Red Star (The Triple Stars Volume 2)

  For all those who fight the power

  Table of Contents

  Prologue - The Magellanic Heresies

  Diurnal The Moving Stars

  Low-orbit Turbulence

  The Dust of Shattered Worlds

  Aetheral

  The Teeming Death

  Alien Megastructures

  The Neverkey

  Sigma Counterspin

  Millennial Evils

  Communication

  Radiance

  Contamination

  Eb

  Void Wraiths

  The Periarch

  Fenwinter

  Detonation

  Convocation

  Epochal Aevus

  The Seer Stone

  Ansider

  Labyrinthine

  The Fight at the Red Star

  Toruk

  Prologue - The Magellanic Heresies

  Fragments recovered from the journal of Senjen Vorst, planetologist of the deep space exploratory vessel Magellanic Cloud, as reassembled and translated by Ondo Ynwa Lagan from discoveries made on the (now extinct) planet Maes Far.

  Warning: These fragments form part of the Magellanic Heresies as proscribed by Concordance. Ownership or propagation of these documents is considered an act of extreme heresy against Omn. Read or distribute at your own risk.

  …the three stellar masses meant that we were forced to translate from metaspace at a much greater distance from the centre of the system than normal. Frustrating! It will take many weeks to reach the planet. Telemetry is, however, slowly giving us a more complete picture of the stars and their single world…

  …we now observe small degrees of orbital perturbation in the movements of the three suns. Frankly, it's a relief. The wilder theories of some of the crew can now be discounted; these are not artificially engineered stars, as if such things were even possible. Their motions are remarkably regular, but that appears to be a natural phenomenon, the chance arrangement of gravitational influences holding them in their patterns of movement about each other. Eventually, as they lose mass through normal stellar radiation, this regularity will fail, and it is conceivable that two or even three of the stars will collide or fuse…

  …so much for the suns, but what of the planet and its moons? Some on the ship are convinced significant terraforming has taken place on this world, but they are unable to explain how that could be achieved – or why anyone would go to such lengths. The number of viable planets in the galaxy far outweighs the number of cultures requiring relocation or room for expansion, and this must always have been the case. This planet, especially, with no land masses upon it, is hardly a good candidate for occupation…

  …a strange conversation with one of the chemists on board, Dragonel Vulpis. He wanted me to support his view that the planet is anomalous, unnatural in some way. He actually used the term supernatural. He more or less pinned me to the bulkhead as he spoke, his eyes wide, unblinking. The man used to amuse me, but he becomes more and more alarming. Something has broken inside his brain. I explained that the apparent regularity of the planetary and lunar motions is an illusion caused by our lack of time perspective; that the orbital patterns are in constant flux, and we've simply arrived at a galactic moment when everything appears to be in clockwork equilibrium. We don't live long enough to see the pattern.

  He wouldn't have it and grew angry. I must talk to the officers about him before he causes more trouble; the long voyage appears to have taken a psychological toll upon him. A single, disturbed crew-member can have a hugely destructive effect upon a ship…

  Three hours after Selene and Ondo's arrival at the dead star…

  Part 1 - Diurnal

  1. The Moving Stars

  The 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. She smiled to herself at the irony of it. She had 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, they 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.

  Was this what it had been like for the original inhabitants of this planet? Had they known the end was coming for them, too, and that there was nothing they could do? A last few moments to hold loved ones, stare into the sky, bury themselves in some hedonistic oblivion?

  It struck her how lost she would feel at Ondo's demise. With him gone, she'd be more alone than she'd ever been. Once, during her rescue from Maes Far and her reconstruction, she'd genuinely hated and feared him, blaming him for the pain she was suffering, for prolonging her agonies, for taking away everything she'd loved. She hadn't always been rational. People lashed out when they were wounded.

  Later, she'd grown to trust him – even love him. His eccentricity and distracted manner enraged her and amused her in equal measure. He'd admitted to thinking of her as his folkdaughter, a replacement for Juma, and the truth was that she also thought of him as some kind of father. She hadn't admitted it to him, and she regretted the fact. It was only now that she fully understood how much she'd come to depend on him. His calming presence had brought a little sense back to a fractured universe. He'd said something similar about her: your arrival at the Refuge felt like the pieces of a broken picture slotting into place. They'd both found something they'd needed in each other.

  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.

  It wasn't so long since she'd been a carefree, self-absorbed young woman on Maes Far. That Selene Ada often felt like a different person, now. Growing up, the presence of Concordance had always been there in the back of her mind, a constant background note of discord, rarely intruding upon her conscious thoughts. She was a very different person now. Her whole world had been destroyed – quite literally – and everything had changed. She'd set out to fight Concordance, attempt to rid the galaxy of its malign influence, and now here she was, rapidly running out of oxygen upon a spinning lump of rock a long way from any place she knew. She'd joined Ondo upon his trail through the stars, but it had led only to death: to the dead star whose nebulous ghost filled her sky and, soon, to the death of her and Ondo too.

>   The Warden entity at the Depository had seemed to think that she was some kind of saviour. You will return with the dawn? it had asked. At last there is light, the glow of the dawn before the sun rises. It was clear it had been badly misguided in its prophecies. She wasn't going to save anything. Not even herself.

  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 rather than having them ripped from their minds by the Augurs of Omn. The Refuge with its recovered scraps of history were 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, pupa-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. Once, early on in her reconstruction, she might have given in, but not now. Conceding defeat let them win. Time to stop following the trails left by others and force a new one of her own. Since she'd started flying 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? Perhaps 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. It was a realisation she'd come to too late, perhaps. There was little hope of rescue from the dead star and its shattered planets. But that wasn't going to stop her trying.

  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 black-out 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. “I think so, yes. The real me clearly believed it. Perhaps some of your innate scepticism has leeched into my thoughts from your brain, so I have some doubts, 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 repea
tedly 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 – technological and aesthetic – would embrace death to that extent.”

  “The ships Concordance use, the Cathedral ships, they're beautiful, yet they embrace death. They're all about death. 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. That, perhaps, is another lesson we can learn from coming here. They are not all-powerful. Not at all.”

  “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.