Линда Нагата - Edges

Urban glowered. “I won’t feel anything because I’ll shut the avatar down. Now, are you going or not?”

Riffan agreed to go. Really, did he have a choice? Urban was determined to visit the Rock and it would be wrong to let him go alone. And Riffan conceded—if only to himself—that his attitude toward avatars, while not wrong, might be a bit provincial, a little too impractical for the demands of his current existence. He suspected Pasha would think so.

But then, Pasha was an exceptional individual. In general, the people of Deception Well tended to cling to the old ways. Avatars were rare and could only be used with the approval of the council. Even then, only one instance of an individual could be awake and aware at any given time, so that when Riffan had served on Long Watch , he’d had to leave his original body in cold sleep in the city of Silk.

But Deception Well was far behind him now. He’d embarked on a new life with new demands, and also, new opportunities. Pasha would see that, and she would consider him an idiot for hesitating over this issue—and she would be right.

Exploration and discovery were the very reasons Riffan had uploaded his ghost to Dragon . So what if he was more accustomed to exploring the galaxy through highly processed images gathered by distant orbital telescopes, rather than in person? He could adapt! He would adapt. He owed it to himself and to Urban and to everyone aboard Dragon who might wish they’d had this opportunity that had been given to him.

He promised himself this expedition to the Rock would be only the first of many adventures to come. And then he split his timeline, creating a duplicate ghost that he sent to the probe.

I’m still here , he realized. Still aboard Elepaio . He was not the copy destined to explore the shipwrecks and the little rocky world. Disappointment flashed across the complex pattern that defined his mind. Relief followed in its wake.

Riffan—that version assigned to the probe—awoke to panic, certain he was on the edge of death. A horrifying pressure crushed him from every side. It prevented him moving or even breathing. His arms were pinned, his legs impossible to bend. He imagined his lungs collapsed, his eyes deformed, his brain reduced to jelly. And he couldn’t see a damned thing—no light at all—though he could hear: a fast ominous arrhythmic scattershot of clicks and clunks that had him imagining this container so determined to crush him might change tactics and fly apart at any moment. Corruption and chaos! he thought. Why did I have to be this version of me?

The plan called for the probe to dump velocity as it approached the planetoid—a violent deceleration that would allow it to slip into orbit. A crushing deceleration.

Once in orbit, the probe would separate into its components. The surveillance and communications module would break away from the cargo capsule, and then the capsule would partition, its two pods exploding apart—Urban in one, Riffan in the other.

Riffan’s life depended on a tether designed to shoot out at a predetermined target. On impact, the tether’s hot zone would bond, forming an anchor to prevent his momentum from carrying him away in some useless and fatal direction.

Riffan thought the whole scheme quite precarious, but he was only a copy of himself after all. An expendable copy. A copy created to be left behind.

Shit, shit, shit .

The pod burst open—or so Riffan surmised in the seconds that followed. In the moment he was only aware of a sudden release of pressure, starlight everywhere, cool air rushing into his lungs only to rush out again in a choked scream as he gave vent to his terror.

This was his first experience in open space, the first time he’d worn a skin suit. Not exactly a gentle introduction.

Breathe , he ordered himself.

The suit fit like a thick, insulating second skin. A muzzle over his nose and mouth fed him delightful cool air. Through the clear visor he saw a black mass slowly roll into his view frame. It appeared infinitely large, quenching stars. Then it slid away, and a multicolored blaze of stars rose sedately above its horizon. Moments later, another dark shape moved into his field of view.

Oxygenated blood must have begun to reach his brain because it came to him that he was slowly spinning.

Aboard Elepaio , Urban watched the light-speed delayed images sent from the probe. Riffan’s ghost hovered beside him.

The probe had conducted a detailed survey of the planetoid on its approach. It had found no artificial structures, no outgassing, no ice deposits. Nothing to hint at life or at mechanical activity. If anything was there, it was hidden, and there was no time to conduct a more thorough search. Elepaio would not remain within communications range for long.

That was why the probe had gone in fast and burned out its reef, dumping velocity in a hard deceleration. Now it swung around the Rock in a low, slow orbit. One set of cameras continued to study the terrain, but Urban watched the series of images generated by the second camera set, assigned to survey the shipwrecks.

The Chenzeme ship was a fragment. Only half its hull remained. It tumbled bow over broken-midsection in an extremely low orbit.

“What could have done that?” Riffan asked in a fearful whisper. He did not seem to expect an answer and Urban did not offer one.

The two other ships rode in higher orbits as if they’d been deliberately parked. Nothing about them suggested they were Chenzeme, but neither did they resemble one another.

The smaller of the two, the one that was the source of the beacon, was not even a quarter of the length and circumference of Dragon . By its size and its design, Urban recognized it as a fusion-powered starship of the migration—the same class of ship as Null Boundary had been—large enough to transit between worlds while carrying hundreds of passengers in cold sleep. The frontier had been populated by such ships.

The other starship was in a slightly lower orbit. It was huge, close to Dragon in size. Along the tapered cylinder of its hull Urban could see the blown-out remnants of longitudinal ridges that might once have been vent tubes similar to Dragon ’s, suggesting it had been powered by a reef—but he was sure it was no Chenzeme ship. The dimensions were wrong and there was no indication of even a glossy remnant of philosopher cells.

Both ships had been breached, but the pattern of damage indicated a destructive force originating from within their hulls—suggesting to Urban that each crew had made the desperate decision to scuttle their own ship.

Riffan groped for the tether that was supposed to be anchored to the chest of his skin suit. It had to be there. If it wasn’t there, he was going to spin away into some uncontrolled eccentric orbit and no doubt eventually collide catastrophically with one of the dead starships.

Relief washed through him as his gloved hands found the tether, closed around it. The gloves translated the feel of the line. Solid. Not like a rope, but like a thin rod. Its molecular structure had expanded to absorb his wild momentum, gradually reducing his velocity so that he had not been fatally crushed when he hit the end of the line.

The tether vibrated. It would be contracting now, arresting his gyrations and drawing him in to… what ?

The DI guiding the probe had been in charge of choosing their landing site. If it sighted an obvious structure or entrance on the surface of the planetoid, they were to have touched down there. If not, their target would be the wrecked ship that was the source of the beacon.