Edges

Chapter 27

Days passed. The containment capsule remained unchanged. It grew no new tendrils. It did not expand. But it maintained a temperature far warmer than the bio-mechanical tissue surrounding it. The heat of internal processes underway.

Riffan followed the situation closely. He could not forget the way he’d conducted himself at the Rock, how he’d let fear blunt good judgment. He’d wasted an opportunity. If he’d done a better job, if he’d responded more intelligently to the entity’s overtures, this whole awkward infestation might have been avoided.

He needed to let go of his provincial attitude and get used to the idea that he was… well, disposable. Any single version of himself anyway. There might be unpleasantness in a demise, but so long as there was another copy, a backup version stashed somewhere, then someone who was him would go on. That’s how Urban looked at things and Riffan could appreciate the logic of it. It was a philosophy that encouraged risk and bold choices in dangerous situations.

They were in a dangerous situation now. All of them under the gun, quite literally, with Griffin trailing at a secure distance, there to ensure Dragon did not become an enemy.

Kona had put it on the ship’s company to find a way out of this mess, to explore every possible option—and Riffan had an idea. A very simple idea. The trouble was, it might kill him—that was the sticking point—it was why he needed to adopt Urban’s philosophy as his own.

He drew a deep breath. “You’ve got this,” he muttered aloud.

The first, careful step was to send a fresh back-up of his ghost to Artemis, from where it would eventually be relayed to Griffin. He did that. Then he checked the personnel map for Urban and found him present at the cottage he shared with Clemantine.

Riffan allowed himself one more deep sigh. Then he rose from where he’d been sitting cross-legged at his breakfast table.

He would need Urban’s help to try his possibly fatal idea.

“Oh, hello, Urban,” Riffan said, working to sound casual. “Could I have a word?”

Urban’s half-closed eyes opened to take in Riffan. “Nothing’s changed,” he said irritably, from where he sat on the stoop of his cottage.

“No, I don’t expect that anything has,” Riffan countered. “That’s the nature of a stalemate. But I’ve been thinking. The entity did try to communicate when we were there at the Rock. It might be willing to do so again, if the setting was not entirely hostile. So I’d like to volunteer to go out there. Take the risk. Face to face, as it were. Try to get it to chat.”

Urban cocked his head. A slight, incredulous smile. “You mean go out there physically. Knock on its door. As it were.”

Riffan noted the sarcasm, but ignored it. “Yes,” he said. “That’s it exactly.” He dropped into a squat, bringing himself to Urban’s level. He balanced easily, arms resting on bent knees. “Most likely nothing will happen. Still, if we can’t get rid of it, our next best step is to try talking to it. Let it know we’re willing to communicate. It would be helpful to understand what it is, what it wants… what it intends to do with the ship.”

“It won’t do anything with the ship,” Urban said. “Because I’ll have Griffin destroy this ship before that happens.”

Riffan suppressed a shiver. “Right. I understand. Nevertheless, I’d like to try.”

“It could infect you,” Urban warned.

“It could have done that already. It could have done that to all of us. But it hasn’t. Look, this thing… if it’s not human, it’s human derived or a human descendant and I’ve come here to study such things. Besides, the more we learn now, the safer we’ll be later.”

Urban stared past him—pondering the proposal?

“You can get me out there, can’t you?” Riffan asked.

Urban cocked his head, refocusing on Riffan. “I think so. Understand that you’ll be cut off out there. Isolated. I won’t leave a passage open that it can use to access the inhabited areas.”

“Understood… so long as I can get back.”

He nodded. “Assuming nothing goes wrong.”

“Probably nothing will happen,” Riffan repeated.

“If you’re lucky.”

Well, Riffan thought. Here I am, and still alive.

Urban had created a pod to protect him from the hostile nanotech in Dragon’s Chenzeme tissue. It was just large enough to contain him in the slightly curled posture he naturally adopted in the zero-gravity environment outside the gee deck. Riffan had feigned confidence as he allowed himself to be sealed inside it. Not that Urban had been fooled.

“You sure you want to do this, Riffan?” he’d asked.

No! Riffan’s mind had screamed.

“Yes. Yes, of course,” he’d answered in a soft voice that almost hid his fear. “Let’s go. Let’s do it. I’m not going to change my mind.”

And he hadn’t.

The pod had ferried him outward through Dragon’s insulating layer of bio-mechanical tissue. A long, slow trip. He’d closed his eyes against the glow of the pod’s inner surface, trying not to think about how his avatar had disappeared at the Rock, or about how the robotic laser cutters had been engulfed by the sudden expansion of the containment capsule. Embedded molecular machines worked hard to soak up the carbon dioxide expelled by his rapid exhalations. They released oxygen back into the pod to keep him alive long enough for the entity to kill him.

It hasn’t tried to kill you, you idiot! Not yet.

The pod’s journey ended when it bumped up against the containment capsule. Riffan had expected to die then, but the capsule remained quiescent, not responding in any way. So Riffan’s pod moved to the next stage. It opened.

Where it was in contact with the capsule, the wall retracted. The perimeter of the circular opening shimmered, an active boundary working to keep the surrounding Chenzeme tissue from leaking in. Framed within that circle was a small section of the capsule’s ribbed, bone-white surface. The sight of it amplified Riffan’s quiet terror. And yet, as the seconds slipped past, he discovered himself to be a little disappointed too, because apparently he’d been correct when he predicted that nothing would happen. Nothing at all. Not so far.

He wanted something to happen. Not something terrible. Just… something, to make this awful venture worthwhile.

So he gathered up his courage and, bracing himself against the pod’s wall, he reached out with a trembling hand and touched a finger to the capsule.

No response.

The capsule felt warm. He slid his finger along its ribbed surface. Slick, he thought. Almost frictionless.

Urban spoke within his atrium: *No defensive reaction?

He meant toxins, electrical shock, nanotechnological defenses.

*No, Riffan replied, without speaking aloud. *It’s warm. Like a living thing.

He placed his palm against the surface, barely touching it, using almost no pressure so his hand would not slide. “Talk to us,” he said aloud, his voice gentle but a little hoarse from the dryness of his throat. “Tell us who you are.”

No answer came—he had not really expected one—and there was no visible change. Yet he felt his fear fade. Out of nowhere, a sense of comfort and beneficence came over him. He couldn’t help but smile a peaceful smile.

*Behavioral virus, Urban said.

*I feel it, Riffan acknowledged. *It’s just a simple emotional boost. Nothing that interferes with cognition. It wants us to trust it, to know that it means no harm.

*The design of that virus is ancient, Urban said. *It appears multiple times in the library.

*More evidence of a human origin, Riffan replied.

*Agreed.

Riffan’s defensive Makers easily broke down the behavioral virus. Its influence waned within seconds, but Riffan’s fear did not return. He reasoned that if the entity meant to kill him or absorb him into its matrix it would have done so by now, but here he was.

At the Rock, the entity had identified their language and addressed them with it. Riffan spoke to it, hoping it had brought that knowledge of language with it. He didn’t know if it could hear him, if it understood, if it listened at all. He spoke to it anyway, telling it of Dragon, of the ship’s origin, and the amalgam of lifeforms it represented—Chenzeme, human, the reef, the Well. He explained that they were bound for the old worlds to discover what might still be there.

He told it of his own curiosity, his desire to communicate with it, to understand what it was, where it had come from, how it had come to be at the Rock, and what it wanted to accomplish now that it was part of Dragon.

He did his best to convince it that they meant it no harm. He said, “The ship’s internal defenses reacted to protect us from what we interpreted as hostile action, but compromise is possible.”

*Only when I’m in control, Urban warned.

*We don’t know that it’s hostile, Riffan countered. *It could have continued to spread, taken control of every aspect of the ship, but it didn’t.

*The governors would have stopped it.

Riffan pondered this. *Do you really think so?

*I’ve been thinking about what it’s doing in there. Maybe trying to puzzle out a defense against the governors.

This troubled Riffan, because it felt plausible. Aloud, he said, “We mean you no harm, and we ask you to take no hostile action.”

Still no response, but then, he didn’t expect anything to happen.