by Linda Nagata
“We went dark less than two years ago,” Kona said. “Maybe it lost track of us, decided to reveal itself, to see if we’d do the same.”
“Maybe,” Urban said. “But two years is no time at all to a Chenzeme mind. I think it heard the beacon. Its internal pilot wouldn’t know how to respond to an anomaly like that, so it woke the philosopher cells.”
The calm tone of this discussion felt increasingly surreal to Clemantine. As a ghost, her emotions were muted. Even so, it took effort to resist a rising anger, an impatience to get on with it. In her mind, this courser stood for all those coursers that had pursued and destroyed human ships, and ravaged human worlds. Now it had become their prey and she was eager to go after it.
Urban went on, thinking aloud. “My guess: those cells will respond like Dragon’s. They’ll quickly reach a consensus to attack the beacon.”
“Despite our presence?” Vytet asked quietly. He had assumed a masculine aspect again, this time with dark-brown skin and a flat face. He wore his hair long, tied at the nape, and he looked out on the world from beneath heavy black eyebrows. Even stranger, he had indulged in the outlandish, ancient affectation of a closely trimmed beard. Sitting on a plinth summoned from the library’s floor and staring pensively at the display, he looked like an ancient sage in some historical drama.
“Does it even know where we are?” Riffan wondered. He looked just the same, masculine and moderately handsome, with a bright, interested expression. “Our course adjustment came after the hull cells went dark.”
“It may not know,” Urban acknowledged, “but it will expect us to join in the hunt.”
Clemantine gave him a sharp look. “We’re not going to do that.”
“No,” he agreed.
“We could stay dark,” Kona suggested. “Hang back and watch. See what happens if it attacks the beacon.”
This suggestion triggered in Vytet a rare display of anger. “Absolutely not!” he said. “There could be a human settlement there. We are not going to skulk in the dark and watch it destroyed.”
Urban crossed his arms, frowning at the map. “We aren’t going to let it attack the beacon.”
“Agreed,” Clemantine said. “It belongs to us. We’re going after it. We need its mass, the elements it’s carrying.”
“But do we want to take it here?” Kona asked. “Put on a violent display in sight of the beacon, when we have no idea what’s there?”
“You’re worried we will appear to be the aggressor,” Vytet said.
Clemantine shrugged. “We will be the aggressor. What choice?”
“Lead it away?” Riffan proposed.
But Urban said, “No, we’re going to meet it. It’s not even a choice at this point. It’s programmed instinct for these ships to meet and mate and trade their memories.”
He turned to Clemantine with an appraising gaze. She could guess what he was thinking. On the Null Boundary Expedition, they had met a courser in just such a way. It had been a horrifying experience. Even now, remembering those helpless hours, she shuddered. But this was different. This time, they would dominate the encounter.
She waved a hand, dismissing Urban’s concern, saying, “If we ignore protocol and retreat, we’ll become the hunted.”
“Sooth.” His focus shifted away. Something internal? A submind perhaps, bringing him a new memory. He nodded as if in silent agreement with a decision already made. “I’m tumbling the ship bow to stern so we can decelerate.”
The Pilot said, “And I’m working out a trajectory that will let us intercept.”
“I’ll wake our philosopher cells when we’re closer,” Urban said. “They know how to work this, how to get us in striking distance.” He looked at the second Apparatchik. “The Bio-mechanic will prepare our assault.”
“Disable, deplete, and destroy,” Clemantine summarized in a soft voice that disguised her rising tension. “That’s the procedure you’ve used before. But I’ve been thinking. This time, we could be more ambitious.”
Urban cocked his head, looking vaguely insulted but also intrigued. “Okay,” he said. “Tell me what you have in mind.”
She had studied his past encounters and could see no reason why her idea couldn’t work. “Consider this,” she said. “We disable and deplete this courser, taking what we need from it—but we don’t destroy it. We hijack it instead. Take it, the same way you took Dragon.” She gestured at the display, speaking quickly now. “We have no idea what that beacon represents. We have no idea what else we might find where we’re going. This new courser will be a lesser beast, but with two together they can protect one another and be far stronger than one.”
Urban leaned toward her, looking both astonished and impressed. “Don’t tease me,” he warned. “You really want to do that?”
“I’m surprised you haven’t done it before.”
“Me?” He shook his head. “No. I wouldn’t do it.”
His refusal caught her by surprise. She had expected Urban, always so bold, to embrace the idea. Her disappointment was acute, even within her simulated existence.
He saw that, reacted to it. “It’s not that I don’t like the idea,” he said. “I love it. I love that it’s you who suggested it. But I won’t do it again. It weighs on me, Clemantine. Dragon is mine. I won’t ever give it up. But you know what it’s like on the high bridge. I feel like I’ve got my foot forever on the throat of an old murderer who would overthrow me and slash my throat if I ever once allow an opening. It’s not an experience I need to duplicate. One Chenzeme monster is enough for me. But you could do it.”
If she’d been flesh, she would have caught her breath, felt a rush of hot blood in her cheeks. As it was, her ghost froze. She had considered the idea, pondered the reality of living every second within the violence of the Chenzeme mind, immersed in the unceasing hate that had destroyed her people, her birth world. Urban endured it without complaint but Clemantine shrank from the idea.
Still, she had to ask herself, How much does my personal discomfort matter?
She felt sure her reasoning was solid. They could gain both the resources they needed and a second warship. But to do it, she would have to bear the dire responsibility of commanding that ship. No one else could do it. No one else but Urban had experience on the high bridge.
She lifted her chin, conscious of everyone’s eyes on her. She heard herself say in a perfectly steady, calm tone, “Yes, all right. I’ll do it.”
She had the uncanny sense it was some other version of herself speaking.
<><><>
Chenzeme warships were adaptive. Through the interface of the philosopher cells they observed the galaxy around them, evaluated what they saw, reacted, and changed tactics as need required—and they shared their experiences with one another.
These exchanges of memories took place when two ships met in the void. Hardwired instinct drew them together, into physical proximity, so that data-encoded dust could be traded between them.
These encounters also served to reinforce the warships’ genocidal behavior. The ships were ancient. They had far outlived the species that created them. Given their adaptability and the long timespan of their existence, behavioral drift should have led the ships to diverge from their core dogma of intolerance for all other technological lifeforms—except mechanisms existed to prevent that.
Every encounter between two warships was a chance to reassert the primacy of Chenzeme dogma. As the ships exchanged data they tested and challenged and compared themselves, one to the other, in a process that assessed and exposed their behavioral drift. The stronger ship would suppress or rewrite heretical thoughts in the weaker one. Either ship could trigger an instinct that would drive the other to return swan where it would be met with devices designed to reset the programming, thoughts, and memories of a warship straying from dogma.
Urban had learned these things partly through his experiences on the Null Boundary Expedition, and in part through his explorations of the deep-time memories of
Dragon’s philosopher cells.
Those cells were now thoroughly tainted by his influence, their behavior far diverged from dogma, but their alien nature would not be immediately apparent to another courser—not until an exchange of dust exposed the truth. But Dragon would strike before that point.
Dragon was a hybrid ship, armed with molecular weapons unknown to other Chenzeme coursers. In its two past encounters it had used the camouflage of its philosopher cells to get close to an enemy courser—close enough to deploy packets laden with a molecularly active dust that destroyed the hull cells of its prey—striking before the other ship could release its own transformative dust.
In the immediate aftermath of this assault, the enemy courser was left helpless. Urban had used the interval to harvest mass from the stricken ship and then he’d retreated, opening up a safe distance before using the gamma-ray gun to destroy the hulk that remained.
Clemantine had insisted on learning all of this long ago. She’d studied the past encounters through library records and re-lived them through the detailed memories retained by Dragon’s philosopher cells. Urban had assisted her, answered her questions. Now, he cautioned her:
*Hijacking a ship will be more complicated. It will be riskier. More opportunity for something to go wrong. Only the opening gambit will be the same. Dragon must present itself as authentically Chenzeme.
*I understand.
With the philosopher cells dormant, the high bridge remained unnaturally tranquil. Urban still received a constant low boil of sensory input from the ship’s bio-mechanical tissue, its circulatory system, matter storage, its reef, and from the telescopes and the organic cameras native to the hull. But that was a quiet meditation compared to the harsh, strident presence of the cells.
It had been a pleasant respite, but it was time to get on with things.
He told Clemantine: *Wake the philosopher cells.
She sent the signal he had taught her, amplified across a hundred thousand links. Small clusters of cells switched on around each point. The newly active cells roused their neighbors. Awareness swept across the vast expanse of the hull and the conversation began.
The philosopher cells had been aware of the beacon, and intent on destroying it, at the time Urban sent them into dormancy. On waking, their first action was to pinpoint their target—but it was not where they expected to find it. The cells easily picked up the beacon’s signal, but swift calculations showed the ship still far outside of weapons range.
Their conversation exploded into waves of confusion and fiery anger.
Urban soothed them. He turned their attention away from the beacon and injected into the debate an awareness of the distant gleam of the trailing courser. The high bridge allowed him to do this, to address them with the alien subtlety of their own chemical language, but when expressing the meaning in human terms he was left with only crude approximations of his argument:
– awareness: other –
– offer: integration –
– self-other exchange –
He felt Clemantine’s cool presence overlaid against his own, observing his every action and the responding activity of the cells as they quieted, as they considered his proposition. Memories of the past two encounters began to circulate, tainting the instinctive desire to meet and mate. Urban translated the cells’ conversation as:
The cells quickly grew more aggressive, reliving their attacks on the other ships. Their brutal successes. Their discovery of the weakness of others. They respected strength—their own strength especially. Dragon’s cells understood they were different:
They perceived the philosopher cells of other ships as inferior and tainted:
Quickly, a new proposition circulated:
Too soon for that, even if destroying the new courser had still been Urban’s goal. He rejected the homicidal argument. He refused it at every point it appeared, overwhelming the field with repetitions of his initial thesis:
– self-other exchange –
The protocols of meeting must be observed. The cells must display the proper sequence of signals to establish trust between the two heavily armed ships. Without this first step, the new courser would not allow Dragon to draw close—and Urban needed to be in intimate proximity to wield his molecular weapons.
– self-other exchange –
He repeated it, again and again, and slowly the hull cells accepted this proposition.
FIFTH
Your sky survey finds a smudge of white light where none should be. You analyze the spectrum. The pattern of wavelengths identifies the object as another of the alien starships that nearly destroyed you. Its luminosity indicates it has just begun to encroach on the Near Vicinity.
Joy overtakes the ancestral mind. You’ve studied the dead hulk of the first ship, mapped its structure, analyzed its components on a molecular scale. You’ve made your preparations. You need only wait for the beast to hear your beacon. When it does, it will come in to investigate, just as the first alien ship did, but there will be no battle this time. You will lie in wait for it, and take it when it comes.
And you will finally have means to return home.
You watch the progress of the alien beast for several million seconds and then it disappears. The light of its hull cells quenched.
Fear stirs in the ancestral mind. Dread rises. Why? you ask yourself. Why has it gone dark? The first alien ship did not hide itself. Why is this one behaving differently?
The beacon continues to bleat its signal. You do not modify it or shut it off. That would be an admission of your presence here while the mindless repetition, even in the face of threat, will give the appearance of a distress beacon from a nonsentient ship.
That is your hope, anyway.
You resume your sky survey, aware that the unseen alien ship is likely modifying its course and speed. It could reappear at any time in an unexpected location.
When it finally does reappear, you realize your existence has become as precarious as it ever has been.
There are now two ships.
You wonder if this is a war you can win.
Chapter
16
Aboard the outrider Elepaio, Riffan soon discovered he did not like living as a ghost. Virtual existence did not feel real to him. He could inhabit a simulation of his body within the library—a duplicate of the library aboard Dragon—and though it was a good simulation, even an excellent one, it never felt quite right. That virtual world was too smooth, too clean, too convenient—too lacking in the rough complexity of actual existence. It left him feeling disoriented, unsure of his ability to distinguish between reality and delusion.
He did not have the option of retreating to a physical existence. The outrider did not have the room or the resources to support a living avatar. His one alternative was to forgo the illusion of human presence entirely and exist disembodied within the sensory system of the little ship. But this, he was sure, would be far worse.
So he remained dormant for most of the long voyage to the beacon, waking his ghost for only an hour or two every few days.
Urban’s ghost remained awake and alert at all times as was his custom, though he rewrote his sense of time passing so that the accumulating days did not weigh on him.
Little changed during the first year. Occasionally, the coded location in the beacon’s signal would shift and Urban would make a slight revision to his course, but he still could not resolve any object at the coordinates where the beacon must be.
It was early in the second year when he observed the appearance of another courser. Envy brushed him as he imagined his other self, that version of him aboard Dragon, plotting to seduce and dominate and
destroy this intruder. He looked forward to gaining the memory of that encounter when he finally returned to Dragon. Meanwhile, Elepaio fared on, ever closer to the source of the beacon.
A time came when Elepaio’s telescope was finally able to distinguish an object directly ahead. A tiny dark smudge, nothing more. That it could be resolved at all indicated it had a high albedo, its surface reflecting the starlight that fell against it.
More time passed and the smudge resolved into multiple objects. This surprised Urban. He had expected to find a single large object, well-armed as it attempted to draw the curious into range. Instead, there were at least three and maybe four objects. He wasn’t sure yet. One was much larger than the others and round, like a tiny planetary body stripped from the gravitational hold of its parent star and cast out into the void. The others appeared to be minute, irregularly shaped moons. Still too far away to discern details. The scene lit only by a scattering of distant starlight.
Riffan’s ghost woke and exclaimed in excitement over the fuzzy image. He stayed awake as additional imagery came in. In infrared, the little moons appeared cold and lifeless. “But look at the planetary body,” Riffan said. He floated cross-legged in the library while Urban stood beside him, arms crossed, studying a large, detailed projection. “It possesses a slight thermal signature, though it’s not nearly large enough to maintain a molten interior. If it was a true rogue planetoid, it would have gone cold eons ago. So there must be something there. Recent enough to keep it slightly warm.”
“The source of the signal,” Urban said.
Riffan nodded. “A logical hypothesis.”
Urban suffered a surge of impatience. He wanted to know what was there and he wanted to know now. But time must always be paid in full measure. No rushing it.
No holding it back, either.
Each day, Elepaio drew nearer to the signal’s source. Each day, its telescope collected more and more faint reflected starlight and slowly, slowly, the scene became clear.
