Edges

Chapter 36

Urban glimpsed a fog of luminous silver sparks rising from Lezuri’s upturned palms, their shimmer suggesting a composition similar to the needle Lezuri had given him, although that was locked into a fixed crystalline structure, while this flowed.

He had never seen such a mechanism before. Maybe it was another demonstration, like the needle? He hesitated a full second, wanting to see it as benign. In that time, the silver replicated across Lezuri’s palms. It wound together, forming a tendril.

Instinct took over.

Urban stumbled backward, heart racing. He’d waited too long. The tendril leaped toward him with appalling speed, forcing him to accept the bitter truth: It was a weapon. What else could it be?

He remembered the protocol put in place years ago against this moment. He undertook the prescribed action, triggering a radio burst that would close the data gate to Griffin. Next he sent a submind to warn his ghost on the high bridge. Then he messaged Clemantine:

*Warn our people! I think—

The tendril touched him. Instantly, it expanded to envelop his body, enwrapping him from head to toe in a new skin, a skin that consumed him, grinding down through the layers of his physical existence, dis-assembling him so swiftly there wasn’t time to register pain or the shocking inadequacy of his own defensive Makers in the face of this new and unexpected form of assault.

All he had time to do was upload a ghost, a last imprint of this version of himself.

Clemantine was walking with Kona back from the dining terrace when Urban’s truncated message reached her: *Warn our people! I think—

Words sharp with a high-edge of panic, jumbled together in his hurry to get them out.

*Urban?

She looked ahead along the path that wound between neat cottages and pretty gardens, everything well ordered under a bright artificial sky.

*Urban!

“What is it?” Kona asked, though she had not spoken aloud.

“Something’s happened to Urban. We need to find him.”

A moment before, he had been at their cottage. She did not bother to recheck the personnel map, but took off running, aware of Kona following a step behind.

*Urban, answer me!

He did not.

She rounded the last bend in the path. Her cottage came into view. A luminous silver fog billowed from the doorway and from the window, dissolving the surrounding walls as it touched them, and leaching through the miniature meadow on the roof.

She came to an abrupt stop, putting an arm out to block Kona. Urban had said, Warn our people. Now she knew why. She composed a general message, dictating it out loud so that it doubled as a shouted warning: “Evacuate! Evacuate! We’ve got a runaway event. Take shelter now!”

The cloud collapsed just as her warning went out. It condensed into a thick silver liquid. Only a few centimeters deep, it flowed over the threshold and onto the patio, shimmering there for a few seconds.

Then it was gone, vanished. Evaporated? Or absorbed into the floor of the gee deck? She couldn’t tell.

She started forward.

“No, get back,” Kona told her.

She went on anyway, to the edge of the patio. From there, she could see in through the doorway. She could see inside easily because a meter of wall on either side of the threshold was gone, and so was most of the interior wall that divided the bedroom.

The cottage was empty.

Literally empty. Urban was not there. Neither was the sofa, the carpet, the pillows, the paintings, the side table with the shallow dish that held her irises—everything gone, nothing left behind. No goo, no detritus. On the surviving walls, the room’s adaptive tissue was exposed, its surface scalloped where mass had been carved away.

She edged across the patio, vaguely aware of Kona cautioning her, but she had to see.

“It’s cold,” she realized as she reached the threshold. There was not even the heat of metabolic processes left behind. The room was cold. So cold that the damaged surfaces of the adaptive tissue began to steam as they initiated self-repair.

A notification reached Urban on the high bridge, one he’d set up in the first years of the voyage, to let him know whenever a ghost woke from the archive. Riffan’s ghost had just awoken. He noted it. It should have been just one more banal data point and yet something about it troubled him.

Clemantine sensed the shift in his mood. *What? she asked.

*Riffan just woke his ghost from the archive. Why would he do that when he’s already awake?

A radio signal burst from Dragon’s antenna, startling him, startling the philosopher cells. He recognized it as a warning to close the data gate on Griffin.

Somewhere, something had gone very wrong.

A submind reached him, overwhelming him in memories: an encounter with Lezuri, a newly discovered artificial world, a moment of proud defiance—and death in the form of a leaping silver tendril.

The ghost Urban had generated within his dying mind instantiated in the library. Riffan was there ahead of him, gazing at a window that displayed a view of the ring world at Verilotus. He turned to greet Urban, his face beaming with a friendly smile. “Look! It’s such an amazing thing. We must make it our destination.”

Within the library, geometry was flexible so that proximity could shift, becoming greater or lesser, but change unfolded as a sliding scale, not as teleportation. Riffan had found a way around that rule. One moment, he was by the window. And then he was face-to-face with Urban.

In the infinitesimal fraction of a second Urban required to register this, the ghost raised its fist.

At this range, Urban perceived the apparition with a peculiar double vision. There was the smiling ghost, utterly normal in appearance, but he could see into it. He could see that it was a shell, an envelope structured in Riffan’s guise, using Riffan’s permissions to allow an unauthorized intruder into the network. Contained within the shell was a dense, three-dimensional maze of computational weaponry that shimmered in luminous silver motion.

The ghost shoved its fist into Urban’s chest, injecting a data parasite.

Urban congealed his recent memories into a submind and retreated, wiping his ghost as he left.

Standing on the cold threshold of her cottage, Clemantine traded subminds with her ghost on the high bridge. Urban was there, safe, but another version of him had triggered a radio warning to close the data gate to Griffin.

“Where is he?” Kona demanded. “What the hell is going on?”

Clemantine didn’t answer. Instead, she addressed a message to both Pasha and the Bio-mechanic: *Alert! I don’t know what’s happening, but it’s bad. Be ready to trigger the Pyrrhic Defense.

Excited conversations circulated among the philosopher cells as they developed explanations for the anomalous radio signal. Ideas were proposed, analyzed, boosted or rejected within a fraction of a second while Urban fought hard to keep his rising fear in check. Lezuri had attacked him, erased him—

*What’s wrong? Clemantine demanded.

*Lezuri—

He broke off as a new submind arrived, the memories it carried seizing his attention: Riffan’s false ghost and the attack of computational weaponry.

*What about Lezuri? Clemantine pressed him.

He told her, *The war’s gone hot. A predator is loose in the network. It came after my ghost. Destroyed it. May have subsumed my permissions. If we lose the network, we lose the ship.

He could not hide his raw fear from the philosopher cells. They sensed it across a hundred thousand nodes and reacted by sending energy flowing toward the gamma-ray gun. But there was no threat in the Near Vicinity. No target.

He aborted the response: – negate that! –

The only potential threat was Griffin, trailing behind, commanded by that colder version of Clemantine.

Lezuri knew Griffin was there.

So why had he attacked, with Griffin ready and willing to put an end to any takeover attempt? Why? Unless he thought he could take over Griffin too?

Riffan’s ghost! Each time it was updated, it would have been copied from Dragon’s archive, sent in a package to Artemis, and from there to Griffin.

Shit.

In Griffin’s library, Clemantine stood at the center of her council of Apparatchiks. She’d summoned them immediately after she’d closed the data gate.

“Something has happened. We don’t know what, and we’ve had no instructions on whether to hold off or proceed with termination—”

“It’s too soon to commence,” the Scholar said. “We can’t act precipitously, without data.”

“I agree.”

“But we also need to be prepared to reach a decision on our own,” the Engineer said.

“Yes.” She turned to the Astronomer. “It’s on you to alert us to any external activity. If Dragon should fire a steerage jet or begin to swivel its gun—”

The entire circle froze, the attention of each entity diverted as Griffin picked up a new radio communication.

Urban’s voice: Access your archive. Delete Riffan’s ghost. Do not allow it to instantiate. It is corrupt. Repeat: it is corrupt. Do not allow it to instantiate. Do it now!

She met the Scholar’s gaze. Nodded to him. He disappeared. After he was gone, she had time to wonder if the message was true, or some inexplicable trick that would ultimately condemn Riffan to extinction.

The Scholar returned. “It’s done.”

Despite the muted emotions of her ghost, she shuddered. If the message was a hoax or the information in it wrong, she might have just murdered a man.

“Was the ghost active?” she asked.

“It was on the verge of waking.”

She closed her eyes in relief. No ghost in Griffin’s archive should have been able to wake on its own. “So it was corrupt.”

“Yes. I’m undertaking an inspection of the entire archive to ensure no other ghosts are affected.”

“Good. Clean out the archive on Artemis too.”

She radioed a response to Dragon: “It’s done. We have no backup of Riffan. Repeat: We have no backup. What is going on over there?”

Her own voice answered her, “Stand by.”

Just seconds had passed since Clemantine issued a general warning to the ship’s company to evacuate the gee deck. Queries came back to her, too many to answer, but people were responding. Confused chatter filled the gee deck as they emerged from their homes, most asking, Is it real? A few firm voices rose above the general indecision, Shoran’s and Alkimbra’s among them:

“Everyone! Go to the warren!”

“We meet at the warren!”

“Move! It’ll take time to get everyone through the transit gate.”

Turning from the ruined threshold, she encountered Kona.

“What do you know?” he demanded.

She told him the dire news brought by her latest submind. “Lezuri got into the network. Released a predator there. I don’t know if we can contain it.”

Pasha came running up, yelling in indignation that verged on panic, “You haven’t answered any of my queries! Neither has the Bio-mechanic! I need to know. Do we launch?”

Clemantine drew a shuddering breath. The Pyrrhic Defense would do nothing to counter the attack on the network; it was designed only to eliminate the physical presence of the entity from the ship. And once launched, there would be no going back, no stopping it. It would gut the ship, cripple Dragon, and leave them with hundreds of days of repair and reconstruction.

She met Pasha’s gaze. “Yes. Trigger it. Now.”

The Bio-mechanic understood the end had come.

The initial radio transmission had alerted him. Clemantine’s message confirmed the imminent emergency.

He extended his senses throughout the ship and throughout the network, gathering data. He hunted the entity’s avatar, but found no trace of it, even the cocoon had dissolved. He detected an imbalance in the quantity of matter flushed through the gee deck’s circulatory system along with a drop in the deck’s atmospheric temperature. And he registered a surplus of computational activity in the library. This last commanded his attention.

He instantiated within his window in time to see the predator reveal itself. He witnessed the assault on Urban’s ghost. He watched the predator turn its attention to him—and he smiled the bitter smile of a cynic whose worst expectations have come to pass.

The enemy had entered the network undetected—something he had dared to believe was impossible. This was the final insult. It was the end. The end of sixty-three years of unceasing effort aimed at beating the entity’s nanotech arsenal. Sixty-three years of maddening defeat.

He alerted the other Apparatchiks, warned them of the intrusion, instructed them: Face it one at a time. Learn what you can before you die. And then he added, I’ll go first.

He meant to trigger the Pyrrhic Defense, to deny Lezuri full possession of the ship—but the predator shifted location so swiftly he did not have time to act. It popped into existence right beside him, invading the isolated virtual world contained within his window—and buried a fist in his gut.

He let his extended senses collapse around him. He drew in all of his intellect, the complexity of his structure, to meet this intrusion, to enfold it, concentrating his efforts on the creation of a map that recorded details of the predator’s structure, even as it ripped through him.

With his sense of self dissolving, the Bio-mechanic used his last microseconds to dump the partial map into a submind. Addressed it to Urban on the high bridge. Released it.

Griffin was safe, but Urban did not have time to enjoy the news as another submind dropped in, this one originating with the Bio-mechanic. He did not normally trade memories with his Apparatchiks, but he could do it. He allowed the submind to merge.

Shock swept through him as he absorbed the memory of the Bio-mechanic’s last moments: a vicious attack, an ugly defeat, defiant anger, and a resolve to wipe his failing ghost before the predator could learn from it.

The Bio-mechanic was gone! But his anger remained. It became Urban’s anger and it bled into the cell field.

Urban did not try to hold it back; he didn’t have the resources. His focus was diverted by the gift the Bio-mechanic had included in his final submind: a partial structural map of the predator. He acted quickly, distributing the map to the surviving Apparatchiks. *Use it! Find a counter attack.

Acknowledgments came back from the Engineer, the Astronomer, the Scholar, the Mathematician—but the Pilot sent him a submind. Urban did not want to accept it. He feared what it contained. But he needed to know, so he let it in.

It brought cold confirmation of what he’d guessed. The predator had defeated the Pilot. Two Apparatchiks already gone.

Unlike the Bio-mechanic, the Pilot’s last submind contained only a remote emotional imprint. It helped to cool Urban’s swirling rage. It also brought him an updated version of the map, with additional details of the predator’s structure.

He forwarded the expanded map to the survivors. Then he replicated his ghost, sending it into the network to hunt.

*What are you doing? Clemantine asked.

*Learning to defeat that thing.

The ghost fed data back to him, critical glimpses revealing more and more of the predator’s structure. Then it sent a submind.

Urban did not hesitate to let it merge, but he should have. Unlike the Pilot, his ghost had not censored its emotions. Packed into that submind was the memory of his demise: his wild anger, his frustration as the predator tore him apart, his swift decision to dissolve that ghost, end his own existence. But the submind brought insight too, additional data that further expanded his map.

His understanding of the predator grew.

Again, he distributed the revised structure to the Apparatchiks. The Scholar and the Mathematician acknowledged receipt, but not the Engineer and the Astronomer. Instead, their last subminds came to him—mercifully stripped of emotion.

Desperation focused his mind and quickened his response time as he compiled the new data, created another ghost, and sent it out to face the predator.

He found it in a cardinal, or it found him. In that environment they met as two disembodied forces. Urban strove to trace what he could of the predator’s computational shape, holding out against its probing assault until he felt his sense of self begin to crumble. End it! He generated a submind to carry back what he’d learned and then he wiped yet another broken version of himself.

It became a cycle—another ghost, another hunt, another crushing defeat, a fragment of mind all that could get away. But each returning submind expanded his knowledge of the predator’s structure, and each conflict lasted a little longer as his defenses evolved. He strove to shield the last two Apparatchiks—the Scholar and the Mathematician—by putting his own ghost in the path of the predator. That ghost went down so he sent another. Too late. Both Apparatchiks were already gone.

All through it, he accumulated the emotional stress of conflict—the fury, fear, frustration, and resolve experienced by his ghosts, and their hunger for revenge—all flooding across the bridge to the philosopher cells.

Clemantine strove to calm the cells, but it was as if she and he contended against each other. Chaos raged across the cell field.

*You need to leave the high bridge, she told him.

He rejected the idea. He had never left the high bridge. He had always been present there, in some form, from the first moment he possessed it. Now he should flee? Leave it to Clemantine? Shift his consciousness to another stratum?

Yes.

He had to do it. It would be a temporary retreat. He promised himself that. But where to go? Nowhere was safe, not even the high bridge. The predator would find its way there eventually. When it did, would it target Clemantine too?

That prospect only fed his turmoil.

*I can’t protect you, he told her.

*I’ll take care of myself. Just go.

Still, he delayed, while the confusion among the philosopher cells rose to a new peak. Then confusion crystallized into action. The cells called for a surge of power from the reef—too much!—it would produce a crushing acceleration, more than the gee deck had been designed to handle.

*We need to stop it now!

He organized a counter argument to calm the cells, but Clemantine was faster. She took control—control of his ship. Before he could react, he felt the hammer of her will fall across the hundred thousand points of the high bridge, suppressing the cells’ panicked fight-or-flight response—but she could not kill it entirely.

The reef surged—at only a fraction of the force the cells had called for, but still enough to send Dragon’s immense mass leaping forward.

“Yes,” Clemantine had told Pasha. “Trigger it. Now.”

The words were barely out when the gee deck shuddered, lurching so violently, she was thrown from the threshold of her ruined cottage.

No, she fell from the threshold, fell horizontally, all the way across the patio and then across the path, fetching up in shrubbery on the other side as a ripping, popping, shrieking cacophony of devastation exploded around her. An intrusion of chaos that endured for a long awful span of seconds.

And then she was floating, rising weightless toward a beatific sky, her arms and legs mapped with bloody tracks drawn by the broken twigs of the hedge that had caught her. Scratches burned on her face too, but when she checked her atrium it reported no serious injuries.

A glance around showed debris everywhere, drifting in the air. Trees down, cottages askew. People in slow confused flight, yelling at one another: By the Waking Light! What happened? Are you hurt? Get to the warren!

The gee deck had stopped rotating.

So far, that looked to be the worst of it. The atmosphere wasn’t compromised—yet. Hopefully the barrier wall had maintained integrity. If not, it still might be able to self-repair in time to prevent an incursion of Chenzeme tissue. From the ground below and from the broken walls came the whisper of molecular repair mechanisms already engaged in frantic rebuilding.

A submind dropped in, proving the network still intact. It brought memories of that version of herself on the high bridge. She re-lived the panic among the philosopher cells, the sudden acceleration—a revelation of understanding that brought her stunned mind back up to speed. On a subconscious level, she’d linked the gee deck’s damage to the Pyrrhic Defense, presuming a flawed calculation and unforeseen blowback. But acceleration had caused the damage.

Had the defense even been triggered?

“Pasha!” she shouted. But didn’t wait for an answer. Generating a ghost, she transited to the library.

DIs streamed in, bringing to Urban reports of the disaster on the gee deck, their little world, broken.

*You caused that! Clemantine accused, her righteous anger bringing order to the dangerous turbulence of the cell field.

*I know it.

He strove to suppress his seething frustration, to assume the façade of the Sentinel. It was not enough.

*You’re causing chaos, she warned. *You need to leave the high bridge.

She was right, but he stayed anyway, held by an irrational fear that if he left, if he finally gave up his post there, he would not find his way back again.

Then a new presence joined them.

The high bridge supported no illusion of physical existence, but it did convey a kind of physical sensation so that Urban felt the intimate pressure of this intruder, and recognized it as a computational shape matching every aspect of his evolving map of the predator.

It ignored the philosopher cells. It ignored Clemantine’s ghost. It came for him.

He did not dare to stand and fight, not when the predator had destroyed every ghost he’d sent after it and all of his Apparatchiks. So he fell back, abandoning the high bridge, driven from it, no choice but to flee, to leave it to Clemantine.

His ghost transited to a cardinal on the lower bridge. He sensed the predator coming through behind him and moved again. Onward to the next cardinal and the next, the predator in close pursuit and no way to stop it.

It’s over.

The thought hit hard, but he couldn’t deny it. He had lost. He’d lost his ship, he’d lost his Apparatchiks, he’d failed to protect Clemantine and Kona and all the members of the ship’s company who had trusted their lives to him on this ruined venture.

They, at least, would have a chance to start again on Griffin. He hoped they would do better than he had done.

A microsecond to sequester his grief, his fury, his despair.

He messaged Clemantine, letting her know: *It’s over.

One more task.

Alone on the high bridge, Clemantine strove to grasp what had happened, what was still happening.

Dragon’s velocity, boosted by the burst of acceleration, was dangerously high, but she did not try to bring it back down. Not yet. It was enough that the cells, having failed to detect any perceivable threat from outside the ship, were settling into a watchful state, allowing her to focus on the ship’s interior.

DIs rotated in and out, bringing reports that assured her the active boundaries between human and Chenzeme tissue remained stable and that the entity had made no move to expand the containment capsule or claim more territory within the ship.

Reports came in from the cardinals, marking the passage of Urban’s fleeing ghost.

A submind arrived from the gee deck. It brought visual testimony of the ruin that had been made of her home, but it also brought the welcome knowledge of imminent retribution.

Through it all she held tight to a cold animosity that bled into the cell field, unifying it, and bringing it fully under her control.

Then came a message from Urban: *It’s over.

Her composure shattered in a flash of white-hot denial: Not yet! It was too soon to give up. She messaged him back: *It’s not over! We are not done fighting!

He didn’t answer.

Urban abandoned the cardinals, instantiating in the library. The place felt hollow and wrong, empty of any sense of the Apparatchiks’ presence. But not abandoned. Other ghosts were there. He glimpsed them, tiny figures separated from him by an emotional distance—Clemantine, Kona, Pasha, Vytet. They would be working to stabilize the ship, not realizing Dragon was overrun and already lost.

No time to warn them. He had time only to ensure their future on Griffin. He did it—his last task. He triggered a preset radio message to clarify for that other Clemantine the irretrievable nature of their situation: commence termination of Dragon; commence termination of Dragon; commence termination of Dragon—

Here at last, echoing the choice of those crews who had scuttled their ships at the Rock—except that he meant to escape.

Alone among the ship’s company, Urban did not keep an archived ghost on Griffin. Instead, he kept copies on the outriders where they remained under his direct control.

He created a submind, bundling all his recent memories into it. To escape Dragon, all he had to do was hold off the predator long enough for that submind to slip away through the data gate. Not towards Griffin—that way was closed—but towards Elepaio and the vanguard of outriders.

He launched the submind just as the predator instantiated in the library, still wearing Riffan’s smiling face.