Edge of Dark

by Brenda Cooper

  “War happened. The ship there—the one that you see holed in the central building—it belonged to the mechs, who became the ice pirates after they were banished from the system.”

  “I’ve heard that term,” she mused. “Mechs. It meant human uploads to machine bodies, right?”

  “And similar things. Copies of humans, so there could be a whole fleet of a hundred robotic ships managed by a single human mind that was also a hive mind.”

  She looked over at the destroyed city. “I hadn’t realized they hated us so much,” she said softly.

  “I don’t know who hated who the most. Or who was the most afraid of who.”

  “So what is it now? Is it hatred or fear?”

  “I don’t know.” He started unpacking a picnic. Jean Paul had sent two vegetable sandwiches, two cookies, water, and a bottle of wine with two nice glasses. He frowned at the wine. Jean Paul knew better; Charlie didn’t drink when he was working. “Maybe war is always both.”

  “You brought me here to see this because of what happened to the High Sweet Home?”

  “Partly. I might have brought you here anyway.”

  She went silent for a minute before musing, “Whether we’re afraid of the ice pirates or we hate them, it might be the same. Satyana thinks a war could ruin the Glittering. That they’ve been building up so much military strength that they could destroy every station. Every one. All of them. I never imagined the Diamond Deep being vulnerable before. We have defenses for asteroids and enough guns and fighters to fend off a small fleet of invaders, but that’s all. Satyana thinks the ice pirates could take the Deep, or destroy her.” She looked up, as if she could see the pirates from here. “I talked to her this morning, and she’s more worried than I’ve ever heard her.”

  His gut tightened. Of course the stations were threatened, too. “Surely there’d be no reason.”

  She looked directly at him, determined. “Just like we need to save Lym, the Deep matters to humanity. It is our greatest social and technical achievement.”

  It sounded like propaganda, but she believed it. He’d never thought of the Glittering as anything other than a vague evil. But he saw she was right. “Okay.”

  “Satyana said that the High Sweet Home has been partly disassembled.”

  He handed her a sandwich. “I’m sorry about your friend.”

  She turned away, but not before he noticed her blinking back a tear. He looked straight ahead, giving her space. Eventually, she ate.

  They got through lunch with a quiet companionship that felt pregnant with some desire for more. It made Charlie profoundly uncomfortable. He knew how to refuse a client who flirted inappropriately with him, but Nona wasn’t flirting at all.

  He was attracted to her.

  He hadn’t felt like this about anyone for a decade. As she helped him pick up the remains of their picnic, her pinky brushed the back of his hand. Her touch felt like a trail of fire.

  Feeling slightly reckless, he opened the wine and poured a full glass for each of them. Even though he contrived to spill half of his since he was on duty, he felt off-balance, threatened from above by war and from the side by a beautiful woman.

  They sat and drank in silence together. No toasts, no small talk that didn’t matter. Only a silence that felt like conversation.

  When they finished the wine, she proclaimed, “I’m going for a walk.”

  “It’s really not safe,” he told her.

  “Is anywhere safe?” She laughed at him, a good-natured laugh. “I want to get some close-ups.”

  He swallowed a retort and grabbed up both his projectile gun and the stun gun he’d used on the tongats before he followed. “Okay. I’ll go with you. But only to the edge.”

  She followed a thin animal trail toward the broken city. He matched her pace, even though being next to her meant he walked on stonier ground and had to be careful not to trip. He forced himself not to put his arm around her and did his best to look away from her.

  “I have something to tell you,” she said.

  “Okay.”

  “I’m going back home. I need to go to my hotel tomorrow, to start getting ready. I’m leaving in a few days.”

  He felt stunned, and his words came out gruff. “I thought you had a few weeks.”

  “I have to go see if I can help Chrystal. I can’t just be here and let bad things happen to my best friend.”

  “That’s absurd. What can you do?” he asked her. He could see his words strike her like physical things and wished for them back. “I mean, I know you’re capable. But you’re one person. A teacher.”

  She looked up toward the Glittering. “I’ve got a ship coming. I can get out to space, maybe out near the Ring to find out what’s happening.”

  “Aren’t there already people doing that?”

  “Satyana says not many. Most people are coming in and not going out.”

  “Doesn’t it take a long time to get anywhere?”

  “Months, at least. More since I’ll stop at the Deep.”

  Her words were sinking in. “What do you mean you’ve got a ship coming? Satyana is sending one for you?” She had a starship?

  “It’s my ship,” she said. She sounded defensive.

  Oh. “Okay. You can have a ship.” She hadn’t been acting rich, and he had been forgetting about that. Fool.

  “Of course I can have a ship.” She pointed at the skimmer. “You do.”

  “I bet yours is bigger.”

  “I bet it is, too.”

  “You don’t know?”

  “It’s bigger.” She pulled away from him, jogging downhill.

  “The skimmer’s not mine anyway. It’s Lym’s.”

  She stopped and let him catch up. “I forgot. You don’t really own things here.”

  “That’s right.”

  “So I’m not really paying you? I’m paying the collective?”

  “I get a salary.” They passed a tangle of broken metallic parts that had once been girders or windows but had become barriers for blowing soil.

  She stopped and looked over the shattered buildings, taking pictures of them. She seemed to be trying to capture the way they loomed and leaned, the silence and the emptiness. “It seems like a dry place for such a big city.”

  “It didn’t used to be. The currents were different when sea level was higher and all of these hills were cropland.

  “Can we go further?”

  “We shouldn’t.”

  “I’m not ever going to be back here.”

  She kept walking. He wished she wouldn’t. He tried to imagine picking her up and slinging her over his shoulder, but it didn’t seem like a good idea. Rich woman with her own ship, headstrong. Just like he had first thought she might be.

  There was nothing to do but follow her, so he did. “We’re coming into the part of the city that used to be markets and restaurants. You can see some tables still.”

  She leaned in the open doorway of a broken wall, looking through it. She hissed at him quietly. “Come here.”

  He had to stand close to her to look through. She smelled faintly of dust and wine.

  She pointed. “Look.”

  On the far side of a littered square, a woman with long grey hair and a long cowl stood looking around, as if hunting for something.

  “That’s Freida,” he whispered. “She’s a gleaner.”

  “A gleaner?”

  “They consider themselves re-wilded . . . no medicine. Nothing they can’t hunt or gather. They live in small groups. She’s not supposed to be here, though. Neville is so off-limits that I had to file a report and get a permit for today.”

  “Should we talk to her?”

  He put a hand on Nona’s shoulder. “Not yet.”

  “Turn around.” The words came from behind him, from a man. He turned to see a ragged figure standing on a rooftop that he thought had been caved in. The man wore clothes like Frieda’s: handwoven material stained by soot and grease. His weathered face looked crag
gy and lined with wrinkles. His eyes bored into Charlie’s, his gaze determined and a little nervous. The gun in his hand pointed unwaveringly at Charlie’s chest.

  “There’s more,” Nona whispered.

  CHAPTER FOURTEEN

  NONA

  Nona feel faint as she shifted her glance between all three of the people who had weapons pointed at her. There was the man on the roof who had first spoken to them. Ratty, everything covered but his wrinkled face and his dark, piercing eyes. He watched Charlie, but he could certainly fire at her if he wanted to. Across the narrow street from him, a young boy crouched in a doorway. He couldn’t be more than fifteen, still caught on the ragged edge of puberty. Blond hair hung across his nose and chin in a tangled curtain, masking his expression. His eyes were mod-eyes, something she could have seen on the Deep. They looked like a cat’s, with huge golden pupils and squished-oval green irises. The woman that Charlie knew, Frieda, had also pulled a weapon. She had come up on the opposite side from the cat-eyed boy. She stood slightly bent over and looked quite frail, although she held her gun steady.

  Blood pounded in Nona’s throat. She wanted to run even though her feet felt like lead. She’d never been threatened with her life, never really felt like she could die in the next second. Not until she got here, where the ocean had nearly swallowed her and now a man pointed a weapon at her.

  “What do you want?” Charlie asked, his voice as calm as a day in the park.

  Frieda spoke. “We need to show you something.”

  “You don’t need guns for that.”

  Frieda gestured toward Nona. “Do you trust her?”

  For half a breath she worried about his answer, but he said, “Yes.”

  The man smiled and nodded. “Follow the boy.”

  Cat-eyes led them deeper into the city. Nona followed, cursing herself. Charlie had told her not to go in here, and she had been too stubborn to listen.

  Their guide took a number of turns. Nona stumbled once, and Frieda whispered at her, “Be quiet.”

  Who they were afraid would hear them? After Frieda’s admonishment, Nona winced every time she accidentally dragged her foot. She coughed once and felt her face flush with embarrassment.

  They entered a door, which closed behind them. Sudden darkness stole her vision. The boy hissed at her to take his hand and shuffle, and she did. The dark felt thick and alive. The corridor smelled of urine. Charlie and their other two captors made barely audible shuffling footsteps behind her. Frieda gave them instructions to stand still and close their eyes.

  Nona did, her fists clenched. Some small scared part of her expected to be shot.

  A light snapped on. She blinked in the unexpected brightness.

  Some technology she couldn’t see projected pictures in the air. Frieda addressed Charlie. “Sorry for the ambush. We didn’t want you to call for help and we didn’t want to be seen.”

  Nona stepped toward the closest picture and found she could put her hand right through it without causing so much as a ripple. On the Deep, people used displays like this in museums or on stages or even in upscale bars, but she’d never been close enough to touch one. The image above her head showed the inside of Neville, at least unless there was another ruined city nearby. A metallic figure moved left-to-right through the picture in an endless loop. “A robot?” Nona asked.

  Frieda pursed her lips. “We’ve seen three of these things . . .” She waved her hand around at all the pictures on the wall “. . . we think the same three. We’ve seen them three times, in three places. The last place is here. This morning. On the other side of the city. After we saw them here, we searched our pictures to find the other two sightings. We thought you might know if they’re ice pirates.”

  “What do you know about ice pirates?” Charlie asked.

  “They killed a station,” Cat-eyes said. “One of the big ones.” He seemed proud of his knowledge. “That’s what made us want to find you.”

  Charlie stalked around the room, looking at each picture. Nona followed him, the pictures bobbing down for her, recognizing she was shorter. It felt a little like they were demanding children popping into her face, and she even tried to brush one aside and let out a high nervous laugh when her gesture made no difference.

  Each image contained a robotic figure and, after a turn through them all, she could identify them as three different robots. They looked humanoid. One had legs that were too long for its body, with one leg a different color than the other, as if a spare part had been stuck on in an emergency and left there. Another’s arm ended in a stump. The third looked the most human—with soft skin and smooth movements.

  Charlie frowned. “Wouldn’t robots from the Edge be more . . . sophisticated? These look cobbled together.”

  “But if they wanted to pass?” Frieda prompted.

  “Then they might look like this.”

  Nona asked, “Do you use this kind of robot here? Are they familiar?”

  Cat-eyes said, “We’ve seen robo-bodies like these on farms. But they always had people around them. Bosses.”

  “Seen any people around these?” Charlie asked.

  “No, but you don’t always see scavengers,” Frieda said. “Especially the good ones.”

  “Why are you showing them to us?” Nona asked.

  Charlie answered. “Because I’m a ranger. And I have a skimmer.”

  “Can’t you just send the pictures?” Nona asked.

  “To who?” Cat-eyes said. “We’re allowed to exist, but no one really wants us here.”

  She wondered how such a young man had been thrown into this kind of society. It seemed like choosing to die when you didn’t have to. Some people on the Deep got old enough they got bored and started doing stupid things until almost dying either scared them back to life or they did die. It seldom happened to the young, though.

  Charlie paced, frowning. Finally he stopped and said, “I don’t know. Can we take copies of your images?”

  “Will you keep our secret?” Cat-eyes asked. “We don’t want anybody to know we were here.”

  “I suppose I can say someone left them on the skimmer when we took a walk.”

  “Say whatever you want,” the man said. “Just leave us out of it.”

  Charlie looked at Frieda instead of at the boy. She could almost see him thinking through options. “If you escort us back, and if you leave this place.”

  The boy looked ready to complain, but Frieda said, “I want to be away from cities anyway. Especially if they’re full of pirates.”

  “Why do you think they’re Next?” Nona asked.

  “Next?” the boy asked.

  “That’s what the pirates call themselves,” Nona explained.

  “I thought they were soulbots,” Frieda said.

  Nona nodded. “I’ve heard that term. But why do you think these are soulbots?”

  Frieda gave her a long look. “Call it old age and instinct.” She glanced at Charlie. “You should capture one. Take it apart.”

  He frowned at the closest picture. “Later. Do you think there are more?”

  Frieda said, “I don’t know.”

  “Is there anything else you want us to see?” he asked.

  “No,” the man said. He stepped forward and handed Charlie a small, dark square. “The pictures are on here. You’ll have something that can read it.”

  Charlie nodded. “I will.”

  They returned through the dark and the bad scents and burst again into the sunshine and the ruined city. The crazy skyscrapers and broken bridges and jagged edges threw an odd assortment of shadows. Nona found herself looking down alleyways for robots and being even more careful about making noise. Everyone but her had a weapon out, generally held loosely near their thighs and waists and easily available.

  No one spoke until they emerged from the city and started climbing the hill. Nona had expected the gleaners to leave them where they found them, but they continued to come along and still held out their guns. Charlie took the
lead. Cat-eyes came up near Nona and said, “I hear you’re from a station.”

  “From the Diamond Deep,” she said.

  “What’s it like?”

  She smiled. “It’s the biggest station in the system. Bigger than Lym, or at least bigger if you calculate all the surfaces we can walk on.”

  His eyes widened, which gave him a comical look. “Many people?”

  “Thousands of times more than you have on all of Lym. We have no space like this, no open land, no sky.”

  “We grow your food.” He sounded pleased with himself for it.

  “Some of it. We appreciate it.”

  He looked wistful. “I’d love to see a station.”

  “Maybe someday you can. Did you go to school?”

  “I can read and write.”

  That wasn’t enough to survive on the Deep all by itself. “If you can get work on a ship sometime, you can visit.”

  “I’d like that. I’d like to see a station.”

  “I bet you would like it.” Besides, she thought, maybe then he’d decide to live. She liked him and felt sorry for him all at once. It seemed like his future was being stolen while he was too young to recognize the theft for a crime.

  They climbed the hill toward the rocks that hid the skimmer. Bright sun made it tough to see, and when she looked behind her, the bones of the city almost glowed with light.

  “Stop,” Charlie said. “Wait here.” He glanced at Cat-eyes. “You’re responsible for her,” he said, clearly meaning Nona.

  Cat-eyes nodded.

  “What are you worried about?” she asked.

  “I thought I saw something move.”

  She swallowed.

  “It’s probably an animal.” He turned back and kept going the way they had been until the sound of his footsteps faded. The man looked behind them, Frieda at where Charlie had disappeared. Cat-eyes and Nona looked in the other two directions.

  Nothing moved. No one spoke. Frieda passed a bottle of sun-warmed water around. Nona wet her lips. The water tasted surprisingly good, like citrus of some kind.

  Charlie came back. “All clear. I can’t find anything.” He still looked worried. The group held their silence as he led them to the skimmer. “Hang on,” he told Frieda. “Maybe I have some supplies for you.” He held out a bottle of water and some energy gels. The man grabbed the lot of it and tucked it into his ragged robe.