Линда Нагата - Edges

“ No ,” Zira said, hovering over her workstation with fist clenched. “Active radar is too much of a risk. It will expose us . It will pinpoint our position.”

“We’ll have moved position long before the signal reaches the courser,” Pasha countered.

Riffan considered it, considered what he knew of Pasha. He’d known her all his life. They were a similar age. They’d gone to school together. Even so, she had never been more than a casual friend, someone to say hello to. The truth was, Riffan had always found her uncomfortably blunt, even acerbic. Intimidating, too. But he’d never seen her rattled, and he was glad to have her on the bridge.

He said, “Pasha, I think you’re right. We’ve got too many unknowns. Zira, I want you to plot that course, and Pasha, I’m authorizing the radar scan.”

“On it,” she said, cool and professional.

Riffan hoped it was the right decision. Every order he gave was automatically relayed in-system. Any order he gave could be countermanded by the Defense Force chief, but if that happened, he wouldn’t know about it for twelve hours.

To Riffan’s surprise, the bridge door snapped open, the luminous white material of the flesh-soft wall retracting to create an oval entrance.

Apart from the bridge crew—already present—there were only six students aboard Long Watch . All should have known to stay clear of the bridge during this emergency. Riffan opened his mouth, ready to remind the transgressor of that, but then he caught sight of the intruder and realized she was not one of the students.

The gentle reprimand he’d intended died on his tongue as an unknown woman glided in. She was tall and muscular, her skin golden-brown, her hair black and very short, her features bold, strong. Tiny gold tattoos glinted on her earlobes. She reached back for a hand-hold that sprouted from the wall just in time for her to grasp it, arresting her momentum with expert grace.

He cocked his head, trying to puzzle out how she had come to be there. They were isolated. On the edge of the system. Visitors did not just drop in.

Gasps and astonished protests greeted her entrance:

“ Whoa .”

“What?”

“Where did she—?”

Riffan’s atrium automatically queried hers for an identity, but he didn’t need its help. “I know you,” he said, pushing away from his workstation to get a better look at her past the projection of the nebula. “At least… I know of you.” He’d never seen her before, not in the flesh, but he knew who she was. Everyone did. She was a figure out of history, out of mythology. “You’re Clemantine,” he concluded in astonishment.

Clemantine had been part of Deception Well’s founding generation and later she’d ventured into Chenzeme space, part of the Null Boundary Expedition. She’d been the only one of a four-person company of adventurers to return home. The zero-point propulsion reef had been exclusively a Chenzeme technology until Clemantine brought it back with her, giving the people of Deception Well the means to defend themselves—giving them the technology to build warships of their own.

He’d had no idea Clemantine kept an avatar on this ship.

Clemantine had followed the conversation on the bridge through an open audio channel, so she knew where things stood. Gambling her celebrity would give her some measure of authority, she said, “Get that radar sweep underway. We need to know what’s out there—and given the distance, it’s going to take hours to get any returns.”

“Yes, ma’am.”

This response came from a woman, identified by Clemantine’s DI as Pasha Andern, an exobiologist. Short, white-blond hair floated in a layered halo around Pasha’s alert face. She had the slim, slight body type of those who favored efficiency over raw physical strength, an impression reinforced by the beige tunic and pale-green leggings she wore: simple, pragmatic clothing. Pasha added, “It’s an honor to have you here, ma’am.”

In contrast to Pasha, the ship’s commander-of-the-moment, Riffan Naja, had some size to him—well-muscled and emphatically male without being pretentious. Riffan agreed, “It is an honor. But why are you here? How long have you been here? Oh…” His confusion gave way to realization. “You were waiting for this day, weren’t you?”

“For the day the Chenzeme returned?” Clemantine asked him, startled at the bitterness she heard in her own voice. “ Yes .”

“Then you knew they’d come again.” This was spoken by the engineer, Zira Lin. Each syllable sharp with anger, her words an accusation.

“Of course,” Clemantine answered. “Did you let yourself believe otherwise?”

A warm flush rose in Zira’s cheeks. She looked away, rolling a shoulder as if to deny such a naive thought. But truth was in her words. “We hoped,” she said. “Some of us dared to hope, anyway. It’s been more than seven centuries since the last sighting.”

Clemantine had no patience for such a limited perspective. “What are seven centuries,” she asked, “when the Chenzeme have waged their autonomous war for thirty million years? A war of that duration won’t end in your lifetime or in mine, however many centuries we might survive.”

“At least we have survived,” Zira answered, though she sounded chastened. “Here in the Well. Some say we’re the last to survive. That between the Chenzeme and the collapse of the Hallowed Vasties, the human age has come to an end.”

She paused as if to give Clemantine an opening to argue, but Clemantine did not. Riffan spoke up instead, “I don’t believe that.”

“Do you believe that?” Zira pressed as if Clemantine owed her an answer.

Clemantine consented, giving all the answer there was: “No way to know.”

The truth was, hunkered down as they were in the shelter of the nebula, not daring to venture beyond it, not since the Null Boundary Expedition anyway, they were abysmally ignorant of the status of other star systems. Still, Clemantine did not hold much hope.

Deception Well survived because of the nebula’s ancient inhuman technology. No other reason. And no one knew how far the robotic Chenzeme ships had ventured in their war of extermination. They might have pushed past the frontier, in among the star systems of the Hallowed Vasties. If so, had they found anything left there to destroy?

“It doesn’t matter if we’re the last or not,” Clemantine concluded. “Our duty is the same—to survive.”

For Zira, this was answer enough. Tears shone briefly in her eyes, crystalline, trembling in the zero gravity until she wiped them away.

Forty-nine minutes later Riffan had an update on the courser’s relative velocity and a solid estimate of its trajectory. Together, those figures assured him that it would bypass the Well. At closest approach, TH-6 would still be light-hours beyond the measurable edge of the nebula with a velocity too high to be captured by the system’s gravity or to survive passage through the nebula’s debris field.

It might still try to dump that velocity. Turn about and return. But such a maneuver would require months, maybe years. Someone else would be designated as commander of Long Watch by then. So Riffan put the courser out of his mind, focusing instead on the suspected weapons swarm.

He watched and he waited, enduring the slow unfolding of time as radar waves propagated outward, moving at the speed of light but still requiring most of an hour to reach the nearest target, and an equivalent time for the reflected waves to return to Long Watch .

At last the first faint signals arrived. A DI compiled them into a blurry image, revealing the shape and size of the leading object in the swarm. They all studied it—Riffan and Pasha, Enzo and Zira, and Clemantine.