Линда Нагата - Edges

Riffan held onto the tether. Faint blue dots glowed along its length. He felt infinitely grateful to have them there. Everything else was so dark. The stars so far away. Those little blue lights gave him something to focus on, a receding line that pointed to a black bulk. He could not tell how far away that dark object was, but that would be where the tether had anchored itself, its holdfast molecularly bonded to the surface… whatever that surface might be.

Riffan’s skin suit spoke in a brusque female voice. “Boosting default visibility.” The voice sounded unexpectedly familiar, leaving Riffan to worry that it had spoken to him before but he’d been too crushed and frightened to properly notice. He hoped he hadn’t missed anything too important.

“Thank you,” he murmured, though of course no response was required because it was only the generated voice of his skin suit’s DI.

The optics of his visor shifted. The luminous intensity of the distant stars remained the same, but the black mass ahead of him brightened, acquiring detail. Definitely not the planetoid. He decided he was looking at the smooth outer hull of one of the orbiting starships. Quite large—and looming larger against the stars with each passing second. He didn’t think it’d be long before he made contact.

“Urban?” he asked tentatively.

A response came at once through his atrium:

*I’m here. It’s all good. His voice calm, unrattled. *Selected target is the beacon ship. Scout-bots have already been released. And then he added, *Hell of a ride in, huh?

Anger was almost refreshing. “You’re insane, you know that?”

Urban laughed. *Hey, we made it.

“Where are you, anyway?” Riffan asked, turning his head to search for Urban. “I don’t—” He broke off, his attention caught by the sight of the planetoid’s surface slowly passing by below him.

The Rock did not look so tiny from his present low orbit. Instead, it looked planetary in scale.

Despite his enhanced optics, the surface of the Rock remained dim, its rugged impact craters appearing flattened under starlight that arrived at nearly the same intensity from every direction. He turned to look at those stars—and shuddered as an atavistic fear of falling swept over him. He felt as if he was falling into those stars, so unreachably far he would be falling forever.

Squeezing his eyes shut, Riffan clutched at the tether, his heart hammering.

“Twenty seconds until termination,” the suit informed him.

Termination?

Riffan opened his eyes again to see that the bulk of the shipwreck was approaching rather swiftly. Wasn’t this tether supposed to control his speed? Prevent him from crashing so hard he knocked himself out?

As if in answer, he felt a sharp, sideways jerk. Following the line of blue lights, he could see that the tether had bent at a point many meters ahead of him. Now, instead of racing straight at the hull, he moved at a sedate speed, swinging in at an angle.

His leisurely approach allowed time to look around. Not necessarily a good thing. He felt dizzy and disoriented as his brain struggled to decide if he was adrift alongside a great vertical wall or descending toward a horizontal plane. In either case, he felt quite small beside the immense hull, and awed by the myriad tiny scars marring its surface, testimony to past interstellar crossings and the unavoidable impacts of high-speed molecules.

He wondered why the hull had not self-repaired. It chilled him to think the ship had died before that task could be done—a somber thought that reminded him he was not going to get out of there. A ghost would escape, but not this version of him. His heart fluttered in the rush of a quiet, desperate fear.

You are the ghost , he told himself, unsure if this was truth or lie.

Sudden, startling motion anchored him back in the present. His gaze instinctively tracked it. A stick figure: four thin jointed legs, each half a meter in length, attached to an ovoid central point a few centimeters in size. It cartwheeled across the hull. Not alone. He glimpsed three more objects just like it, disappearing in different directions.

Scout-bots. There were ten of them altogether, somewhere. They’d been dropped off by the probe, just as he’d been.

Seeing those bots brought Riffan’s mind back to the task. He reminded himself that there would be only a few hours to explore. Focus on that, he told himself. Do the job. And remember: You’re lucky to be here .

He looked ahead to where the arc of his approach would take him, and he spotted Urban at last, floating a few meters above the edge of a gaping fissure torn open in the side of the starship.

The fissure was at least fifty meters long, half that in width. It looked as if the ship had ruptured from the inside. Torn and jagged sheets of bio-mechanical tissue had burst outward before freezing in the chill of the void, forming colossal, glass-edged blades that stood all around the perimeter of the wound.

The probe relayed multiple data streams to Elepaio , allowing Urban to monitor the planet, along with the activity of the scout-bots as they dispersed across the hull or dove into the opening torn into the ship’s side.

Each time a scout-bot’s leg tapped the deck it fused briefly, sampling the substrate, analyzing its composition. The hull itself, though crystallized and inactive, proved to be typical bio-mechanical tissue, its structure identical to that of Elepaio , confirming for Urban that this was one of the great ships of the frontier.

There were no active defensive Makers on the hull, though some of the bots detected frozen molecular fragments that matched known designs.

“Have a look,” Riffan urged him. “We’re getting a sketch of the interior.”

Urban looked up from the molecular reports.

Two scout-bots had descended into the fissure. The data they returned was being used to create a three-dimensional schematic map. It floated above the library floor, drawn in glowing white lines. It showed the fissure descending through what looked like solid tissue to a horizontal opening far below. Probably a deck. The schematic brightened as translucent colors filled the area of the open deck: a temperature gradient.

“It shouldn’t be warm down there,” Urban said, his rising tension reflected in his voice. “Looks like we found something.”

Riffan sounded distressed when he said, “We can’t warn them.”

“No.” The light-speed lag prevented a conversation. “But they have the same data. They see what we see.”

“They’ll know when to back out,” Riffan said, though he didn’t sound convinced. “I mean, if it’s dangerous…” His voice trailed off.

“It doesn’t matter,” Urban reminded him.

Only the ghosts would be returning. Riffan was having a hard time with that idea and despite the force of his earlier argument, Urban didn’t like it either. He remembered the first time he’d had to dissolve his body… well, he didn’t remember it, because he was the ghost who’d escaped. His core consciousness had remained behind, trapped in a dying husk, no way out. His visit to Long Watch was only the second time he’d abandoned a body, but he’d planned for it, so the process had been easy.

“Yes, you’re right,” Riffan said with a reluctant nod. “Their fate has already been decided.” He turned to look again at the map and exclaimed, “Hey… is that something moving in the interior?”

Startled, Urban followed his pointing finger and saw, at the edge of the deck’s mapped space, the vague suggestion of a humanoid figure. He scowled. Riffan had an over-active imagination. “It’s not moving.”