by Linda Nagata
Well, he had.
A lie of omission because he knew Clemantine never would have agreed to come if he’d told her the full truth.
He dressed and went early to the forest room. Evening was falling, casting a rosy glow through the pergola. Lanterns drifting within the perimeter nooks gleamed with soft light. White moths fluttered around them, casting erratic shadows.
He chose a nook, hooked his foot into a stirrup, and turned to face the entrance. He did not have to wait long.
After just a few minutes, Clemantine floated in. She saw him, and kicked off the wall, gliding the short distance to join him, holding out her hand. He took it, and they hugged. He breathed in the sweet, rich scent of her. “I love you,” he whispered.
She drew back, suspicion igniting in her eyes. “You’re really in trouble, aren’t you?”
“Yes,” he agreed ruefully, offering no resistance as she pulled away.
Vytet came in next, looking distracted, as if his mind was engaged elsewhere—until he joined them in the nook. Then his attention lit on Urban. “Is it an issue of resources?” he asked.
“Let’s discuss it altogether,” Urban said tersely though he suspected it was being discussed in an exchange of messages not addressed to him.
Vytet’s eyes narrowed. He traded a glance with Clemantine. Then they both turned toward the entrance just as Kona glided in.
“All right,” Kona said as he joined them. “This must be about the outriders.” He hooked a bare foot under a stirrup, and Urban found himself the subject of a stern, all-too-familiar gaze that sent him back through time, twelve hundred years, to when he was a kid in pursuit of adventure and ever short on good judgment.
“You’re going to have a hard time replacing the lost outriders. Is that correct?” Kona asked.
“Yes,” Urban agreed. “That’s right.” Feeling off balance, his planned speech already blown. “If it was just a question of mass alone, Dragon would be able to easily re-grow the lost ships—”
“But some necessary elements are in short supply,” Kona finished for him. “You don’t have them in sufficient quantity.”
Despite his growing ire, Urban was impressed. He’d thought Vytet would work it out, or Clemantine, but the old man had gotten there first. “That’s right,” he agreed. “That’s the issue.”
“You didn’t plan for this?” Kona asked.
“Oh, I did. I just didn’t think it’d become an issue this early.”
“Say it, then,” Clemantine urged him, her voice low and dangerous.
“I have to postpone completion of the gee deck. We can finish the engineering phase, but work on the interior has to wait—along with the resurrection of the ship’s company.”
“You’re not serious,” she said.
“I am. I’m sorry.”
“We owe our people a life, Urban. You can’t keep them archived forever.”
“I don’t want to keep them archived forever! That is not my intention. But I need time to recover from this loss.”
Kona said, “You must have had the elements set aside to finish the deck.”
“Yes,” Urban agreed. “And I still have them. I could finish the deck. But that would leave nothing. No reserves. No way to grow another outrider. And I’m already down to four. If I lose another—”
“You’re saying our people have to wait,” Clemantine interrupted, “while you devote resources to re-growing your fleet?”
“No. I don’t have the resources to re-grow both outriders. I’d have to cannibalize the gee deck to do it, and while the Engineer thinks we could do that, there’s risk involved, a possibility of destabilizing the boundaries, and even if that didn’t happen, we’d run a similar risk starting all over again later—”
Clemantine cut him off. “We are not cannibalizing the gee deck.”
“I agree,” he said, gripping a wall loop to stabilize himself. “That is not going to happen.”
“Do we even need to replace the outriders?” Kona asked. “Can we go with just the four ships we have left? Even three might be enough.”
To Urban’s surprise, Clemantine answered this. “The Scholar believes we’re vulnerable to a stealth Chenzeme attack without all six outriders monitoring the Near Vicinity.”
“It’s true,” Urban said. “The Pilot will tell you the same thing. And you’ve seen now how easily the outriders can be destroyed. We’re a long way from the Hallowed Vasties. There’s a real chance we’ll lose another before we get there.”
Vytet said, “I don’t think anyone is arguing against the advantage of a full fleet. If six is the ideal number, six is the number we should aim for. The question is, how do you intend to replace them? We are deep in the void. There is nothing out here but us. Must we divert to a planetary system?”
“It will take decades to set up a mining operation,” Kona said, his forehead wrinkled in thought as if he was already planning key steps in the operation.
“That’s not what we’re going to do,” Urban said. He drew a deep breath, then plunged ahead. “Dragon is a predator. It hunts other ships to consume them, to use their mass, to harvest the rare elements they carry. That’s how its sustained. That’s how it grows. That’s how I’ve been able to grow the fleet of outriders.”
“Other ships?” Clemantine asked. “What other ships?”
“Right,” he said. “The only ships you’re ever going to see out here are Chenzeme coursers. I hunt Chenzeme coursers. I’ve done it twice before.”
Clemantine ducked her chin. Her eyes narrowed. Urban imagined he could taste her fury. Instinct warned him to open the distance between them, but he stayed.
“You can’t be serious,” Kona said.
“I am.”
Clemantine said, “I didn’t see anything about this in the ship’s history.”
“I know. I kept it hidden.”
Her hand squeezed into a fist. “You promised me you’d kept nothing hidden.”
“Nothing about the Null Boundary Expedition,” he said weakly.
Her eyes widened, shock and hurt and a sense of betrayal in her gaze. “So this is it,” she said acidly. “This is what you’ve been hiding, what you’ve been afraid to tell me. I knew there was something.”
“I couldn’t tell you.”
“Why not?”
“You wouldn’t have come.”
Seconds passed as she considered this. Then she nodded slowly—“You’re right”—her anger unabated.
“It’s different now,” he said quickly. “You’re different. You’ve been on the high bridge. You’ve commanded the ship. You know we can do this. You can do it. Destroy another courser. Take it apart. Ensure it never attacks another world, never takes another life. You can do that.”
He held out a hand to her, hoping she would yield, that she would concede him some measure of forgiveness, but she refused. “You asked me to trust you,” she said.
Kona scowled fiercely. “So this was your plan from the start?”
“Yes,” Urban confirmed. “It was always the plan.”
“How can it work?” Vytet demanded to know. “Dragon is a hybrid ship. If you take us close to another courser, it’s going to recognize our alien nature. It has to—and it will do all it can to kill us.”
“I know how to put on an acceptable appearance,” Urban insisted. He hesitated at the irony in this claim, but then he pushed on. “Our target won’t know what we are until it’s too late.”
He turned to Clemantine again. “You know how it works. You’ve seen it before. One courser. That’s all we need, and we’ll be able to fill up our reserves, grow new outriders, finish the gee deck, resurrect everyone in the ship’s company, and still have a margin for future projects. We have to do this. There’s no choice in it. It would be dangerous to go into the Hallowed Vasties without reserves. It would be foolish. We have no idea what we’ll find there, no idea what kind of ancillary defenses we’ll need. We need to be ready.”
“There is a ch
oice,” Kona said, looking thoughtfully at Clemantine.
She nodded her agreement, turned to Urban, and said, “There is the choice to go back.”
His heart boomed. He couldn’t read her, couldn’t tell if she meant it. “Is that what you want?” he asked, low-voiced, hearing his own resentment. “Retreat?”
“No,” she said in a dangerous purr. “You’re right. It’s different now that I’ve been on the high bridge.” The hard line of her lips curled into a snarl . . . or maybe she meant it as a smile. “Let’s hunt.”
<><><>
Dragon followed a navigational path that would bypass the clustered stars of the Committee. Chenzeme ships had hunted first among those stars, scourging inhabited worlds. Historians believed the Chenzeme had pushed on from there, venturing ever deeper into human-settled space, just as Urban was doing. He felt sure he would be able to find a courser still prowling among the star systems that lay along his route to the Hallowed Vasties.
The four outriders kept watch over the Near Vicinity. Adapting to their reduced numbers, they coordinated scopes and sensors to continue their ongoing survey of the void.
A DI combed the collected data. It updated the library’s star maps, logging positions of the myriad red dwarfs that were everywhere in the galaxy. It also sought anomalies, looking specifically for the spectra of luminous philosopher cells and for gamma-ray bursts that might be a grim indication of a new assault against some surviving settlement. The DI looked for gravitational perturbations too, in an effort to detect the presence of a stealthed courser powered by a zero-point reef.
Urban also searched with Chenzeme senses. On the high bridge, with Clemantine observing, he entered into a conversation with the philosopher cells. As always, they were immersed in an instinctive hunt for other lifeforms. He shifted their focus by introducing a new argument:
– find another –
This was an instinctive task too and the cells consented without protest. Their luminosity was always a signal to other Chenzeme ships and might be enough to draw one in. He hoped so. Let the other ship take the risk of acceleration.
*Now we wait, Urban told Clemantine.
*It might be years before we find one, Clemantine said.
Urban warned her, *It might be centuries.
*If we don’t find one, we’ll need to set up a mining operation somewhere, like Kona said.
*It’s an option, but I don’t want to take the time. Better to take out one of our enemy’s ships. Don’t you think? That, after all, was the argument that had persuaded her to stay.
*Sooth, she agreed. *I thought I never wanted to see another Chenzeme courser. Now I hope we find one soon.
FOURTH
You are formidable.
Three shipwrecks now orbit your world. As you had guessed, the first ship came to ensure your demise and pick over your bones. You surprised that one, breached its defenses, attempted to take control of it—but its autonomous synthetic mind destroyed its propulsion mechanism and then destroyed itself. You remained marooned.
The second ship carried a human crew of ancestral form. Their forebears had escaped the Communion. They, like you, had seen the synthetic’s ship. They’d watched it from afar, seen it decelerate in the middle of nowhere—and then never saw it again. This piqued their curiosity and because they were a people both wealthy and adventurous, they sent a ship to investigate, with no idea what they might find.
You admired these people. You admired their bravery, their fortitude, even their decision to disable their starship rather than let you take it.
After that, nothing, as billions of seconds passed. You used the time to recover more and more of yourself and to grow ever more formidable. In time, you decided you were strong enough to risk making your presence known. You called out to the void and your call was answered by an alien starship.
That was not an event you anticipated. Nowhere in your shattered memory was there mention of such a thing. Such a beast. You survived only because it delayed its attack as it sought to ascertain just what you were before it killed you. Even so, it was a hard-fought encounter that left you nearly undone again.
More repairs.
But when you recovered sufficiently, you sent an avatar to investigate the ruined hulk of the alien ship and you learned much from it. You learned enough to be ready should such a chance come again.
Chapter
13
Clemantine’s ghost awoke from dormancy. A submind slipped into its pattern, integrating, so she knew things she had not known before: Dragon was over three hundred ninety years out of Deception Well—almost 80% of the way to the edge of the Hallowed Vasties; ahead of them an anomalous radio signal had been detected.
Clemantine experienced a surge of excitement, of anticipation—and fear too. Fear was necessary, caution essential, because it was impossible to know what they might find. Anything could be out there, from the unthinking residues of moldy life to godlike beings among the ruins—and maybe it would not be so easy to tell the difference?
But they would look. That was why they’d come: to discover what was here, what might remain—while doing all they could to survive first contact.
The radio signal was weak, too attenuated by distance for Dragon to detect it directly. Remote Fortuna had found it—the lead ship in the vanguard—and passed the record back through the fleet.
Clemantine transited to the library, manifesting there in a simulation of physical existence. Kona arrived alongside her.
Urban and Vytet were already present, studying a three-dimensional map showing Dragon’s position amid the nearest stars. The map’s colors were inverted: white background, black stars. Far ahead of the fleet and offset to the left of their trajectory, a small, curving swath of space glowed faintly blue. Sequences of monotone beeps played in soft rhythm, each set of beeps separated by a silence that lasted an equivalent time:
beep-beep-beep-beep
beep-beep-beep-beep-beep
beep-beep-beep-beep-beep-beep
An absurdly simple sequence, but Clemantine listened with an attentiveness she might have given to a complex symphony while the count continued to climb until it reached ten. Then with the next round the number of beeps commenced to drop, declining steadily toward one.
Urban indicated the blue glow. “We think the signal is originating from somewhere in this area,” he said, his voice taut with excitement. He turned to Clemantine, his expression bright with the flush of discovery, no trace of his usual cynicism in the tight curve of his smile. “It’s not Chenzeme,” he said. “At least, not like any Chenzeme signal we’ve ever heard before.”
“Human?” she asked.
“I don’t know.”
“What is human?” Kona wondered. “The closer we get to the Hallowed Vasties, the more likely we’ll face that question.”
“This could be human,” someone said. An unfamiliar, childlike voice.
Clemantine’s head snapped around in surprise—though it had to be Vytet’s voice, spoken by a new aspect, updated since the last time they had been together. Doubtless Vytet had changed many times in the intervening years, but Clemantine’s daily inspections of the ship did not extend to an inspection of Dragon’s inhabitants.
In this version, Vytet had adopted pale blue skin, deep blue eyes, and a creamy white color for the pelt that covered her scalp. Finely sculpted facial features suggested a feminine nature, but the lack of both masculine weight or feminine curves on a body as thin as Clemantine had ever seen it, left gender open to question. Time would tell. Until then, Clemantine defaulted to the universal she.
Vytet continued to think out loud. “A simple signal,” she murmured, her voice possessing the sweet, high tone of a pre-adolescent child. “Certainly artificial—but not a language. The complexity of language isn’t there. It could be a new Chenzeme tactic. We don’t know—”
She broke off as the pulsing beeps dropped in number to one. They all listened to a single drawn-out tone that laste
d several seconds. Then abruptly the signal changed to a complex series of swift beeps, suggesting some kind of code.
“It got our attention,” Clemantine said. “Now it’s telling us what it wants us to know.”
Kona looked up from the map, looked around. Impatiently: “Where are the Scholar and the Mathematician? We need them on deck to do the decoding.”
Both instantiated immediately, appearing within their frameless windows on opposite sides of the black-on-white starfield. The Scholar, with his mature countenance, wore formal blue. The Mathematician, Urban’s double, was dressed exactly like him, in a casual charcoal-gray pullover and snug black trousers.
Both Apparatchiks looked annoyed.
“They’re already working on it,” Urban explained. “My guess is that if we’re meant to understand the code, the solution will be easy.”
“We,” Clemantine mused. “Do you think it’s aware of us?”
Urban answered her question with one of his own: “How close is it? Close enough to resolve the light of our hull cells? Probably not.”
“It’s got to be a trap,” Kona said with a fierce scowl. “A lure to draw in the curious.”
Urban nodded reluctantly. “I agree it’s some kind of lure. It wants to be found. But that says nothing about its purpose.”
A trap.
Given the hostile nature of the Universe as Clemantine knew it, that made grim sense. Her perspective shifted, her first flush of enthusiasm cooled. She made herself listen, really listen, to the continuing sequence of arrhythmic beeps, striving to extract some meaning from them, though they remained meaningless to her ear.
She knew from the library that Urban had never encountered anything like this before. “If it is a lure,” she pointed out, “whoever or whatever is behind it doesn’t fear attention or discovery by the Chenzeme.”