Edges

Chapter 24

Urban’s ghost streamed in from the returning outrider, Elepaio. Rejoining with his core self, he possessed the memories of both timelines. He had been present when Griffin was captured, the outriders rebuilt, the gee deck finished, the ship’s company resurrected, and a consensus reached to keep Tanjiri as their first destination. He had also been present at the Rock when the marooned entity spoke to him. Both pasts equally real and already integrated into the totality of his experiences.

Riffan’s ghost would follow him in, and then the rest of the data gathered during the fly-by.

He turned to Clemantine, who lay asleep beside him in the bed they shared in her cottage. It was ship’s night outside. Quiet but for a few crickets, and dark. If lights were on in the other cottages, they were hidden behind window screens. He triggered a slight glow in the walls, enough to see her shape. He kissed her cheek until she awoke.

“What is it?” she murmured.

He purred deep in his throat, and then confessed, “God, I’ve missed you.”

She pushed him away, far enough that she could sit up. “You’re back, aren’t you? Tell me what you saw.”

So he did, while the data streamed in—chemical analyses, spectral analyses, log files, video, and his own brief summary of his findings—all downloading into Dragon’s library.

Clemantine willed the lights to a brighter setting. She studied him, looking skeptical, worried. “I don’t like to think of your avatar gone like that, into the hands of some… monster.”

“I terminated.”

“You know that?”

“You know I would have.”

“But there’s no record of it. No data on how you were taken down—and that leaves us vulnerable. Without data on what happened, how do we improve our defenses for the next time?”

That was the problem he’d been wrestling with throughout the return journey—and not much to show for it. But he was saved from having to answer when a query reached his atrium. “Hold on,” he told her. “Vytet wants to talk. I’ll link you in.” Then to Vytet, “Go ahead.”

“I’ve read your summary,” Vytet said—a feminine voice tonight, though her tone was flat. A mask for anxiety? “I think we’ve got an immediate problem.”

“What kind of a problem?” Urban asked. “The data’s not corrupt?”

“No. The data is good, what I’ve seen of it, anyway. I haven’t had time to go over it in detail, but so far it all—”

“What’s the problem, Vytet?” Clemantine said, cutting her off.

An audible sigh. “The mission summary. It concerns me. The shipwrecks—at least the two human ships—Urban, you think those crews scuttled their ships to keep the entity from escaping.”

“Yes. That’s how it looked.”

“But you got away untouched?”

“Yes, because only the probe went into the system. Elepaio never got close. No data viruses got into the library.”

“Yes,” Vytet said, and now she sounded impatient. “Yes, all that should have meant you were clean, but there is a glamour surrounding the returning outrider.”

Clemantine looked at Urban, her fine eyebrows raised in question. “A glamour?” she repeated. “What does that mean?”

“Come to the library,” Vytet said. “I’ll show you.”

Vytet had become a female version of the dark-haired man she’d been, her black eyes glittering as she turned to greet Urban and Clemantine. The Apparatchiks were with her in the library, all six of them. A rare gathering, signaling a critical issue.

“Here,” Vytet said, gesturing at a large frameless window. “Have a look.”

Like all the outriders, Elepaio was stealthed. As it returned to the fleet, its position had been unknown until the data came in. But as soon as Vytet received its position information, she’d turned Dragon’s telescopes on it.

The image she’d captured showed the expected faint infrared signature of Elepaio’s hull, but there was also an indistinct blur encircling the bow.

“It’s not surprising you didn’t notice it,” Vytet said. “The outrider’s hull cameras are designed to see distant objects. This… fog, this mist, I think it’s indicative of something caught in the field of Elepaio’s reef and energized by that interaction. The outrider is so small, you see, that the reef’s effect extends beyond its hull.”

“This is not a processing error?” Clemantine asked. “Or a flaw in the lens?”

“I hoped it was only that,” Vytet said. “Or degassing from the bio-mechanical tissue, caused by impact damage.”

“There was an impact,” Urban said. “There were two.”

“Yes. I saw that in the summary. I asked the Apparatchiks to evaluate the finding.”

“There is no flaw in the lens,” the Astronomer said.

The Engineer crossed his arms. “If the aura was the result of impact, I would expect to see an uneven mix of particulate elements and frozen gases. What we see here is an evenly distributed particulate cloud.”

“Ah, shit,” Urban whispered.

He composed a message to Elepaio, ordering it to stand off, to approach no closer to the fleet. That might not make a difference. The light-speed lag meant the message would take time to reach the little ship and then Elepaio would require additional time to arrest its momentum and change its course. But he had to try.

A submind shunted his consciousness to the high bridge, plunging him into a weave of fuming, muttering dialogs, the philosopher cells edgy and suspicious as they debated the idea of the returning outrider.

Their interest was a bad sign. Long ago, Urban had instilled in the cells an acceptance of the outriders. He’d hooked into their instinctive concept of ancillary ships, training them to regard the outriders as harmless companions that should be tracked but never targeted. Now, this rule was being questioned.

He perceived an image only a few seconds old, recurring among the braided thoughts. Distinct, bright points of heat like a necklace circling the bow of Elepaio.

Vytet had called it a glamour, a mist, a fog. The hull cells saw it more clearly. A swarm of tiny devices that had hitched a ride in the propulsion field spilling over from Elepaio’s reef.

Urban had seen pits open on the rogue world but he’d had no hint of their purpose. Now he knew. The pits had opened to allow an inner mechanism to shoot millions, maybe billions, of small projectiles across his path. Elepaio had been struck twice, high-energy collisions that rattled the hull. At least one had successfully released its cargo.

He’d never suspected.

A submind arrived from the library, bringing a memory of Vytet saying, It’s significant that the devices did not attempt to infiltrate Elepaio, but instead used it to get close to the fleet.

Sooth. The heavily armed coursers had been the target all along and he had transported the alien devices, provided them with a means to reach the fleet.

Anger spiked—at himself, at the situation, at the entity on the Rock. The philosopher cells welcomed his anger, amplified it. Anger was their baseline state; it drove their murderous instinct.

A proposition was offered:

Urban agreed to this without hesitation: – kill it –

Why not? Each device in the swarm surely carried data, along with molecular tools to translate that data into physical form once it reached an appropriate substrate. Each device, a seed to resurrect the entity.

– kill it! –

It was the only logical response in the face of potential alien invasion.

Consensus swept across the cell field.

Clemantine arrived on the high bridge just as the steerage jets fired, initiating a slow rotation that would bring Dragon’s gamma-ray gun in line to vaporize Elepaio and sterilize the space around the outrider. She took a moment for review and assessment. Urban expected her to object when she grasped his intention. Instead, she said, *Yes. Whatever the cost, don’t allow this infestation.

Griffin’s philosopher cells sighted the invasive matter around Elepaio. They had no concept of such a phenomenon, so they tagged it as likely hostile. At the same time, they launched multiple searches into the cell field’s deep memory, seeking a similar situation, a past experience to help them interpret what they saw and to suggest a method of attack.

Clemantine didn’t know what to make of it either until a submind arrived and memories unfolded. Her first action was to reinforce the classification of “hostile.”

Through the ship’s senses, she looked ahead to the gleam of Dragon’s philosopher cells, a hundred kilometers distant, and read the message contained in their microsecond flashes:

Sooth. It was the logical next step.

Bracing herself against the terrible sense of dissociation she knew would come, she shunted power to the gun.

*Urban, Clemantine warned.

The urgency in her voice let him know that the Clemantine who spoke was his Clemantine, the version of her on Dragon’s high bridge, and not the icy mistress of Griffin.

*I see it, he answered, apprehending the cause of her concern.

An updated image of Elepaio circulated through the philosopher cells’ conversation. In it, the discrete warm points indicating the presence of matter energized by the reef could no longer be seen. Elepaio had lost its glamour. It appeared now to be clean.

A submind brought a memory of the most recent telescope image. It confirmed the hull cells’ observation: The glamour was gone.

Clemantine said, *The devices have launched from Elepaio.

*Sooth.

The devices would try to reach Dragon or Griffin. No way to know how widely they were scattered or how fast they might be coming. And it was possible, even likely, that each device was really a package of smaller weapons. That’s how he would have done it—loaded each with thousands or tens of thousands of needle projectiles like those he’d used to infect Griffin.

He canceled his decision to use the gamma-ray gun:

– hold fire –

No need to sacrifice Elepaio when the invasive devices were already gone.

– hold fire: don’t shoot –

He dumped the argument at a hundred thousand points across Dragon’s cell field.

– hold fire –

To his surprise, the philosopher cells affirmed this argument. Reinforced it:

But Clemantine objected: *What are you doing? We can still hit the swarm of devices while they’re on their way in.

*They’ve already scattered. The time delay. The immense span of space. I’d have to burn out the reef to cover it all.

*Then burn it! You can’t let the swarm hit us.

The philosopher cells picked up on her mood, echoed it, their hostility swiftly rising.

*All right.

He envisioned Elepaio. Sent that image to the cells with a warning: – do not target –

He shared with them the idea of an incoming infectious swarm—a concept they understood because he’d deployed it against them in the distant past.

The cells established a summary and proposed a response:

He made no objection, but emphasized the protection he’d placed on Elepaio: – do not target –

The philosopher cells carried out the maneuver, orienting Dragon so its bow faced Elepaio, presenting the smallest profile to the incoming swarm.

To Clemantine, he said, *Tell her.

*She knows everything I know, Clemantine assured him.

As if to prove it, Griffin’s hull cells signaled their intention to fire. Seconds later, a high-energy lance punched through the wide gulf between Dragon and Elepaio. Blind strikes, repeating. Again. And again.

Excitement ignited among Dragon’s philosopher cells. With no input from Urban they flashed a microsecond message to Griffin, urging the companion ship to continue——while commencing their own high-energy sweep of the suspect region.

Urban mentally braced as power leaped from the reef to the gun, the force of it twisting, tearing, destabilizing the reality in which he existed. Knife slices from a parallel universe.

The beam hunted blindly through the gulf, while across the surface of the reef, polyps began to immolate, burned up by the energy they channeled, burned off in micro-thin layers, blue fire eroding down into the lifeless depths that lay beneath the reef’s living veneer.

The same process underway on Griffin.

How many layers could be lost? He didn’t know—but too many, and the reef might not recover.

Enough!

He dropped the hammer of command: – stop –

Simultaneously messaging the other Clemantine: *Stop! Don’t burn out your reef.

In a cold, calm voice, easily distinguished from his Clemantine, she answered, *I’m done… for now.

Was there an unspoken implication in her words? His Clemantine thought so. She said, *If the entity gets through, we fight it. We aren’t going to yield either ship.

*We’ll do all we can, the mistress of Griffin agreed. *But warn the company. Be ready to evacuate.

The philosopher cells kept watch, and eventually they sighted sparks of plasma, barely discernible, flaring to brief life in the laser-strafed gulf. Signatures of vaporizing matter, each spark marking the destruction of a vector of infection.

Thousands of them.

No way to know if they’d gotten them all.

In the library, Clemantine said, “If even one gets through…”

“Sooth. I know it.”

On the high bridge, Urban prepared the philosopher cells for the possibility of invasion, for imminent infestation. They rallied molecular defenses. The resulting metabolic activity was so extreme it caused the temperature just beneath the cell field to climb. Aggressive preparations, but he remembered too well how swiftly his avatar had vanished after he’d entered the shipwreck… and he did not believe it would be enough.

We can help each other.

Alone in Griffin’s library, Clemantine listened again to the recorded voice of the entity at the Rock. Her ghost lip curled, showing ghost teeth—an ancient threat response.

We will help each other.

A scary monster lurking in the dark beyond the hull.

I mean you no harm.

Disingenuous words, given the thousands of vector devices found and destroyed by the laser barrage. What harm would ensue if a surviving device found its way to Dragon? No one knew. No one wanted to know. Engineers—both human and Apparatchik—worked to enhance the defense, laboring over molecular, incendiary, and mechanical responses to potential invasion.

Should all their efforts fail, Griffin would become the fallback position, their only possible refuge—though it could not substitute for Dragon.

Griffin had no habitable space and so it could offer no chance of a physical existence, not in the immediate future. And the library did not have the computational resources to support so many ghosts. But Griffin’s archive could contain them. Its archive now held updated copies of every member of the ship’s company. Insurance, should the worst occur.