by Linda Nagata
He wondered why the hull had not self-repaired. It chilled him to think the ship had died before that task could be done—a somber thought that reminded him he was not going to get out of there. A ghost would escape, but not this version of him. His heart fluttered in the rush of a quiet, desperate fear.
You are the ghost, he told himself, unsure if this was truth or lie.
Sudden, startling motion anchored him back in the present. His gaze instinctively tracked it. A stick figure: four thin jointed legs, each half a meter in length, attached to an ovoid central point a few centimeters in size. It cartwheeled across the hull. Not alone. He glimpsed three more objects just like it, disappearing in different directions.
Scout-bots. There were ten of them altogether, somewhere. They’d been dropped off by the probe, just as he’d been.
Seeing those bots brought Riffan’s mind back to the task. He reminded himself that there would be only a few hours to explore. Focus on that, he told himself. Do the job. And remember: You’re lucky to be here.
He looked ahead to where the arc of his approach would take him, and he spotted Urban at last, floating a few meters above the edge of a gaping fissure torn open in the side of the starship.
The fissure was at least fifty meters long, half that in width. It looked as if the ship had ruptured from the inside. Torn and jagged sheets of bio-mechanical tissue had burst outward before freezing in the chill of the void, forming colossal, glass-edged blades that stood all around the perimeter of the wound.
<><><>
The probe relayed multiple data streams to Elepaio, allowing Urban to monitor the planet, along with the activity of the scout-bots as they dispersed across the hull or dove into the opening torn into the ship’s side.
Each time a scout-bot’s leg tapped the deck it fused briefly, sampling the substrate, analyzing its composition. The hull itself, though crystallized and inactive, proved to be typical bio-mechanical tissue, its structure identical to that of Elepaio, confirming for Urban that this was one of the great ships of the frontier.
There were no active defensive Makers on the hull, though some of the bots detected frozen molecular fragments that matched known designs.
“Have a look,” Riffan urged him. “We’re getting a sketch of the interior.”
Urban looked up from the molecular reports.
Two scout-bots had descended into the fissure. The data they returned was being used to create a three-dimensional schematic map. It floated above the library floor, drawn in glowing white lines. It showed the fissure descending through what looked like solid tissue to a horizontal opening far below. Probably a deck. The schematic brightened as translucent colors filled the area of the open deck: a temperature gradient.
“It shouldn’t be warm down there,” Urban said, his rising tension reflected in his voice. “Looks like we found something.”
Riffan sounded distressed when he said, “We can’t warn them.”
“No.” The light-speed lag prevented a conversation. “But they have the same data. They see what we see.”
“They’ll know when to back out,” Riffan said, though he didn’t sound convinced. “I mean, if it’s dangerous . . .” His voice trailed off.
“It doesn’t matter,” Urban reminded him.
Only the ghosts would be returning. Riffan was having a hard time with that idea and despite the force of his earlier argument, Urban didn’t like it either. He remembered the first time he’d had to dissolve his body . . . well, he didn’t remember it, because he was the ghost who’d escaped. His core consciousness had remained behind, trapped in a dying husk, no way out. His visit to Long Watch was only the second time he’d abandoned a body, but he’d planned for it, so the process had been easy.
“Yes, you’re right,” Riffan said with a reluctant nod. “Their fate has already been decided.” He turned to look again at the map and exclaimed, “Hey . . . is that something moving in the interior?”
Startled, Urban followed his pointing finger and saw, at the edge of the deck’s mapped space, the vague suggestion of a humanoid figure. He scowled. Riffan had an over-active imagination. “It’s not moving.”
“I saw it move.”
“It could be the body of one of the crew. It might be just a skin suit.”
“I saw it move,” Riffan insisted. “I’ll run that segment again and—”
On the deck, tags flashed at either side of the mapped space, reporting the same status for both scout-bots: Signal lost.
Urban had expected to lose contact once the bots were deep enough into the interior that the hull blocked their transmissions. He had not expected to lose contact this soon—and not simultaneously.
More ominous, the beacon ceased to bleat.
“Shit,” Riffan whispered. “And we can’t warn them.”
Urban’s answer was grim and pragmatic. “They already know.”
SIXTH
A radio signal alerts you. Faint. Impossible to know from what direction it originates or how far away its source might be, but you know this much: It is human.
Hell of a ride in, huh?
A familiar language, common to many worlds. Your players spoke in this tongue, though their accent was different. She spoke thus when she said, Let us make a world together. And you answered, Yes.
Most of your attention—and your telescopes—have been trained on the distant pair of alien ships, but your attention is made up of many threads, many perspectives. Some of these threads shift to review recent data collected by your ongoing sky survey.
A few seconds later you find an anomaly: a background star momentarily eclipsed. Something out there, dark, silent, and moving fast. A fly-by, come to investigate your beacon, but at a cautious distance. You might have missed it altogether if not for the radio chatter that’s spilling now over your senses:
Hell of a ride in, huh?
You’re insane, you know that?
Hey, we made it.
Where are you, anyway?
You do the math and draw a conclusion within a microsecond. The silent fly-by is moving too fast to rendezvous or to return, but it has delivered at least two avatars. They are here on a one-way expedition, likely less than ten thousand seconds in duration. Only data will be returned.
You admire their daring and their cleverness.
You intend to defeat their caution.
Chapter
18
Urban’s tether anchored him beside the fissure. He drifted above the sharp sheets of torn and frozen bio-mechanical tissue, eyeing a read-out of data from two scout-bots making their way down the interior wall.
Movement drew his attention away from the display. He cleared it and looked up to see the anchor securing Riffan’s tether migrating across the scarred hull, sliding closer with amoebic motion. At the same time, the tether—morphed now into a rod—bent at a sharp angle, swinging Riffan in, bringing him to a floating stop alongside Urban.
Riffan craned his neck to peer into the fissure.
Far below, a light flashed, briefly illuminating a section of the inner wall. After a few seconds, another flash.
*The scout bots, Riffan said.
“Yes,” Urban acknowledged, speaking aloud. He’d sent scout-bots one and two to survey and map the fissure.
*You’re going in, aren’t you?
“We’re going in.”
Using his atrium, Urban signaled the light-emitting panels on the shoulders of his skin suit to switch on.
“I want you to stay at least ten meters behind me. If you lose your link to the probe, go back up until you get a signal. You’re the relay. I need you to make sure a full record of this gets back to Elepaio.”
*I understand, Riffan said. *But what if I lose your signal?
Urban shrugged. “Come rescue me?”
*Not funny.
“Do what you think is best.”
He followed the scout-bots down, his tether trailing behind him as he glided past the ship’s outermost layer of
insulation. The tissue glittered, its frozen crystals catching and reflecting his suit’s light, looking smoother than he’d expected. Maybe some of the rough edges had evaporated into the void over passing centuries.
His goal was to find information, a ship’s log or library that would tell him where the crew had come from, why they’d come and when, and if this site had anything to do with the Hallowed Vasties. And he wanted to know what had happened to them and to their ship, and why they’d left a beacon bleating their location, if they were the ones who’d left it.
He hoped the fissure would reach at least to the outermost deck. It wasn’t likely he’d be able to go any farther than that. The most secure, protected, and sheltered sections of the ship—its cold-sleep cells, computational strata, and core chamber—would be sealed and inaccessible within an insulating cocoon of frozen bio-mechanical tissue. He had no way to get past that, not in the time available, so he had to hope the crew had left some easily accessible record intended to warn the curious of the hazard they had encountered here.
Or maybe they’d thought the scuttled ship was warning enough?
On the periphery of his vision, the three-dimensional map charted by the scout-bots showed his position and Riffan’s in the fissure. He’d descended halfway through the mapped space of the near-vertical walls; Riffan was at least twenty meters above him.
Abruptly, the map expanded horizontally. Urban eyed it as he continued to drift downward. The scout-bots had found a deck. It was a large open area, maybe intended for storage or construction. Translucent colors appeared, indicating a temperature gradient—matter warmer than the uniform frozen temperature of the fissure’s walls.
He shifted his display, accessing direct infrared video from the two scout-bots. Both video feeds showed a deck that was mostly empty. No drifting debris. The only visible structures were several towering cubes. They were set far apart and extended from the deck’s floor to its high ceiling. The sides of the cubes were shingled with leaves of gray . . . glass? That’s what it looked like, glass shingles warm enough to glow brightly in infrared. But they were not the warmest object captured by the scout-bot’s cameras.
That was the gray-glass figure of a man, standing beyond the blocks, upside down to the orientation of the cameras. Details were hard to discern in the bright blaze of heat, but Urban was certain he saw the figure move—right before the video feed dropped out.
“Riffan,” he said, “stay where you are.”
*What was that? Riffan whispered. And then, *Oh, shit. I’ve lost my link to the probe.
Urban’s skin suit confirmed it. “Uplink lost,” it informed him.
“Go back,” Urban ordered. “Recover the link.”
*What are you going to do?
“I’m going on.”
*Urban—
“Just go!”
He slapped the wall. Shot downward. He wanted to know what they’d found. He wanted video of it to send back to Elepaio.
As he neared the bottom, his tether morphed to slow his descent. His light illuminated a fan-shaped slice of the deck and sparkled against the gray glass that shingled the nearest of the massive cubes.
He looked for the upside-down glass man, but did not see him.
A red light popped on in the periphery of his vision. His skin suit spoke again, informing him in a calm voice, “Suit integrity is under threat.” Urban sucked in a sharp breath. That meant he was under attack but not with a weapon he could directly perceive. The assault was taking place on a molecular scale.
A moment later, the suit spoke again, announcing the failure of Urban’s molecular defenses: “Suit integrity has been compromised.”
Foreign nanomachines had fought past the skin suit’s defenses, breaching it, opening microscopic channels through its fabric. He felt the results as needles of cold that stabbed into his hands, his chest, his eyes.
Only for a moment.
The cold subsided as the suit self-repaired, but the enemy was already inside. Urban cried out as searing heat erupted at the points where his suit had been penetrated. His vision clouded. A battle was being fought across the moist surfaces of his eyes, as well as against the skin of his chest and hands—his defensive Makers against the intruding nanotech.
He clenched his fists against the pain and when, after a few seconds, the pain failed to subside, he knew he had lost. His defensive Makers had failed to protect him, leaving him at the mercy of whatever it was that existed down here.
Urban did not trust the mercy of alien lifeforms.
The pain in his eyes sharpened. He envisioned the attacking nanomachines driving deeper into his head. Soon they would reach his brain, his atrium. God knows what would happen then.
He wasn’t going to let it happen. He wasn’t going to leave any meaningful data for this lifeform to exploit.
No time to prepare a ghost.
Just end it.
“Riffan!” he shouted, hoping his comms still worked. “We’re terminating!”
*What? No! I’m still trying to recover the link.
A memory, searing across Urban’s consciousness: the first time he’d had to terminate. He’d been dying, but still so hard to do. He’d known Riffan wouldn’t be up to it, not without hesitation. So on the way in he’d hacked Riffan’s avatar, setting up a code word that would kick off the termination sequence for both of them. He spoke it.
*No! Riffan screamed.
But the process was already underway. Hosts of Makers erupted from the tendrils of their atriums, replicating madly, consuming brain tissue to do it, converting the content of their skulls into gray goo, devoid of information.
<><><>
Contact had been lost with the avatars and with scout-bots one and two—the pair that had entered the shipwreck—but Elepaio remained in contact with the probe. Data was still being received. The scout-bots assigned to explore the shipwreck’s hull were still active, while the probe’s cameras continued to watch both the wreck and the planetoid below.
Urban felt a submind drop in. It melded with his ghost, bringing him the knowledge that there was now activity on the planetoid’s surface.
He turned to examine a continuously updating three-dimensional projection of the Rock that floated in the virtual space of Elepaio’s library. All its cracks and craters had been carefully mapped, but that map was now being revised as the seemingly lifeless surface began to change.
The latest images showed black circles that had not been observed before. The features appeared at high points on the planet’s scarred surface: the rims of craters, the peaks of low, folded hills. Perfect circles of darkness. Urban counted ten, then fifteen, then twenty of them. No pattern in their arrangement.
They looked like tiny spots on the face of this little world, but the scale showed them to be at least five hundred meters across. He suspected they were pits, holes in the ground, missile silos maybe. If so, they were huge.
More appeared as the probe continued to advance in its slow orbit, collecting fresh images of the surface.
Urban realized Riffan was now hovering beside him. “Corruption take us,” he whispered. “And chaos too.”
“It’s definitely awake now,” Urban said. “Whatever it is.”
“Let’s see it in infrared.”
The library obliged and each circle shifted from black to blazing white. “Subterranean network,” Riffan said. “Got to be. Significantly warm. Maybe a fusion power source. Impressive how little of that interior heat we were able to detect before the doors opened.”
“Skilled at playing dead,” Urban agreed.
The circles began to pulse, growing briefly brighter—not synchronized, not flaring everywhere at once, not flaring in a discernible pattern—but repeatedly.
“A weapon?” Riffan wondered.
“Not enough power there to harm us.”
“A code?”
“Meant for who?”
Riffan shook his head. “Possible to get scout-bots down there?”
The probe continued its orbital survey but found no more openings. The region below it now appeared to be the same unmarked, lifeless surface they’d first seen.
“Hey,” Riffan said suspiciously. “What’s going on? Do you think there’s no activity in this region?”
“Or is the activity already over with?” Urban asked. “Did silos open here too, but close before we could record them?”
He wanted to do the impossible: Turn the probe around, look again at the area just surveyed, determine if the openings they’d seen were still there. But by the time the probe could survey that region again, they’d be out of communications range.
He turned an uneasy gaze back to the library window that held the latest image of the shipwreck, but there was nothing new to see there.
“Damn,” he whispered, angry because he might never figure out what had just happened.
The voice of a DI interrupted his brooding thoughts. “Contact reestablished with scout-bot one,” it announced. “Current transmission is voice only.”
“It’s recovered,” Riffan whispered in wonder. “Maybe—”
Urban cut him off with a slashing gesture. “It’s not the scout-bot. The scout-bot doesn’t have a voice.” But something was there at the Rock. It had caused him to lose the avatars, it had taken his scout-bots, and now it was playing with him.
A new image of the shipwreck posted. The wreck appeared the same, but the figure of a man could now be seen standing on the ruptured hull, just outside of the torn, frozen tissue surrounding the fissure.
The man was not him. It was not Riffan.
In all likelihood it was also not a man because he was standing naked on the hull without the benefit of a skin suit. Scale was hard to gauge, but Urban guessed him to be of moderate human height. A lean but muscular build, black hair adrift in the zero gravity, his complexion seeming dark in the dim light. His eyes were dark too, cast in shadow as he looked back at the watching probe—which made it feel as if he was looking Urban in the eyes.