by Linda Nagata
“A bio-mechanical entity,” Urban decided.
“Agreed,” Riffan said softly. “We’re dead in there, aren’t we?”
“Yes.”
“It beat us.”
“It did.”
They’d entered the shipwreck protected by Urban’s best defensive Makers, but they had not come out again. Not even a ghost had escaped.
The entity spoke—or at least its mouth moved in an imitation of words that it could not possibly be uttering without the presence of air. Urban heard its words anyway as its voice rode the channel that had formerly belonged to scout-bot one. The voice was human, male, rich in tone, and powerful. It said: “We can help each other.”
Urban had studied history. He was aware there were hundreds of human languages. He’d even learned a few over the long, empty stretches of time he’d lived through. Of all those languages, this voice spoke his language, the one language of Deception Well, and it used the same archaic accent that Urban used.
Fear accelerated his simulated heartbeat. Had his avatar failed to terminate in time? Had this thing harvested information from his mind? He throttled the connection rate to ensure no ghost would be able to get through.
“What did you just do?” Riffan asked when the image failed to update.
“Voice only,” Urban said. “I don’t want its ghost showing up at the data gate.”
“God, no,” Riffan breathed. And then added, “We can’t answer it.”
“No.” The light-speed lag prevented conversation.
Maybe the entity didn’t realize this. Maybe it thought it was speaking to a consciousness housed in the probe. “We will help each other,” it warned.
“It wants off the Rock,” Urban said. He smiled grimly. Shook his head. “Not going to happen. We’re going to stay far, far away.”
That thing was dangerous. Two crews had made the choice to wreck their ships, stranding themselves, rather than allowing this being to escape its isolation. And it had beaten a Chenzeme courser as well as Urban’s best defensive Makers.
He would have to improve his defenses.
That would be difficult without insight on the system that had defeated him. This thought led him to ponder the risks he would be facing in his determination to explore the Hallowed Vasties. Had this entity come from there? Did it represent what was left there, what he could expect to find? He feared it might be so. All the same, he longed to know.
The entity spoke again. It said, “I mean you no harm.” An assurance made unconvincing by its threatening tone.
“I wonder how you got here,” Urban mused aloud. “Was that an accident? Or did a bigger monster exile you?”
“I wish we could talk to it,” Riffan said.
Urban nodded his agreement. Still, “It’s distance that keeps us safe.”
He hoped the entity would speak again, but it did not.
Sometime later, Elepaio struck debris, the concussion made audible in Urban’s virtual environment. Fear gripped him, along with a profound awareness of the fragility of his little ship. He desperately wanted to make it back to Dragon, tell his story. A quick check showed no damage to essential systems. No doubt there was a charred crater in the hull, but it would heal.
Minutes later, a second impact, less brutal than the first.
Nothing after that.
The beacon did not resume.
Days passed. The mystery of the Rock fell ever farther behind them in both space and time. Riffan grew bored with the transit. He disappeared into dormancy, leaving Urban alone to reflect over what they’d found. Not just the entity.
His thoughts kept returning to the two ships of human origin and the decision their crews had made to scuttle them. It pleased Urban to think he’d done better, that he’d escaped relatively unscathed given the superiority of the entity’s nanotechnology. At the least, he’d come away with the knowledge of its existence.
Still, he regretted not learning more, and as time dragged on he began to wonder if he’d done all he could. A familiar self-appraisal. So easy to drift from there into a gyre of regret for things past, lost things, things he had not been able to save.
Once before, an alien nanotechnology had defeated his best efforts to decode it. That time, it had not attacked him, only locked him out.
“I couldn’t save him,” he murmured. A recurring lamentation.
Now, a thousand years on, he’d encountered a being that had easily overwhelmed his best defenses. And he wondered, If I’d had its knowledge back then, its power, would that have made a difference?
Regret weighed on him, and guilt for what had happened—but these were feelings he rejected out of habit. Time flowed in one direction only, life did not grant do-overs, and it was his nature to reject any suggestion of melancholy. A useless emotion. Better to arm up. Be ready. Be stronger, faster, smarter.
Right now he was vulnerable.
He’d done the smart thing by keeping his distance from the Rock. That had let him avoid any risk of contamination . . . but what had his avatar done?
His avatar was him and he knew what he would have done. The moment he understood his defenses had been breached, he would have terminated. Urban—in any form—was haunted by a deep fear of being hijacked, of having an avatar rebuilt or resurrected without agency, under the control of another. Still—why had the encounter been hostile?
Maybe it had been an accidental conflict. If the entity had sought information and pushed too hard, a nanoscale war could have erupted.
The thing had said, We can help each other.
Was that an apology?
It had been a long time since Urban had encountered anything stronger than himself, a long time since he’d been challenged. He wished he could have learned more.
He considered what it would take to go back to the Rock, even though he knew he would not do it. To reverse Dragon’s momentum and return would require years.
To hell with second-guessing. Better to push on. The Hallowed Vasties lay ahead. He was sure to find ample opportunities there to test his skills and his nerve.
Yet regret persisted, a vaporous presence in his virtual world.
So he edited his ghost, making it less vulnerable to melancholy, to introspection, to boredom. Then he summoned several specialized DIs and with their help he spent the remainder of the return voyage immersed in the task of developing new lines of defensive Makers.
Chapter
19
Clemantine floated cross-legged in the forest room, her chest rising and falling in slow, meditative breaths as she gazed into the sunlit forest where a simulated breeze stirred a few fading leaves into subtle motion. The chatter and whistles of birdsong sounded from overhead. She listened, pretending she was not afraid.
In a private virtual space within the library, she floated cross-legged amid the darkness of the void, watching Dragon approach its prey. Her perspective, that of the outrider Artemis, standing off a mere twelve kilometers, brought in to observe the interaction of the two coursers.
On the high bridge, she observed that interaction in greater intimacy, watching alongside Urban as Dragon’s philosopher cells carried out the intricate, instinctive ritual of greeting:
Subminds migrated among her aspects, so that she existed simultaneously across all three timelines as time advanced and the two ships drew closer to one another.
Both glowed white with the light of their hull cells. Through human eyes, Clemantine perceived it as a constant light, but through her Chenzeme senses she distinguished rapid pulses of communication. Warnings and murderous threats at first, giving way to continuous affirmations of identity and cooperative intent as the two coursers negotiated the intricate navigational steps required to bring them parallel to one another.
Relative to nearby stars they still hurtled at close to thirty-one percent light speed, but within their own frame of reference they became nearly stationary, only slowly drifting to close the two-point-five kilometer gap that re
mained between them.
Both were massive starships, but their size was not apparent in the video feed out of Artemis because there was nothing human within range of the watching cameras that could lend perspective. This encounter was purely alien—or it appeared that way.
In truth, Dragon’s blazing hull was camouflage disguising hostile intentions. Beneath that bright surface, a hundred thousand needle-like projectiles lay ready to launch, each one packed with proven molecular weapons.
Clemantine breathed deeply, fighting the anxiety, the tension that tried to rise as the distance between the two coursers narrowed, closing at a rate close to 3.5 seconds per meter.
In a normal encounter between Chenzeme ships, the ritualized exchange of data-encoded dust would not begin until physical contact was nearly established, but Urban meant for her to take control of the second courser long before that point.
He waited until the distance between the ships dropped below two kilometers. Then he called it: *Time to go dark.
Clemantine responded: *Sooth, let’s do it.
No quiet suggestion this time. Urban formatted a harsh command—
– GO DARK –
—and dropped it simultaneously across his hundred thousand links.
Clemantine followed with a supporting argument issued in a different voice:
– affirm now - go dark –
Artemis’s camera showed tendrils of darkness shooting across Dragon’s hull, branching, linking, expanding . . . stagnating.
Counter arguments erupted as allied cells resisted the call to go dormant. No such call had been made during the previous attacks against other coursers. Remembering this, the most aggressive cells fought the unexpected deviation, and the wave of dormancy began to reverse.
In the darkness of the library, Clemantine watched in fatalistic detachment. In the forest room, her heartbeat quickened in fear. On the high bridge her anger escalated. This time she seized the hammer of argument:
– GO DARK! –
And Urban followed with a hundred thousand supporting voices:
– affirm now - go dark –
The objective of this encounter was capture, not annihilation. The cells had fulfilled their role by getting Dragon close. Now they needed to go dark so they could do no harm.
Across the hull, the weight of argument shifted again. Allied networks of cells reinforced the emphatic directive:
Within seconds, only a few scattered cells remained awake, points of white, like the last stars on the galaxy’s edge.
The alien courser reacted immediately. Any deviation in expected behavior had to be interpreted as a threat—so it tried to withdraw. It triggered its propulsion reef. Artemis observed it shudder as it made a desperate effort to pull away.
It could not move fast enough to evade attack.
All along Dragon’s length, half a million needle projectiles shot out through seams between the dormant hull cells. Each was a long thin barb of diamond, engineered to shatter along deliberate fault lines to allow the release of the payload of assault Makers carried within a hollow interior.
In seconds, the needles crossed the void between the two ships. They struck the alien courser. Most shattered against the glassy surfaces of its hull cells, uselessly releasing the Makers they carried in bursts of harmless mist. But some hundreds struck the interlocking seams between the cells and penetrated into the underlying bio-mechanical tissue.
These needles shattered too, but here their payload had a purpose. Assault Makers spilled into the Chenzeme tissue. The Makers set to work, replicating even as they set up a defensive perimeter.
Chenzeme nanomachines responded to the incursion, but the invading Makers had fought battles like this before. They understood Chenzeme design and Chenzeme tactics and they used that knowledge to push back the attack, expanding their defensive perimeter.
Within the secured territory, other Makers worked to gather raw material that they used to construct cardinal nanosites. Within a minute, several hundred of the tiny processing nodes were scattered throughout the courser’s tissue.
The cardinals began to send out tendrils, guarded by assault Makers. The surrounding tissue grew hot with the activity of construction and conflict. Minutes passed. The tendrils began to find one another. They linked up, connecting the cardinals in a network that continued to grow, wrapping around the captive courser, diving inward to connect with critical systems, and expanding outward to reach the philosopher cells, establishing a high bridge.
The bridge issued a single, simple command to the now-captive philosopher cells, stimulating them to emit a short, chaotic radio burst.
Clemantine heard it in the library. She heard it on Dragon’s high bridge. Affirmation that the alien courser was now hers. Moments later she heard a ping of greeting from the captive courser’s newly constructed data gate.
In the library, she edited her ghost to numb her dread.
In the forest room she filled her lungs, emptied them again, and swore she would become what she needed to be.
From the high bridge came the anxious thought: No time to hesitate!
The courser was bridged, but until Clemantine assumed her post there, its philosopher cells would continue to control the ship. A dark line had opened in its cell field, swiftly expanding to allow deployment of its gamma-ray gun. Its steerage jets were firing, pushing its massive bulk toward an angle that would allow the gun’s swiveling lens to bear on Dragon.
Clemantine synthesized a new ghost, one endowed with the memories of all three current timelines. She sent it through the data gate. And seemingly without transition she plunged into a furious consensus:
Clemantine wanted to recoil. The coordinated currents of hate, the murderous contempt, the deep craving need to inflict fiery death on all that was not self or the equivalent of self—it horrified her, but she plunged in anyway. No choice. She had to take control.
She extended her senses across the high bridge—so different from Dragon’s high bridge!—its structure still expanding, growing, extending ever more links into the cell field.
Yet here at the start she had only a small percentage of the connections she’d taken for granted aboard Dragon. Ten percent? Fifteen?
Doesn’t matter!
This is what she’d been given. Her will and her anger had to make up for the rest.
Her opening argument blasted out across what she now guessed to be fifteen thousand links:
– NEGATE THAT! –
The force of it overwhelmed adjacent cells, inducing them to take it up, echo it, evaluate it, and argue—an effect that rippled outward, introducing fault lines in the agreement of the field, disrupting consensus.
She offered an alternative argument across all the links: – the other is chenzeme –
A counter argument slammed back:
– NEGATE THAT! –
All her rage for what had been lost coiled within that short, sharp communication. A moment’s stunned pause. She had shocked the field into silence; shocked herself too with the force of her anger. She recovered, and commenced to hammer her will through every link in the rapidly expanding bridge:
– negate revulsion! the other is chenzeme –
– negate killing! the other is chenzeme –
– negate conflict! the other is chenzeme –
– the other is chenzeme –
– the other is chenzeme –
– the other is chenzeme –
– required: agreement –
This induced a positive response—
She amplified that weak response, and extended her argument:
– AGREEMENT! the other is chenzeme –
– we
are allied chenzeme! –
– required: agreement –
The response came back stronger:
Still a fragile concession, but enough that she was able to cut off the steerage jets, route power away from the gun. She continued through rapid, looping argument to enforce her will, until after many seconds she hammered out hard-won consensus:
<><><>
The high bridge continued to grow. More links reached the cell field, each an additional point of influence, further securing Clemantine’s hold over the ship’s mind.
She gave the newly captured courser a name: Griffin.
*Dragon’s partner, she explained to Urban through an open channel in the data gate. *A second hybrid monster, a kind of chimera, a mix of different organisms.
She invited him to send a ghost to visit the new high bridge but he refused, reminding her, *Never again.
Instead, he sent her copies of the Apparatchiks, all six of them, to haunt the cardinal nanosites.
She welcomed them, knowing that centuries had gone into their development and that each carried centuries of experience. They were a ready-made crew and she was grateful that their presence relieved her of any need to create her own ensemble of assistants. As far back as the Null Boundary Expedition, Urban had toyed with experimental personas, but Clemantine never had. Her sense of identity was too fixed for that. The idea that when her ghost split, she, this point of view, might become the one to be pruned and rewritten—it repulsed her.
And anyway, she knew how to handle the quirks of the Apparatchiks’ personalities.
When the Bio-mechanic returned from an inspection of the bridge, he concluded, *My assault was flawless.
Clemantine immediately disagreed. *The high bridge had insufficient connections to the cell field. I nearly lost the argument.