Edges

Chapter 18

Urban’s tether anchored him beside the fissure. He drifted above the sharp sheets of torn and frozen bio-mechanical tissue, eyeing a read-out of data from two scout-bots making their way down the interior wall.

Movement drew his attention away from the display. He cleared it and looked up to see the anchor securing Riffan’s tether migrating across the scarred hull, sliding closer with amoebic motion. At the same time, the tether—morphed now into a rod—bent at a sharp angle, swinging Riffan in, bringing him to a floating stop alongside Urban.

Riffan craned his neck to peer into the fissure.

Far below, a light flashed, briefly illuminating a section of the inner wall. After a few seconds, another flash.

*The scout bots, Riffan said.

“Yes,” Urban acknowledged, speaking aloud. He’d sent scout-bots one and two to survey and map the fissure.

*You’re going in, aren’t you?

“We’re going in.”

Using his atrium, Urban signaled the light-emitting panels on the shoulders of his skin suit to switch on.

“I want you to stay at least ten meters behind me. If you lose your link to the probe, go back up until you get a signal. You’re the relay. I need you to make sure a full record of this gets back to Elepaio.”

*I understand, Riffan said. *But what if I lose your signal?

Urban shrugged. “Come rescue me?”

*Not funny.

“Do what you think is best.”

He followed the scout-bots down, his tether trailing behind him as he glided past the ship’s outermost layer of insulation. The tissue glittered, its frozen crystals catching and reflecting his suit’s light, looking smoother than he’d expected. Maybe some of the rough edges had evaporated into the void over passing centuries.

His goal was to find information, a ship’s log or library that would tell him where the crew had come from, why they’d come and when, and if this site had anything to do with the Hallowed Vasties. And he wanted to know what had happened to them and to their ship, and why they’d left a beacon bleating their location, if they were the ones who’d left it.

He hoped the fissure would reach at least to the outermost deck. It wasn’t likely he’d be able to go any farther than that. The most secure, protected, and sheltered sections of the ship—its cold-sleep cells, computational strata, and core chamber—would be sealed and inaccessible within an insulating cocoon of frozen bio-mechanical tissue. He had no way to get past that, not in the time available, so he had to hope the crew had left some easily accessible record intended to warn the curious of the hazard they had encountered here.

Or maybe they’d thought the scuttled ship was warning enough?

On the periphery of his vision, the three-dimensional map charted by the scout-bots showed his position and Riffan’s in the fissure. He’d descended halfway through the mapped space of the near-vertical walls; Riffan was at least twenty meters above him.

Abruptly, the map expanded horizontally. Urban eyed it as he continued to drift downward. The scout-bots had found a deck. It was a large open area, maybe intended for storage or construction. Translucent colors appeared, indicating a temperature gradient—matter warmer than the uniform frozen temperature of the fissure’s walls.

He shifted his display, accessing direct infrared video from the two scout-bots. Both video feeds showed a deck that was mostly empty. No drifting debris. The only visible structures were several towering cubes. They were set far apart and extended from the deck’s floor to its high ceiling. The sides of the cubes were shingled with leaves of gray… glass? That’s what it looked like, glass shingles warm enough to glow brightly in infrared. But they were not the warmest object captured by the scout-bot’s cameras.

That was the gray-glass figure of a man, standing beyond the blocks, upside down to the orientation of the cameras. Details were hard to discern in the bright blaze of heat, but Urban was certain he saw the figure move—right before the video feed dropped out.

“Riffan,” he said, “stay where you are.”

*What was that? Riffan whispered. And then, *Oh, shit. I’ve lost my link to the probe.

Urban’s skin suit confirmed it. “Uplink lost,” it informed him.

“Go back,” Urban ordered. “Recover the link.”

*What are you going to do?

“I’m going on.”

*Urban—

“Just go!”

He slapped the wall. Shot downward. He wanted to know what they’d found. He wanted video of it to send back to Elepaio.

As he neared the bottom, his tether morphed to slow his descent. His light illuminated a fan-shaped slice of the deck and sparkled against the gray glass that shingled the nearest of the massive cubes.

He looked for the upside-down glass man, but did not see him.

A red light popped on in the periphery of his vision. His skin suit spoke again, informing him in a calm voice, “Suit integrity is under threat.” Urban sucked in a sharp breath. That meant he was under attack but not with a weapon he could directly perceive. The assault was taking place on a molecular scale.

A moment later, the suit spoke again, announcing the failure of Urban’s molecular defenses: “Suit integrity has been compromised.”

Foreign nanomachines had fought past the skin suit’s defenses, breaching it, opening microscopic channels through its fabric. He felt the results as needles of cold that stabbed into his hands, his chest, his eyes.

Only for a moment.

The cold subsided as the suit self-repaired, but the enemy was already inside. Urban cried out as searing heat erupted at the points where his suit had been penetrated. His vision clouded. A battle was being fought across the moist surfaces of his eyes, as well as against the skin of his chest and hands—his defensive Makers against the intruding nanotech.

He clenched his fists against the pain and when, after a few seconds, the pain failed to subside, he knew he had lost. His defensive Makers had failed to protect him, leaving him at the mercy of whatever it was that existed down here.

Urban did not trust the mercy of alien lifeforms.

The pain in his eyes sharpened. He envisioned the attacking nanomachines driving deeper into his head. Soon they would reach his brain, his atrium. God knows what would happen then.

He wasn’t going to let it happen. He wasn’t going to leave any meaningful data for this lifeform to exploit.

No time to prepare a ghost.

Just end it.

“Riffan!” he shouted, hoping his comms still worked. “We’re terminating!”

*What? No! I’m still trying to recover the link.

A memory, searing across Urban’s consciousness: the first time he’d had to terminate. He’d been dying, but still so hard to do. He’d known Riffan wouldn’t be up to it, not without hesitation. So on the way in he’d hacked Riffan’s avatar, setting up a code word that would kick off the termination sequence for both of them. He spoke it.

*No! Riffan screamed.

But the process was already underway. Hosts of Makers erupted from the tendrils of their atriums, replicating madly, consuming brain tissue to do it, converting the content of their skulls into gray goo, devoid of information.

Contact had been lost with the avatars and with scout-bots one and two—the pair that had entered the shipwreck—but Elepaio remained in contact with the probe. Data was still being received. The scout-bots assigned to explore the shipwreck’s hull were still active, while the probe’s cameras continued to watch both the wreck and the planetoid below.

Urban felt a submind drop in. It melded with his ghost, bringing him the knowledge that there was now activity on the planetoid’s surface.

He turned to examine a continuously updating three-dimensional projection of the Rock that floated in the virtual space of Elepaio’s library. All its cracks and craters had been carefully mapped, but that map was now being revised as the seemingly lifeless surface began to change.

The latest images showed black circles that had not been observed before. The features appeared at high points on the planet’s scarred surface: the rims of craters, the peaks of low, folded hills. Perfect circles of darkness. Urban counted ten, then fifteen, then twenty of them. No pattern in their arrangement.

They looked like tiny spots on the face of this little world, but the scale showed them to be at least five hundred meters across. He suspected they were pits, holes in the ground, missile silos maybe. If so, they were huge.

More appeared as the probe continued to advance in its slow orbit, collecting fresh images of the surface.

Urban realized Riffan was now hovering beside him. “Corruption take us,” he whispered. “And chaos too.”

“It’s definitely awake now,” Urban said. “Whatever it is.”

“Let’s see it in infrared.”

The library obliged and each circle shifted from black to blazing white. “Subterranean network,” Riffan said. “Got to be. Significantly warm. Maybe a fusion power source. Impressive how little of that interior heat we were able to detect before the doors opened.”

“Skilled at playing dead,” Urban agreed.

The circles began to pulse, growing briefly brighter—not synchronized, not flaring everywhere at once, not flaring in a discernible pattern—but repeatedly.

“A weapon?” Riffan wondered.

“Not enough power there to harm us.”

“A code?”

“Meant for who?”

Riffan shook his head. “Possible to get scout-bots down there?”

“No. They’ve all been deployed.”

The probe continued its orbital survey but found no more openings. The region below it now appeared to be the same unmarked, lifeless surface they’d first seen.

“Hey,” Riffan said suspiciously. “What’s going on? Do you think there’s no activity in this region?”

“Or is the activity already over with?” Urban asked. “Did silos open here too, but close before we could record them?”

He wanted to do the impossible: Turn the probe around, look again at the area just surveyed, determine if the openings they’d seen were still there. But by the time the probe could survey that region again, they’d be out of communications range.

He turned an uneasy gaze back to the library window that held the latest image of the shipwreck, but there was nothing new to see there.

“Damn,” he whispered, angry because he might never figure out what had just happened.

The voice of a DI interrupted his brooding thoughts. “Contact reestablished with scout-bot one,” it announced. “Current transmission is voice only.”

“It’s recovered,” Riffan whispered in wonder. “Maybe—”

Urban cut him off with a slashing gesture. “It’s not the scout-bot. The scout-bot doesn’t have a voice.” But something was there at the Rock. It had caused him to lose the avatars, it had taken his scout-bots, and now it was playing with him.

A new image of the shipwreck posted. The wreck appeared the same, but the figure of a man could now be seen standing on the ruptured hull, just outside of the torn, frozen tissue surrounding the fissure.

The man was not him. It was not Riffan.

In all likelihood it was also not a man because he was standing naked on the hull without the benefit of a skin suit. Scale was hard to gauge, but Urban guessed him to be of moderate human height. A lean but muscular build, black hair adrift in the zero gravity, his complexion seeming dark in the dim light. His eyes were dark too, cast in shadow as he looked back at the watching probe—which made it feel as if he was looking Urban in the eyes.

“A bio-mechanical entity,” Urban decided.

“Agreed,” Riffan said softly. “We’re dead in there, aren’t we?”

“Yes.”

“It beat us.”

“It did.”

They’d entered the shipwreck protected by Urban’s best defensive Makers, but they had not come out again. Not even a ghost had escaped.

The entity spoke—or at least its mouth moved in an imitation of words that it could not possibly be uttering without the presence of air. Urban heard its words anyway as its voice rode the channel that had formerly belonged to scout-bot one. The voice was human, male, rich in tone, and powerful. It said: “We can help each other.”

Urban had studied history. He was aware there were hundreds of human languages. He’d even learned a few over the long, empty stretches of time he’d lived through. Of all those languages, this voice spoke his language, the one language of Deception Well, and it used the same archaic accent that Urban used.

Fear accelerated his simulated heartbeat. Had his avatar failed to terminate in time? Had this thing harvested information from his mind? He throttled the connection rate to ensure no ghost would be able to get through.

“What did you just do?” Riffan asked when the image failed to update.

“Voice only,” Urban said. “I don’t want its ghost showing up at the data gate.”

“God, no,” Riffan breathed. And then added, “We can’t answer it.”

“No.” The light-speed lag prevented conversation.

Maybe the entity didn’t realize this. Maybe it thought it was speaking to a consciousness housed in the probe. “We will help each other,” it warned.

“It wants off the Rock,” Urban said. He smiled grimly. Shook his head. “Not going to happen. We’re going to stay far, far away.”

That thing was dangerous. Two crews had made the choice to wreck their ships, stranding themselves, rather than allowing this being to escape its isolation. And it had beaten a Chenzeme courser as well as Urban’s best defensive Makers.

He would have to improve his defenses.

That would be difficult without insight on the system that had defeated him. This thought led him to ponder the risks he would be facing in his determination to explore the Hallowed Vasties. Had this entity come from there? Did it represent what was left there, what he could expect to find? He feared it might be so. All the same, he longed to know.

The entity spoke again. It said, “I mean you no harm.” An assurance made unconvincing by its threatening tone.

“I wonder how you got here,” Urban mused aloud. “Was that an accident? Or did a bigger monster exile you?”

“I wish we could talk to it,” Riffan said.

Urban nodded his agreement. Still, “It’s distance that keeps us safe.”

He hoped the entity would speak again, but it did not.

Sometime later, Elepaio struck debris, the concussion made audible in Urban’s virtual environment. Fear gripped him, along with a profound awareness of the fragility of his little ship. He desperately wanted to make it back to Dragon, tell his story. A quick check showed no damage to essential systems. No doubt there was a charred crater in the hull, but it would heal.

Minutes later, a second impact, less brutal than the first.

Nothing after that.

The beacon did not resume.

Days passed. The mystery of the Rock fell ever farther behind them in both space and time. Riffan grew bored with the transit. He disappeared into dormancy, leaving Urban alone to reflect over what they’d found. Not just the entity.

His thoughts kept returning to the two ships of human origin and the decision their crews had made to scuttle them. It pleased Urban to think he’d done better, that he’d escaped relatively unscathed given the superiority of the entity’s nanotechnology. At the least, he’d come away with the knowledge of its existence.

Still, he regretted not learning more, and as time dragged on he began to wonder if he’d done all he could. A familiar self-appraisal. So easy to drift from there into a gyre of regret for things past, lost things, things he had not been able to save.

Once before, an alien nanotechnology had defeated his best efforts to decode it. That time, it had not attacked him, only locked him out.

“I couldn’t save him,” he murmured. A recurring lamentation.

Now, a thousand years on, he’d encountered a being that had easily overwhelmed his best defenses. And he wondered, If I’d had its knowledge back then, its power, would that have made a difference?

Regret weighed on him, and guilt for what had happened—but these were feelings he rejected out of habit. Time flowed in one direction only, life did not grant do-overs, and it was his nature to reject any suggestion of melancholy. A useless emotion. Better to arm up. Be ready. Be stronger, faster, smarter.

Right now he was vulnerable.

He’d done the smart thing by keeping his distance from the Rock. That had let him avoid any risk of contamination… but what had his avatar done?

His avatar was him and he knew what he would have done. The moment he understood his defenses had been breached, he would have terminated. Urban—in any form—was haunted by a deep fear of being hijacked, of having an avatar rebuilt or resurrected without agency, under the control of another. Still—why had the encounter been hostile?

Maybe it had been an accidental conflict. If the entity had sought information and pushed too hard, a nanoscale war could have erupted.

The thing had said, We can help each other.

Was that an apology?

It had been a long time since Urban had encountered anything stronger than himself, a long time since he’d been challenged. He wished he could have learned more.

He considered what it would take to go back to the Rock, even though he knew he would not do it. To reverse Dragon’s momentum and return would require years.

To hell with second-guessing. Better to push on. The Hallowed Vasties lay ahead. He was sure to find ample opportunities there to test his skills and his nerve.

Yet regret persisted, a vaporous presence in his virtual world.

So he edited his ghost, making it less vulnerable to melancholy, to introspection, to boredom. Then he summoned several specialized DIs and with their help he spent the remainder of the return voyage immersed in the task of developing new lines of defensive Makers.