Edges

Chapter 2

Like Long Watch, Deception Well’s array of telescopes orbited on the periphery of the system, beyond the nebula’s obscuring dust. They formed a great circle, so far from the central star a single orbit required two and a half centuries to complete.

Riffan had pursued his position aboard Long Watch to gain access to those telescopes. He’d undertaken the requisite two years of Defense Force training to earn time on them and he’d used every minute he’d been allotted.

Half his telescope time had gone to searching the stellar frontier. The other half he’d used to look much farther back along the route of human migration, turning the lenses toward that distant region of space known as the Hallowed Vasties, where the human species had begun.

Great civilizations had once existed there, but all observational evidence suggested those civilizations were gone, lost in a catastrophic collapse centuries ago, though they were so far away no one knew what had happened or what might be left. No one had gone back to look because the resources of the frontier had been consumed in the long defensive struggle against the Chenzeme’s robotic ships.

Riffan, gazing at the projected line of unidentified objects on track to enter the nebula, could no longer doubt he was about to engage in an action in that war.

His gaze shifted to take in the span separating Long Watch from Deception Well. Nearly six light-hours lay between them. It would be hours more before the security council even knew there was a threat. Riffan could not receive timely orders or advice. Whatever action he took he would take under his own authority, and the fate of his people could very well depend on the choices he made over the next few hours.

He ought to be frantic under that burden, on the edge of meltdown, yet he felt strangely detached. In shock, he supposed. He was aware of being afraid—muscles taut, heart running in a giddy beat, his breathing a little ragged—but as he weighed the array of threats they faced his mind felt clear.

Despite the known hazard of the luminous courser and the potential threat of a hypothetical dark twin, the line of six undefined objects worried him most.

The Defense Force training they’d all undergone had covered every known means of Chenzeme attack, but had failed to describe an attack like this one. Pasha had searched the library, seeking any mention, any hint of such a phenomenon, but she’d found nothing so far.

“Working hypothesis,” Riffan said aloud, his voice trembling only a little. He gestured at the orange lines marking the widely separated paths of the anomalies. “These objects originated with the courser but are now independent of it, powered by their own zero-point propulsion reefs. They are likely small, stealthed, designed to penetrate the nebula while carrying some specialized weapon of unknown capabilities.”

“That ‘unknown’ aspect,” Pasha said heavily. “That part’s brutal. Is it unknown because it’s new? Never been used against anyone in our branch of history? Or is it unknown because no one survived the encounter?”

“Right,” Riffan said.

History was understood to branch. Given the distances between settled worlds there had never been much trade in information and after the war with the Chenzeme had gotten underway there had been none. So the history they possessed was only that branch lived by their ancestors. Distant worlds around the frontier would have their own legacies—if those worlds still survived.

Many worlds had not—a stark fact that compelled Riffan to say, “It doesn’t matter which it is. Either way, we do what is necessary—whatever is necessary—to prevent the devices from reaching the nebula.”

He looked across the chamber to Zira. “If you could get a DI working on navigational options. Develop a course that will bring us within effective range of the intruding devices, optimized so we can hit all of them over the smallest possible span of time. I don’t want to have to chase them down.”

She drew back, looking horrified at this request. “Riffan, if we move the ship while the courser is in position to observe us, that could give it incentive to come in-system.”

“Right,” Riffan said again. “I understand that and I agree it’s a risk.” He realized he was responding as an academic rather than a military officer, but given Zira’s obvious emotional fragility he thought that might be best. “We are a warship,” he reminded her. “We have fire power. We were designed to take on the Chenzeme.” He called on his acting skills again, making sure to sound confident—though neither Long Watch nor Silent Vigil had ever been tested in battle. “Anyway,” he added quietly, “if there’s a dark courser already in-system, we need to draw it out.”

“I agree,” Pasha snapped. “We need to act. But let’s remember that this projection is showing us estimated positions. Until we know what’s out there and exactly where it is, we’ve got nothing to shoot at. Right now, what we need more than anything is data. We can get that by using active radar. If we illuminate the unknown devices, we can pinpoint their locations, map trajectories and velocities. And maybe expose the dark courser, if one is out there.”

“No,” Zira said, hovering over her workstation with fist clenched. “Active radar is too much of a risk. It will expose us. It will pinpoint our position.”

“We’ll have moved position long before the signal reaches the courser,” Pasha countered.

Riffan considered it, considered what he knew of Pasha. He’d known her all his life. They were a similar age. They’d gone to school together. Even so, she had never been more than a casual friend, someone to say hello to. The truth was, Riffan had always found her uncomfortably blunt, even acerbic. Intimidating, too. But he’d never seen her rattled, and he was glad to have her on the bridge.

He said, “Pasha, I think you’re right. We’ve got too many unknowns. Zira, I want you to plot that course, and Pasha, I’m authorizing the radar scan.”

“On it,” she said, cool and professional.

Riffan hoped it was the right decision. Every order he gave was automatically relayed in-system. Any order he gave could be countermanded by the Defense Force chief, but if that happened, he wouldn’t know about it for twelve hours.

To Riffan’s surprise, the bridge door snapped open, the luminous white material of the flesh-soft wall retracting to create an oval entrance.

Apart from the bridge crew—already present—there were only six students aboard Long Watch. All should have known to stay clear of the bridge during this emergency. Riffan opened his mouth, ready to remind the transgressor of that, but then he caught sight of the intruder and realized she was not one of the students.

The gentle reprimand he’d intended died on his tongue as an unknown woman glided in. She was tall and muscular, her skin golden-brown, her hair black and very short, her features bold, strong. Tiny gold tattoos glinted on her earlobes. She reached back for a hand-hold that sprouted from the wall just in time for her to grasp it, arresting her momentum with expert grace.

He cocked his head, trying to puzzle out how she had come to be there. They were isolated. On the edge of the system. Visitors did not just drop in.

Gasps and astonished protests greeted her entrance:

“Whoa.”

“What?”

“Where did she—?”

Riffan’s atrium automatically queried hers for an identity, but he didn’t need its help. “I know you,” he said, pushing away from his workstation to get a better look at her past the projection of the nebula. “At least… I know of you.” He’d never seen her before, not in the flesh, but he knew who she was. Everyone did. She was a figure out of history, out of mythology. “You’re Clemantine,” he concluded in astonishment.

Clemantine had been part of Deception Well’s founding generation and later she’d ventured into Chenzeme space, part of the Null Boundary Expedition. She’d been the only one of a four-person company of adventurers to return home. The zero-point propulsion reef had been exclusively a Chenzeme technology until Clemantine brought it back with her, giving the people of Deception Well the means to defend themselves—giving them the technology to build warships of their own.

He’d had no idea Clemantine kept an avatar on this ship.

Clemantine had followed the conversation on the bridge through an open audio channel, so she knew where things stood. Gambling her celebrity would give her some measure of authority, she said, “Get that radar sweep underway. We need to know what’s out there—and given the distance, it’s going to take hours to get any returns.”

“Yes, ma’am.”

This response came from a woman, identified by Clemantine’s DI as Pasha Andern, an exobiologist. Short, white-blond hair floated in a layered halo around Pasha’s alert face. She had the slim, slight body type of those who favored efficiency over raw physical strength, an impression reinforced by the beige tunic and pale-green leggings she wore: simple, pragmatic clothing. Pasha added, “It’s an honor to have you here, ma’am.”

In contrast to Pasha, the ship’s commander-of-the-moment, Riffan Naja, had some size to him—well-muscled and emphatically male without being pretentious. Riffan agreed, “It is an honor. But why are you here? How long have you been here? Oh…” His confusion gave way to realization. “You were waiting for this day, weren’t you?”

“For the day the Chenzeme returned?” Clemantine asked him, startled at the bitterness she heard in her own voice. “Yes.”

“Then you knew they’d come again.” This was spoken by the engineer, Zira Lin. Each syllable sharp with anger, her words an accusation.

“Of course,” Clemantine answered. “Did you let yourself believe otherwise?”

A warm flush rose in Zira’s cheeks. She looked away, rolling a shoulder as if to deny such a naive thought. But truth was in her words. “We hoped,” she said. “Some of us dared to hope, anyway. It’s been more than seven centuries since the last sighting.”

Clemantine had no patience for such a limited perspective. “What are seven centuries,” she asked, “when the Chenzeme have waged their autonomous war for thirty million years? A war of that duration won’t end in your lifetime or in mine, however many centuries we might survive.”

“At least we have survived,” Zira answered, though she sounded chastened. “Here in the Well. Some say we’re the last to survive. That between the Chenzeme and the collapse of the Hallowed Vasties, the human age has come to an end.”

She paused as if to give Clemantine an opening to argue, but Clemantine did not. Riffan spoke up instead, “I don’t believe that.”

“Do you believe that?” Zira pressed as if Clemantine owed her an answer.

Clemantine consented, giving all the answer there was: “No way to know.”

The truth was, hunkered down as they were in the shelter of the nebula, not daring to venture beyond it, not since the Null Boundary Expedition anyway, they were abysmally ignorant of the status of other star systems. Still, Clemantine did not hold much hope.

Deception Well survived because of the nebula’s ancient inhuman technology. No other reason. And no one knew how far the robotic Chenzeme ships had ventured in their war of extermination. They might have pushed past the frontier, in among the star systems of the Hallowed Vasties. If so, had they found anything left there to destroy?

“It doesn’t matter if we’re the last or not,” Clemantine concluded. “Our duty is the same—to survive.”

For Zira, this was answer enough. Tears shone briefly in her eyes, crystalline, trembling in the zero gravity until she wiped them away.

Forty-nine minutes later Riffan had an update on the courser’s relative velocity and a solid estimate of its trajectory. Together, those figures assured him that it would bypass the Well. At closest approach, TH-6 would still be light-hours beyond the measurable edge of the nebula with a velocity too high to be captured by the system’s gravity or to survive passage through the nebula’s debris field.

It might still try to dump that velocity. Turn about and return. But such a maneuver would require months, maybe years. Someone else would be designated as commander of Long Watch by then. So Riffan put the courser out of his mind, focusing instead on the suspected weapons swarm.

He watched and he waited, enduring the slow unfolding of time as radar waves propagated outward, moving at the speed of light but still requiring most of an hour to reach the nearest target, and an equivalent time for the reflected waves to return to Long Watch.

At last the first faint signals arrived. A DI compiled them into a blurry image, revealing the shape and size of the leading object in the swarm. They all studied it—Riffan and Pasha, Enzo and Zira, and Clemantine.

Zira spoke first: “It looks too small to be well armed.”

The object was like a dart, thin and elongated, only seventy meters from bow to stern and just a few meters in breadth.

Zira said, “It’s large enough to house a zero-point propulsion reef and enough bio-mechanical tissue to insulate a thin core of computational strata—but not much more than that.”

“Maybe it’s a plague ship,” Enzo suggested grimly.

Pasha proposed another possibility. “Maybe the swarm is meant to scout the system, chart our defenses and our weaknesses.”

Both suggestions sounded plausible to Riffan. He turned to Clemantine, wanting her interpretation, knowing that she’d endured a more harrowing experience of the Chenzeme than anyone else alive. He was taken aback by the shock he saw on her face. “Do you know what it is?” he asked her.

She bit her lip. He heard a hoarse tremor in her words as she said, “I’ve seen the form before.”

Pasha, eyes half closed in mad linkage with the library, said, “It’s the same dimensions as the ship that brought you home!”

“Oh, hey!” Enzo shouted in excitement, one hand tapping and stroking his control panel. “Riffan, I’ve got a radio transmission.”

“Radio?” Riffan echoed in confusion. Communications out of Deception Well came by laser relay—and it was far too soon for that.

Enzo said, “It’s a repeating segment. Voice. Human voice. Not encoded. Here, listen.” He touched a finger to the screen of his workstation and a man’s voice emanated from hidden speakers: Don’t shoot. Don’t shoot. A repeated phrase spoken in the language of Deception Well, but with an accent like Clemantine’s, only heard among the older generations:

Don’t shoot. I mean no harm. My name is Urban, formerly of the starship Null Boundary. Like Clemantine before me, I’ve come home. Then he laughed and added, Are you listening to this, Clemantine? I know you made it home, that you brought them the zero-point reef because I’ve detected its signature here. We won, Clemantine. We learned how to beat the Chenzeme. This courser you see? It’s mine. I took it. I hijacked it and made it my own. So don’t shoot. I’ve sent small outrider ships in-system as a communications relay. They’re harmless, but through them I can send you the history of the Null Boundary Expedition. You’ll want that. Respond to this. Open a data gate. And set up a resurrection pod. I’m sending my pattern through. Do it quickly. I won’t be in range for long.

A tonal signal followed, indicating a break, and then the message started to repeat: Don’t shoot. Don’t shoot… .

Riffan’s heart hammered in shock, in suspicion, in a desperate hope that it was all true.

He had not been born when Clemantine returned from the Null Boundary Expedition. In those days the Well had possessed only paltry defenses, but even so, Clemantine had approached cautiously in the tiny ship Messenger.

Excitement cut across this line of thought. The object picked up by radar had the same dimensions as Messenger—corroborating evidence that the radio transmission was true. Only someone familiar with the Null Boundary Expedition could have known what those dimensions were.

Clemantine had made her presence known months before she came into range of Deception Well’s orbital guns. Her ghost—an electronic version of her persona—had preceded the ship itself and a physical avatar had been grown for her. She’d testified to the history of the expedition up to the point she’d left it, she’d delivered a library of data, and she’d brought the propulsion reef that powered both Long Watch and Silent Vigil.

She’d been accepted for who she was, but Clemantine had not come back in the company of a Chenzeme courser.

Riffan turned to her as the voice continued to speak its repeated message. “Is it a trick?” he demanded.

Her eyes were closed, her lashes trembling against the pressure of a flood of emotion. “It is probably a trick,” she said in a husky murmur just audible over the recorded laugh. Her head tilted back as she drew a gasping breath like a swimmer surfacing after some long time underwater. “But it is his voice, his inflections, his attitude.” Her eyes opened. She listened—they all listened—until the message finished again.

As the tonal interlude began, she turned to Riffan. In words now sharp and sure she said, “Reply to him. Quickly. As quickly as you can. He can’t be allowed into Silk, not yet. Not until we’re sure. But we can bring him here. Give him the access code to a data gate, accept his pattern. We can examine it while his avatar is assembled. If there’s anything suspicious in it…”

A slight hesitation, that Pasha filled. “Then we end the process,” she said. “And wipe the avatar before he’s live.”

Clemantine’s gaze fixed on Pasha, as if really seeing her for the first time. Riffan thought she must be angry, but after a few seconds she acknowledged Pasha’s words with a slow nod. “Yes. Exactly.” Stern approval in her voice.

Then she turned again to Riffan. “In the meantime I suggest you adjust this ship’s course, take it closer to the swarm, and find the best angle for the guns.” She kicked off the wall and glided toward the still-open doorway.

Before she passed through it, Pasha spoke again. “This is why you’re really here, isn’t it? This is why you’ve spent centuries in cold sleep at this remote post. You were waiting for him, or them…”

Riffan hissed at her, appalled at the impertinence of such a question. Too late. Clemantine caught the edge of the doorway and turned back. Riffan braced for an outburst, a reprimand.

But Clemantine sounded only downcast, not angry. “Not knowing what became of them has been hard,” she confessed to Pasha. “If it is him, I will be grateful to hear his story. But to come here after so long, after all he must have seen, and in such circumstance—” She gestured at the projection. “Who is he now? Not the man I knew.”

With that she went out, and the sides of the door swept in, sealing shut behind her.

The message continued to repeat as Riffan turned to Enzo. “Do as she said,” he instructed. “Reply to him, and send him the key to a data gate.”

“On it.”

“We’ll need to isolate all data that comes in,” Riffan added. “Create a new library for it, separate from ship’s systems.”

Zira said, “I’ll set that up.”

“Thank you, Zira,” Riffan told her. “I’ll work on our trajectory.”

He was grateful they had time to prepare. Given the light-speed delay, it would be nearly two hours before the pattern that defined Urban’s physical incarnation came through—if it was him at all, and not some Chenzeme trick.

This thought cast a shadow on his mind. Even so, he recalled a subset of the words Urban had spoken: We learned how to beat them.

By the Pure First Light, Riffan hoped it was true.