Линда Нагата - Edges

Foreign nanomachines had fought past the skin suit’s defenses, breaching it, opening microscopic channels through its fabric. He felt the results as needles of cold that stabbed into his hands, his chest, his eyes.

Only for a moment.

The cold subsided as the suit self-repaired, but the enemy was already inside. Urban cried out as searing heat erupted at the points where his suit had been penetrated. His vision clouded. A battle was being fought across the moist surfaces of his eyes, as well as against the skin of his chest and hands—his defensive Makers against the intruding nanotech.

He clenched his fists against the pain and when, after a few seconds, the pain failed to subside, he knew he had lost. His defensive Makers had failed to protect him, leaving him at the mercy of whatever it was that existed down here.

Urban did not trust the mercy of alien lifeforms.

The pain in his eyes sharpened. He envisioned the attacking nanomachines driving deeper into his head. Soon they would reach his brain, his atrium. God knows what would happen then.

He wasn’t going to let it happen. He wasn’t going to leave any meaningful data for this lifeform to exploit.

No time to prepare a ghost.

Just end it.

“Riffan!” he shouted, hoping his comms still worked. “We’re terminating!”

*What? No! I’m still trying to recover the link.

A memory, searing across Urban’s consciousness: the first time he’d had to terminate. He’d been dying, but still so hard to do. He’d known Riffan wouldn’t be up to it, not without hesitation. So on the way in he’d hacked Riffan’s avatar, setting up a code word that would kick off the termination sequence for both of them. He spoke it.

*No! Riffan screamed.

But the process was already underway. Hosts of Makers erupted from the tendrils of their atriums, replicating madly, consuming brain tissue to do it, converting the content of their skulls into gray goo, devoid of information.

Contact had been lost with the avatars and with scout-bots one and two—the pair that had entered the shipwreck—but Elepaio remained in contact with the probe. Data was still being received. The scout-bots assigned to explore the shipwreck’s hull were still active, while the probe’s cameras continued to watch both the wreck and the planetoid below.

Urban felt a submind drop in. It melded with his ghost, bringing him the knowledge that there was now activity on the planetoid’s surface.

He turned to examine a continuously updating three-dimensional projection of the Rock that floated in the virtual space of Elepaio ’s library. All its cracks and craters had been carefully mapped, but that map was now being revised as the seemingly lifeless surface began to change.

The latest images showed black circles that had not been observed before. The features appeared at high points on the planet’s scarred surface: the rims of craters, the peaks of low, folded hills. Perfect circles of darkness. Urban counted ten, then fifteen, then twenty of them. No pattern in their arrangement.

They looked like tiny spots on the face of this little world, but the scale showed them to be at least five hundred meters across. He suspected they were pits, holes in the ground, missile silos maybe. If so, they were huge.

More appeared as the probe continued to advance in its slow orbit, collecting fresh images of the surface.

Urban realized Riffan was now hovering beside him. “Corruption take us,” he whispered. “And chaos too.”

“It’s definitely awake now,” Urban said. “Whatever it is.”

“Let’s see it in infrared.”

The library obliged and each circle shifted from black to blazing white. “Subterranean network,” Riffan said. “Got to be. Significantly warm. Maybe a fusion power source. Impressive how little of that interior heat we were able to detect before the doors opened.”

“Skilled at playing dead,” Urban agreed.

The circles began to pulse, growing briefly brighter—not synchronized, not flaring everywhere at once, not flaring in a discernible pattern—but repeatedly.

“A weapon?” Riffan wondered.

“Not enough power there to harm us.”

“A code?”

“Meant for who?”

Riffan shook his head. “Possible to get scout-bots down there?”

“No. They’ve all been deployed.”

The probe continued its orbital survey but found no more openings. The region below it now appeared to be the same unmarked, lifeless surface they’d first seen.

“ Hey ,” Riffan said suspiciously. “What’s going on? Do you think there’s no activity in this region?”

“Or is the activity already over with?” Urban asked. “Did silos open here too, but close before we could record them?”

He wanted to do the impossible: Turn the probe around, look again at the area just surveyed, determine if the openings they’d seen were still there. But by the time the probe could survey that region again, they’d be out of communications range.

He turned an uneasy gaze back to the library window that held the latest image of the shipwreck, but there was nothing new to see there.

“ Damn ,” he whispered, angry because he might never figure out what had just happened.

The voice of a DI interrupted his brooding thoughts. “Contact reestablished with scout-bot one,” it announced. “Current transmission is voice only.”

“It’s recovered ,” Riffan whispered in wonder. “Maybe—”

Urban cut him off with a slashing gesture. “It’s not the scout-bot. The scout-bot doesn’t have a voice.” But something was there at the Rock. It had caused him to lose the avatars, it had taken his scout-bots, and now it was playing with him.

A new image of the shipwreck posted. The wreck appeared the same, but the figure of a man could now be seen standing on the ruptured hull, just outside of the torn, frozen tissue surrounding the fissure.

The man was not him. It was not Riffan.

In all likelihood it was also not a man because he was standing naked on the hull without the benefit of a skin suit. Scale was hard to gauge, but Urban guessed him to be of moderate human height. A lean but muscular build, black hair adrift in the zero gravity, his complexion seeming dark in the dim light. His eyes were dark too, cast in shadow as he looked back at the watching probe—which made it feel as if he was looking Urban in the eyes.

“A bio-mechanical entity,” Urban decided.

“Agreed,” Riffan said softly. “We’re dead in there, aren’t we?”

“Yes.”

“It beat us.”

“It did.”

They’d entered the shipwreck protected by Urban’s best defensive Makers, but they had not come out again. Not even a ghost had escaped.

The entity spoke—or at least its mouth moved in an imitation of words that it could not possibly be uttering without the presence of air. Urban heard its words anyway as its voice rode the channel that had formerly belonged to scout-bot one. The voice was human, male, rich in tone, and powerful. It said: “We can help each other.”

Urban had studied history. He was aware there were hundreds of human languages. He’d even learned a few over the long, empty stretches of time he’d lived through. Of all those languages, this voice spoke his language, the one language of Deception Well, and it used the same archaic accent that Urban used.

Fear accelerated his simulated heartbeat. Had his avatar failed to terminate in time? Had this thing harvested information from his mind? He throttled the connection rate to ensure no ghost would be able to get through.

“What did you just do?” Riffan asked when the image failed to update.