon he'd die, and then the only version of him left in the universe would be the engram copy she carried within her own head. And then, when she finally succumbed, they'd both be gone in the same moment.

She wished she'd been able to protect him, dissuade him from coming to Coronade. If he were still at the Refuge, then there'd be hope. On her lone visits to other worlds, she'd sometimes thought of him as a low, flickering candle-flame in a huge night, a glow of promise on the edge of the galaxy. Now the flame was sputtering out.

They could perhaps have retraced their steps through the archways and the metaspace tunnels to return to the ruins of Coronade, but they'd agreed in Ondo's last few minutes of consciousness not to do so, not to place themselves in the hands of Concordance. This lonely death was better than any drawn-out end their pursuers might choose to give them. Better that their secrets died with them than having their knowledge ripped from their minds by the Augurs of Omn. The Refuge with its recovered scraps of history was safely hidden. Perhaps some unknown traveller would find it one day, and bring the memories back to life.

Conscious thought slipped away from Selene for a moment, and there was only the blazing cloud of ionized gas and plasma from the destroyed star to fill her eyes. Strange how something so violently destructive could create something so beautiful. The fragment of rock, crowned by its archway, spun rapidly, tumbling through space from the blast of the sun's explosion. As a result, its tumbling day was short, but there was no separation of light and darkness. A blur of fulgent light surrounded her. The colours were dazzling; she felt them filling her universe, pulling her in, promising to draw her to themselves. The thought was comforting. It would be so easy to let go, let the light absorb her. Let Concordance win.

No. She fought back, forcing herself to kick for the surface, out of the depths and back to awareness. Her biomechanical side reacted to her conscious instruction, pushing more adrenaline through her blood vessels, giving her another burst of life.

The irony was that her artificial tissues could easily have been made to survive a zero-oxygen environment – except that she'd insisted on having them fully integrated with what remained of her biology during her reconstruction. Ondo had given her the choice early on; her flesh could be an adjunct, sustained and maintained as long as it was viable, then discarded, placenta-like. He'd offered her that immortality, but she'd recoiled in horror. If all of the cells and tissues of her original body were gone, then who was she? In what sense was she still Selene Ada?

It was one of the last things he'd said to her, before his eyes closed: “I should have insisted.”

“I wouldn't have let you.”

He'd actually smiled. “I should have done it anyway, and not told you until now.”

“Did you?”

“Regrettably, no. I'm sorry. I'm sorry for all of this. I should have made you lead a normal life, safe on a planet somewhere.”

“And I told you, that life would never have worked for me. Not after Maes Far.”

Her two halves were inextricably intertwined, just as she'd demanded, and that meant she was doomed. The blast wave from the stellar extinction event had stripped away its planets' atmospheric envelopes, turning viable biosphere into bare rock, and the only breathable air she and Ondo had was that which they'd brought with them. She'd consumed less of her suit's oxygen than Ondo had, but in the end, it wasn't going to make any difference.

Still she fought. She would go back to Coronade, face down Concordance. Time to stop following the trails left by others and force a new one of her own. Since she'd started travelling in the Radiant Dragon, Ondo had often accused her of taking crazy risks, and to herself she admitted that he was probably right: her fury and desire for revenge did make her take unnecessary chances. Sometimes it felt like her own survival didn't matter much anymore. Why should she get to live when everyone she'd grown up with had not? It was survivor's guilt; she should have died alongside them. She wasn't always rational. If she was going to fight Concordance, she needed to be more controlled. There was a time to unleash her anger, but she needed to be patient, pick the right moment. To win a war, you sometimes had to lose a battle, or refuse to fight it at all.

Could she reopen the Coronade entrance using the metakey they'd been given by the Warden? Perhaps. The archway had clearly been designed to ensure people couldn't easily move from Coronade to the dead star system, and perhaps prevent them from returning at all. It was a puzzling fact if you accepted Ondo's view of the golden age culture. Why go to such lengths to construct miraculous passageways among the stars, and then prevent their use? Ondo had to be wrong; the Coronade civilisation had been radically different to the one he'd imagined.

In any case, she would try to make the return journey. Ondo would know nothing of her actions; he was too far gone for it to matter. She would return through the tunnels, attempt to reopen the archway and fight their pursuers. She would have no chance – they would drop more atmospheric nukes or unleash beam-weapon fire and she'd be vaporised – but perhaps, somehow, she could get to them first, take some of them with her.

She forced herself to her knees, then to her feet. She retched, her mouth filling with bitter-sour liquid. She swallowed it back down. Vomiting inside a sealed suit was never a good thing. Stars swirled in her vision and the galaxy threatened to blackout completely, but she willed herself to remain upright and conscious. She took a step forwards, and then another, leaving Ondo's body where it was on the ground.

She stepped through the archway, taking the short, featureless tunnel that led to the outer planet they'd first arrived at. If the tunnels had ever had breathable atmosphere, it was long-gone now; whatever form of energy walls the archways propagated hadn't prevented any air from leeching away. Perhaps the builders simply hadn't considered the possibility of the atmosphere at one end of the tunnel being torn away. She and Ondo had tried and failed to find some sort of control mechanism that might restore air-pressure but hadn't found any.

She talked to him, the copy in her head at least, as she battled forwards. Partly it was to take her mind off what she was doing, partly to hear his voice. Also, it felt right for him to know everything that had happened.

He absorbed her news without comment, whatever sense of loss he might be feeling left unexpressed. She wondered whether he thought he was dying, or whether it was someone else, just a different Ondo.

“Do you still think there's a trail?” she asked. “That we were led here for a reason?”

He paused very briefly before replying. “Perhaps some of your innate scepticism has leeched into my thoughts from your brain, but I still think we have a purpose. There are fragments of the picture here.”

“It's hard to see a picture if you're dead,” she said. “You said this supernova was engineered, an anomaly, but maybe you were wrong. Even my enhanced senses give us only crude readings. This could have been a completely natural disaster, nothing more. A star exploding after its core collapsed unexpectedly.”

“This was clearly a technological society; you've seen the scale of the ruins. From the similarities in the architecture, I'd say this was the same culture spread across multiple worlds: the three that we've glimpsed, and perhaps others. There's no way a society that advanced wouldn't know its star was close to catastrophic explosion. And you've studied the readings; the mass of stellar material is at odds with what we can calculate from the planets' original orbits. My view is still that someone did this: triggered solar collapse and wiped out these worlds in a moment of galactic time. Even the farthermost planet would have been devastated within a few minutes. If there was no warning, no chance to evacuate, billions of people must have died. Billions of lives and much that was unique and glorious, all gone. We have to accept that's the most likely explanation.”

Walking was an effort, an act of will. Her muscles were cramping and her brain threatened repeatedly to succumb to the darkness. Her breathing was rapid, panicky. She forced herself to keep moving and talking. “Then, perhaps there was some end-of-days cult going on; the people chose to live close to the edge of destruction, knowing the end could come at any moment. People do things like that, right? Perhaps they embraced catastrophe like Concordance do.”

“It seems so unlikely. From what I can tell of the ruins, the buildings must have been quite beautiful.”

“What the hell does that have to do with anything?”

“I suppose I can't believe that a people capable of such marvels would embrace death to that extent.”

“Concordance ships are beautiful. You're projecting how you think about the universe onto unknown cultures.”

“Concordance are anomalous, and I don't believe they are responsible for creating the wonders they wield.”

“Who is, then?”

“That, of course, we don't know. But it's clear Concordance aren't fully in control of the technology at their disposal. For one thing, they're not here. If they knew about the tunnels and the archways, they'd have come for us. They'd have been waiting for us. I don't believe they know where we are and I don't believe they understand how the metaspace pathways function.”

“It's not a lesson we can put to any use, given how near to dying I am.”

“How close are you?”

She granted him access to her internal status. “That close.”

“There isn't much time left,” he said after a moment.

“No. I noticed that.”

She emerged at the circle of three archways, stumbling to the ground as she did so. She was on her back, confused about how she'd got there. The ruined domes and archways of the planet crowded around her peripheral vision. Like people standing silently around a deathbed, peering in at her.

The glowing plasma blotted out the stars above her. She thought about the times she'd looked at the galaxy from the Refuge, imagining it as something like a brain. And, again, on Migdala, sitting with Myrced upon the roof of her house, that sweet interlude in her recent life. She, Selene, had said then that the stars move, that things changed, but sometimes so slowly you couldn't see it. The stars turned, yes, but they moved in other ways, too: forming and dying. She wished she could tell Myrced that. Change was possible. Change was inevitable. And, it wasn't only a natural process: stars could be created and destroyed in acts of stellar engineering. What seemed constant, untouchable, could be swept away. Perhaps that meant Concordance could be swept away.

With a grunt of effort, she forced herself onto her side. A glint of light in the dust of the ruins caught her eye, down at ground-level, reflecting the glow in the sky. What was that? They'd explored briefly upon first arriving and had found nothing but debris and destruction among the ruined walls and domes. The spark was dim; her natural eye wouldn't have been able to detect it. She moved her head from side-to-side a little and the mote of light disappeared, reappeared, disappeared. It was only visible from the one spot she happened to have fallen in. Some shard of glass perhaps? Hard to know how far away it was, but she guessed it was relatively small and near judging by the tiny movements needed to affect it.

The archway that would take her back across the galaxy to Coronade was a few paces away, but the speck of light intrigued her. Another tiny glow in a sea of darkness. She would find out what it was. She deactivated her inner Ondo – she didn't want to give him any explanations of what she was doing – and worked her way to her knees, her feet. She could no longer see the light, the angle of the reflection wrong. She knelt back down and by positioning her head just so, saw it again.

Very well, she would crawl. It was about all she had energy left to do anyway.

She toiled forwards, eyes fixed on her target. This world hadn't been blown to fragments by the nova, and it still rotated in a ghost of its day and night cycle. That meant the mysterious light might shift at any moment, wink out. Its life was tenuous, brief. She suddenly had to get to it, as if it held all the answers she sought.

The floor of the archway circle was smooth stone, protected somehow from the drifting powder of the ruins all around, but once she moved off it, her hands and knees sank into a dense layer that was more like volcanic ash than dust from collapsed buildings. It weighed her down, clogging her movements. Three times she knelt on some buried fragment of sharp rock. Her suit cushioned her, but alarm cut through her that a puncture would vent all her remaining oxygen. Then she would only have moments.

The clock in her brain chose that point to give her an update, sounding annoyingly calm.

Oxygen supply 0.8% - 4 minutes remaining

The mote of light glinted to her through a ragged hole in the side of one of the ruined buildings. The gap at ground level was too small; she'd have to climb through an opening a metre up. The effort of it nearly broke her, sent nausea and panic washing through her. Her heart rate was a desperate flutter. Her enhanced half was dragging her oxygen-starved biology along. She hauled herself though the gap and half-fell back to the ground on the other side, the surface-layer of dust engulfing her.

Oxygen supply 0.2% - 1 minute remaining

She'd lost awareness; minutes had slipped by unnoticed. Once again, she forced herself to act, flipping herself over to wade on hands and knees through the carpet of ash and dust. Her tissues screamed their alarm, sending more adrenaline through her. She gulped deep breaths but she might have been inhaling sand.

Gloriously, she saw the light again, brighter now, glinting close-by. She willed herself towards it, refusing to be beaten.

A skull protruded from the dust layer, on its side, one eye socket staring at her. They hadn't found many biological remains, and at first had hoped that the planets had been abandoned before the nova event. A brief chemical analysis of the detritus layer suggested otherwise: there was a widespread concentration of what appeared to be organic markers: bone-calcium and protein strands. They'd also unearthed a few visible fragments of skeleton. Many people had died there.

The skull was elongated in shape, reminding her of something she could no longer recall. A ragged hole had been punched into it from some crushing injury, filling it with the glow of the plasma. The light she'd seen twinkled through the eye socket, refracting through something inside the cranium.

She reached out with a gauntleted hand, scrabbling with her fingertips to snag the skull. She caught it, pulled it towards her. A glass bead, half a centimetre in diameter, fell out through the open floor of the bone cavity, disappearing into the dust layer. A glass bead inside a skull: that triggered a memory. They'd found one just like it somewhere. Thinking was hard work, the thoughts emerging from a sluggish fog. It came back to her: the ice cap on Maes Far, her own world. The borer that Ondo had released had found a bead and reported that it appeared to have come from inside a skull cavity from the impressions left behind in the ice. A memory bead or some augmentation fleck, but not like any now in use. The bead she'd taken to the Depository and activated using the Warden's machine to retrieve a stream of baffling, confused images. She recalled looking into its depths, the feeling that she was staring into an eye.

Desperately, she dug through the dust to find this new one. It wasn't going to save her, but it seemed suddenly important. A connection made.

She couldn't find it, her gauntlets too clumsy. She sent unlock codes to her left one, exposing her artificial hand to the void, to the near-absolute-zero temperature and hard radiation, then began to search with her augmented fingertips for the elusive object.

Finally, she found it, pincered it between two fingers to lift into her eyeline. It clearly was another bead like the one from Maes Far, the same iridescence in its depths. How had it come to be here, in the ancient ruins of a lost civilisation on the other side of the galaxy? She wished, desperately, hopelessly, that she could tell Ondo of her discovery.

Her fingers closed, clutching the bead in her fist. Then a wave of exhaustion overwhelmed her, an unstoppable tide, and she sank beneath its drowning depths.