Линда Нагата - Edges

“Voice only,” Urban said. “I don’t want its ghost showing up at the data gate.”

“God, no,” Riffan breathed. And then added, “We can’t answer it.”

“No.” The light-speed lag prevented conversation.

Maybe the entity didn’t realize this. Maybe it thought it was speaking to a consciousness housed in the probe. “We will help each other,” it warned.

“It wants off the Rock,” Urban said. He smiled grimly. Shook his head. “Not going to happen. We’re going to stay far, far away.”

That thing was dangerous. Two crews had made the choice to wreck their ships, stranding themselves, rather than allowing this being to escape its isolation. And it had beaten a Chenzeme courser as well as Urban’s best defensive Makers.

He would have to improve his defenses.

That would be difficult without insight on the system that had defeated him. This thought led him to ponder the risks he would be facing in his determination to explore the Hallowed Vasties. Had this entity come from there? Did it represent what was left there, what he could expect to find? He feared it might be so. All the same, he longed to know.

The entity spoke again. It said, “I mean you no harm.” An assurance made unconvincing by its threatening tone.

“I wonder how you got here,” Urban mused aloud. “Was that an accident? Or did a bigger monster exile you?”

“I wish we could talk to it,” Riffan said.

Urban nodded his agreement. Still, “It’s distance that keeps us safe.”

He hoped the entity would speak again, but it did not.

Sometime later, Elepaio struck debris, the concussion made audible in Urban’s virtual environment. Fear gripped him, along with a profound awareness of the fragility of his little ship. He desperately wanted to make it back to Dragon , tell his story. A quick check showed no damage to essential systems. No doubt there was a charred crater in the hull, but it would heal.

Minutes later, a second impact, less brutal than the first.

Nothing after that.

The beacon did not resume.

Days passed. The mystery of the Rock fell ever farther behind them in both space and time. Riffan grew bored with the transit. He disappeared into dormancy, leaving Urban alone to reflect over what they’d found. Not just the entity.

His thoughts kept returning to the two ships of human origin and the decision their crews had made to scuttle them. It pleased Urban to think he’d done better, that he’d escaped relatively unscathed given the superiority of the entity’s nanotechnology. At the least, he’d come away with the knowledge of its existence.

Still, he regretted not learning more, and as time dragged on he began to wonder if he’d done all he could. A familiar self-appraisal. So easy to drift from there into a gyre of regret for things past, lost things, things he had not been able to save.

Once before, an alien nanotechnology had defeated his best efforts to decode it. That time, it had not attacked him, only locked him out.

“I couldn’t save him,” he murmured. A recurring lamentation.

Now, a thousand years on, he’d encountered a being that had easily overwhelmed his best defenses. And he wondered, If I’d had its knowledge back then, its power, would that have made a difference?

Regret weighed on him, and guilt for what had happened—but these were feelings he rejected out of habit. Time flowed in one direction only, life did not grant do-overs, and it was his nature to reject any suggestion of melancholy. A useless emotion. Better to arm up. Be ready. Be stronger, faster, smarter.

Right now he was vulnerable.

He’d done the smart thing by keeping his distance from the Rock. That had let him avoid any risk of contamination… but what had his avatar done?

His avatar was him and he knew what he would have done. The moment he understood his defenses had been breached, he would have terminated. Urban—in any form—was haunted by a deep fear of being hijacked, of having an avatar rebuilt or resurrected without agency, under the control of another. Still—why had the encounter been hostile?

Maybe it had been an accidental conflict. If the entity had sought information and pushed too hard, a nanoscale war could have erupted.

The thing had said, We can help each other .

Was that an apology?

It had been a long time since Urban had encountered anything stronger than himself, a long time since he’d been challenged. He wished he could have learned more.

He considered what it would take to go back to the Rock, even though he knew he would not do it. To reverse Dragon ’s momentum and return would require years.

To hell with second-guessing. Better to push on. The Hallowed Vasties lay ahead. He was sure to find ample opportunities there to test his skills and his nerve.

Yet regret persisted, a vaporous presence in his virtual world.

So he edited his ghost, making it less vulnerable to melancholy, to introspection, to boredom. Then he summoned several specialized DIs and with their help he spent the remainder of the return voyage immersed in the task of developing new lines of defensive Makers.

Clemantine floated cross-legged in the forest room, her chest rising and falling in slow, meditative breaths as she gazed into the sunlit forest where a simulated breeze stirred a few fading leaves into subtle motion. The chatter and whistles of birdsong sounded from overhead. She listened, pretending she was not afraid.

In a private virtual space within the library, she floated cross-legged amid the darkness of the void, watching Dragon approach its prey. Her perspective, that of the outrider Artemis , standing off a mere twelve kilometers, brought in to observe the interaction of the two coursers.

On the high bridge, she observed that interaction in greater intimacy, watching alongside Urban as Dragon ’s philosopher cells carried out the intricate, instinctive ritual of greeting:

Subminds migrated among her aspects, so that she existed simultaneously across all three timelines as time advanced and the two ships drew closer to one another.

Both glowed white with the light of their hull cells. Through human eyes, Clemantine perceived it as a constant light, but through her Chenzeme senses she distinguished rapid pulses of communication. Warnings and murderous threats at first, giving way to continuous affirmations of identity and cooperative intent as the two coursers negotiated the intricate navigational steps required to bring them parallel to one another.

Relative to nearby stars they still hurtled at close to thirty-one percent light speed, but within their own frame of reference they became nearly stationary, only slowly drifting to close the two-point-five kilometer gap that remained between them.

Both were massive starships, but their size was not apparent in the video feed out of Artemis because there was nothing human within range of the watching cameras that could lend perspective. This encounter was purely alien—or it appeared that way.

In truth, Dragon ’s blazing hull was camouflage disguising hostile intentions. Beneath that bright surface, a hundred thousand needle-like projectiles lay ready to launch, each one packed with proven molecular weapons.

Clemantine breathed deeply, fighting the anxiety, the tension that tried to rise as the distance between the two coursers narrowed, closing at a rate close to 3.5 seconds per meter.

In a normal encounter between Chenzeme ships, the ritualized exchange of data-encoded dust would not begin until physical contact was nearly established, but Urban meant for her to take control of the second courser long before that point.