Edges

by Linda Nagata

  Pasha must have picked up on his worry, because she spoke in a voice so firmly determined Riffan knew it was a play to shore up his confidence. “If there is a second ship, we’ll find it and we’ll hit it—or Silent Vigil will—before it knows we’re here. It doesn’t know we’re here, Riffan. We’re dark, too.”

  Not entirely true. Long Watch had a heat signature. It was unavoidable given that the ship had to provide an environment warm enough to sustain biological lifeforms. And they potentially advertised their position every time they engaged in bursts of laser communications with the head office in the city of Silk—although such communications took place over a narrow beam unlikely to be detected even with some scattering from the nebula’s dust and debris.

  “We need to get this right,” Riffan said quietly, speaking as much to himself as to the bridge crew. He did not feel adequate to the task but that didn’t matter. The task was his.

  “Oh,” Enzo said. A soft solitary syllable, dull with fear. His head was cocked, his eyes unfocused as he contemplated some newly arrived data visible only to him. “Oh,” he repeated. “This is not good.”

  He looked up, looked around, looked at Riffan. “I put a DI to the task of analyzing recent data from the gravitational sensors. It’s found a series of perturbations. Faint. Very faint. But real. A swarm of them, each with a signature that suggests a propulsion reef.”

  “A swarm?” Riffan asked, his stomach knotting painfully. “Does that mean multiple objects?”

  Enzo’s lip stuck out. He scowled, he shrugged, then finally he nodded, conceding the distasteful truth: “Six discrete sources of perturbations. I’m assuming six distinct objects.”

  By the Pure First Light!

  “Do you have locations?” Pasha snapped. If she felt any fear, she kept it firmly locked away.

  In contrast, Enzo’s voice shook when he answered her: “There’s data enough to triangulate, to chart their recent movement. All six objects appear to be following roughly parallel paths, separated by intervals between one and two light-hours. I’m going to show you estimated trajectories. Posting on the display . . . now.”

  Six thin lines, bright orange in color, popped into existence on the projection of the Near Vicinity. The lines curved, suggesting paths that dipped slightly toward the sun. In his mind, Riffan imagined another curved line, one that connected the still-unseen objects in the swarm. Extended outward, that line pointed in the general direction of the courser.

  In a subdued voice, Enzo said, “Note that less than a light-hour separates Long Watch from the closest object in the swarm.”

  Pasha spoke aloud the obvious conclusion. “That proximity can’t be coincidence. It knows we’re here.”

  <><><>

  Clemantine woke from her latest sojourn in cold sleep, brought slowly to awareness by the ministrations of her body’s complement of Makers—complex nanomachines programmed to sustain her at peak physical condition and to defend her body at a microscopic level.

  She did not allow her Makers to affect her mood, so they did nothing to ease the anxiety that arrived with awareness.

  Her first thought: How much time has gone by? Impossible to know if days had passed, or years—or centuries?

  She’d left a personal Dull Intelligence on watch, charged with overseeing the integrity of her cold-sleep chamber and instructed to awaken her only for a short list of explicit reasons:

  If her personal security was threatened.

  If there was an existential threat to Deception Well.

  If ever there was a visitor or news of events from beyond the system.

  She did not try to guess between these reasons. As her thoughts quickened, she assumed the cause of her waking encompassed all three.

  The transparent mucilaginous tissue of her cold-sleep cocoon pulled away, retreating in shimmering streams along the ribbons of its anchoring umbilicals, leaving her adrift in the zero-gee of her tiny chamber aboard Long Watch.

  Clemantine was not part of the ship’s small crew. She was but an elder legend, an artifact of a tumultuous past, a hero to her people, and as such she was granted certain privileges—like the privilege of maintaining a private sanctuary here on the edge of the system. Forgotten by most as she was ferried forward in time through the routine of cold sleep, always awaiting some word, some echo of salvation from those who’d left long ago on a quest to find the source of the Chenzeme warships. They’d been just a small company of adventurers. She’d been one of them, once, and an avatar might be one of them still in an alternate life. A better life than this one? Or a worse life? A life already ended? No way to know.

  “How long?” she asked, speaking aloud to the empty chamber.

  The DI that had wakened her answered in its familiar voice, speaking through her atrium:

  *Seven hundred twenty-three years, one hundred twelve days, two hours, thirty-two minutes.

  “By the Unknown God,” she whispered, taken aback at such a span of time. Far longer than any she’d ever spent in cold sleep before.

  The Dull Intelligence made no response to this comment, commencing instead on a status report as its instructions dictated it should do, brief line items spoken in a nurturing masculine voice audible only to her, summarizing the centuries so as to orient her in this age:

  Deception Well’s active population had slowly increased, tripling in size. Many still lived in the capital city of Silk, built around the column of a space elevator, 320 kilometers above the planet’s surface. Many more now lived on the planet, in scattered villages.

  The inactive population had grown as well: more people in cold sleep, and many kept only as library records.

  The orbital construction yards remained dormant, their last products the twin warships, now more than eight centuries old.

  A long untroubled time.

  But the DI would not have wakened her only to say that all was well.

  “Get to it,” she said, wiping the last of the mucus off her smooth brown skin. “What’s gone wrong?”

  The DI told her of the Chenzeme courser. In its reassuring voice it said:

  *The warship’s heading is still being determined. It is not yet known if it will enter the Deception Well system. But there is an additional threat. Gravitational sensors have detected faint perturbations approaching this sector of the system periphery. These signals are consistent with known effects generated by propulsion reefs, suggesting the presence of an inbound swarm of artificial objects, estimated six in number.

  Fear shot through her, bitter cold. “Give me details. What kind of objects are we talking about?”

  *Unknown. The telescopes have been unable to resolve an object in any wavelength.

  So the objects were stealthed. They had to be weapons. What else could they be? Running silent and dark.

  “Has there been an order for a radar sweep?” she asked, knowing her revival would have required nearly half an hour following the initial alert. Time enough for the bridge crew to take action.

  *Negative. That strategy is presently under discussion.

  Despite her lack of any official position, Clemantine intended to be part of that discussion. Caution had always been the guiding principle of their little civilization at Deception Well. Caution, always—and they were a long-lived people. Change came slowly. She didn’t doubt that even now someone on the bridge was insisting that using radar was a mistake, that the courser would detect it, and interpret it as confirmation that some fragment of a technological civilization still existed in the Well, while passive observation would give away nothing.

  But we are not hidden from any who bother to look!

  Clemantine intended to argue for aggressive action. Every Chenzeme encounter recorded in their broken and fragmented histories—whether with courser or swan burster or plague—was a testament to the ruthless nature of the Chenzeme killing machines. It must be assumed the stealthed objects were associated with the courser—and anything associated with the courser had to be a weapon
aimed against them.

  It was up to the crew of Long Watch to locate and destroy the intruding swarm before it could deliver its payload in-system.

  Clemantine looked around to find freshly compiled clothing budding off the walls. Puffs of air propelled the clothes toward her. She dressed quickly in a gray-green shirt with a patterned weave and dark-gray leggings—surprised and grateful at the return of such a simple, practical fashion. She ran her palms over her scalp, smoothing black hair that had been modified at the roots to never grow to more than a stubble. Then she kicked at the wall, propelling her muscular body toward the door.

  “Open an audio channel to the bridge,” she told the DI. “I want to hear what’s going on.”

  Chapter

  2

  Like Long Watch, Deception Well’s array of telescopes orbited on the periphery of the system, beyond the nebula’s obscuring dust. They formed a great circle, so far from the central star a single orbit required two and a half centuries to complete.

  Riffan had pursued his position aboard Long Watch to gain access to those telescopes. He’d undertaken the requisite two years of Defense Force training to earn time on them and he’d used every minute he’d been allotted.

  Half his telescope time had gone to searching the stellar frontier. The other half he’d used to look much farther back along the route of human migration, turning the lenses toward that distant region of space known as the Hallowed Vasties, where the human species had begun.

  Great civilizations had once existed there, but all observational evidence suggested those civilizations were gone, lost in a catastrophic collapse centuries ago, though they were so far away no one knew what had happened or what might be left. No one had gone back to look because the resources of the frontier had been consumed in the long defensive struggle against the Chenzeme’s robotic ships.

  Riffan, gazing at the projected line of unidentified objects on track to enter the nebula, could no longer doubt he was about to engage in an action in that war.

  His gaze shifted to take in the span separating Long Watch from Deception Well. Nearly six light-hours lay between them. It would be hours more before the security council even knew there was a threat. Riffan could not receive timely orders or advice. Whatever action he took he would take under his own authority, and the fate of his people could very well depend on the choices he made over the next few hours.

  He ought to be frantic under that burden, on the edge of meltdown, yet he felt strangely detached. In shock, he supposed. He was aware of being afraid—muscles taut, heart running in a giddy beat, his breathing a little ragged—but as he weighed the array of threats they faced his mind felt clear.

  Despite the known hazard of the luminous courser and the potential threat of a hypothetical dark twin, the line of six undefined objects worried him most.

  The Defense Force training they’d all undergone had covered every known means of Chenzeme attack, but had failed to describe an attack like this one. Pasha had searched the library, seeking any mention, any hint of such a phenomenon, but she’d found nothing so far.

  “Working hypothesis,” Riffan said aloud, his voice trembling only a little. He gestured at the orange lines marking the widely separated paths of the anomalies. “These objects originated with the courser but are now independent of it, powered by their own zero-point propulsion reefs. They are likely small, stealthed, designed to penetrate the nebula while carrying some specialized weapon of unknown capabilities.”

  “That ‘unknown’ aspect,” Pasha said heavily. “That part’s brutal. Is it unknown because it’s new? Never been used against anyone in our branch of history? Or is it unknown because no one survived the encounter?”

  “Right,” Riffan said.

  History was understood to branch. Given the distances between settled worlds there had never been much trade in information and after the war with the Chenzeme had gotten underway there had been none. So the history they possessed was only that branch lived by their ancestors. Distant worlds around the frontier would have their own legacies—if those worlds still survived.

  Many worlds had not—a stark fact that compelled Riffan to say, “It doesn’t matter which it is. Either way, we do what is necessary—whatever is necessary—to prevent the devices from reaching the nebula.”

  He looked across the chamber to Zira. “If you could get a DI working on navigational options. Develop a course that will bring us within effective range of the intruding devices, optimized so we can hit all of them over the smallest possible span of time. I don’t want to have to chase them down.”

  She drew back, looking horrified at this request. “Riffan, if we move the ship while the courser is in position to observe us, that could give it incentive to come in-system.”

  “Right,” Riffan said again. “I understand that and I agree it’s a risk.” He realized he was responding as an academic rather than a military officer, but given Zira’s obvious emotional fragility he thought that might be best. “We are a warship,” he reminded her. “We have fire power. We were designed to take on the Chenzeme.” He called on his acting skills again, making sure to sound confident—though neither Long Watch nor Silent Vigil had ever been tested in battle. “Anyway,” he added quietly, “if there’s a dark courser already in-system, we need to draw it out.”

  “I agree,” Pasha snapped. “We need to act. But let’s remember that this projection is showing us estimated positions. Until we know what’s out there and exactly where it is, we’ve got nothing to shoot at. Right now, what we need more than anything is data. We can get that by using active radar. If we illuminate the unknown devices, we can pinpoint their locations, map trajectories and velocities. And maybe expose the dark courser, if one is out there.”

  “No,” Zira said, hovering over her workstation with fist clenched. “Active radar is too much of a risk. It will expose us. It will pinpoint our position.”

  “We’ll have moved position long before the signal reaches the courser,” Pasha countered.

  Riffan considered it, considered what he knew of Pasha. He’d known her all his life. They were a similar age. They’d gone to school together. Even so, she had never been more than a casual friend, someone to say hello to. The truth was, Riffan had always found her uncomfortably blunt, even acerbic. Intimidating, too. But he’d never seen her rattled, and he was glad to have her on the bridge.

  He said, “Pasha, I think you’re right. We’ve got too many unknowns. Zira, I want you to plot that course, and Pasha, I’m authorizing the radar scan.”

  “On it,” she said, cool and professional.

  Riffan hoped it was the right decision. Every order he gave was automatically relayed in-system. Any order he gave could be countermanded by the Defense Force chief, but if that happened, he wouldn’t know about it for twelve hours.

  To Riffan’s surprise, the bridge door snapped open, the luminous white material of the flesh-soft wall retracting to create an oval entrance.

  Apart from the bridge crew—already present—there were only six students aboard Long Watch. All should have known to stay clear of the bridge during this emergency. Riffan opened his mouth, ready to remind the transgressor of that, but then he caught sight of the intruder and realized she was not one of the students.

  The gentle reprimand he’d intended died on his tongue as an unknown woman glided in. She was tall and muscular, her skin golden-brown, her hair black and very short, her features bold, strong. Tiny gold tattoos glinted on her earlobes. She reached back for a hand-hold that sprouted from the wall just in time for her to grasp it, arresting her momentum with expert grace.

  He cocked his head, trying to puzzle out how she had come to be there. They were isolated. On the edge of the system. Visitors did not just drop in.

  Gasps and astonished protests greeted her entrance:

  “Whoa.”

  “What?”

  “Where did she—?”

  Riffan’s atrium automatically queried hers for a
n identity, but he didn’t need its help. “I know you,” he said, pushing away from his workstation to get a better look at her past the projection of the nebula. “At least . . . I know of you.” He’d never seen her before, not in the flesh, but he knew who she was. Everyone did. She was a figure out of history, out of mythology. “You’re Clemantine,” he concluded in astonishment.

  Clemantine had been part of Deception Well’s founding generation and later she’d ventured into Chenzeme space, part of the Null Boundary Expedition. She’d been the only one of a four-person company of adventurers to return home. The zero-point propulsion reef had been exclusively a Chenzeme technology until Clemantine brought it back with her, giving the people of Deception Well the means to defend themselves—giving them the technology to build warships of their own.

  He’d had no idea Clemantine kept an avatar on this ship.

  <><><>

  Clemantine had followed the conversation on the bridge through an open audio channel, so she knew where things stood. Gambling her celebrity would give her some measure of authority, she said, “Get that radar sweep underway. We need to know what’s out there—and given the distance, it’s going to take hours to get any returns.”

  “Yes, ma’am.”

  This response came from a woman, identified by Clemantine’s DI as Pasha Andern, an exobiologist. Short, white-blond hair floated in a layered halo around Pasha’s alert face. She had the slim, slight body type of those who favored efficiency over raw physical strength, an impression reinforced by the beige tunic and pale-green leggings she wore: simple, pragmatic clothing. Pasha added, “It’s an honor to have you here, ma’am.”

  In contrast to Pasha, the ship’s commander-of-the-moment, Riffan Naja, had some size to him—well-muscled and emphatically male without being pretentious. Riffan agreed, “It is an honor. But why are you here? How long have you been here? Oh . . .” His confusion gave way to realization. “You were waiting for this day, weren’t you?”