Edges

Chapter 17

Riffan agreed to go. Really, did he have a choice? Urban was determined to visit the Rock and it would be wrong to let him go alone. And Riffan conceded—if only to himself—that his attitude toward avatars, while not wrong, might be a bit provincial, a little too impractical for the demands of his current existence. He suspected Pasha would think so.

But then, Pasha was an exceptional individual. In general, the people of Deception Well tended to cling to the old ways. Avatars were rare and could only be used with the approval of the council. Even then, only one instance of an individual could be awake and aware at any given time, so that when Riffan had served on Long Watch, he’d had to leave his original body in cold sleep in the city of Silk.

But Deception Well was far behind him now. He’d embarked on a new life with new demands, and also, new opportunities. Pasha would see that, and she would consider him an idiot for hesitating over this issue—and she would be right.

Exploration and discovery were the very reasons Riffan had uploaded his ghost to Dragon. So what if he was more accustomed to exploring the galaxy through highly processed images gathered by distant orbital telescopes, rather than in person? He could adapt! He would adapt. He owed it to himself and to Urban and to everyone aboard Dragon who might wish they’d had this opportunity that had been given to him.

He promised himself this expedition to the Rock would be only the first of many adventures to come. And then he split his timeline, creating a duplicate ghost that he sent to the probe.

I’m still here, he realized. Still aboard Elepaio. He was not the copy destined to explore the shipwrecks and the little rocky world. Disappointment flashed across the complex pattern that defined his mind. Relief followed in its wake.

Riffan—that version assigned to the probe—awoke to panic, certain he was on the edge of death. A horrifying pressure crushed him from every side. It prevented him moving or even breathing. His arms were pinned, his legs impossible to bend. He imagined his lungs collapsed, his eyes deformed, his brain reduced to jelly. And he couldn’t see a damned thing—no light at all—though he could hear: a fast ominous arrhythmic scattershot of clicks and clunks that had him imagining this container so determined to crush him might change tactics and fly apart at any moment. Corruption and chaos! he thought. Why did I have to be this version of me?

The plan called for the probe to dump velocity as it approached the planetoid—a violent deceleration that would allow it to slip into orbit. A crushing deceleration.

Once in orbit, the probe would separate into its components. The surveillance and communications module would break away from the cargo capsule, and then the capsule would partition, its two pods exploding apart—Urban in one, Riffan in the other.

Riffan’s life depended on a tether designed to shoot out at a predetermined target. On impact, the tether’s hot zone would bond, forming an anchor to prevent his momentum from carrying him away in some useless and fatal direction.

Riffan thought the whole scheme quite precarious, but he was only a copy of himself after all. An expendable copy. A copy created to be left behind.

Shit, shit, shit.

The pod burst open—or so Riffan surmised in the seconds that followed. In the moment he was only aware of a sudden release of pressure, starlight everywhere, cool air rushing into his lungs only to rush out again in a choked scream as he gave vent to his terror.

This was his first experience in open space, the first time he’d worn a skin suit. Not exactly a gentle introduction.

Breathe, he ordered himself.

The suit fit like a thick, insulating second skin. A muzzle over his nose and mouth fed him delightful cool air. Through the clear visor he saw a black mass slowly roll into his view frame. It appeared infinitely large, quenching stars. Then it slid away, and a multicolored blaze of stars rose sedately above its horizon. Moments later, another dark shape moved into his field of view.

Oxygenated blood must have begun to reach his brain because it came to him that he was slowly spinning.

Aboard Elepaio, Urban watched the light-speed delayed images sent from the probe. Riffan’s ghost hovered beside him.

The probe had conducted a detailed survey of the planetoid on its approach. It had found no artificial structures, no outgassing, no ice deposits. Nothing to hint at life or at mechanical activity. If anything was there, it was hidden, and there was no time to conduct a more thorough search. Elepaio would not remain within communications range for long.

That was why the probe had gone in fast and burned out its reef, dumping velocity in a hard deceleration. Now it swung around the Rock in a low, slow orbit. One set of cameras continued to study the terrain, but Urban watched the series of images generated by the second camera set, assigned to survey the shipwrecks.

The Chenzeme ship was a fragment. Only half its hull remained. It tumbled bow over broken-midsection in an extremely low orbit.

“What could have done that?” Riffan asked in a fearful whisper. He did not seem to expect an answer and Urban did not offer one.

The two other ships rode in higher orbits as if they’d been deliberately parked. Nothing about them suggested they were Chenzeme, but neither did they resemble one another.

The smaller of the two, the one that was the source of the beacon, was not even a quarter of the length and circumference of Dragon. By its size and its design, Urban recognized it as a fusion-powered starship of the migration—the same class of ship as Null Boundary had been—large enough to transit between worlds while carrying hundreds of passengers in cold sleep. The frontier had been populated by such ships.

The other starship was in a slightly lower orbit. It was huge, close to Dragon in size. Along the tapered cylinder of its hull Urban could see the blown-out remnants of longitudinal ridges that might once have been vent tubes similar to Dragon’s, suggesting it had been powered by a reef—but he was sure it was no Chenzeme ship. The dimensions were wrong and there was no indication of even a glossy remnant of philosopher cells.

Both ships had been breached, but the pattern of damage indicated a destructive force originating from within their hulls—suggesting to Urban that each crew had made the desperate decision to scuttle their own ship.

Riffan groped for the tether that was supposed to be anchored to the chest of his skin suit. It had to be there. If it wasn’t there, he was going to spin away into some uncontrolled eccentric orbit and no doubt eventually collide catastrophically with one of the dead starships.

Relief washed through him as his gloved hands found the tether, closed around it. The gloves translated the feel of the line. Solid. Not like a rope, but like a thin rod. Its molecular structure had expanded to absorb his wild momentum, gradually reducing his velocity so that he had not been fatally crushed when he hit the end of the line.

The tether vibrated. It would be contracting now, arresting his gyrations and drawing him in to… what?

The DI guiding the probe had been in charge of choosing their landing site. If it sighted an obvious structure or entrance on the surface of the planetoid, they were to have touched down there. If not, their target would be the wrecked ship that was the source of the beacon.

Riffan held onto the tether. Faint blue dots glowed along its length. He felt infinitely grateful to have them there. Everything else was so dark. The stars so far away. Those little blue lights gave him something to focus on, a receding line that pointed to a black bulk. He could not tell how far away that dark object was, but that would be where the tether had anchored itself, its holdfast molecularly bonded to the surface… whatever that surface might be.

Riffan’s skin suit spoke in a brusque female voice. “Boosting default visibility.” The voice sounded unexpectedly familiar, leaving Riffan to worry that it had spoken to him before but he’d been too crushed and frightened to properly notice. He hoped he hadn’t missed anything too important.

“Thank you,” he murmured, though of course no response was required because it was only the generated voice of his skin suit’s DI.

The optics of his visor shifted. The luminous intensity of the distant stars remained the same, but the black mass ahead of him brightened, acquiring detail. Definitely not the planetoid. He decided he was looking at the smooth outer hull of one of the orbiting starships. Quite large—and looming larger against the stars with each passing second. He didn’t think it’d be long before he made contact.

“Urban?” he asked tentatively.

A response came at once through his atrium:

*I’m here. It’s all good. His voice calm, unrattled. *Selected target is the beacon ship. Scout-bots have already been released. And then he added, *Hell of a ride in, huh?

Anger was almost refreshing. “You’re insane, you know that?”

Urban laughed. *Hey, we made it.

“Where are you, anyway?” Riffan asked, turning his head to search for Urban. “I don’t—” He broke off, his attention caught by the sight of the planetoid’s surface slowly passing by below him.

The Rock did not look so tiny from his present low orbit. Instead, it looked planetary in scale.

Despite his enhanced optics, the surface of the Rock remained dim, its rugged impact craters appearing flattened under starlight that arrived at nearly the same intensity from every direction. He turned to look at those stars—and shuddered as an atavistic fear of falling swept over him. He felt as if he was falling into those stars, so unreachably far he would be falling forever.

Squeezing his eyes shut, Riffan clutched at the tether, his heart hammering.

“Twenty seconds until termination,” the suit informed him.

Termination?

Riffan opened his eyes again to see that the bulk of the shipwreck was approaching rather swiftly. Wasn’t this tether supposed to control his speed? Prevent him from crashing so hard he knocked himself out?

As if in answer, he felt a sharp, sideways jerk. Following the line of blue lights, he could see that the tether had bent at a point many meters ahead of him. Now, instead of racing straight at the hull, he moved at a sedate speed, swinging in at an angle.

His leisurely approach allowed time to look around. Not necessarily a good thing. He felt dizzy and disoriented as his brain struggled to decide if he was adrift alongside a great vertical wall or descending toward a horizontal plane. In either case, he felt quite small beside the immense hull, and awed by the myriad tiny scars marring its surface, testimony to past interstellar crossings and the unavoidable impacts of high-speed molecules.

He wondered why the hull had not self-repaired. It chilled him to think the ship had died before that task could be done—a somber thought that reminded him he was not going to get out of there. A ghost would escape, but not this version of him. His heart fluttered in the rush of a quiet, desperate fear.

You are the ghost, he told himself, unsure if this was truth or lie.

Sudden, startling motion anchored him back in the present. His gaze instinctively tracked it. A stick figure: four thin jointed legs, each half a meter in length, attached to an ovoid central point a few centimeters in size. It cartwheeled across the hull. Not alone. He glimpsed three more objects just like it, disappearing in different directions.

Scout-bots. There were ten of them altogether, somewhere. They’d been dropped off by the probe, just as he’d been.

Seeing those bots brought Riffan’s mind back to the task. He reminded himself that there would be only a few hours to explore. Focus on that, he told himself. Do the job. And remember: You’re lucky to be here.

He looked ahead to where the arc of his approach would take him, and he spotted Urban at last, floating a few meters above the edge of a gaping fissure torn open in the side of the starship.

The fissure was at least fifty meters long, half that in width. It looked as if the ship had ruptured from the inside. Torn and jagged sheets of bio-mechanical tissue had burst outward before freezing in the chill of the void, forming colossal, glass-edged blades that stood all around the perimeter of the wound.

The probe relayed multiple data streams to Elepaio, allowing Urban to monitor the planet, along with the activity of the scout-bots as they dispersed across the hull or dove into the opening torn into the ship’s side.

Each time a scout-bot’s leg tapped the deck it fused briefly, sampling the substrate, analyzing its composition. The hull itself, though crystallized and inactive, proved to be typical bio-mechanical tissue, its structure identical to that of Elepaio, confirming for Urban that this was one of the great ships of the frontier.

There were no active defensive Makers on the hull, though some of the bots detected frozen molecular fragments that matched known designs.

“Have a look,” Riffan urged him. “We’re getting a sketch of the interior.”

Urban looked up from the molecular reports.

Two scout-bots had descended into the fissure. The data they returned was being used to create a three-dimensional schematic map. It floated above the library floor, drawn in glowing white lines. It showed the fissure descending through what looked like solid tissue to a horizontal opening far below. Probably a deck. The schematic brightened as translucent colors filled the area of the open deck: a temperature gradient.

“It shouldn’t be warm down there,” Urban said, his rising tension reflected in his voice. “Looks like we found something.”

Riffan sounded distressed when he said, “We can’t warn them.”

“No.” The light-speed lag prevented a conversation. “But they have the same data. They see what we see.”

“They’ll know when to back out,” Riffan said, though he didn’t sound convinced. “I mean, if it’s dangerous…” His voice trailed off.

“It doesn’t matter,” Urban reminded him.

Only the ghosts would be returning. Riffan was having a hard time with that idea and despite the force of his earlier argument, Urban didn’t like it either. He remembered the first time he’d had to dissolve his body… well, he didn’t remember it, because he was the ghost who’d escaped. His core consciousness had remained behind, trapped in a dying husk, no way out. His visit to Long Watch was only the second time he’d abandoned a body, but he’d planned for it, so the process had been easy.

“Yes, you’re right,” Riffan said with a reluctant nod. “Their fate has already been decided.” He turned to look again at the map and exclaimed, “Hey… is that something moving in the interior?”

Startled, Urban followed his pointing finger and saw, at the edge of the deck’s mapped space, the vague suggestion of a humanoid figure. He scowled. Riffan had an over-active imagination. “It’s not moving.”

“I saw it move.”

“It could be the body of one of the crew. It might be just a skin suit.”

“I saw it move,” Riffan insisted. “I’ll run that segment again and—”

On the deck, tags flashed at either side of the mapped space, reporting the same status for both scout-bots: Signal lost.

Urban had expected to lose contact once the bots were deep enough into the interior that the hull blocked their transmissions. He had not expected to lose contact this soon—and not simultaneously.

More ominous, the beacon ceased to bleat.

“Shit,” Riffan whispered. “And we can’t warn them.”

Urban’s answer was grim and pragmatic. “They already know.”