Edges

by Linda Nagata

She met the Scholar’s gaze. Nodded to him. He disappeared. After he was gone, she had time to wonder if the message was true, or some inexplicable trick that would ultimately condemn Riffan to extinction.

  The Scholar returned. “It’s done.”

  Despite the muted emotions of her ghost, she shuddered. If the message was a hoax or the information in it wrong, she might have just murdered a man.

  “Was the ghost active?” she asked.

  “It was on the verge of waking.”

  She closed her eyes in relief. No ghost in Griffin’s archive should have been able to wake on its own. “So it was corrupt.”

  “Yes. I’m undertaking an inspection of the entire archive to ensure no other ghosts are affected.”

  “Good. Clean out the archive on Artemis too.”

  She radioed a response to Dragon: “It’s done. We have no backup of Riffan. Repeat: We have no backup. What is going on over there?”

  Her own voice answered her, “Stand by.”

  <><><>

  Just seconds had passed since Clemantine issued a general warning to the ship’s company to evacuate the gee deck. Queries came back to her, too many to answer, but people were responding. Confused chatter filled the gee deck as they emerged from their homes, most asking, Is it real? A few firm voices rose above the general indecision, Shoran’s and Alkimbra’s among them:

  “Everyone! Go to the warren!”

  “We meet at the warren!”

  “Move! It’ll take time to get everyone through the transit gate.”

  Turning from the ruined threshold, she encountered Kona.

  “What do you know?” he demanded.

  She told him the dire news brought by her latest submind. “Lezuri got into the network. Released a predator there. I don’t know if we can contain it.”

  Pasha came running up, yelling in indignation that verged on panic, “You haven’t answered any of my queries! Neither has the Bio-mechanic! I need to know. Do we launch?”

  Clemantine drew a shuddering breath. The Pyrrhic Defense would do nothing to counter the attack on the network; it was designed only to eliminate the physical presence of the entity from the ship. And once launched, there would be no going back, no stopping it. It would gut the ship, cripple Dragon, and leave them with hundreds of days of repair and reconstruction.

  She met Pasha’s gaze. “Yes. Trigger it. Now.”

  <><><>

  The Bio-mechanic understood the end had come.

  The initial radio transmission had alerted him. Clemantine’s message confirmed the imminent emergency.

  He extended his senses throughout the ship and throughout the network, gathering data. He hunted the entity’s avatar, but found no trace of it, even the cocoon had dissolved. He detected an imbalance in the quantity of matter flushed through the gee deck’s circulatory system along with a drop in the deck’s atmospheric temperature. And he registered a surplus of computational activity in the library. This last commanded his attention.

  He instantiated within his window in time to see the predator reveal itself. He witnessed the assault on Urban’s ghost. He watched the predator turn its attention to him—and he smiled the bitter smile of a cynic whose worst expectations have come to pass.

  The enemy had entered the network undetected—something he had dared to believe was impossible. This was the final insult. It was the end. The end of sixty-three years of unceasing effort aimed at beating the entity’s nanotech arsenal. Sixty-three years of maddening defeat.

  He alerted the other Apparatchiks, warned them of the intrusion, instructed them: Face it one at a time. Learn what you can before you die. And then he added, I’ll go first.

  He meant to trigger the Pyrrhic Defense, to deny Lezuri full possession of the ship—but the predator shifted location so swiftly he did not have time to act. It popped into existence right beside him, invading the isolated virtual world contained within his window—and buried a fist in his gut.

  He let his extended senses collapse around him. He drew in all of his intellect, the complexity of his structure, to meet this intrusion, to enfold it, concentrating his efforts on the creation of a map that recorded details of the predator’s structure, even as it ripped through him.

  With his sense of self dissolving, the Bio-mechanic used his last microseconds to dump the partial map into a submind. Addressed it to Urban on the high bridge. Released it.

  <><><>

  Griffin was safe, but Urban did not have time to enjoy the news as another submind dropped in, this one originating with the Bio-mechanic. He did not normally trade memories with his Apparatchiks, but he could do it. He allowed the submind to merge.

  Shock swept through him as he absorbed the memory of the Bio-mechanic’s last moments: a vicious attack, an ugly defeat, defiant anger, and a resolve to wipe his failing ghost before the predator could learn from it.

  The Bio-mechanic was gone! But his anger remained. It became Urban’s anger and it bled into the cell field.

  Urban did not try to hold it back; he didn’t have the resources. His focus was diverted by the gift the Bio-mechanic had included in his final submind: a partial structural map of the predator. He acted quickly, distributing the map to the surviving Apparatchiks. *Use it! Find a counter attack.

  Acknowledgments came back from the Engineer, the Astronomer, the Scholar, the Mathematician—but the Pilot sent him a submind. Urban did not want to accept it. He feared what it contained. But he needed to know, so he let it in.

  It brought cold confirmation of what he’d guessed. The predator had defeated the Pilot. Two Apparatchiks already gone.

  Unlike the Bio-mechanic, the Pilot’s last submind contained only a remote emotional imprint. It helped to cool Urban’s swirling rage. It also brought him an updated version of the map, with additional details of the predator’s structure.

  He forwarded the expanded map to the survivors. Then he replicated his ghost, sending it into the network to hunt.

  *What are you doing? Clemantine asked.

  *Learning to defeat that thing.

  The ghost fed data back to him, critical glimpses revealing more and more of the predator’s structure. Then it sent a submind.

  Urban did not hesitate to let it merge, but he should have. Unlike the Pilot, his ghost had not censored its emotions. Packed into that submind was the memory of his demise: his wild anger, his frustration as the predator tore him apart, his swift decision to dissolve that ghost, end his own existence. But the submind brought insight too, additional data that further expanded his map.

  His understanding of the predator grew.

  Again, he distributed the revised structure to the Apparatchiks. The Scholar and the Mathematician acknowledged receipt, but not the Engineer and the Astronomer. Instead, their last subminds came to him—mercifully stripped of emotion.

  Desperation focused his mind and quickened his response time as he compiled the new data, created another ghost, and sent it out to face the predator.

  He found it in a cardinal, or it found him. In that environment they met as two disembodied forces. Urban strove to trace what he could of the predator’s computational shape, holding out against its probing assault until he felt his sense of self begin to crumble. End it! He generated a submind to carry back what he’d learned and then he wiped yet another broken version of himself.

  It became a cycle—another ghost, another hunt, another crushing defeat, a fragment of mind all that could get away. But each returning submind expanded his knowledge of the predator’s structure, and each conflict lasted a little longer as his defenses evolved. He strove to shield the last two Apparatchiks—the Scholar and the Mathematician—by putting his own ghost in the path of the predator. That ghost went down so he sent another. Too late. Both Apparatchiks were already gone.

  All through it, he accumulated the emotional stress of conflict—the fury, fear, frustration, and resolve experienced by his ghosts, and their hunger for revenge—all flooding across the bridge
to the philosopher cells.

  Clemantine strove to calm the cells, but it was as if she and he contended against each other. Chaos raged across the cell field.

  *You need to leave the high bridge, she told him.

  He rejected the idea. He had never left the high bridge. He had always been present there, in some form, from the first moment he possessed it. Now he should flee? Leave it to Clemantine? Shift his consciousness to another stratum?

  Yes.

  He had to do it. It would be a temporary retreat. He promised himself that. But where to go? Nowhere was safe, not even the high bridge. The predator would find its way there eventually. When it did, would it target Clemantine too?

  That prospect only fed his turmoil.

  *I can’t protect you, he told her.

  *I’ll take care of myself. Just go.

  Still, he delayed, while the confusion among the philosopher cells rose to a new peak. Then confusion crystallized into action. The cells called for a surge of power from the reef—too much!—it would produce a crushing acceleration, more than the gee deck had been designed to handle.

  *We need to stop it now!

  He organized a counter argument to calm the cells, but Clemantine was faster. She took control—control of his ship. Before he could react, he felt the hammer of her will fall across the hundred thousand points of the high bridge, suppressing the cells’ panicked fight-or-flight response—but she could not kill it entirely.

  The reef surged—at only a fraction of the force the cells had called for, but still enough to send Dragon’s immense mass leaping forward.

  <><><>

  “Yes,” Clemantine had told Pasha. “Trigger it. Now.”

  The words were barely out when the gee deck shuddered, lurching so violently, she was thrown from the threshold of her ruined cottage.

  No, she fell from the threshold, fell horizontally, all the way across the patio and then across the path, fetching up in shrubbery on the other side as a ripping, popping, shrieking cacophony of devastation exploded around her. An intrusion of chaos that endured for a long awful span of seconds.

  And then she was floating, rising weightless toward a beatific sky, her arms and legs mapped with bloody tracks drawn by the broken twigs of the hedge that had caught her. Scratches burned on her face too, but when she checked her atrium it reported no serious injuries.

  A glance around showed debris everywhere, drifting in the air. Trees down, cottages askew. People in slow confused flight, yelling at one another: By the Waking Light! What happened? Are you hurt? Get to the warren!

  The gee deck had stopped rotating.

  So far, that looked to be the worst of it. The atmosphere wasn’t compromised—yet. Hopefully the barrier wall had maintained integrity. If not, it still might be able to self-repair in time to prevent an incursion of Chenzeme tissue. From the ground below and from the broken walls came the whisper of molecular repair mechanisms already engaged in frantic rebuilding.

  A submind dropped in, proving the network still intact. It brought memories of that version of herself on the high bridge. She re-lived the panic among the philosopher cells, the sudden acceleration—a revelation of understanding that brought her stunned mind back up to speed. On a subconscious level, she’d linked the gee deck’s damage to the Pyrrhic Defense, presuming a flawed calculation and unforeseen blowback. But acceleration had caused the damage.

  Had the defense even been triggered?

  “Pasha!” she shouted. But didn’t wait for an answer. Generating a ghost, she transited to the library.

  <><><>

  DIs streamed in, bringing to Urban reports of the disaster on the gee deck, their little world, broken.

  *You caused that! Clemantine accused, her righteous anger bringing order to the dangerous turbulence of the cell field.

  *I know it.

  He strove to suppress his seething frustration, to assume the façade of the Sentinel. It was not enough.

  *You’re causing chaos, she warned. *You need to leave the high bridge.

  She was right, but he stayed anyway, held by an irrational fear that if he left, if he finally gave up his post there, he would not find his way back again.

  Then a new presence joined them.

  The high bridge supported no illusion of physical existence, but it did convey a kind of physical sensation so that Urban felt the intimate pressure of this intruder, and recognized it as a computational shape matching every aspect of his evolving map of the predator.

  It ignored the philosopher cells. It ignored Clemantine’s ghost. It came for him.

  He did not dare to stand and fight, not when the predator had destroyed every ghost he’d sent after it and all of his Apparatchiks. So he fell back, abandoning the high bridge, driven from it, no choice but to flee, to leave it to Clemantine.

  His ghost transited to a cardinal on the lower bridge. He sensed the predator coming through behind him and moved again. Onward to the next cardinal and the next, the predator in close pursuit and no way to stop it.

  It’s over.

  The thought hit hard, but he couldn’t deny it. He had lost. He’d lost his ship, he’d lost his Apparatchiks, he’d failed to protect Clemantine and Kona and all the members of the ship’s company who had trusted their lives to him on this ruined venture.

  They, at least, would have a chance to start again on Griffin. He hoped they would do better than he had done.

  A microsecond to sequester his grief, his fury, his despair.

  He messaged Clemantine, letting her know: *It’s over.

  One more task.

  <><><>

  Alone on the high bridge, Clemantine strove to grasp what had happened, what was still happening.

  Dragon’s velocity, boosted by the burst of acceleration, was dangerously high, but she did not try to bring it back down. Not yet. It was enough that the cells, having failed to detect any perceivable threat from outside the ship, were settling into a watchful state, allowing her to focus on the ship’s interior.

  DIs rotated in and out, bringing reports that assured her the active boundaries between human and Chenzeme tissue remained stable and that the entity had made no move to expand the containment capsule or claim more territory within the ship.

  Reports came in from the cardinals, marking the passage of Urban’s fleeing ghost.

  A submind arrived from the gee deck. It brought visual testimony of the ruin that had been made of her home, but it also brought the welcome knowledge of imminent retribution.

  Through it all she held tight to a cold animosity that bled into the cell field, unifying it, and bringing it fully under her control.

  Then came a message from Urban: *It’s over.

  Her composure shattered in a flash of white-hot denial: Not yet! It was too soon to give up. She messaged him back: *It’s not over! We are not done fighting!

  He didn’t answer.

  <><><>

  Urban abandoned the cardinals, instantiating in the library. The place felt hollow and wrong, empty of any sense of the Apparatchiks’ presence. But not abandoned. Other ghosts were there. He glimpsed them, tiny figures separated from him by an emotional distance—Clemantine, Kona, Pasha, Vytet. They would be working to stabilize the ship, not realizing Dragon was overrun and already lost.

  No time to warn them. He had time only to ensure their future on Griffin. He did it—his last task. He triggered a preset radio message to clarify for that other Clemantine the irretrievable nature of their situation: commence termination of Dragon; commence termination of Dragon; commence termination of Dragon—

  Here at last, echoing the choice of those crews who had scuttled their ships at the Rock—except that he meant to escape.

  Alone among the ship’s company, Urban did not keep an archived ghost on Griffin. Instead, he kept copies on the outriders where they remained under his direct control.

  He created a submind, bundling all his recent memories into it. To escape Dragon, all he had to do w
as hold off the predator long enough for that submind to slip away through the data gate. Not towards Griffin—that way was closed—but towards Elepaio and the vanguard of outriders.

  He launched the submind just as the predator instantiated in the library, still wearing Riffan’s smiling face.

  Chapter

  37

  Clemantine’s ghost left the ruin of the gee deck to instantiate in the library.

  Immediately, she sensed that something had changed. She froze, looking around. The virtual environment appeared the same but felt sharply different. The extra sense she always gained in the library—the one that let her feel the presence of data—had been truncated. She still perceived the files, and yet some vital aspect was gone.

  Puzzle it out later! She needed the Bio-mechanic. She had expected to find him already on deck but he wasn’t there. So she moved to summon him. Only then did she realize his link no longer existed.

  That was the missing element.

  She thought of the Engineer, the Scholar. But she could find no links to them, either—or to any of the Apparatchiks.

  A crowd of ghosts manifested around her: Kona, Vytet, Naresh, and Pasha.

  Pasha demanded to know, “Where is the Bio-mechanic?”

  “Gone,” Clemantine said. “All the Apparatchiks, gone.”

  The absence left her reeling, blinded to the true status of the ship. She reached out to her ghost on the high bridge and traded subminds. Memories merged just as Dragon began bleating a preset radio message authorizing its own demise.

  Both versions of Clemantine converged in defiant agreement: Not yet.

  From the bridge, she terminated the communication.

  In the library, she composed a new message to replace it: “Abort that last. We are still fighting.”

  “Where is the predator?” Kona demanded. “Has it been contained?”