Edges

by Linda Nagata

  “I don’t know,” Clemantine told him. “I don’t know where it is. I don’t know where Urban is. But we’re not done yet.”

  More ghosts appeared—Tarnya and Alkimbra and two of Vytet’s engineers, come to find out what had happened, to see if they could help, all asking questions that no one was ready to answer.

  Pasha reached out, a reassuring hand on Clemantine’s arm. “We’re okay. We’ll be okay without the Bio-mechanic. He left us the link to trigger the defense.”

  “Show me.”

  “What defense?” Naresh asked.

  And Vytet: “Where are the Apparatchiks?”

  Kona summoned a floating three-dimensional model of the ship, with the network detailed and the library mapped. It showed Clemantine’s ghost on the high bridge and the crowd of ghosts in the library. She searched for Urban, searched every part of the map. She asked the map to highlight his position. But he wasn’t there. He wasn’t anywhere.

  Pasha’s hand tightened on her arm, a pressure-grip that broke through her numb shock.

  “Are you sure we should do it?” Pasha whispered, ignoring the chatter all around them.

  Clemantine turned from the devastating evidence of Urban’s absence, to meet Pasha’s intense gaze. “Yes. Show it to me.”

  A small window appeared between them. It was tilted so that only Clemantine had a clear view of it. It framed a sliding switch neatly labeled off—on. Without hesitation, she touched the black button, slid it to the right. The button flashed green.

  “Ten seconds to change your mind,” Pasha warned.

  Clemantine didn’t need a waiting period. She pressed the flashing green button. It turned gray.

  “What defense?” Naresh asked again.

  Pasha turned to him, speaking bluntly: “The Bio-mechanic set it up for us—and there’s no stopping it now. We’re evicting Lezuri from the ship.” She added bitterly, “We should have done it before.”

  <><><>

  The assault began with three small missiles, their casings nearly frictionless, launched simultaneously from stealthed pods hidden deep within Dragon’s bio-mechanical tissue, far beneath the entity’s containment capsule. The missiles drilled through the tissue, tearing open circulation paths and severing communications lines, leaving behind open channels steaming with the heat of molecular repair and the rage of Chenzeme defensive molecules seeking an enemy to dis-assemble.

  The missiles were programmed to detonate when they reached the containment capsule, or sooner, if their shells were dissolved or breached along the way.

  Pasha enlarged the existing model of the ship. Clemantine watched it closely as it updated in stuttering steps that reflected the intermittent arrival of new data from internal sensors. Additional sensors had been placed to track the path of pressure waves through Dragon’s bio-mechanical tissue. Hull cameras and cameras on the outrider Artemis gave an external view.

  A cry of dismay went up from the crowd of ghosts as the three missiles blew in a silent flare of light.

  Weirdly silent, Clemantine thought. The model did not replicate sound, but there had surely been something to hear within the ship’s tissue.

  “They detonated early,” Pasha observed.

  Clemantine nodded. “But they got close.”

  “Oh no,” Naresh breathed, peering at the model as it updated to show transient bubbles blasted in the bio-mechanical tissue and a shockwave that reached the philosopher cells. “No, no, this can’t be real.”

  Clemantine felt the reality of it. With a train of subminds linking her to the high bridge, she felt the shockwave. She sensed the ensuing confusion of the cells as they strove to determine what had happened, explanations proposed and rejected at furious speed.

  Ironic memory surfaced: In the first years of the voyage they had been so careful, so cautious as they grew the warren, worried that any aggressive expansion would overthrow the careful balance Urban had developed along the uneasy borders between Chenzeme and human tissue. Now, all caution had been blown away.

  “Who’s behind this?” Vytet demanded, horror on her face.

  “We are,” Pasha answered calmly. “Me, Clemantine, the Bio-mechanic, and Griffin’s crew.”

  “It was necessary,” Clemantine added. “But you can call for a judicial hearing if you want.”

  The model updated, showing a second salvo of missiles extending the paths burned opened by the first. These detonated at the scheduled time, in the vicinity of the containment capsule. No sensors in the blast zone survived, so there was no way to know yet if the capsule had been damaged.

  “You have to stop this!” Naresh shouted. “It needs to end.”

  Pasha said, “It will end when the entity gives up and departs.”

  “We discussed and rejected this kind of solution long ago,” Vytet argued. “The entity’s tendrils reach into the core. You’ll cripple the ship if you try to eliminate them. You’ll destroy the reef. And you’re going to ignite an evolutionary war with the Chenzeme tissue—if you haven’t already.”

  “We’ve planned carefully,” Pasha said in clipped syllables. “Griffin’s Engineer was consulted.” She turned from the model to face Vytet, her expression a mix of guilt and defiance. “The damage will be extensive but not irreparable. And the risk of a molecular war is mitigated because we’re using Chenzeme elements to carry out the attack. The activity should be perceived as a new scenario, a strategy the Chenzeme mind will find acceptable when it rids the ship of an alien parasite.”

  Vytet’s voice climbed an octave. “Do you think Lezuri won’t fight back? That he can’t fight back?”

  “Do you think he can fight back from the center of a firestorm?” Clemantine asked. “For all his talents, even Lezuri cannot prevent molecular bonds from breaking under extreme heat.”

  “The shockwaves are being felt in the warren,” Kona reported. “I’ve let them know what’s going on.”

  The dual wave of missiles had not been expected to destroy the containment capsule—no one believed the entity could be defeated that easily—but the heat prevented an immediate counterattack, while the shockwaves snapped the tendrils linking the entity’s fortress to deeper layers of the ship.

  <><><>

  From Griffin’s high bridge, Clemantine watched as Dragon’s hull cells communicated a message of existential alarm. The coded pulses were too swift to be discerned by human eyes, but Griffin’s philosopher cells understood them and interpreted them for Clemantine.

  Subminds carried the meaning to her ghost in Griffin’s library. She looked around at her assembled Apparatchiks, each in their frameless window, and announced, “It’s begun. Dragon is enduring an attack from within.”

  “But is it the Pyrrhic Defense?” the Pilot asked. He glared around the circle, a dark, impatient figure, arms crossed, standing on nothing, the light of hundreds of stars blazing behind him. “Or is it Lezuri, extending his domain, making Dragon his own?”

  The Scholar, wearing dark blue, looked up from his studies with narrowed eyes. “The data gate is closed,” he reminded them all. “A termination order has been received.”

  “Received and immediately countermanded,” the Engineer replied from his plain brown frame.

  “How can we know which instruction is legitimate?” the Scholar asked.

  Clemantine said, “We’ll know soon.”

  Lezuri had used Riffan’s corrupted ghost in a play to take both ships. He had failed, but the situation aboard Dragon was surely dire. Clemantine’s hope rested on the promise of the last radioed message, spoken in her own voice: We are still fighting. That had to mean the Pyrrhic Defense was launched or soon would be. There was no other way to fight Lezuri.

  She waited for proof.

  The Pilot spoke again, impatient to do something. “I remind you that Dragon’s velocity is now slightly higher than our own. We can match it, or we can exceed it and narrow the distance between us. Dragon is a more powerful ship and could outrun us if it tried.”


  “It can’t outrun our gun,” Clemantine said. “Not at this range.”

  The Engineer said, “I agree. I do not recommend an increase in velocity.”

  Griffin presently trailed twenty-one thousand kilometers behind Dragon. Once Clemantine gave the word, the philosopher cells would require less than ten seconds to deploy the gun and align its lens. They would be able to fire several times before Dragon could turn to defend itself, and by then, Dragon would be gone.

  Clemantine hoped it would not come to that. She desperately hoped for a chance to strike a different target—but she kept that hope locked away from Griffin’s philosopher cells.

  The cells were in a dangerous state. Dragon’s alarmed communications stirred no hint of empathy among them, but instead roused their contempt and their hatred. Already a faction of cells was lobbying for attack:

 

 

  Clemantine slowed the argument:

  – hold –

  And diverted it:

  – awaiting target –

  But she allowed the cells to continue in their excited state, ready and eager to attack.

  <><><>

  The next phase of the Pyrrhic Defense was underway. Thousands of small vesicles made of Chenzeme tissue and packed with explosives, moved into positions designated by their swarm programming. Some massed alongside the entity’s severed tendrils. Others arranged themselves in layers above his capsule.

  The outermost layer of explosives triggered first. The blast erupted outward. Gasps and cries from the gathered ghosts as a seam ripped open in the hull, a geyser of boiling debris spewing from the side of the ship.

  The next layer went off a second later, and the next after that, and the next, blasting open a channel down to the massive containment capsule.

  On the high bridge, Clemantine felt the repeating concussions and the shock of the philosopher cells as the field tore open and a long region of cells was burned away.

  In the library, she felt nothing, heard nothing. The library synthesized its own reality and it had not been designed to simulate the shuddering of the ship.

  THIRTEENTH

  My people, you think bitterly as the extreme heat of the firestorm begins to snap the molecular bonds that constitute your mind.

  You might have annihilated them at first contact, but you chose not to because you admired them, you allowed yourself to be entranced by their cleverness, their bravery. You put your own future at risk for the chance of making them part of your world and now they have betrayed you.

  Clever and brave, indeed.

  Their assault is primitive, brutal, potentially suicidal—and effective. The crushing heat and the concussions both threaten your physical integrity. You must escape.

  You will escape.

  You prepared for this contingency. The mechanism exists. An alternate path forward. Less desirable, but in the fullness of time, you will recover.

  Chapter

  38

  From Griffin’s high bridge, Clemantine watched victory take shape in the form of a hundred-meter rift blown open on Dragon’s hull. A terrible rupture, though only a fraction of the length of the massive ship.

  Proof at last: The Pyrrhic Defense was underway!

  A pulse of effluent geysered out of the rift, and then another, and another, each pulse emerging hot in infrared, but quickly cooling in a rapidly dispersing cloud that reflected the light of the hull cells—cells that flashed their rage and a stark order to Griffin to:

 

  To Clemantine’s surprise, Griffin’s cells respected this hold-fire order. Forgoing internal debate, they went quiet: waiting, watching, wanting to understand the mechanism of what they perceived as Dragon’s approaching victory.

  After several seconds, the terrible rift ceased to pulse, though effluent still streamed from it, adding to the density of the cloud so that the light of the hull cells was reflected only on its surface. From Clemantine’s perspective, it took on the shape of a sickle moon.

  She readied the philosopher cells, visualizing for them a parasite within Dragon that would need to be obliterated when it emerged. The cells pondered this. They drew parallels with their experience of releasing the proto-ships, and they prepared to shunt power to the gun.

  <><><>

  On Dragon’s high bridge, Clemantine undertook a similar preparation. She engaged the philosopher cells, interpreting for them the raging conflict within the body of the ship, visualizing the presence of a parasite and the explosives being used to sever its anchoring tendrils and to force open a rift that would let it be expelled.

  A brutal cognitive debate ensued across the field as the cells considered the merits of this explanation. Skeins of opinion vied to declare its probability or improbability, simulations ran that measured its potential for success. Throughout it, Clemantine used her many voices to force and reinforce a consensus that accepted the internal violence as a new, innovative, and powerful Chenzeme strategy that would restore the ship’s integrity.

  From this point, the field of philosopher cells introduced an additional concept, reaching a swift consensus before Clemantine understood what they intended. It became clear to her only when the next submind brought her an external view of the ship, captured by the outrider Artemis.

  Dragon’s hull was contorting, bending into an immense arc beneath the site of the rift, an action that tore the rift wider.

  As if timed to that movement, a final, massive round of explosives went off deep within the ship’s tissue.

  <><><>

  Griffin’s telescopes provided a detailed image of an astonishing sight. Dragon’s immense hull was flexing, bending in a shallow arc that tore the rift wide open. Tissue churned out: chunks and sheets and frozen clouds of matter.

  Clemantine watched from the library, she watched from the bridge, her two aspects synchronized by a continuous stream of subminds. Alarm hit them both as she realized Dragon was rolling, turning slowly on its long axis as if to move the rift clear of the debris—and as it did, the rift disappeared from her line of sight.

  – reacquire target area! –

  The philosopher cells simultaneously called for the same action:

 

  Steerage jets fired, but Griffin was massive. Momentum built slowly. The ship had hardly begun to move when dark channels ripped open on Dragon’s hull, radiating outward from the hidden rift, each one releasing new clouds of debris.

  Then, over the horizon of Dragon’s hull, Clemantine glimpsed the tapered cylinder of the entity’s containment capsule, its white ceramic surface reflecting the hull cells’ gleam. Writhing white snakes trailed from it, ripped out of the freshly opened channels. These were the tendrils that had infiltrated the interior of the ship, their frantic whipping motion suggesting bio-mechanical spasms.

  – KILL IT –

 

  The surface of the capsule went black—a matte black that made it disappear in the visible range, although it still blazed with heat in the infrared.

  The gun deployed, the lens aligned—and then the capsule slipped out of sight behind Dragon, pushed by the white fire of steerage jets that it should not have possessed.

  In the library, Clemantine exploded in frustration: “Corruption take us!”

  On the high bridge she coolly instructed the cells:

  – reacquire target –

  <><><>

  The tendrils ripped free of Dragon, tearing deep channels in the hull, destroying long swaths of philosopher cells and isolating blocks of them. Clemantine lost many of her links to the cell field. She used the surviving connections to issue a new directive: – kill it –

  The remaining cells united in consensus:

  She did not try to instruct them on the means. They knew better than she did.

  Under the direction of the philosopher cells, Dragon’s hull began to straighten, while it rolled and rotated through three
dimensions, striving to bring the containment capsule within range of its gun. The lens swiveled, seeking its target, but it was capable of only a narrow range of motion.

  Clemantine watched it close in, anticipating the surge of power . . . until a new sensation drew her attention. Six lateral lines composed Dragon’s gravitational sensor. They were evenly spaced around the hull and ran from bow to stern. At least one line had survived the expulsion of the capsule, because it alerted her to the presence of a newly activated propulsion reef, one so close she saw the disturbance it produced moving like a wave through the debris field.

  In the library, Naresh identified the cause: “Lezuri must have equipped his capsule with a reef! He’s converted it into a starship!”

  A tiny ship, just forty meters long.

  The little ship paralleled Dragon, accelerating so swiftly it would pass beyond the bow in seconds, putting itself in front of the gun.

  No. That was too good to be true. Clemantine could not believe Lezuri would make such a blatant mistake. Something, some factor still unknown to her, would allow the little ship a chance to escape.

  The philosopher cells did not share her doubt. Their consensus was absolute:

  It swept past the bow. The lens locked on to its target. Then . . .

  Nothing.

  No surge of power from the reef. No destructive rush of energy.

  Confusion and fury erupted among the cells as the little ship gained velocity, racing away.

  Clemantine introduced a new argument to the surviving cells:

  – pursue it –

  Consensus was immediate, but again, the reef did not respond.

  Why not? It might be weakened, but it was not destroyed. The gravitational sensor registered its latent influence like a subtle vibration in her mind . . . but that was all. She had no awareness of the reef’s condition, no feedback from it at all. That implied that every connection between the reef and the cell field had been torn loose—or maybe destroyed on purpose by the entity.