Линда Нагата - Edges

“Tell her what Lezuri offered you,” Kona said.

A slight, cynical smile. “He told me, ‘Give me your loyalty and I will teach you what you want to know.’”

Clemantine drew a sharp breath, apprehensive, sure that he was tempted. Knowledge had always been a path to power for Urban. He strove to learn how things worked, he sought to control the mechanisms around him, because to be in control was his assurance that no one could choose the path of his life for him.

“You’re thinking about it, aren’t you?” she asked.

Another smile—that pirate smile. Mocking the idea that his loyalty was a commodity to be traded—unless the offer was right?

“Lezuri wants allies,” Kona said. “But why? Why does he need us?”

Clemantine sipped her tea to settle her mind, musing on Kona’s question—and an idea came to her. “Why did you need us?” she asked Urban.

He returned her gaze with a quizzical expression.

“You were by yourself for centuries,” she reminded him. “You described it as misery. Soul-annihilating loneliness. We are human. We’re not meant to be alone. And at his core, Lezuri is human too.”

“You’re saying he’s lonely?” Urban asked.

“I don’t know if ‘lonely’ is the right word,” she said, working out her thoughts as she spoke. “But you saw his performance today. He wants admiration, even responsibility. From what he said today, his strength was built out of the act of gathering personalities around him. I think he’s still doing that. He’s seeking subjects. Followers. Satellite personalities that can give him a sense of purpose, define his place at the center of a social web. I don’t doubt that he’s power-seeking and narcissistic, but he’s posing as beneficent—and I think he wants to see himself that way.”

Urban set his cup down with a sharp crack. “He wants my ship.”

Refusing to coddle him, she answered, “He has your ship.”

“No. I still command Dragon . If I didn’t, I would end this, like the crews of those other ships.”

“It might come to that,” Kona said. “You have to recognize it, if it does.”

“Don’t worry about that.”

“We’re not there yet,” Clemantine cautioned. She would do everything in her power to hold onto her home here on Dragon . Just a little longer, and the Bio-mechanic’s swift secretive mission to prepare the Pyrrhic Defense would add a final, necessary layer to their resistance—but she did not tell Urban that. He had rejected all similar suggestions for so long, she feared he would try to undo their plan if he knew it was real and underway.

She did not feel much guilt over the deception. It was necessary, and she had not forgotten how he’d once hidden a critical truth from her because he felt she could not handle it.

She watched him sip his tea, eyes unfocused. Contemplating? Or collecting another tide of subminds?

He said, “I think I’ll let Lezuri try to persuade me.”

Clemantine’s shoulders slumped. She traded a weary look with Kona. Silent consensus: Didn’t we both know it would go this way?

Urban took no notice, musing aloud: “If he wants my loyalty, he can try to win it. Prove to me he’s beneficent, that he’s willing to share what he knows. That will give me an opening. A way to get close to him, to learn what I need to learn. He knows so much more than we do.”

Clemantine shook her head, set her teacup down. She reached for his hand, squeezed it. “He knows so much more than we do,” she echoed. “Hear the truth in that. You’ll try to play him, but he will play you, draw you into his orbit.”

“I won’t let that happen.”

“Urban,” Kona pleaded. “You have to remember, he grew out of the Swarm. None of us has the capacity to even imagine—”

“Whatever he used to be, that’s not what he is now,” Urban interrupted. “He’s only a fragment of that past self. That’s why we have a chance. But to make this work, I need to play the game.” He turned to Clemantine. “When I think about all those years on Null Boundary , and what we might have done if only we knew what this thing knows—”

She raised her hand. “Stop,” she commanded, shocked that she hadn’t realized regret was one part of what drove him. “Don’t go there. Don’t let it haunt you. You can’t rewrite the past.”

A rough gesture, casting aside her concern. “It’s not about the past. It’s about ensuring our future. I need to learn everything I can from this thing. And in the end, I will learn enough to defeat him.”

She studied him in this, his fallback state: cocky, confident, in denial of hard inevitabilities. So far he’d had the luck and the strength to recover when those inevitabilities inevitably hit—but luck didn’t last forever.

“Guard yourself,” she warned. “I’ve gotten used to your company. I don’t want to lose you.”

That version of Clemantine existing alone aboard Griffin received these memories. She shared them with her Apparatchiks. The Scholar said, “A truce with this being could be highly advantageous as Urban has surmised, but there is no way to be sure of Lezuri’s intentions while he exists under the threat of our gun.”

“So we continue in vigilance,” Clemantine said. “With so many factions in play, something is bound to break.”

Now that he’d located the cocoon that held the entity’s newest avatar, the Bio-mechanic longed to destroy it. It would be so easy to do.

The structure of the cocoon was well known to him. It was a copy of the barrier wall he’d designed to protect the warren. And it was not defended by the unfathomable nanotech that guarded the containment capsule. Instead, it utilized the Bio-mechanic’s own system of Makers to keep it safe from the surrounding Chenzeme tissue.

Knowing the entity had so casually replicated his work infuriated him. It fed his determination to rid the ship of this maddening infestation. Adding to his pique was the knowledge that the thing within the cocoon was a masquerade and not at all human.

Ultrasound had yielded an initial view, later confirmed by molecular mapping. The partly grown avatar had lightweight honeycombed bones, no brain, no digestive system, and lungs just large enough to give it the capability of speech. It had many small hearts and what looked like gas-exchange surfaces in its skin to supplement the undersized lungs. An inefficient structure, clearly not intended for long-term use, but with the advantage that it could not be killed by a single projectile as a human could.

The Bio-mechanic maneuvered a fleet of sensors into position to monitor the cocoon… though it would be so much more satisfying to bring into play one of the pods of stealthed explosives he’d prepared for the Pyrrhic Defense. He imagined using such a device to immolate the cocoon.

He so looked forward to putting a fiery end to the entity’s tenure.

But the avatar was not the entity. It would do no good to attack the cocoon, whatever momentary satisfaction he might derive. So he resisted the temptation.

Resisting temptation was new to him. In the past, he would either act or not act, as logic dictated. He did not suffer illogical desires. But his decades-long failure to evict the entity had changed him, made him more bitter, more duplicitous, more human.

A hundred years ago he would not have had the complexity to resist the temptation to report to Urban on the existence of the Pyrrhic Defense. Now he had nearly completed the project without informing either Urban or the other Apparatchiks.

The Bio-mechanic despised his new skill at duplicity. He foresaw that it would inevitably destabilize the smooth operation of the ship. But for now, no one knew better than he did what must be done and by the Unknown God he would do it.