Линда Нагата - Edges

“I saw it move.”

“It could be the body of one of the crew. It might be just a skin suit.”

“I saw it move,” Riffan insisted. “I’ll run that segment again and—”

On the deck, tags flashed at either side of the mapped space, reporting the same status for both scout-bots: Signal lost .

Urban had expected to lose contact once the bots were deep enough into the interior that the hull blocked their transmissions. He had not expected to lose contact this soon—and not simultaneously.

More ominous, the beacon ceased to bleat.

“ Shit ,” Riffan whispered. “And we can’t warn them.”

Urban’s answer was grim and pragmatic. “They already know.”

A radio signal alerts you. Faint. Impossible to know from what direction it originates or how far away its source might be, but you know this much: It is human.

Hell of a ride in, huh?

A familiar language, common to many worlds. Your players spoke in this tongue, though their accent was different. She spoke thus when she said, Let us make a world together . And you answered, Yes .

Most of your attention—and your telescopes—have been trained on the distant pair of alien ships, but your attention is made up of many threads, many perspectives. Some of these threads shift to review recent data collected by your ongoing sky survey.

A few seconds later you find an anomaly: a background star momentarily eclipsed. Something out there, dark, silent, and moving fast. A fly-by, come to investigate your beacon, but at a cautious distance. You might have missed it altogether if not for the radio chatter that’s spilling now over your senses:

Hell of a ride in, huh?

You’re insane, you know that?

Hey, we made it.

Where are you, anyway?

You do the math and draw a conclusion within a microsecond. The silent fly-by is moving too fast to rendezvous or to return, but it has delivered at least two avatars. They are here on a one-way expedition, likely less than ten thousand seconds in duration. Only data will be returned.

You admire their daring and their cleverness.

You intend to defeat their caution.

Urban’s tether anchored him beside the fissure. He drifted above the sharp sheets of torn and frozen bio-mechanical tissue, eyeing a read-out of data from two scout-bots making their way down the interior wall.

Movement drew his attention away from the display. He cleared it and looked up to see the anchor securing Riffan’s tether migrating across the scarred hull, sliding closer with amoebic motion. At the same time, the tether—morphed now into a rod—bent at a sharp angle, swinging Riffan in, bringing him to a floating stop alongside Urban.

Riffan craned his neck to peer into the fissure.

Far below, a light flashed, briefly illuminating a section of the inner wall. After a few seconds, another flash.

*The scout bots , Riffan said.

“Yes,” Urban acknowledged, speaking aloud. He’d sent scout-bots one and two to survey and map the fissure.

*You’re going in, aren’t you?

“ We’re going in.”

Using his atrium, Urban signaled the light-emitting panels on the shoulders of his skin suit to switch on.

“I want you to stay at least ten meters behind me. If you lose your link to the probe, go back up until you get a signal. You’re the relay. I need you to make sure a full record of this gets back to Elepaio .”

*I understand , Riffan said. *But what if I lose your signal?

Urban shrugged. “Come rescue me?”

*Not funny.

“Do what you think is best.”

He followed the scout-bots down, his tether trailing behind him as he glided past the ship’s outermost layer of insulation. The tissue glittered, its frozen crystals catching and reflecting his suit’s light, looking smoother than he’d expected. Maybe some of the rough edges had evaporated into the void over passing centuries.

His goal was to find information, a ship’s log or library that would tell him where the crew had come from, why they’d come and when, and if this site had anything to do with the Hallowed Vasties. And he wanted to know what had happened to them and to their ship, and why they’d left a beacon bleating their location, if they were the ones who’d left it.

He hoped the fissure would reach at least to the outermost deck. It wasn’t likely he’d be able to go any farther than that. The most secure, protected, and sheltered sections of the ship—its cold-sleep cells, computational strata, and core chamber—would be sealed and inaccessible within an insulating cocoon of frozen bio-mechanical tissue. He had no way to get past that, not in the time available, so he had to hope the crew had left some easily accessible record intended to warn the curious of the hazard they had encountered here.

Or maybe they’d thought the scuttled ship was warning enough?

On the periphery of his vision, the three-dimensional map charted by the scout-bots showed his position and Riffan’s in the fissure. He’d descended halfway through the mapped space of the near-vertical walls; Riffan was at least twenty meters above him.

Abruptly, the map expanded horizontally. Urban eyed it as he continued to drift downward. The scout-bots had found a deck. It was a large open area, maybe intended for storage or construction. Translucent colors appeared, indicating a temperature gradient—matter warmer than the uniform frozen temperature of the fissure’s walls.

He shifted his display, accessing direct infrared video from the two scout-bots. Both video feeds showed a deck that was mostly empty. No drifting debris. The only visible structures were several towering cubes. They were set far apart and extended from the deck’s floor to its high ceiling. The sides of the cubes were shingled with leaves of gray… glass ? That’s what it looked like, glass shingles warm enough to glow brightly in infrared. But they were not the warmest object captured by the scout-bot’s cameras.

That was the gray-glass figure of a man, standing beyond the blocks, upside down to the orientation of the cameras. Details were hard to discern in the bright blaze of heat, but Urban was certain he saw the figure move—right before the video feed dropped out.

“Riffan,” he said, “stay where you are.”

*What was that? Riffan whispered. And then, *Oh, shit. I’ve lost my link to the probe.

Urban’s skin suit confirmed it. “Uplink lost,” it informed him.

“Go back,” Urban ordered. “Recover the link.”

*What are you going to do?

“I’m going on.”

*Urban—

“Just go!”

He slapped the wall. Shot downward. He wanted to know what they’d found. He wanted video of it to send back to Elepaio .

As he neared the bottom, his tether morphed to slow his descent. His light illuminated a fan-shaped slice of the deck and sparkled against the gray glass that shingled the nearest of the massive cubes.

He looked for the upside-down glass man, but did not see him.

A red light popped on in the periphery of his vision. His skin suit spoke again, informing him in a calm voice, “Suit integrity is under threat.” Urban sucked in a sharp breath. That meant he was under attack but not with a weapon he could directly perceive. The assault was taking place on a molecular scale.

A moment later, the suit spoke again, announcing the failure of Urban’s molecular defenses: “Suit integrity has been compromised.”