Линда Нагата - Edges

He waited until the distance between the ships dropped below two kilometers. Then he called it: *Time to go dark .

Clemantine responded: *Sooth, let’s do it .

No quiet suggestion this time. Urban formatted a harsh command—

– GO DARK –

—and dropped it simultaneously across his hundred thousand links.

Clemantine followed with a supporting argument issued in a different voice:

– affirm now — go dark –

Artemis ’s camera showed tendrils of darkness shooting across Dragon ’s hull, branching, linking, expanding… stagnating.

Counter arguments erupted as allied cells resisted the call to go dormant. No such call had been made during the previous attacks against other coursers. Remembering this, the most aggressive cells fought the unexpected deviation, and the wave of dormancy began to reverse.

In the darkness of the library, Clemantine watched in fatalistic detachment. In the forest room, her heartbeat quickened in fear. On the high bridge her anger escalated. This time she seized the hammer of argument:

– GO DARK! –

And Urban followed with a hundred thousand supporting voices:

– affirm now — go dark –

The objective of this encounter was capture, not annihilation. The cells had fulfilled their role by getting Dragon close. Now they needed to go dark so they could do no harm.

Across the hull, the weight of argument shifted again. Allied networks of cells reinforced the emphatic directive:

Within seconds, only a few scattered cells remained awake, points of white, like the last stars on the galaxy’s edge.

The alien courser reacted immediately. Any deviation in expected behavior had to be interpreted as a threat—so it tried to withdraw. It triggered its propulsion reef. Artemis observed it shudder as it made a desperate effort to pull away.

It could not move fast enough to evade attack.

All along Dragon ’s length, half a million needle projectiles shot out through seams between the dormant hull cells. Each was a long thin barb of diamond, engineered to shatter along deliberate fault lines to allow the release of the payload of assault Makers carried within a hollow interior.

In seconds, the needles crossed the void between the two ships. They struck the alien courser. Most shattered against the glassy surfaces of its hull cells, uselessly releasing the Makers they carried in bursts of harmless mist. But some hundreds struck the interlocking seams between the cells and penetrated into the underlying bio-mechanical tissue.

These needles shattered too, but here their payload had a purpose. Assault Makers spilled into the Chenzeme tissue. The Makers set to work, replicating even as they set up a defensive perimeter.

Chenzeme nanomachines responded to the incursion, but the invading Makers had fought battles like this before. They understood Chenzeme design and Chenzeme tactics and they used that knowledge to push back the attack, expanding their defensive perimeter.

Within the secured territory, other Makers worked to gather raw material that they used to construct cardinal nanosites. Within a minute, several hundred of the tiny processing nodes were scattered throughout the courser’s tissue.

The cardinals began to send out tendrils, guarded by assault Makers. The surrounding tissue grew hot with the activity of construction and conflict. Minutes passed. The tendrils began to find one another. They linked up, connecting the cardinals in a network that continued to grow, wrapping around the captive courser, diving inward to connect with critical systems, and expanding outward to reach the philosopher cells, establishing a high bridge.

The bridge issued a single, simple command to the now-captive philosopher cells, stimulating them to emit a short, chaotic radio burst.

Clemantine heard it in the library. She heard it on Dragon ’s high bridge. Affirmation that the alien courser was now hers. Moments later she heard a ping of greeting from the captive courser’s newly constructed data gate.

In the library, she edited her ghost to numb her dread.

In the forest room she filled her lungs, emptied them again, and swore she would become what she needed to be.

From the high bridge came the anxious thought: No time to hesitate!

The courser was bridged, but until Clemantine assumed her post there, its philosopher cells would continue to control the ship. A dark line had opened in its cell field, swiftly expanding to allow deployment of its gamma-ray gun. Its steerage jets were firing, pushing its massive bulk toward an angle that would allow the gun’s swiveling lens to bear on Dragon .

Clemantine synthesized a new ghost, one endowed with the memories of all three current timelines. She sent it through the data gate. And seemingly without transition she plunged into a furious consensus:

>

>

Clemantine wanted to recoil. The coordinated currents of hate, the murderous contempt, the deep craving need to inflict fiery death on all that was not self or the equivalent of self—it horrified her, but she plunged in anyway. No choice. She had to take control.

She extended her senses across the high bridge—so different from Dragon ’s high bridge!—its structure still expanding, growing, extending ever more links into the cell field.

Yet here at the start she had only a small percentage of the connections she’d taken for granted aboard Dragon . Ten percent? Fifteen?

Doesn’t matter!

This is what she’d been given. Her will and her anger had to make up for the rest.

Her opening argument blasted out across what she now guessed to be fifteen thousand links:

– NEGATE THAT! –

The force of it overwhelmed adjacent cells, inducing them to take it up, echo it, evaluate it, and argue—an effect that rippled outward, introducing fault lines in the agreement of the field, disrupting consensus.

She offered an alternative argument across all the links: – the other is chenzeme –

A counter argument slammed back:

– NEGATE THAT! –

All her rage for what had been lost coiled within that short, sharp communication. A moment’s stunned pause. She had shocked the field into silence; shocked herself too with the force of her anger. She recovered, and commenced to hammer her will through every link in the rapidly expanding bridge:

– negate revulsion! the other is chenzeme –

– negate killing! the other is chenzeme –

– negate conflict! the other is chenzeme –

– the other is chenzeme –

– the other is chenzeme –

– the other is chenzeme –

– required: agreement –

This induced a positive response— —but it was weak.

She amplified that weak response, and extended her argument:

– AGREEMENT! the other is chenzeme –

– we are allied chenzeme! –

– required: agreement –

The response came back stronger:

Still a fragile concession, but enough that she was able to cut off the steerage jets, route power away from the gun. She continued through rapid, looping argument to enforce her will, until after many seconds she hammered out hard-won consensus:

The high bridge continued to grow. More links reached the cell field, each an additional point of influence, further securing Clemantine’s hold over the ship’s mind.

She gave the newly captured courser a name: Griffin .

* Dragon ’s partner , she explained to Urban through an open channel in the data gate. *A second hybrid monster, a kind of chimera, a mix of different organisms.