Линда Нагата - Edges

Excitement ignited among Dragon ’s philosopher cells. With no input from Urban they flashed a microsecond message to Griffin , urging the companion ship to continue— —while commencing their own high-energy sweep of the suspect region.

Urban mentally braced as power leaped from the reef to the gun, the force of it twisting, tearing, destabilizing the reality in which he existed. Knife slices from a parallel universe.

The beam hunted blindly through the gulf, while across the surface of the reef, polyps began to immolate, burned up by the energy they channeled, burned off in micro-thin layers, blue fire eroding down into the lifeless depths that lay beneath the reef’s living veneer.

The same process underway on Griffin .

How many layers could be lost? He didn’t know—but too many, and the reef might not recover.

Enough!

He dropped the hammer of command: – stop –

Simultaneously messaging the other Clemantine: *Stop! Don’t burn out your reef.

In a cold, calm voice, easily distinguished from his Clemantine, she answered, *I’m done… for now.

Was there an unspoken implication in her words? His Clemantine thought so. She said, *If the entity gets through, we fight it. We aren’t going to yield either ship.

*We’ll do all we can , the mistress of Griffin agreed. *But warn the company. Be ready to evacuate.

The philosopher cells kept watch, and eventually they sighted sparks of plasma, barely discernible, flaring to brief life in the laser-strafed gulf. Signatures of vaporizing matter, each spark marking the destruction of a vector of infection.

Thousands of them.

No way to know if they’d gotten them all.

In the library, Clemantine said, “If even one gets through…”

“Sooth. I know it.”

On the high bridge, Urban prepared the philosopher cells for the possibility of invasion, for imminent infestation. They rallied molecular defenses. The resulting metabolic activity was so extreme it caused the temperature just beneath the cell field to climb. Aggressive preparations, but he remembered too well how swiftly his avatar had vanished after he’d entered the shipwreck… and he did not believe it would be enough.

We can help each other.

Alone in Griffin ’s library, Clemantine listened again to the recorded voice of the entity at the Rock. Her ghost lip curled, showing ghost teeth—an ancient threat response.

We will help each other .

A scary monster lurking in the dark beyond the hull.

I mean you no harm .

Disingenuous words, given the thousands of vector devices found and destroyed by the laser barrage. What harm would ensue if a surviving device found its way to Dragon ? No one knew. No one wanted to know. Engineers—both human and Apparatchik—worked to enhance the defense, laboring over molecular, incendiary, and mechanical responses to potential invasion.

Should all their efforts fail, Griffin would become the fallback position, their only possible refuge—though it could not substitute for Dragon .

Griffin had no habitable space and so it could offer no chance of a physical existence, not in the immediate future. And the library did not have the computational resources to support so many ghosts. But Griffin ’s archive could contain them. Its archive now held updated copies of every member of the ship’s company. Insurance, should the worst occur.

A single needle, lacking self-awareness, rides on unseen vectors that draw it irresistibly toward the massive bulk of the lead starship.

The hull looms, a vast, glowing plain. The frictionless needle passes through this outer barrier without resistance; it slides meters deep into the bio-active tissue beneath. Obedient to its simple programming, it shape shifts, extruding hooks that roughen its surface and abruptly stop its descent.

It monitors the temperature of the surrounding tissue as the steam generated by the friction of deceleration dissipates. Microseconds pass.

Then it shape-shifts again.

Its outer skin opens and it releases an initial payload: Nanotech devices that consume the host tissue, drawing energy from it as they begin to build.

A cardinal nanosite detected the intrusion. A monitoring DI picked up the alert, reviewed the known data, and reported in:

*The hull is breached , it announced in an alert that went out to everyone in the ship’s company. *The infiltration consists of a bore hole. Diameter zero point seven millimeters. Depth thirteen meters. Defensive procedures have been initiated.

On the high bridge, Urban replicated his ghost. Sent it to the affected cardinal. Arrived to find a molecular-level war well underway—attack, adaptation, and counter-attack playing out at the speed of molecular reactions. Tissue steamed with heat generated by the ferocity of the battle.

For several seconds, the ship’s defensive systems held their ground. The cardinal modeled the conflict as a three-dimensional projection: bright-red shapes suggestive of hooks and drills and prongs and sockets contending against a featureless silver tide, all of it writhing and shifting in frantic motion reflecting a flood of incoming data.

Urban didn’t expect the ship’s defenses to defeat this invasion. He only hoped to slow the assault, allowing time for containment efforts to work.

Rapidly growing capillaries branched into the hot zone, supplying Makers tasked with constructing a barrier around the incursion, a containment shell that would seal it off from the rest of the ship. Within the shell, a layer of explosives set to trigger when containment was complete, sterilizing everything inside.

Powerful ligaments reached into the hot zone. They attached to the forming shell, poised to eject it from the ship’s hull.

Within the restrictive environment of the cardinal, Urban had no illusion of full physical presence, but there were cues. When Vytet joined him, he knew it by the gravity of her presence.

“Nearly over,” Urban growled.

“No,” Vytet said. “Something’s gone wrong. It’s taking too long, and the heat around the containment shell is not dissipating. There! You see? The problem is with the ligaments. They’re not attached.”

He looked more closely at the model and saw that she was right. The ligaments had been rejected. That meant the containment shell was no longer under their control. He sent an override command to immediately trigger the explosives.

No explosion occurred.

Instead, a silvery sheen appeared over the shell’s ribbed surface—a default representation used by the model whenever information was lacking. It indicated something was there, but the model had no data to determine what it might be or what it was made of.

“ Shit ,” Urban whispered.

The invasion had outstripped his efforts to contain it, and the shell’s silvery surface—the face of the unknowable, the inaccessible—was rapidly expanding. It lost its spherical form. It extended into a rounded cylinder. Tendrils sprouted from it, also sheathed in the silver of undefined matter. The tendrils shot through the ship’s bio-mechanical tissue, advancing as if they faced no resistance, though armies of molecular defenses marshaled against them.

Urban watched in horror, understanding that he was beaten. His best defenses, useless against this thing.