Edges

Chapter 40

Urban instantiated aboard Fortuna amid the austere architecture of the library. He stood alone on a white path winding away across a glassy blue plane of data, the color deepening with distance. This library was a copy of the one that had been carried aboard Dragon, but the only archived ghost that existed there was his.

If Urban had been a physical avatar, the running battle with the predator would have left him shaking with exhaustion, but a ghost did not feel fatigue. Now that he was safely locked behind a closed data gate, he took up the task of editing out the useless emotional detritus of fear and panic that lingered in the wake of this latest brush with death.

And then he went further. He created for himself a machinelike calm, walling off the fury and frustration that arose from the certainty that he’d lost Dragon.

The entity’s assault against him had left him with no choice but to call for termination. If Griffin had received that radio message, then Dragon was gone, blown apart, reduced to vapor and debris.

All sixty-five of the ship’s company gone with it. His last words to Clemantine: It’s over.

Grief seeped past his machine calm. And fear. He wondered, Was it over?

If Griffin had not received that message, or if the other Clemantine had not carried through with it, the situation would be far worse. The entity would have secured command of Dragon.

No.

She would never allow that. She would not take the risk of Dragon turning against her. He remembered her promise: I’ll do whatever’s necessary to protect all of you. He trusted her to protect the archived ghosts she carried, regardless of the cost.

Editing his ghost again, he sequestered his doubt and his grief. He couldn’t help Clemantine. Not now. He had to assess and secure his own situation and then decide on a strategy, one based on fact, not on what he wished things could be.

He knew already he could not go back the way he’d come. The predator had wiped the computational strata in each successive outrider, leaving it nonfunctional. And with Fortuna so far from Griffin, any error in the targeting of the communications laser would be magnified many times over, so that the smallest initial discrepancy would cause the beam to miss its target, possibly by tens of kilometers. The independent motion of both ships made the problem excruciatingly complex. It was unrealistic to think he could get any data through.

But he was not helpless. He had Fortuna, and the little ship should be fully operational. He queried the Dull Intelligence that oversaw its operation to confirm this. “Review current status.”

A gentle masculine voice answered, “Ship’s location is 7.5 light-hours from command ship Dragon’s last calculated position. Proceeding to target star system Tanjiri at a steady thirty-five percent light speed as measured against the velocity of the target star. Reef function is nominal, though presently dampened to a minimally active state. Internal network and computational strata report healthy. Navigational fuel reserves at 93%. Telescope presently engaged in a survey of the Near Vicinity. Collected data will be held until authorization is received to open the data gate.”

“Don’t open the data gate,” Urban said.

“Understood.”

“And reorient the telescope. Look back. Calculate expected positions for both Dragon and Griffin and locate them with the scope.”

“Understood.”

Urban longed to go back. He resolved that as soon as he confirmed Dragon gone, and Griffin the survivor, he would order the DI to flip Fortuna bow to stern and then dump velocity. Griffin’s forward progress would close the gap and eventually Urban’s ghost would be able to make the jump between the ships.

A fine plan, shattered by the first image the telescope returned.

The image posted within a library window, its resolution shockingly poor. Urban was used to working with images compiled from data collected across multiple telescopes. Now he had only one. At such a distance even a courser was a minuscule object, its details blurred despite extensive processing. Still, the three-part equation of distance, luminosity, and the known dimensions of both coursers left no doubt that the ship captured in the image was Dragon.

Clearly, it was battle damaged. Long, lightless scars sliced through the luminous philosopher cells and the ship was surrounded by a faint blur, a halo, that had to be a cloud of debris and frozen vapor. “Analyze that,” he told the DI.

“Analysis indicates water, molecular oxygen, carbon dioxide, and an array of metals within the de-gassed cloud.”

Urban felt an automated routine kick in, locking out despair.

“Where is Griffin?” he demanded.

“A search of Griffin’s calculated position is presently underway.”

“You haven’t found it yet?”

“That is correct.”

“Keep looking. It has to be there.”

But did it? Did it have to be there? Didn’t Dragon’s survival indicate Griffin’s demise?

“Keep looking,” he said again.

Hours passed. Then days, but Griffin could not be resolved.

Griffin hunted the void, full stealth, its philosopher cells dark, its radar dormant, all transmissions silenced.

There was silence too, on the high bridge, with no conversation to endure from hibernating cells. Clemantine had to conduct her search without the benefit of their acute vision, but Lezuri’s ship was so small and dark the cells could not have seen it anyway, unless it came so close that it reflected a glint of their own light.

For Clemantine, the silence was a welcome respite that let her focus on the Near Vicinity as she tracked Lezuri’s propulsion reef. The faint signal cut out for hours and she thought she’d lost him. Then the signal reappeared, shifted intensity, changed trajectory, vanished again. The Pilot calculated where Lezuri should be. They swooped in on a heading meant to intercept his little ship, but did not find him.

Clemantine quieted Griffin’s reef to minimize its interference while the gravitational sensor felt the void all around, seeking for the faint signal of Lezuri’s dormant reef. She scanned with cameras and telescopes. But there was nothing.

More hours passed.

Time enough to reflect that worlds could be lost in the dark between the stars.

“What if we’ve miscalculated?” she asked the Pilot. “What if Lezuri was decelerating when we thought he was still accelerating? Maybe his goal isn’t to get away. Maybe it’s to linger and wait for Dragon to close the distance, come near enough to try his needles again.”

“Or to wait for us,” the Engineer pointed out. “We’re vulnerable to his needles too.”

If Clemantine had existed in human form, that thought would have given her chills.

The Pilot dismissed these concerns with a contemptuous wave of his hand. “I did not make such a mistake. I cannot pinpoint Lezuri’s exact location but I know his last course adjustment took him away from the trajectory of the fleet, and that his velocity is greater than ours, and that he has used his reef hard. He will not have the power to return, not for some time. And he cannot be hunting us in the same way we’ve been hunting him. His vessel is too small to carry a gravitational sensor. So we are hidden from him, as long as we remain silent and dark.”

“I think there is very little chance now that we will find him,” the Astronomer said. “He won’t give us any more signals to follow. He’ll coast for years before he uses his reef again.”

“It’s what I’d do,” the Pilot agreed.

This assessment brought both guilt and relief to Clemantine. Abandoning the hunt felt wrong, but she longed to return to Dragon, to offer her help, and to learn how much of the ship and its company had survived.

“All right,” she said. “We stay dark, and we go home.”

No easy task to catalog all the damage—especially with the Apparatchiks gone.

Clemantine kept to her post on Dragon’s high bridge. What choice? There was no one else to do it. From there she sent out an army of DIs to search the network, the library files, the archive, seeking for any sign of the predator… and of Urban.

In the library, she approached Vytet. “I know you’re angry over this—”

Vytet transformed, looming larger than life, features exaggerated, amber eyes now glinting red. “Angry over what? The fact you decided, on your own, to risk all of our futures? That you destroyed any chance of a peaceful coalition with a great being? Or that you blew the ship apart?” She gestured at a projection of Dragon showing the known damage, with vast tracts of the ship still to be surveyed. “You did this.”

“Yes. I made the choice. But we’re still alive, and the ship is ours.”

“At what cost?” Vytet demanded to know. “You have no idea what’s been lost or if we can recover.”

“I think I do know what’s been lost,” Clemantine said. “But we will recover, though I’m going to need your help.”

Tempers were even more heated in the warren, where she quickly found herself in a shouting match with Naresh:

“You had no right to launch an assault on your own!”

“We had no choice but to do it that way!”

“No! You did have a choice.”

“Success required secrecy!”

“You call the wreck you’ve made of this ship success?”

“I do.”

“Does Urban consider this a success? Did you even consult with him? Where is he anyway?”

Grimly, she said, “I don’t know.”

They were in the forest room, and by this time, more than twenty people had gathered around, drawn by the heat of their argument, drifting one above another in the absence of gravity. Kona was among them. He’d been busy in the warren, organizing people and assigning tasks, setting some to grow resurrection pods to restore those too badly injured to heal on their own, and others to organizing meals and quarters, while encouraging as many as he could to retreat to cold sleep, to reduce the draw on the ship’s resources.

Now he looked at Clemantine. “What do you mean? Are you saying you can’t find him? If you can’t find him, wake his ghost from the archive.”

“The archive’s been wiped,” she told him. “Nothing is left there. I think the predator attacked that first, when it emerged.”

This announcement drew gasps and cries of horror.

She turned again to Naresh. “It’s why I came to talk to you. I’m giving you the task of re-establishing an archive, and making sure everyone posts a fresh copy there.”

“Urban will have a ghost safe aboard Griffin,” Kona said.

She forced herself to meet his gaze. Held it. Not so much to prepare him, but to give herself time to gather her courage. “Urban didn’t keep a ghost on Griffin. He kept his backups on the outriders, in secured archives that only he could access.”

Kona gave a firm nod, as if this answer satisfied him. “We’ll find him on the outriders, then.” His confidence a veil pulled over a terrible fear—a fear she shared.

The data gate kept a log of traffic. It showed Urban had sent a submind to Elepaio, with Riffan’s corrupt ghost following close behind him.

“Where is Riffan?” she asked, aiming the question at no one in particular.

Tarnya emerged from the crowd to answer her. “He was hurt. We had to put him in a resurrection pod. He’ll be out in a day or so.”

“No. Leave him there. He may be the source of a security issue. Leave him locked down until I say so.”

She faced more questions, arguments, and accusations, as subminds cycled in and out. Eventually, she retreated alone to the gee deck.

It was a shambles. Dust and debris drifting everywhere, confused birds fluttering in panic at her approach. At the same time, she listened to Vytet in the library, reporting that an initial inspection of the deck had found the rotation cylinder cracked and the gearing shattered.

Shoran appeared, gliding from beneath the upside-down canopy of a small uprooted tree, its branches bearing withered leaves and faded flowers. “Hey,” she said. “Personnel map’s down, but I heard the flutter of bird wings and thought someone might be here.”

“The guilty party has arrived.”

“Guilty of saving our asses.”

“No, it was Pasha who designed the defense. I only made sure it was implemented.”

“I’ll thank her later.” Shoran gestured over her shoulder. “Some of the generative walls are still working. I started to do some initial cleanup, shoving debris back into the system to be recycled, but I think the vats are full.”

“Or the deck’s circulatory system has stopped working.”

“Or that,” Shoran conceded. “So tell me, where do we really stand? I’ve heard a lot of chatter in the warrens, but what’s the real situation?”

“It’s not so bad,” Clemantine said. “Dragon is broken, incapable of both acceleration and self-defense. We’re estimating a loss of nineteen percent of our mass and a greater percentage of the philosopher cells. There hasn’t been time to complete a survey, but I can tell you there is extensive damage to the internal transport and communications systems. The ship will have launched self-repair routines, but that activity will rapidly drain core reserves. I’ll be using up more of our limited resources when I start repairing severed filaments of the neural bridge. Oh, and there’s an excellent chance all the repair work will stimulate molecular disputes along all Chenzeme-Human boundaries. But from what I’ve seen so far, it looks like Lezuri is gone.”

Shoran grinned. “So we’re going to make it?”

“Yes,” Clemantine affirmed. She couldn’t celebrate it. Not in the face of Urban’s absence. But it was true. “Yes. We are going to make it.”

Urban continued to monitor the status of Dragon. He watched the debris cloud disperse into invisibility and the battle scars on its hull slowly fill with luminous cells as the ship healed itself.

The entity had taken his ship. No way to know if anyone among the ship’s company was left alive… Clemantine, Kona, Vytet, Riffan, Shoran, and all the rest. Lezuri might have let them live… or at least captured their patterns.

Urban searched his mind, he searched the local library, desperate to devise some way to take his ship back, but the predator’s ferocity haunted him. It was like a promise from Lezuri that he would put Fortuna under the gun if ever he suspected Urban’s presence there.

Lezuri wanted to reach the ring-shaped world.

Verilotus. That was its name. Lezuri had wanted to go there armed with the coursers’ weapons. Urban’s refusal to do so had triggered disaster. Everything that mattered, lost, because he’d promised himself he would not return a broken god to its seat of power.

He decided that promise still held. If he could do nothing else, he would do that.

He watched and he waited as Dragon continued to coast, its velocity only slightly higher than Fortuna’s and its course, so far, unchanged.

If its course shifted, if it turned away from Tanjiri and towards Verilotus, that would be final proof that Lezuri controlled the ship. Then Urban would change course too. He would need to reach Verilotus ahead of Dragon, and once there, do what he could to block the ambition of a broken god.