Edges

by Linda Nagata

  “There is no flaw in the lens,” the Astronomer said.

  The Engineer crossed his arms. “If the aura was the result of impact, I would expect to see an uneven mix of particulate elements and frozen gases. What we see here is an evenly distributed particulate cloud.”

  “Ah, shit,” Urban whispered.

  He composed a message to Elepaio, ordering it to stand off, to approach no closer to the fleet. That might not make a difference. The light-speed lag meant the message would take time to reach the little ship and then Elepaio would require additional time to arrest its momentum and change its course. But he had to try.

  A submind shunted his consciousness to the high bridge, plunging him into a weave of fuming, muttering dialogs, the philosopher cells edgy and suspicious as they debated the idea of the returning outrider.

  Their interest was a bad sign. Long ago, Urban had instilled in the cells an acceptance of the outriders. He’d hooked into their instinctive concept of ancillary ships, training them to regard the outriders as harmless companions that should be tracked but never targeted. Now, this rule was being questioned.

  He perceived an image only a few seconds old, recurring among the braided thoughts. Distinct, bright points of heat like a necklace circling the bow of Elepaio.

  Vytet had called it a glamour, a mist, a fog. The hull cells saw it more clearly. A swarm of tiny devices that had hitched a ride in the propulsion field spilling over from Elepaio’s reef.

  Urban had seen pits open on the rogue world but he’d had no hint of their purpose. Now he knew. The pits had opened to allow an inner mechanism to shoot millions, maybe billions, of small projectiles across his path. Elepaio had been struck twice, high-energy collisions that rattled the hull. At least one had successfully released its cargo.

  He’d never suspected.

  A submind arrived from the library, bringing a memory of Vytet saying, It’s significant that the devices did not attempt to infiltrate Elepaio, but instead used it to get close to the fleet.

  Sooth. The heavily armed coursers had been the target all along and he had transported the alien devices, provided them with a means to reach the fleet.

  Anger spiked—at himself, at the situation, at the entity on the Rock. The philosopher cells welcomed his anger, amplified it. Anger was their baseline state; it drove their murderous instinct.

  A proposition was offered:

  Urban agreed to this without hesitation: – kill it –

  Why not? Each device in the swarm surely carried data, along with molecular tools to translate that data into physical form once it reached an appropriate substrate. Each device, a seed to resurrect the entity.

  – kill it! –

  It was the only logical response in the face of potential alien invasion.

  Consensus swept across the cell field.

  Clemantine arrived on the high bridge just as the steerage jets fired, initiating a slow rotation that would bring Dragon’s gamma-ray gun in line to vaporize Elepaio and sterilize the space around the outrider. She took a moment for review and assessment. Urban expected her to object when she grasped his intention. Instead, she said, *Yes. Whatever the cost, don’t allow this infestation.

  <><><>

  Griffin’s philosopher cells sighted the invasive matter around Elepaio. They had no concept of such a phenomenon, so they tagged it as likely hostile. At the same time, they launched multiple searches into the cell field’s deep memory, seeking a similar situation, a past experience to help them interpret what they saw and to suggest a method of attack.

  Clemantine didn’t know what to make of it either until a submind arrived and memories unfolded. Her first action was to reinforce the classification of “hostile.”

  Through the ship’s senses, she looked ahead to the gleam of Dragon’s philosopher cells, a hundred kilometers distant, and read the message contained in their microsecond flashes:

 

  Sooth. It was the logical next step.

  Bracing herself against the terrible sense of dissociation she knew would come, she shunted power to the gun.

  <><><>

  *Urban, Clemantine warned.

  The urgency in her voice let him know that the Clemantine who spoke was his Clemantine, the version of her on Dragon’s high bridge, and not the icy mistress of Griffin.

  *I see it, he answered, apprehending the cause of her concern.

  An updated image of Elepaio circulated through the philosopher cells’ conversation. In it, the discrete warm points indicating the presence of matter energized by the reef could no longer be seen. Elepaio had lost its glamour. It appeared now to be clean.

  A submind brought a memory of the most recent telescope image. It confirmed the hull cells’ observation: The glamour was gone.

  Clemantine said, *The devices have launched from Elepaio.

  *Sooth.

  The devices would try to reach Dragon or Griffin. No way to know how widely they were scattered or how fast they might be coming. And it was possible, even likely, that each device was really a package of smaller weapons. That’s how he would have done it—loaded each with thousands or tens of thousands of needle projectiles like those he’d used to infect Griffin.

  He canceled his decision to use the gamma-ray gun:

  – hold fire –

  No need to sacrifice Elepaio when the invasive devices were already gone.

  – hold fire: don’t shoot –

  He dumped the argument at a hundred thousand points across Dragon’s cell field.

  – hold fire –

  To his surprise, the philosopher cells affirmed this argument. Reinforced it:

  But Clemantine objected: *What are you doing? We can still hit the swarm of devices while they’re on their way in.

  *They’ve already scattered. The time delay. The immense span of space. I’d have to burn out the reef to cover it all.

  *Then burn it! You can’t let the swarm hit us.

  The philosopher cells picked up on her mood, echoed it, their hostility swiftly rising.

  *All right.

  He envisioned Elepaio. Sent that image to the cells with a warning: – do not target –

 

  He shared with them the idea of an incoming infectious swarm—a concept they understood because he’d deployed it against them in the distant past.

  The cells established a summary and proposed a response:

  He made no objection, but emphasized the protection he’d placed on Elepaio: – do not target –

 

  The philosopher cells carried out the maneuver, orienting Dragon so its bow faced Elepaio, presenting the smallest profile to the incoming swarm.

  To Clemantine, he said, *Tell her.

  *She knows everything I know, Clemantine assured him.

  As if to prove it, Griffin’s hull cells signaled their intention to fire. Seconds later, a high-energy lance punched through the wide gulf between Dragon and Elepaio. Blind strikes, repeating. Again. And again.

  Excitement ignited among Dragon’s philosopher cells. With no input from Urban they flashed a microsecond message to Griffin, urging the companion ship to continue——while commencing their own high-energy sweep of the suspect region.

  Urban mentally braced as power leaped from the reef to the gun, the force of it twisting, tearing, destabilizing the reality in which he existed. Knife slices from a parallel universe.

  The beam hunted blindly through the gulf, while across the surface of the reef, polyps began to immolate, burned up by the energy they channeled, burned off in micro-thin layers, blue fire eroding down into the lifeless depths that lay beneath the reef’s living veneer.

  The same process underway on Griffin.

  How many layers could be lost? He didn’t know—but too many, and the reef might not recover.

  Enough!

&n
bsp; He dropped the hammer of command: – stop –

  Simultaneously messaging the other Clemantine: *Stop! Don’t burn out your reef.

  In a cold, calm voice, easily distinguished from his Clemantine, she answered, *I’m done . . . for now.

  Was there an unspoken implication in her words? His Clemantine thought so. She said, *If the entity gets through, we fight it. We aren’t going to yield either ship.

  *We’ll do all we can, the mistress of Griffin agreed. *But warn the company. Be ready to evacuate.

  <><><>

  The philosopher cells kept watch, and eventually they sighted sparks of plasma, barely discernible, flaring to brief life in the laser-strafed gulf. Signatures of vaporizing matter, each spark marking the destruction of a vector of infection.

  Thousands of them.

  No way to know if they’d gotten them all.

  In the library, Clemantine said, “If even one gets through . . .”

  “Sooth. I know it.”

  On the high bridge, Urban prepared the philosopher cells for the possibility of invasion, for imminent infestation. They rallied molecular defenses. The resulting metabolic activity was so extreme it caused the temperature just beneath the cell field to climb. Aggressive preparations, but he remembered too well how swiftly his avatar had vanished after he’d entered the shipwreck . . . and he did not believe it would be enough.

  <><><>

  We can help each other.

  Alone in Griffin’s library, Clemantine listened again to the recorded voice of the entity at the Rock. Her ghost lip curled, showing ghost teeth—an ancient threat response.

  We will help each other.

  A scary monster lurking in the dark beyond the hull.

  I mean you no harm.

  Disingenuous words, given the thousands of vector devices found and destroyed by the laser barrage. What harm would ensue if a surviving device found its way to Dragon? No one knew. No one wanted to know. Engineers—both human and Apparatchik—worked to enhance the defense, laboring over molecular, incendiary, and mechanical responses to potential invasion.

  Should all their efforts fail, Griffin would become the fallback position, their only possible refuge—though it could not substitute for Dragon.

  Griffin had no habitable space and so it could offer no chance of a physical existence, not in the immediate future. And the library did not have the computational resources to support so many ghosts. But Griffin’s archive could contain them. Its archive now held updated copies of every member of the ship’s company. Insurance, should the worst occur.

  SEVENTH

  A single needle, lacking self-awareness, rides on unseen vectors that draw it irresistibly toward the massive bulk of the lead starship.

  The hull looms, a vast, glowing plain. The frictionless needle passes through this outer barrier without resistance; it slides meters deep into the bio-active tissue beneath. Obedient to its simple programming, it shape shifts, extruding hooks that roughen its surface and abruptly stop its descent.

  It monitors the temperature of the surrounding tissue as the steam generated by the friction of deceleration dissipates. Microseconds pass.

  Then it shape-shifts again.

  Its outer skin opens and it releases an initial payload: Nanotech devices that consume the host tissue, drawing energy from it as they begin to build.

  Chapter

  25

  A cardinal nanosite detected the intrusion. A monitoring DI picked up the alert, reviewed the known data, and reported in:

  *The hull is breached, it announced in an alert that went out to everyone in the ship’s company. *The infiltration consists of a bore hole. Diameter zero point seven millimeters. Depth thirteen meters. Defensive procedures have been initiated.

  On the high bridge, Urban replicated his ghost. Sent it to the affected cardinal. Arrived to find a molecular-level war well underway—attack, adaptation, and counter-attack playing out at the speed of molecular reactions. Tissue steamed with heat generated by the ferocity of the battle.

  For several seconds, the ship’s defensive systems held their ground. The cardinal modeled the conflict as a three-dimensional projection: bright-red shapes suggestive of hooks and drills and prongs and sockets contending against a featureless silver tide, all of it writhing and shifting in frantic motion reflecting a flood of incoming data.

  Urban didn’t expect the ship’s defenses to defeat this invasion. He only hoped to slow the assault, allowing time for containment efforts to work.

  Rapidly growing capillaries branched into the hot zone, supplying Makers tasked with constructing a barrier around the incursion, a containment shell that would seal it off from the rest of the ship. Within the shell, a layer of explosives set to trigger when containment was complete, sterilizing everything inside.

  Powerful ligaments reached into the hot zone. They attached to the forming shell, poised to eject it from the ship’s hull.

  Within the restrictive environment of the cardinal, Urban had no illusion of full physical presence, but there were cues. When Vytet joined him, he knew it by the gravity of her presence.

  “Nearly over,” Urban growled.

  “No,” Vytet said. “Something’s gone wrong. It’s taking too long, and the heat around the containment shell is not dissipating. There! You see? The problem is with the ligaments. They’re not attached.”

  He looked more closely at the model and saw that she was right. The ligaments had been rejected. That meant the containment shell was no longer under their control. He sent an override command to immediately trigger the explosives.

  No explosion occurred.

  Instead, a silvery sheen appeared over the shell’s ribbed surface—a default representation used by the model whenever information was lacking. It indicated something was there, but the model had no data to determine what it might be or what it was made of.

  “Shit,” Urban whispered.

  The invasion had outstripped his efforts to contain it, and the shell’s silvery surface—the face of the unknowable, the inaccessible—was rapidly expanding. It lost its spherical form. It extended into a rounded cylinder. Tendrils sprouted from it, also sheathed in the silver of undefined matter. The tendrils shot through the ship’s bio-mechanical tissue, advancing as if they faced no resistance, though armies of molecular defenses marshaled against them.

  Urban watched in horror, understanding that he was beaten. His best defenses, useless against this thing.

  The tendrils did not seek out the philosopher cells. They ignored the fibers of the neural bridge. Instead, they went deep, reaching for the stored reserves of sorted elements from which nearly anything could be assembled. And they quested forward too, toward the reef.

  “It understands our structure,” Vytet said.

  “It studied the structure of the wrecked courser,” Urban answered tersely. He thought again of the scuttled starships and the choice their crews had made. “I’m going to assemble more explosives. Our last chance is to blast it out.”

  “We’d have to get ahead of it,” Vytet objected. “I don’t think we can.”

  Maybe not. Not while the entity continued to claim more territory with each passing second. Still, he sent a submind to share the idea with the Engineer.

  Vytet proposed another strategy: “We can ask Griffin to burn it out.”

  Urban spent a precious few seconds considering this, weighing what he knew of the philosopher cells and their vicious temperaments. “No,” he decided. “It would be interpreted as an attack. I don’t know what would happen. Maybe I’d lose control. If Dragon retaliated, we could lose both ships. We have to preserve Griffin.”

  He summoned a DI, instructed it to message everyone, encourage them to update their archived ghosts.

  The silver shell, now a long cylindrical capsule of unmapped space, continued to expand. The fibers of the neural bridge retracted before it, yielding territory, and pulling the cardinal that Urban and Vytet occupied to a temporary safety
.

  “We’ll have to fall back farther,” Vytet said, thinking aloud. “Set up a new defensive perimeter. Try again to isolate and eject the main infestation.”

  “Go,” Urban agreed. “Do it. I’ll follow.”

  Vytet’s ghost slid away. Urban lingered, staring at the projection, at the intrusion’s blank reflective face. He had been master of Dragon for centuries. Now his ship was being taken from him in an assault that echoed the strategy he’d used to capture it long ago—the same strategy he’d used to take Griffin—and worse, he’d allowed himself to be a vector for this thing.

  “It’s not over,” he swore.

  Dragon had one more, hidden level of defense. The ship was a mosaic lifeform made up of an alliance of organisms—not just Chenzeme and human and the reef with its utterly alien nature. There were also the ancient, nanotechnological governors of Deception Well, secreted within the ship’s bio-mechanical tissue.

  Urban did not control the governors. He’d never mapped their structures. Elusive and mostly undetectable, they operated on their own, following their own protocols, but they were present, and he hoped they would act to limit this overt, aggressive expansion. To govern it. That’s what they’d been designed to do—and not by him. They were originally engineered by the forgotten beings who had inhabited Deception Well long before humanity existed.

  The governors always sought to integrate new life systems into the existing matrix. But Urban knew from harsh experience that they would attack aggressively if they were under threat.

  “Now,” he murmured. “Now would be a good time.”

  Wishful thinking . . . and yet the infestation abruptly ceased its awful expansion. The shell remained a hot zone, its high temperature indicating intense activity, but its perimeter was no longer growing.

  He watched the model, waiting through anxious seconds for the expansion to begin again. If he’d been capable of breathing in this stub of electronic existence, he would have been holding his breath.