Линда Нагата - Edges

More likely some other entity observed your defeat, your disgrace, and is coming now to pick over your bones.

You ponder this as you walk the corridors of your wounded mind—and you prepare. You hide your presence, disguising the telescopes so that the surface of your world once again appears to be that of a dead and airless rogue world.

There will still be an infrared signature, but that will be attributed to the subterranean ocean cooling only very slowly with the passage of time.

Another aphorism: The best defense is a good offense .

You begin to prepare.

You will never be more than a shadow of your former presence. Still, you remain formidable.

Three point six years out of Deception Well:

From his solitary post on the high bridge, Urban observed an anomalous flash of pale blue light. He saw it through the composite mind of the philosopher cells. A brief, bright flare ahead of the courser, slightly offset from its trajectory.

Furious speculation erupted among the hull cells. The memory of a similar incident circulated among them, a familiar memory, one that Urban shared. Like the cells, he’d seen that same spectrum of light flare and die before. He knew what it meant.

He replicated into the library, sending the rage and frustration rising within him safely away from the cell field, while the copy of his ghost that remained on the high bridge reconfigured, taking the form of the imperturbable Sentinel.

In that form, he sensed the alarm winding through every cross-threaded conversation among the philosopher cells, and their growing awareness of impending danger. He entered the conversation. Determined to soothe the field, he introduced the same argument at a hundred thousand points:

– hold –

– calm –

The composite mind of the philosopher cells had recognized the flash of light as the visible energy emitted by the explosion of an outrider. Urban didn’t know yet which one.

A faction of cells wanted to interpret the incident as a hostile attack, but a far larger number sought consensus for the proposition that what had happened was a fluke, an accident, the result of a collision with a high-speed fragment of matter—a conclusion Urban encouraged.

No reason to believe otherwise. No evidence of another hostile presence anywhere in the Near Vicinity.

Even so, the cells were correct. The hazard was not ended. The danger they anticipated would come from secondary effects that required time to play out.

A report streamed in. Relayed at light speed through the array of outriders, it arrived only a few seconds after the light of the explosion. Each outrider had appended a signature as the report passed through its data gate.

Urban received the report in the library. A submind shared news of it to the high bridge. On both timelines, he noted the signatures of only the three nearest outriders. Khonsu , the closest, Artemis next, and then Lam Lha . Pytheas had been stationed beyond Lam Lha . The absence of its signature told him it was Pytheas he’d lost.

The report unfolded into two windows. One displayed text data, the other, the raw video of the starfield that lay ahead of the fleet.

Urban summoned all six of the Apparatchiks. They manifested in a curved row behind the report, each confined within its own frameless window.

“Analyze it,” Urban ordered them, wanting opinions from them all.

The simulation of a faint vibration alerted him. He looked to the right as Vytet’s ghost popped into existence beside him.

Vytet had never sought the refuge of cold sleep. “I think there are never enough minutes in the day,” she’d explained when Urban asked about it. “I want to monitor the progress of the gee deck, of course, but I could spend a millennium in the library and not reach the end of what there is to do and to learn.”

Since that time, Vytet had shifted gender and updated the envelope of his appearance. His nose had become more prominent, the pelt of his hair had shifted from white to dark red, and his eyes were darker, deeper-set beneath a heavier brow. “What happened?” he asked in a calm masculine voice as he scanned the report.

Urban told him, “I’ve lost Pytheas .”

“Lost?”

Bitter admission: “I saw it explode.”

Clemantine and Kona ghosted in, lagging several seconds behind Vytet—the time it had taken their personal DIs to summon their dormant ghosts from the archive.

Clemantine met his gaze. She’d been away a year and a half, but he’d adapted his time sense to match hers. It felt to him as if she’d been away only hours, while she perceived the time as a sequence of discrete intervals when her ghost had wakened only long enough to assess the status of the ship. That left no awkwardness, no alienation in their reunion.

“ Pytheas hit something and blew apart,” he said to ensure that she and Kona understood that basic fact. He indicated the frameless window containing the starfield. “This is video from Lam Lha .”

It didn’t look like a video. There was no visible motion. The stars were much too far away for their movement to be perceptible, and Pytheas was too small, dark, cold, and distant to be captured by Lam Lha ’s array of cameras. Only the digital clock streaming through fractional seconds in the window’s lower right corner indicated this was not a still image.

A hiss from Clemantine as a spark of blue-white light burst into sight. Flared, and disappeared.

Now the stars moved, the entire field rotating together through a narrow arc.

“Lam Lha is repositioning itself,” Urban explained. “Aiming its prow at the point of the explosion, to minimize its profile and reduce the odds of impact from any surviving debris.” His ghost hand closed into a fist, his temper finally escaping. “By the Unknown God! We are not even four years out of Deception Well!”

“You’re sure it was an accident?” Kona asked. “You’re certain we’re alone out here?”

“ Yes . I’m sure of that much.”

“But can you be sure it was a collision?” Vytet asked. “Or might it have been caused by instability in the outrider’s reef?”

“The reef is monitored. If there was a problem, it would have been detected and addressed.”

“I’ll check the data anyway,” Vytet volunteered. “In case something was missed.”

Urban ignored this. Nothing had been missed. He turned to Kona and Clemantine. “This happened before,” he told them. “It’s not complicated. The outriders are fragile. They don’t have the mass to absorb the energy of a high-speed impact. The concern now is secondary effects.”

He gestured at the starfield. “ Lam Lha , Artemis , Khonsu , Dragon . All four ships were following Pytheas . All four are at risk. It’s going to take time, but eventually each ship will intersect the trailing edge of the debris field and when that happens, there’s a real chance of another impact.”

“Surely not,” Vytet objected with a puzzled frown. “Given the distances between the outriders and the low relative delta V of the debris, the field will have time to disperse across an immense volume of space before the next outrider reaches its perimeter. That will work to minimize any risk of collision.”

“I used to think so too,” Urban answered. “But remember the reef. It doesn’t behave like normal matter.”

As if summoned by his warning, tiny points of blue-tinged light blossomed in a cluster at the center of the video. “There,” Urban said, feeling vindicated. “That’s the debris field. That blue light is generated by remnants of the reef, energized by the explosion. The fragments will try to coalesce, and as they do, they’ll warp the surrounding space, affect the trajectory of the debris. Some of it will gather and fall into their fields.”