Edges

Chapter 1

Riffan Naja rarely thought of himself as a military commander. Really, he was an anthropologist. The study of human society was his specialty, his passion. It was the reason he’d sought a position aboard Long Watch.

Any position aboard either Silent Vigil or Long Watch required extensive Defense Force training—after all, the primary duty of both ships was to guard the Deception Well system against Chenzeme incursion—so Riffan was qualified as a military commander. He had just never expected to use his military training.

No one had expected him to use it because seven centuries had elapsed since the last time a Chenzeme ship was sighted. It had been even longer—twelve hundred years—since a human starship visited the system. Career Defense Force officers had long ago deemed duty aboard either ship too dull to endure.

So over time, Silent Vigil and Long Watch became scientific platforms as well as watch posts. Career officers were no longer posted to the remote duty. Instead, the position of commander rotated among each ship’s senior scientific staff.

Riffan happened to be in command when the emergency notification arrived.

He was alone in the hexagonal chamber of his study, eyeing a complex display of charts and evolving schematics that described the observed orbital motion of debris around an abandoned planet in a distant star system. He hoped a thorough analysis of the data would reveal some anomaly that could be explained only through the presence of a technological lifeform—specifically, human survivors, finally recovering from an assault that had ravaged their system centuries ago.

The alert shattered his concentration with a triple warning-tone that bleated across his brain. His whole body recoiled, his bare foot kicking free of the loop that had anchored him in place in the zero-gravity environment of Long Watch.

He scrambled to catch a hand-hold as the display refreshed and the calm, familiar voice of the astronomical Dull Intelligence spoke into the artificial neural organ of his atrium: *Alert. Alert.

His atrium’s tendrils wound throughout his brain tissue, linking his senses to the ship’s omnipresent network, allowing him to hear the DI, even though the workroom remained silent.

As the Dull Intelligence continued to speak, a text version of its words appeared on the display:

*A newly sighted object, designated Transient Hazard 6, confirms as a Chenzeme courser. Approximate distance, nine light-hours beyond the periphery of the nebula.

Riffan finally caught a hand-hold. He squeezed it in a painful grip. “No,” he whispered as additional data posted to the display. “No, no, no. Love and Nature and the Cosmic First Light, this can’t be right. This can’t be happening. There has to be a mistake.”

*There is no mistake, the DI assured him in its calm way.

“Well then, damn it, why now?” he demanded. “Why me?”

The DI knew better than to attempt an answer and after a moment, Riffan settled the question for himself: “You fool, it had to be someone, didn’t it?”

Seven hundred years was a long span on a human scale. The absence of sightings for all that time had led some to speculate that the ancient robotic warships had already won this latest phase of their endless war of extinction, that Deception Well, nestled within the weaponized nebula, was the last surviving human settlement. With no viable targets left to hit, the warships had withdrawn—so the theory went—to wait with machine patience for the emergence of some future technological species whose history they would subsequently cut short.

Riffan was aboard Long Watch to prove this theory false. He refused to believe Deception Well was the last refuge of humankind. He’d aimed his studies at detecting signs of a surviving human presence, though he’d been unsuccessful, so far. A Chenzeme vessel appearing on his watch struck him as cruel irony. Its existence disproved the theory, without offering hope of other survivors.

“Focus, you idiot,” he ordered himself.

Academic arguments didn’t matter. Other worlds didn’t matter. Not now. All that mattered now was the defense of Deception Well.

He closed his eyes a moment. Drew a deep, calming breath. Then another. Sliding into the role he’d trained for: Defense Force commander. If this Chenzeme courser approached the system, it was Riffan’s duty to direct Long Watch against it.

He sent his first order out over the ship’s network, his voice mostly steady: “All senior crew report to the bridge now. Everyone else, summon your external equipment and see that it’s safely stowed. Secure your internal gear, and configure your quarters for acceleration.”

Then he punched out through the gel membrane that served as the door of his study, shooting into a round-walled passage. Two worried-looking students and a maintenance drone scrambled to get out of his way as he launched himself toward the bridge.

Deception Well was the farthest outpost of the human frontier in the direction known as swan, named for the still-distant supergiant star, Alpha Cygni, brightest light in the constellation of the swan as seen from old Earth.

The first Chenzeme ships ever sighted had come out of the swan, probably originating from somewhere far beyond Alpha Cygni. This newest courser had come from that direction too.

The luminosity of a Chenzeme warship’s hull was a known factor that allowed the astronomical DI to work out the courser’s distance from Long Watch, while the Doppler shift provided a rough estimate of its relative velocity. The implication was ominous.

Riffan reached the bridge just behind the ship’s senior astronomer, Enzo Hui. “You’ve seen the numbers?” Enzo asked in a low voice.

“They don’t look good,” Riffan murmured.

He kicked off the wall, shot through a detailed holographic projection of the Near Vicinity that filled the central volume of the chamber, and then arrested his glide at a workstation on the opposite side of the room.

In its current configuration, the bridge held four workstations evenly spaced in a ring around the plane of the designated floor. Enzo took the station on his right. Exobiologist Pasha Andern already occupied the station to his left.

Without looking up, Pasha said, “I’m going over the historical record. Transient-Hazard 6 is closer to the periphery of the nebula than any previously recorded Chenzeme ship.”

“Understood,” Riffan said as he shoved his bare feet into stirrups that would hold him in place at his workstation. “Its velocity relative to the system also appears significantly slower than past sightings.”

The door drew open again. Past the holographic projection, Riffan saw the ship’s engineer, Zira Lin, glance around the chamber, her eyes wide, lips slightly parted.

Riffan sensed her fear and shared it. His heart raced. His hands trembled, though he strove not to show it. He had a role to play. The amateur acting he’d done helped him to keep his voice steady as he addressed his companions.

“This is serious, friends,” he told them, watching Zira take her place at the station opposite him. “In our sixteen-hundred-year history at Deception Well, no Chenzeme ship has ever tried to enter the nebula. I hope TH-6 will pass on too, but right now it is not behaving like any courser we’ve observed before.”

“Its behavior is frankly ominous,” Pasha interjected, a hard edge to her voice. The exobiologist had spoken without looking up, her right hand moving in steady rhythm as she scrolled a display on the slanted surface of her workstation. “Why would its velocity be so low, unless it intends to come in? We know that can happen. It’s happened at least once before.”

Riffan grunted agreement. The evidence of that long-ago incursion haunted Deception Well’s night sky. Caught in the planet’s gravity well was the dead dark hulk of a swan burster—a gigantic, ring-shaped Chenzeme warship far larger than a courser—easily visible despite its high orbit.

Like all swan bursters, this one had once carried a gamma-ray gun capable of boiling oceans and burning off planetary atmospheres. It was harmless now, but in some long-gone, pre-human era it had penetrated the nebula and reached Deception Well intact.

Riffan said, “If TH-6 tries to come in, we’ll work with Silent Vigil and do what’s necessary to stop it.”

“We’ve got time to work out what it’s doing,” Enzo said. “Maybe days. The courser is slow, but it’s not slow enough to survive the nebula. It’ll have to dump velocity if its target is Deception Well.”

That was true. If the courser entered the nebula at its current speed, its mass would be quickly eroded by continuous micro-collisions with the nebula’s tiny grains of debris, and eventually it would be destroyed. That was the good news. The bad news, Riffan thought with a sinking feeling, was that this awful encounter could stretch on for days.

“It might not slow down,” Zira said in a trembling voice. “Not if this is a kamikaze mission. Depending on its angle of entry, it might be able to survive long enough to deploy its gamma-ray gun against the space elevator, or worse, aim its mass at the planet. With enough momentum, a collision could shatter the crust and destroy the atmosphere. One courser is a small sacrifice if it means wiping out the last surviving settlement anywhere on the frontier.”

Love and Nature! Leave it to an engineer to find the worst-case scenario.

“We are not the last surviving settlement,” Riffan said. “There are others out there, somewhere, and someday we are going to find them. And there is no historical record of Chenzeme ships ever employing a suicide attack.”

“Because they’ve never had to?” Pasha wondered. “Our situation here is unique. Chenzeme tactics might prove unique too.”

“I agree,” Enzo said, eyes half-closed as he communed with the ship’s information system.

Riffan nodded. “We’ll keep that possibility in mind, but right now, Enzo, we need you to calculate the courser’s trajectory. That will tell us if we’ve got a fight coming.”

“I’m working on it,” the astronomer assured him. “But it’s going to take time.”

“Understood.”

To work out the courser’s trajectory, Enzo had to map its relative motion against background stars—and at its present distance many minutes would have to elapse to detect any motion at all.

Riffan looked across the holographic projection to the engineer. “Zira, I want you to reconfirm all systems. Ensure everything’s in peak condition. But keep us silent. Don’t give our position away.”

She sniffed a little, and nodded. “All systems are in peak condition, but I’ll run the checks again.”

“Thank you.” He turned to his left. “Pasha—”

“I’ve already run system checks on the gamma-ray gun,” she said crisply. “All nominal.”

In ordinary circumstances, Pasha spent her hours studying the tiny artificial lifeforms that inhabited the nebula, but for the extent of this emergency, she would serve as weapons officer. Cool and unruffled, she appeared particularly well-suited to the task—though she’d never had an opportunity to fire the weapon. Over the centuries, the laser had been test-fired only three times. The security council feared the weapon would be a beacon to draw the Chenzeme—but they would use it if they had to.

Riffan sighed, now that the first panicked flurry of activity was past. His gaze drifted over the holographic projection, really seeing it for the first time since he’d entered the bridge. It was a high-resolution, three-dimensional model of the Near Vicinity. At the center, a tiny bright sphere represented Kheth, Deception Well’s star. The vast scale of the projection gave an illusory impression that the solitary planet was nestled very close to its sun. The blue-green orb was shown as a dot, far smaller than Kheth, but still exaggerated in size to make it visible on this scale. A silver wisp represented the column of the space elevator that linked the planet’s surface to the orbital construction yards. The city of Silk, mounted on the elevator column, was indicated by a glint of golden light.

Extending far beyond the orbit of the planet was the artificial nebula, its outer boundary represented by a translucent, spherical green shell. A blue flag at the edge of the nebula marked the position of Long Watch. Another indicated Silent Vigil, on the opposite side of the sun.

Vastly farther out, the Chenzeme courser. A red flag marked its position, making it clear that Long Watch was situated to encounter it first—if it was bound in-system.

And if it was inbound? He worried it was not alone.

Warships like this one were known to run in pairs, with one ship dark. Cold and dark and therefore invisible, its propulsion reef quiet as it coasted through the void on a pre-planned trajectory designed to bring its gun into position to deliver maximum destruction. A trajectory detectable only if it chanced to eclipse some background object while the narrow eye of a telescope was turned its way.

He linked to the astronomical DI. *Re-examine all survey imagery. Look for any indication of a second ship, running dark.

*A re-examination is already underway.

Good.

He turned to the astronomer. “Enzo? We really need that trajectory. A rough estimate, at least.”

Enzo shook his head. “Not yet. Not for a while. But if we put another telescope on it—”

“No, I don’t want to do that,” Riffan said. “We know where the courser is. What we don’t know is whether or not it’s alone. Now more than ever, we need to continue the standard full-sky scan.”

Pasha must have picked up on his worry, because she spoke in a voice so firmly determined Riffan knew it was a play to shore up his confidence. “If there is a second ship, we’ll find it and we’ll hit it—or Silent Vigil will—before it knows we’re here. It doesn’t know we’re here, Riffan. We’re dark, too.”

Not entirely true. Long Watch had a heat signature. It was unavoidable given that the ship had to provide an environment warm enough to sustain biological lifeforms. And they potentially advertised their position every time they engaged in bursts of laser communications with the head office in the city of Silk—although such communications took place over a narrow beam unlikely to be detected even with some scattering from the nebula’s dust and debris.

“We need to get this right,” Riffan said quietly, speaking as much to himself as to the bridge crew. He did not feel adequate to the task but that didn’t matter. The task was his.

“Oh,” Enzo said. A soft solitary syllable, dull with fear. His head was cocked, his eyes unfocused as he contemplated some newly arrived data visible only to him. “Oh,” he repeated. “This is not good.”

He looked up, looked around, looked at Riffan. “I put a DI to the task of analyzing recent data from the gravitational sensors. It’s found a series of perturbations. Faint. Very faint. But real. A swarm of them, each with a signature that suggests a propulsion reef.”

“A swarm?” Riffan asked, his stomach knotting painfully. “Does that mean multiple objects?”

Enzo’s lip stuck out. He scowled, he shrugged, then finally he nodded, conceding the distasteful truth: “Six discrete sources of perturbations. I’m assuming six distinct objects.”

By the Pure First Light!

“Do you have locations?” Pasha snapped. If she felt any fear, she kept it firmly locked away.

In contrast, Enzo’s voice shook when he answered her: “There’s data enough to triangulate, to chart their recent movement. All six objects appear to be following roughly parallel paths, separated by intervals between one and two light-hours. I’m going to show you estimated trajectories. Posting on the display… now.”

Six thin lines, bright orange in color, popped into existence on the projection of the Near Vicinity. The lines curved, suggesting paths that dipped slightly toward the sun. In his mind, Riffan imagined another curved line, one that connected the still-unseen objects in the swarm. Extended outward, that line pointed in the general direction of the courser.

In a subdued voice, Enzo said, “Note that less than a light-hour separates Long Watch from the closest object in the swarm.”

Pasha spoke aloud the obvious conclusion. “That proximity can’t be coincidence. It knows we’re here.”

Clemantine woke from her latest sojourn in cold sleep, brought slowly to awareness by the ministrations of her body’s complement of Makers—complex nanomachines programmed to sustain her at peak physical condition and to defend her body at a microscopic level.

She did not allow her Makers to affect her mood, so they did nothing to ease the anxiety that arrived with awareness.

Her first thought: How much time has gone by? Impossible to know if days had passed, or years—or centuries?

She’d left a personal Dull Intelligence on watch, charged with overseeing the integrity of her cold-sleep chamber and instructed to awaken her only for a short list of explicit reasons:

If her personal security was threatened.

If there was an existential threat to Deception Well.

If ever there was a visitor or news of events from beyond the system.

She did not try to guess between these reasons. As her thoughts quickened, she assumed the cause of her waking encompassed all three.

The transparent mucilaginous tissue of her cold-sleep cocoon pulled away, retreating in shimmering streams along the ribbons of its anchoring umbilicals, leaving her adrift in the zero-gee of her tiny chamber aboard Long Watch.

Clemantine was not part of the ship’s small crew. She was but an elder legend, an artifact of a tumultuous past, a hero to her people, and as such she was granted certain privileges—like the privilege of maintaining a private sanctuary here on the edge of the system. Forgotten by most as she was ferried forward in time through the routine of cold sleep, always awaiting some word, some echo of salvation from those who’d left long ago on a quest to find the source of the Chenzeme warships. They’d been just a small company of adventurers. She’d been one of them, once, and an avatar might be one of them still in an alternate life. A better life than this one? Or a worse life? A life already ended? No way to know.

“How long?” she asked, speaking aloud to the empty chamber.

The DI that had wakened her answered in its familiar voice, speaking through her atrium:

*Seven hundred twenty-three years, one hundred twelve days, two hours, thirty-two minutes.

“By the Unknown God,” she whispered, taken aback at such a span of time. Far longer than any she’d ever spent in cold sleep before.

The Dull Intelligence made no response to this comment, commencing instead on a status report as its instructions dictated it should do, brief line items spoken in a nurturing masculine voice audible only to her, summarizing the centuries so as to orient her in this age:

Deception Well’s active population had slowly increased, tripling in size. Many still lived in the capital city of Silk, built around the column of a space elevator, 320 kilometers above the planet’s surface. Many more now lived on the planet, in scattered villages.

The inactive population had grown as well: more people in cold sleep, and many kept only as library records.

The orbital construction yards remained dormant, their last products the twin warships, now more than eight centuries old.

A long untroubled time.

But the DI would not have wakened her only to say that all was well.

“Get to it,” she said, wiping the last of the mucus off her smooth brown skin. “What’s gone wrong?”

The DI told her of the Chenzeme courser. In its reassuring voice it said:

*The warship’s heading is still being determined. It is not yet known if it will enter the Deception Well system. But there is an additional threat. Gravitational sensors have detected faint perturbations approaching this sector of the system periphery. These signals are consistent with known effects generated by propulsion reefs, suggesting the presence of an inbound swarm of artificial objects, estimated six in number.

Fear shot through her, bitter cold. “Give me details. What kind of objects are we talking about?”

*Unknown. The telescopes have been unable to resolve an object in any wavelength.

So the objects were stealthed. They had to be weapons. What else could they be? Running silent and dark.

“Has there been an order for a radar sweep?” she asked, knowing her revival would have required nearly half an hour following the initial alert. Time enough for the bridge crew to take action.

*Negative. That strategy is presently under discussion.

Despite her lack of any official position, Clemantine intended to be part of that discussion. Caution had always been the guiding principle of their little civilization at Deception Well. Caution, always—and they were a long-lived people. Change came slowly. She didn’t doubt that even now someone on the bridge was insisting that using radar was a mistake, that the courser would detect it, and interpret it as confirmation that some fragment of a technological civilization still existed in the Well, while passive observation would give away nothing.

But we are not hidden from any who bother to look!

Clemantine intended to argue for aggressive action. Every Chenzeme encounter recorded in their broken and fragmented histories—whether with courser or swan burster or plague—was a testament to the ruthless nature of the Chenzeme killing machines. It must be assumed the stealthed objects were associated with the courser—and anything associated with the courser had to be a weapon aimed against them.

It was up to the crew of Long Watch to locate and destroy the intruding swarm before it could deliver its payload in-system.

Clemantine looked around to find freshly compiled clothing budding off the walls. Puffs of air propelled the clothes toward her. She dressed quickly in a gray-green shirt with a patterned weave and dark-gray leggings—surprised and grateful at the return of such a simple, practical fashion. She ran her palms over her scalp, smoothing black hair that had been modified at the roots to never grow to more than a stubble. Then she kicked at the wall, propelling her muscular body toward the door.

“Open an audio channel to the bridge,” she told the DI. “I want to hear what’s going on.”