Edges

Chapter 41

Clemantine made a cautious return to the fleet, keeping Griffin dark and silent as the Astronomer used the telescopes to study Dragon and map its ravaged hull.

“There is some regeneration in the cell field,” the Astronomer concluded. “And a new radio antenna has been deployed on the hull.”

Good news. Someone was alive in there.

“Anything else?”

“Nothing visible.” Then he added, in answer to her unspoken question, “No sign of the entity’s capsule.”

She turned to the Engineer. “Let’s use radar again. Map the debris field. Look for anything that might be in our way.”

Radar revealed Griffin’s presence. The response was immediate, a low-power radio hail from Dragon, her own voice demanding, Identify yourself.

She answered, “The iris will bloom again.”

A long pause and then a question: Did you kill him?

“I couldn’t find him.”

Another pause, then: Urban is gone.

“What do you mean?”

There may still be a copy of his ghost on one of the outriders—we lost contact and can’t confirm—but he’s gone from Dragon.

“I’ll establish contact.”

No! Don’t. We need to be cautious. The predator followed him out there. It may still be there.

This time the pause in the conversation was on her side as she processed what her counterpart had just said: Urban was gone.

Aboard Dragon, Vytet lobbied for Griffin to open its data gate. “That will allow us to copy the Apparatchiks back. We need their help, their knowledge, their expertise.”

Clemantine agreed that having the Apparatchiks would speed the recovery, but opening the data gate would put Griffin at risk. “It’s too soon. We need to clean up first, ensure Lezuri is truly gone.”

The entity had left hazardous matter behind.

When the tendrils serving as conduits to the containment capsule ripped free, they had not parted cleanly. Fragments remained—and each piece had begun to regrow.

Vytet’s engineers attacked the problem. In the library, they found a design for a small, snakelike, laser-wielding robot. They grew a prototype, skinned it in Chenzeme tissue, and sent it to hunt the fragments.

Clemantine expected the device to succumb to the entity’s lingering molecular defenses, but the vigor of the initial infestation was gone and the laser snake succeeded in vaporizing its first target. Cheers of success broke out in the library, and the engineers set about creating more of the devices.

The ship’s network still worried Clemantine. She had already inspected it, but she sent a DI to examine it again to ensure nothing of the predator remained. When the network proved clean, she sent the DI into the library to inspect all recently updated files. It found nothing of concern.

There was still one more place she needed to inspect.

She instructed a DI to waken Riffan from his resurrection pod. When it opened, she was there in the warren, waiting.

Riffan emerged, looking worried and confused. His gaze settled on her. “Why am I here? What happened? I remember a terrific noise, and then nothing.” His face scrunched in a frown. “Why can’t I access the network?”

She said, “I’ve locked you out of the network until I have assurance you’re clean.”

“What? What do you mean?” Clothes budded from a generative surface beneath the wall-weed, but he ignored them. “Tell me what’s happened!”

“Lezuri acquired your access to the network.”

“No. That’s impossible.” His frown deepened. “I did allow him to use my tablet. Maybe through that he somehow…” His voice trailed off. His eyes grew wide. “Did something bad happen?”

“Yes,” she said in an icy tone. “Bad things happened. Now I have a question for you. Is it possible there’s a remnant of Lezuri secreted in your atrium?”

His focus turned inward. He looked chilled, pinched with cold.

She sliced the air with the edge of her hand. “Go see Vytet and Naresh. They’re waiting for you. You’ll give them full access to your atrium so they can confirm you’ve got no parasites there. Until that’s done, you’ll stay out of the network.” Her tone softened. “Stay off the gee deck too. It’s dangerous there.” She gestured at him from head to toe. “This is the only version of you. There’s no ghost in our archive, on Artemis, or on Griffin, so be careful, okay?”

His eyes widened in shock. “But how? Why?”

She waved him off. “Go see Vytet and Naresh. They’ll answer all your questions.”

Throughout it all, she remained on the high bridge, overseeing every aspect of the recovery. At her request, Griffin remained dark, a tactic to prevent its philosopher cells from reacting aggressively to the sight of Dragon’s weakness. And Griffin kept its data gate closed, while she fully confirmed the integrity of her ship.

Her ship. It had come to that.

Pasha thought it strange, the way people apportioned blame. She had conceived and designed the Pyrrhic Defense—facts she’d made clear—but everyone angry at the way the project was handled put the blame on Clemantine, saying “She could have stopped it.”

“I could have stopped it too,” Pasha declared every time she heard the argument, whether in the warren or the library. “We both understood the risk, and decided together to go forward—and we succeeded. Lezuri is gone and the ship is clean.”

They had not imagined Urban’s very existence might be lost in the course of the defense. Clemantine had not said much, but Pasha sensed anguish in her silence, grief compounded by the burden of uncertainty. It was important for her, for all of them, to understand what had happened, and why.

Pasha had detailed records of every phase of the Pyrrhic Defense, but she didn’t know what had triggered the hostilities. So she resolved to investigate, to document events prior to the brief conflict.

She announced her project and invited people to share what they knew, particularly if they had seen Urban or Lezuri in the hours before the silver cloud boiled out of Clemantine’s cottage.

To her surprise, Naresh was first to come forward, despite his differences with her. “Lezuri was on the gee deck when the emergency began,” he explained. “I met him, but he said he had come to speak with Urban, alone. So I let him go.” Naresh shook his head. “Now, I wish I’d followed.”

“Do you know that he actually met with Urban?”

This question drew a guilty blush. “Yes,” he confessed. “I watched on the personnel map. He entered the cottage. He was still there when the emergency began. I never saw him leave. Like Urban, he just vanished from the map.”

What had gone on in the cottage? What had been discussed? The ruined structure provided Pasha no clues, so she turned to the ship’s logs. Any commands Urban issued would have been recorded and might hint at what was on his mind when hostilities broke out.

She sent a ghost to the library. Once there, she summoned a DI to assist her. “Display the command log,” she instructed.

A library window opened. Pasha searched the file, locating the time of the radio burst that had closed the data gate to Griffin. She scanned back from there. At first all she saw were lines of automated input, documenting standard processes that did not interest her. Then she found it: A command from Urban to reset Dragon’s twin telescopes, and the one aboard Artemis.

Reset them to what? From what?

The command had been issued just thirty-one seconds before the radio burst.

She told the DI, “Let’s jump to the telescope log.”

The DI opened a new window.

The most recent entries in the log were all alerts reporting no new data being received from the scopes on the outriders. She’d heard contact had been lost. Another issue awaiting attention.

“Delete the alerts. Let me see what else is here.”

The DI complied. Now, at the top of the list, was an order to reset. Pasha pointed to it. “What is this? Tell me what it means.”

“An earlier order diverted telescopes one, two, and four from the standard survey of the Near Vicinity. This order returns them to that task.”

“Okay,” Pasha said, sensing she was close to an answer. “Show me the order that diverted them.”

Clemantine was in the warren, listening to Vytet discuss what it would take to restore the gee-deck’s rotation, when a message arrived from Pasha:

*I figured out what Urban was doing when the war started. Come to the library. I’ll show you.

A flush of fear, a rush of gratitude. She generated a ghost and sent it.

In the library, Pasha had created a three-dimensional astronomical projection. Dragon’s position was labeled. So was Tanjiri System. Another star was marked too, but only with a catalog number. MSC-G-349809. It was closer than Tanjiri, but on a different heading.

Pasha pointed to it. “Urban was looking at this system right before he closed the data gate to Griffin.”

Clemantine studied the point of light, re-read the label. It meant nothing to her. She turned to Pasha for an explanation.

“It’s a G-type star,” Pasha said. “Never cordoned. Never even settled, at least according to our records. This is the most recent image of it captured by the standard survey.”

“And?” Clemantine urged, desperate to understand what it meant, what it had meant to Urban.

“Something’s there. I don’t know what, and it’s too small to resolve visually in this image, but the spectrum indicates a second luminous object, inconsistent with any known type of star.”

“Did Urban know this?” Clemantine asked, struggling to grasp what this implied about the conflict and Urban’s disappearance.

“He was looking at it,” Pasha repeated. “He diverted three telescopes, and focused them on a point close to the star.”

“That must have produced a more detailed image than this.”

“Yes,” Pasha said. “But there is no such image in the library. I think he deleted it. Erased it.”

“No. Not Urban. That’s not how he handles data.”

“I’d repeat the observation,” Pasha said, “but Dragon’s scopes are not working, and we’ve lost communications with all the outriders except Artemis.”

“Yes. Every attempt to reach Elepaio returns an error message. And since Elepaio is closest, no communications are being relayed to the more distant outriders.” She hesitated, still struggling to accept the truth of what must have happened. She told Pasha, “Urban sent a submind out there. Did you know that?”

“No.”

“The predator followed him.”

“Oh no.”

“Yes. The predator wiped our archive here on Dragon. I think it wiped all intelligence from Elepaio too.” She shook her head. “If Elepaio had been physically damaged, it would have self-repaired and renewed contact. Failing that, the other outriders should have responded to the break in communications by dropping back, re-establishing the link. But that hasn’t happened.”

“You think all the outriders were corrupted?” Pasha asked her.

Clemantine nodded. “Urban kept his backups out there.”

Pasha looked away, clearly struggling for something to say. She settled on, “I’m sorry.”

Clemantine pushed back against a smothering sense of loss, strove to focus on the present. Gesturing at the nameless star, she said, “Tell me what this means.”

Pasha visibly gathered herself, then she confessed, “I don’t know what it means. But I think we need to know what’s in that stellar system. It can’t be coincidence. Something Urban saw there triggered the conflict. We need to know what it is.”

“Our telescopes are out of commission, but I can ask Griffin to look.”

“That’s good. We should do that. But if we could find the image, we’d know exactly what Urban saw. You just said he wouldn’t have erased it. So what would he have done with it?”

“Ahh,” Clemantine said, in imitation of a sigh, though her ghost did not breathe. She opened a library window. “He kept a sequestered data cache—personal things.”

“He gave you access?”

“Yes.”

The cache inventory appeared in the window. She searched for the newest file, found it.

“It’s an image,” Pasha said, triumph in her voice.