Edges

Chapter 37

Clemantine’s ghost left the ruin of the gee deck to instantiate in the library.

Immediately, she sensed that something had changed. She froze, looking around. The virtual environment appeared the same but felt sharply different. The extra sense she always gained in the library—the one that let her feel the presence of data—had been truncated. She still perceived the files, and yet some vital aspect was gone.

Puzzle it out later! She needed the Bio-mechanic. She had expected to find him already on deck but he wasn’t there. So she moved to summon him. Only then did she realize his link no longer existed.

That was the missing element.

She thought of the Engineer, the Scholar. But she could find no links to them, either—or to any of the Apparatchiks.

A crowd of ghosts manifested around her: Kona, Vytet, Naresh, and Pasha.

Pasha demanded to know, “Where is the Bio-mechanic?”

“Gone,” Clemantine said. “All the Apparatchiks, gone.”

The absence left her reeling, blinded to the true status of the ship. She reached out to her ghost on the high bridge and traded subminds. Memories merged just as Dragon began bleating a preset radio message authorizing its own demise.

Both versions of Clemantine converged in defiant agreement: Not yet.

From the bridge, she terminated the communication.

In the library, she composed a new message to replace it: “Abort that last. We are still fighting.”

“Where is the predator?” Kona demanded. “Has it been contained?”

“I don’t know,” Clemantine told him. “I don’t know where it is. I don’t know where Urban is. But we’re not done yet.”

More ghosts appeared—Tarnya and Alkimbra and two of Vytet’s engineers, come to find out what had happened, to see if they could help, all asking questions that no one was ready to answer.

Pasha reached out, a reassuring hand on Clemantine’s arm. “We’re okay. We’ll be okay without the Bio-mechanic. He left us the link to trigger the defense.”

“Show me.”

“What defense?” Naresh asked.

And Vytet: “Where are the Apparatchiks?”

Kona summoned a floating three-dimensional model of the ship, with the network detailed and the library mapped. It showed Clemantine’s ghost on the high bridge and the crowd of ghosts in the library. She searched for Urban, searched every part of the map. She asked the map to highlight his position. But he wasn’t there. He wasn’t anywhere.

Pasha’s hand tightened on her arm, a pressure-grip that broke through her numb shock.

“Are you sure we should do it?” Pasha whispered, ignoring the chatter all around them.

Clemantine turned from the devastating evidence of Urban’s absence, to meet Pasha’s intense gaze. “Yes. Show it to me.”

A small window appeared between them. It was tilted so that only Clemantine had a clear view of it. It framed a sliding switch neatly labeled off—on. Without hesitation, she touched the black button, slid it to the right. The button flashed green.

“Ten seconds to change your mind,” Pasha warned.

Clemantine didn’t need a waiting period. She pressed the flashing green button. It turned gray.

“What defense?” Naresh asked again.

Pasha turned to him, speaking bluntly: “The Bio-mechanic set it up for us—and there’s no stopping it now. We’re evicting Lezuri from the ship.” She added bitterly, “We should have done it before.”

The assault began with three small missiles, their casings nearly frictionless, launched simultaneously from stealthed pods hidden deep within Dragon’s bio-mechanical tissue, far beneath the entity’s containment capsule. The missiles drilled through the tissue, tearing open circulation paths and severing communications lines, leaving behind open channels steaming with the heat of molecular repair and the rage of Chenzeme defensive molecules seeking an enemy to dis-assemble.

The missiles were programmed to detonate when they reached the containment capsule, or sooner, if their shells were dissolved or breached along the way.

Pasha enlarged the existing model of the ship. Clemantine watched it closely as it updated in stuttering steps that reflected the intermittent arrival of new data from internal sensors. Additional sensors had been placed to track the path of pressure waves through Dragon’s bio-mechanical tissue. Hull cameras and cameras on the outrider Artemis gave an external view.

A cry of dismay went up from the crowd of ghosts as the three missiles blew in a silent flare of light.

Weirdly silent, Clemantine thought. The model did not replicate sound, but there had surely been something to hear within the ship’s tissue.

“They detonated early,” Pasha observed.

Clemantine nodded. “But they got close.”

“Oh no,” Naresh breathed, peering at the model as it updated to show transient bubbles blasted in the bio-mechanical tissue and a shockwave that reached the philosopher cells. “No, no, this can’t be real.”

Clemantine felt the reality of it. With a train of subminds linking her to the high bridge, she felt the shockwave. She sensed the ensuing confusion of the cells as they strove to determine what had happened, explanations proposed and rejected at furious speed.

Ironic memory surfaced: In the first years of the voyage they had been so careful, so cautious as they grew the warren, worried that any aggressive expansion would overthrow the careful balance Urban had developed along the uneasy borders between Chenzeme and human tissue. Now, all caution had been blown away.

“Who’s behind this?” Vytet demanded, horror on her face.

“We are,” Pasha answered calmly. “Me, Clemantine, the Bio-mechanic, and Griffin’s crew.”

“It was necessary,” Clemantine added. “But you can call for a judicial hearing if you want.”

The model updated, showing a second salvo of missiles extending the paths burned opened by the first. These detonated at the scheduled time, in the vicinity of the containment capsule. No sensors in the blast zone survived, so there was no way to know yet if the capsule had been damaged.

“You have to stop this!” Naresh shouted. “It needs to end.”

Pasha said, “It will end when the entity gives up and departs.”

“We discussed and rejected this kind of solution long ago,” Vytet argued. “The entity’s tendrils reach into the core. You’ll cripple the ship if you try to eliminate them. You’ll destroy the reef. And you’re going to ignite an evolutionary war with the Chenzeme tissue—if you haven’t already.”

“We’ve planned carefully,” Pasha said in clipped syllables. “Griffin’s Engineer was consulted.” She turned from the model to face Vytet, her expression a mix of guilt and defiance. “The damage will be extensive but not irreparable. And the risk of a molecular war is mitigated because we’re using Chenzeme elements to carry out the attack. The activity should be perceived as a new scenario, a strategy the Chenzeme mind will find acceptable when it rids the ship of an alien parasite.”

Vytet’s voice climbed an octave. “Do you think Lezuri won’t fight back? That he can’t fight back?”

“Do you think he can fight back from the center of a firestorm?” Clemantine asked. “For all his talents, even Lezuri cannot prevent molecular bonds from breaking under extreme heat.”

“The shockwaves are being felt in the warren,” Kona reported. “I’ve let them know what’s going on.”

The dual wave of missiles had not been expected to destroy the containment capsule—no one believed the entity could be defeated that easily—but the heat prevented an immediate counterattack, while the shockwaves snapped the tendrils linking the entity’s fortress to deeper layers of the ship.

From Griffin’s high bridge, Clemantine watched as Dragon’s hull cells communicated a message of existential alarm. The coded pulses were too swift to be discerned by human eyes, but Griffin’s philosopher cells understood them and interpreted them for Clemantine.

Subminds carried the meaning to her ghost in Griffin’s library. She looked around at her assembled Apparatchiks, each in their frameless window, and announced, “It’s begun. Dragon is enduring an attack from within.”

“But is it the Pyrrhic Defense?” the Pilot asked. He glared around the circle, a dark, impatient figure, arms crossed, standing on nothing, the light of hundreds of stars blazing behind him. “Or is it Lezuri, extending his domain, making Dragon his own?”

The Scholar, wearing dark blue, looked up from his studies with narrowed eyes. “The data gate is closed,” he reminded them all. “A termination order has been received.”

“Received and immediately countermanded,” the Engineer replied from his plain brown frame.

“How can we know which instruction is legitimate?” the Scholar asked.

Clemantine said, “We’ll know soon.”

Lezuri had used Riffan’s corrupted ghost in a play to take both ships. He had failed, but the situation aboard Dragon was surely dire. Clemantine’s hope rested on the promise of the last radioed message, spoken in her own voice: We are still fighting. That had to mean the Pyrrhic Defense was launched or soon would be. There was no other way to fight Lezuri.

She waited for proof.

The Pilot spoke again, impatient to do something. “I remind you that Dragon’s velocity is now slightly higher than our own. We can match it, or we can exceed it and narrow the distance between us. Dragon is a more powerful ship and could outrun us if it tried.”

“It can’t outrun our gun,” Clemantine said. “Not at this range.”

The Engineer said, “I agree. I do not recommend an increase in velocity.”

Griffin presently trailed twenty-one thousand kilometers behind Dragon. Once Clemantine gave the word, the philosopher cells would require less than ten seconds to deploy the gun and align its lens. They would be able to fire several times before Dragon could turn to defend itself, and by then, Dragon would be gone.

Clemantine hoped it would not come to that. She desperately hoped for a chance to strike a different target—but she kept that hope locked away from Griffin’s philosopher cells.

The cells were in a dangerous state. Dragon’s alarmed communications stirred no hint of empathy among them, but instead roused their contempt and their hatred. Already a faction of cells was lobbying for attack:

Clemantine slowed the argument:

– hold –

And diverted it:

– awaiting target –

But she allowed the cells to continue in their excited state, ready and eager to attack.

The next phase of the Pyrrhic Defense was underway. Thousands of small vesicles made of Chenzeme tissue and packed with explosives, moved into positions designated by their swarm programming. Some massed alongside the entity’s severed tendrils. Others arranged themselves in layers above his capsule.

The outermost layer of explosives triggered first. The blast erupted outward. Gasps and cries from the gathered ghosts as a seam ripped open in the hull, a geyser of boiling debris spewing from the side of the ship.

The next layer went off a second later, and the next after that, and the next, blasting open a channel down to the massive containment capsule.

On the high bridge, Clemantine felt the repeating concussions and the shock of the philosopher cells as the field tore open and a long region of cells was burned away.

In the library, she felt nothing, heard nothing. The library synthesized its own reality and it had not been designed to simulate the shuddering of the ship.