Линда Нагата - Edges

Pasha heaved a sigh. The Sequence had once looked so promising that it stifled discussion of cruder strategies involving explosive weapons. If the entity should finally emerge, a hard strike from Griffin ’s bow gun remained their only means of containing it.

With this grim thought in mind, she made her way to the gee deck. A glance at the personnel map showed Vytet and Naresh together at the dining terrace. No one else.

No voices disturbed the quiet. No music, no annoying buzz of the flying fox. Birdsong and the rustle of an occasional breeze through the low canopies of aging trees served as themes in a composition of silence.

A temporary state.

In forty-eight hours, the newest images from the annual astronomical survey were due. Everyone would wake in time to see them come in. It had become a regular custom, a festival, the time of year when the ship’s company came together.

Pasha went to her cottage. Heated water for tea.

To this version of herself, it felt as if she’d been gone from the cottage for just a few minutes. For the ghost she’d left at work in the library, it had been a year.

She sat in a cushy chair, a steaming teacup on a side table, and allowed the ghost into her atrium—but she did not allow it to merge. Not yet.

It manifested before her, a perfect image of herself overlaid on the reality of the room.

That first day after the entity infested the ship, Kona had tasked everyone in the ship’s company with exploring every possible option that might allow them to continue the expedition without abandoning Dragon . At first, Pasha had focused on understanding the mechanism of the governors, but later she’d turned her mind to more archaic technologies. Through the passing years, she’d studied the structure of the ship, and mastered concepts in bio-mechanics and explosive technology.

For the past year, this ghost had worked in isolation within a private chamber in the library, studying the feasibility of a brute force effort to evict the entity from the ship.

“Can it work?” she asked her ghost. She did not want the burden of the ghost’s experience—the isolation and frustration of the past year—unless it had found a way forward.

“I believe it can,” the ghost said.

Pasha’s heart rate kicked up. This was the answer she’d both hoped for and feared. She leaned forward as the ghost continued to speak.

“I’ve created an initial plan,” it said. “It’s dependent on stealth at every stage—”

“Understood.”

“—but we should be able to remove every structure associated with the entity and lose no more than twenty-three percent of the mass of the ship.”

Pasha’s gut clenched. “Almost a quarter of the ship?”

The ghost shrugged. “This was the most efficient approach. The alternative, if we leave it to Griffin —”

“I know. If we leave it to Griffin , we lose the ship, one hundred percent. Can we preserve essential systems?”

“What we can’t preserve, we can rebuild.”

Pasha stared into her ghost’s pale green eyes, struck by doubt. She had planned to erase the ghost if it determined there was no feasible means to burn out the entity. Now it came to it, she wondered: If that ghost was me, would I lie to preserve myself?

The ghost returned her gaze with a taut smile. “I can show you my strategy paper.”

Pasha leaned back in her chair, settling her shoulders, relaxing her hands. “No,” she said. “I trust your judgment.”

“ Our judgment?”

“Mine,” she concluded—and she allowed the ghost to integrate, its memory of the past year becoming hers.

“Look at that,” Urban whispered, leaning forward in the darkness of the amphitheater as murmured wonder filled the air, punctuated by cries of astonishment. He sat between Clemantine and Riffan, in the highest tier of seats, gazing at the newest image of Tanjiri System. “Not the planet or its moon. I mean the other object. Is it new? Or are we just seeing it at a new angle?”

“We might have seen it before,” Clemantine answered in taut excitement. “But not like this.”

“ Sooth ,” Urban breathed, grinning in the dark.

Over the years, he’d come to enjoy the festival surrounding the annual astronomical survey, and the shared suspense as the Astronomer posted the newest images to the projection screen.

A tag popped up, labeling the object as Tanjiri Artifact 121. More than three hundred artifacts had been cataloged, so TA-121 had certainly been seen before—but never so clearly, completely unobscured. It appeared as two tiny, conical, blue-green crystalline chips pointing at one another across a gulf of space. Presumably, there was a tether—too fine to be resolved—linking them together, allowing them to rotate around a central point.

“It’s a celestial city,” Clemantine said. “I’ve seen them in the histories.”

The Astronomer confirmed it, speaking within the atriums of everyone in the amphitheater: *TA-121 is a tethered structure. The appearance of the dual units suggests an architectural design similar to the city of Silk, with intact transparent canopies to contain atmosphere.

“A living city,” Urban concluded. “Alongside a living planet and a living moon.”

Glittering and bright, the celestial city glided in serene orbit closer to the planet than to the dark debris ring with its looming megastructures.

“It must be huge ,” Riffan breathed. “I wonder who lives there? Or maybe the structure itself is alive?”

“Maybe,” Urban said, throat suddenly tight as a sense of wonder welled up in him, and awe for the tenacity of life, and pride because he had chosen to come here, and fear, knowing he wasn’t equal to the beings inhabiting Tanjiri System.

His mood darkened. Was the entity from Tanjiri? Vytet thought so, though it had given them no hint of its identity or its intention, remaining utterly quiescent through the years, while they busied themselves with the Naresh Sequence.

The Apparatchiks on Griffin were convinced the sequence had been planted by the entity to keep everyone busy, to lull them with a sense of progress. Dragon ’s Bio-mechanic insisted that was impossible, but Urban no longer felt confident that any of them could recognize the boundaries of possible things.

The Naresh Sequence had not brought them a solution, but the effort put into it had been worthwhile. They’d greatly expanded the envelope of their knowledge—and still there was so much they did not understand.

The lights came up, the walls opened. The next image wasn’t due for another ninety minutes. He started to rise, thinking to find something to eat, but Pasha was already up from her front-row seat, stepping onto the dais, her petite figure turning to confront the gathering.

“A moment!” she pleaded.

Urban felt the pressure of Clemantine’s hand on his arm. He settled back down, a sense of tension in his chest, guessing that Pasha’s thoughts this day had paralleled his own.

She said, “I don’t want to cast a shadow on the wonder of this day, but an affirmative decision needs to be made. The entity is still with us and we are decades closer to Tanjiri. Are we going to serve as the vector that allows it to escape its isolation? Or are we going to do everything, everything , in our power to stop it?”

This drew a smattering of angry responses, Naresh the most coherent among them: “Are we back to that, Pasha? What would you have us do? Destroy the ship?”

She crossed her arms. “I don’t want that. I don’t believe we would have to go that far, but now that the Naresh Sequence has failed, we must discuss other options.”