by Linda Nagata
The primary object was a small rocky body, airless, and only about 320 kilometers in diameter. Its density—estimated from the orbital speed of its moons—was surprisingly low. It lacked the gravity to self-organize into a spherical shape. Even so, it was nearly spherical. That might have been coincidence. Or not.
Still, it did not appear to be an artificial world. Its surface was heavily cratered. There were no visible structures, no obvious weapons, no hints of design. Urban would have dismissed it as a stray asteroid of no real interest, except that there was a boneyard in orbit around it. Its three moons could now be distinguished as the wreckage of starships. Two with torn hulls he assumed to be human in origin because what else could they be? The third was a broken remnant of a Chenzeme courser, its hull cells dark.
Urban was also able to pinpoint the source of the beacon. It did not originate on the Rock as he’d supposed. Instead, it issued from the smaller of the two human ships—a finding that disappointed him because it suggested the beacon really was an archaic distress signal and not a lure in a trap.
Riffan said, “Maybe the first ship got in trouble and summoned the second.”
“And the Chenzeme?” Urban asked. “Was it here first? Or last? And why are any of them here? And what killed them?”
“Could they have killed each other?” Riffan wondered. “The Chenzeme ship blown apart by the other two, but those two mortally wounded in the battle.”
Urban shook his head. “An encounter like that would take place with the ships thousands of kilometers apart. There’s no way the minor gravity of the Rock, this rogue world, would have captured all of them.” He looked at Riffan. “Is there a way to know how old the wrecks are?”
This time Riffan shook his head. “I’ve got a search running in the library. We might be able to identify the human ships, put a date on them. Other than that, we just know they’ve been here long enough to lose all their heat, though whether that means a few years or millennia, we aren’t going to be able to tell by distant observation.”
Urban said, “I think the Chenzeme warship was the last one to come here, probably in response to the signal. It might have been curious, wanting to identify the target before it struck, but it waited too long. The next warship to pick up the signal won’t come in close. As soon as it detects the wreck, it’ll fire its gun—but that hasn’t happened yet. That tells me the beacon is probably recent, no more than a few centuries old.”
“So there is something at the Rock,” Riffan said. “Something that can tear apart the hull of a courser as large as Dragon.” He laughed softly, self-deprecatingly. “My voice sounds impressively calm, doesn’t it? This ghost must be poorly rendered, because it isn’t communicating just how disturbed I feel. Do you still want to do the fly-by?”
“Yes. It’s our only option.”
They were on course to do a close fly-by, echoing Urban’s passage of Deception Well. Elepaio had far too much relative momentum to be troubled by the Rock’s slight gravity, and anyway, the little ship was too valuable to risk taking it in on a close approach. Once Elepaio had passed out of observational range, they would accelerate and eventually rejoin Dragon.
“But this means the Rock is a trap,” Riffan said. “Just as you first suggested. We have no idea of its reach. If we get too close . . .”
He did not finish the thought. He didn’t need to.
Still, Urban thought he worried too much. “If it had a long reach, why would it lure its prey in so close?” he asked.
“Because it’s easier to harvest their resources that way, isn’t it? Imagine it luring in ships, disabling them, feeding on their rare elements. You know, I really think we should pass by as quickly as we can.”
“No,” Urban said. “I want to know what’s there. We’re going to dump velocity, prolong our observational time. This is our one chance. We won’t be coming back.”
His plan was to send a disposable probe into the little system to take a closer look. The probe would carry a tiny reef that he would burn out in a brutal maneuver to reduce its relative velocity. As it neared the Rock, he would refine its course, sending it skating close to the hulks of the starships. The data the probe collected would stream back to Elepaio.
Scout-bots would ride aboard the probe but Urban wondered: Was that enough? His curiosity was building and, as Riffan had pointed out, this could be a dangerous venture. A scout-bot was not the most versatile option.
“I think we need to visit the system ourselves,” he decided. “In first person. Physical incarnation.”
Riffan regarded him with a look of shock and horror, seeming to reevaluate him as a mad man. “What? You want to dump that much velocity? Enter orbit? Risk Elepaio?”
Urban rolled his eyes. “No. We’ll go aboard the probe. We’re carrying all the matter and the Makers necessary to synthesize avatars. I’ll transfer that to the probe, launch it, and by the time it reaches the Rock, our avatars will be ready.”
“But how will we get back?”
“We won’t,” Urban said. Wasn’t that obvious? “There’s no way back. Not for an avatar. But we can get the ghosts back. We’ll have their memories.”
“You mean you want to abandon those other versions of ourselves? Leave them to die there in that alien place?”
“Shut them down, yes,” Urban said, irritated. “Dissolve them so they can’t be copied. You must have intended the same thing for that avatar you inhabited on Long Watch. What were you going to do with it, when you were ready to return to the Well? Leave it behind, right? You weren’t going to take a shuttle in-system?”
“Of course not. It would take years to physically transit. I would have returned as a ghost, while the avatar stayed aboard Long Watch in cold sleep.”
“Where it would eventually be recycled.”
“No. It would stay there, in case I needed it again.”
Urban responded to this declaration with a scowl of fierce disapproval. “That’s wasteful.”
“It’s respectful. This concept of throw-away bodies—”
“Hey,” Urban interrupted, feeling a need to defend himself. “It’s not something I do all the time.”
“It’s what you did at the Well. You wiped that version of yourself.”
“There wasn’t a choice. I didn’t want to stay behind.”
“But you did stay behind. Only a ghost escaped. There was no way out for that version of you that comprised the consciousness of the avatar.”
Urban grimaced. This was not a conversation he wanted to have. “That’s just how it works,” he said. “And that’s why I shut the avatar down.”
“You ended its life.”
“So? It was just an avatar. A means to access a different timeline, to allow for a split existence. Nothing wrong with that. What would be wrong, ethically wrong, would be to willy-nilly create copies of yourself and maintain all of them because every copy is afraid of termination.”
Riffan’s lip stuck out, his brow wrinkled. “That’s not what I meant. What’s wrong is to create an avatar that you intend to send on a suicide mission. You can bring yourself to do it because you imagine you’ll be the ghost that escapes. But what if you’re not? What if you’re the consciousness of the avatar and you’re stuck down there and you’ve got no way out? Sure, your ghost has escaped, but you’re still there! How do you think you’ll feel?”
Urban glowered. “I won’t feel anything because I’ll shut the avatar down. Now, are you going or not?”
Chapter
17
Riffan agreed to go. Really, did he have a choice? Urban was determined to visit the Rock and it would be wrong to let him go alone. And Riffan conceded—if only to himself—that his attitude toward avatars, while not wrong, might be a bit provincial, a little too impractical for the demands of his current existence. He suspected Pasha would think so.
But then, Pasha was an exceptional individual. In general, the people of Deception Well tended to cling to the old ways. Avatars were rar
e and could only be used with the approval of the council. Even then, only one instance of an individual could be awake and aware at any given time, so that when Riffan had served on Long Watch, he’d had to leave his original body in cold sleep in the city of Silk.
But Deception Well was far behind him now. He’d embarked on a new life with new demands, and also, new opportunities. Pasha would see that, and she would consider him an idiot for hesitating over this issue—and she would be right.
Exploration and discovery were the very reasons Riffan had uploaded his ghost to Dragon. So what if he was more accustomed to exploring the galaxy through highly processed images gathered by distant orbital telescopes, rather than in person? He could adapt! He would adapt. He owed it to himself and to Urban and to everyone aboard Dragon who might wish they’d had this opportunity that had been given to him.
He promised himself this expedition to the Rock would be only the first of many adventures to come. And then he split his timeline, creating a duplicate ghost that he sent to the probe.
I’m still here, he realized. Still aboard Elepaio. He was not the copy destined to explore the shipwrecks and the little rocky world. Disappointment flashed across the complex pattern that defined his mind. Relief followed in its wake.
<><><>
Riffan—that version assigned to the probe—awoke to panic, certain he was on the edge of death. A horrifying pressure crushed him from every side. It prevented him moving or even breathing. His arms were pinned, his legs impossible to bend. He imagined his lungs collapsed, his eyes deformed, his brain reduced to jelly. And he couldn’t see a damned thing—no light at all—though he could hear: a fast ominous arrhythmic scattershot of clicks and clunks that had him imagining this container so determined to crush him might change tactics and fly apart at any moment. Corruption and chaos! he thought. Why did I have to be this version of me?
The plan called for the probe to dump velocity as it approached the planetoid—a violent deceleration that would allow it to slip into orbit. A crushing deceleration.
Once in orbit, the probe would separate into its components. The surveillance and communications module would break away from the cargo capsule, and then the capsule would partition, its two pods exploding apart—Urban in one, Riffan in the other.
Riffan’s life depended on a tether designed to shoot out at a predetermined target. On impact, the tether’s hot zone would bond, forming an anchor to prevent his momentum from carrying him away in some useless and fatal direction.
Riffan thought the whole scheme quite precarious, but he was only a copy of himself after all. An expendable copy. A copy created to be left behind.
Shit, shit, shit.
The pod burst open—or so Riffan surmised in the seconds that followed. In the moment he was only aware of a sudden release of pressure, starlight everywhere, cool air rushing into his lungs only to rush out again in a choked scream as he gave vent to his terror.
This was his first experience in open space, the first time he’d worn a skin suit. Not exactly a gentle introduction.
Breathe, he ordered himself.
The suit fit like a thick, insulating second skin. A muzzle over his nose and mouth fed him delightful cool air. Through the clear visor he saw a black mass slowly roll into his view frame. It appeared infinitely large, quenching stars. Then it slid away, and a multicolored blaze of stars rose sedately above its horizon. Moments later, another dark shape moved into his field of view.
Oxygenated blood must have begun to reach his brain because it came to him that he was slowly spinning.
<><><>
Aboard Elepaio, Urban watched the light-speed delayed images sent from the probe. Riffan’s ghost hovered beside him.
The probe had conducted a detailed survey of the planetoid on its approach. It had found no artificial structures, no outgassing, no ice deposits. Nothing to hint at life or at mechanical activity. If anything was there, it was hidden, and there was no time to conduct a more thorough search. Elepaio would not remain within communications range for long.
That was why the probe had gone in fast and burned out its reef, dumping velocity in a hard deceleration. Now it swung around the Rock in a low, slow orbit. One set of cameras continued to study the terrain, but Urban watched the series of images generated by the second camera set, assigned to survey the shipwrecks.
The Chenzeme ship was a fragment. Only half its hull remained. It tumbled bow over broken-midsection in an extremely low orbit.
“What could have done that?” Riffan asked in a fearful whisper. He did not seem to expect an answer and Urban did not offer one.
The two other ships rode in higher orbits as if they’d been deliberately parked. Nothing about them suggested they were Chenzeme, but neither did they resemble one another.
The smaller of the two, the one that was the source of the beacon, was not even a quarter of the length and circumference of Dragon. By its size and its design, Urban recognized it as a fusion-powered starship of the migration—the same class of ship as Null Boundary had been—large enough to transit between worlds while carrying hundreds of passengers in cold sleep. The frontier had been populated by such ships.
The other starship was in a slightly lower orbit. It was huge, close to Dragon in size. Along the tapered cylinder of its hull Urban could see the blown-out remnants of longitudinal ridges that might once have been vent tubes similar to Dragon’s, suggesting it had been powered by a reef—but he was sure it was no Chenzeme ship. The dimensions were wrong and there was no indication of even a glossy remnant of philosopher cells.
Both ships had been breached, but the pattern of damage indicated a destructive force originating from within their hulls—suggesting to Urban that each crew had made the desperate decision to scuttle their own ship.
<><><>
Riffan groped for the tether that was supposed to be anchored to the chest of his skin suit. It had to be there. If it wasn’t there, he was going to spin away into some uncontrolled eccentric orbit and no doubt eventually collide catastrophically with one of the dead starships.
Relief washed through him as his gloved hands found the tether, closed around it. The gloves translated the feel of the line. Solid. Not like a rope, but like a thin rod. Its molecular structure had expanded to absorb his wild momentum, gradually reducing his velocity so that he had not been fatally crushed when he hit the end of the line.
The tether vibrated. It would be contracting now, arresting his gyrations and drawing him in to . . . what?
The DI guiding the probe had been in charge of choosing their landing site. If it sighted an obvious structure or entrance on the surface of the planetoid, they were to have touched down there. If not, their target would be the wrecked ship that was the source of the beacon.
Riffan held onto the tether. Faint blue dots glowed along its length. He felt infinitely grateful to have them there. Everything else was so dark. The stars so far away. Those little blue lights gave him something to focus on, a receding line that pointed to a black bulk. He could not tell how far away that dark object was, but that would be where the tether had anchored itself, its holdfast molecularly bonded to the surface . . . whatever that surface might be.
Riffan’s skin suit spoke in a brusque female voice. “Boosting default visibility.” The voice sounded unexpectedly familiar, leaving Riffan to worry that it had spoken to him before but he’d been too crushed and frightened to properly notice. He hoped he hadn’t missed anything too important.
“Thank you,” he murmured, though of course no response was required because it was only the generated voice of his skin suit’s DI.
The optics of his visor shifted. The luminous intensity of the distant stars remained the same, but the black mass ahead of him brightened, acquiring detail. Definitely not the planetoid. He decided he was looking at the smooth outer hull of one of the orbiting starships. Quite large—and looming larger against the stars with each passing second. He didn’t think it’d be long bef
ore he made contact.
“Urban?” he asked tentatively.
A response came at once through his atrium:
*I’m here. It’s all good. His voice calm, unrattled. *Selected target is the beacon ship. Scout-bots have already been released. And then he added, *Hell of a ride in, huh?
Anger was almost refreshing. “You’re insane, you know that?”
Urban laughed. *Hey, we made it.
“Where are you, anyway?” Riffan asked, turning his head to search for Urban. “I don’t—” He broke off, his attention caught by the sight of the planetoid’s surface slowly passing by below him.
The Rock did not look so tiny from his present low orbit. Instead, it looked planetary in scale.
Despite his enhanced optics, the surface of the Rock remained dim, its rugged impact craters appearing flattened under starlight that arrived at nearly the same intensity from every direction. He turned to look at those stars—and shuddered as an atavistic fear of falling swept over him. He felt as if he was falling into those stars, so unreachably far he would be falling forever.
Squeezing his eyes shut, Riffan clutched at the tether, his heart hammering.
“Twenty seconds until termination,” the suit informed him.
Termination?
Riffan opened his eyes again to see that the bulk of the shipwreck was approaching rather swiftly. Wasn’t this tether supposed to control his speed? Prevent him from crashing so hard he knocked himself out?
As if in answer, he felt a sharp, sideways jerk. Following the line of blue lights, he could see that the tether had bent at a point many meters ahead of him. Now, instead of racing straight at the hull, he moved at a sedate speed, swinging in at an angle.
His leisurely approach allowed time to look around. Not necessarily a good thing. He felt dizzy and disoriented as his brain struggled to decide if he was adrift alongside a great vertical wall or descending toward a horizontal plane. In either case, he felt quite small beside the immense hull, and awed by the myriad tiny scars marring its surface, testimony to past interstellar crossings and the unavoidable impacts of high-speed molecules.