Линда Нагата - Edges

*I’ll take care of myself. Just go.

Still, he delayed, while the confusion among the philosopher cells rose to a new peak. Then confusion crystallized into action. The cells called for a surge of power from the reef—too much!—it would produce a crushing acceleration, more than the gee deck had been designed to handle.

*We need to stop it now!

He organized a counter argument to calm the cells, but Clemantine was faster. She took control—control of his ship. Before he could react, he felt the hammer of her will fall across the hundred thousand points of the high bridge, suppressing the cells’ panicked fight-or-flight response—but she could not kill it entirely.

The reef surged—at only a fraction of the force the cells had called for, but still enough to send Dragon ’s immense mass leaping forward.

“Yes,” Clemantine had told Pasha. “Trigger it. Now.”

The words were barely out when the gee deck shuddered, lurching so violently, she was thrown from the threshold of her ruined cottage.

No, she fell from the threshold, fell horizontally, all the way across the patio and then across the path, fetching up in shrubbery on the other side as a ripping, popping, shrieking cacophony of devastation exploded around her. An intrusion of chaos that endured for a long awful span of seconds.

And then she was floating, rising weightless toward a beatific sky, her arms and legs mapped with bloody tracks drawn by the broken twigs of the hedge that had caught her. Scratches burned on her face too, but when she checked her atrium it reported no serious injuries.

A glance around showed debris everywhere, drifting in the air. Trees down, cottages askew. People in slow confused flight, yelling at one another: By the Waking Light! What happened? Are you hurt? Get to the warren!

The gee deck had stopped rotating.

So far, that looked to be the worst of it. The atmosphere wasn’t compromised—yet. Hopefully the barrier wall had maintained integrity. If not, it still might be able to self-repair in time to prevent an incursion of Chenzeme tissue. From the ground below and from the broken walls came the whisper of molecular repair mechanisms already engaged in frantic rebuilding.

A submind dropped in, proving the network still intact. It brought memories of that version of herself on the high bridge. She re-lived the panic among the philosopher cells, the sudden acceleration—a revelation of understanding that brought her stunned mind back up to speed. On a subconscious level, she’d linked the gee deck’s damage to the Pyrrhic Defense, presuming a flawed calculation and unforeseen blowback. But acceleration had caused the damage.

Had the defense even been triggered?

“Pasha!” she shouted. But didn’t wait for an answer. Generating a ghost, she transited to the library.

DIs streamed in, bringing to Urban reports of the disaster on the gee deck, their little world, broken.

*You caused that! Clemantine accused, her righteous anger bringing order to the dangerous turbulence of the cell field.

*I know it.

He strove to suppress his seething frustration, to assume the façade of the Sentinel. It was not enough.

*You’re causing chaos , she warned. *You need to leave the high bridge.

She was right, but he stayed anyway, held by an irrational fear that if he left, if he finally gave up his post there, he would not find his way back again.

Then a new presence joined them.

The high bridge supported no illusion of physical existence, but it did convey a kind of physical sensation so that Urban felt the intimate pressure of this intruder, and recognized it as a computational shape matching every aspect of his evolving map of the predator.

It ignored the philosopher cells. It ignored Clemantine’s ghost. It came for him.

He did not dare to stand and fight, not when the predator had destroyed every ghost he’d sent after it and all of his Apparatchiks. So he fell back, abandoning the high bridge, driven from it, no choice but to flee, to leave it to Clemantine.

His ghost transited to a cardinal on the lower bridge. He sensed the predator coming through behind him and moved again. Onward to the next cardinal and the next, the predator in close pursuit and no way to stop it.

It’s over .

The thought hit hard, but he couldn’t deny it. He had lost. He’d lost his ship, he’d lost his Apparatchiks, he’d failed to protect Clemantine and Kona and all the members of the ship’s company who had trusted their lives to him on this ruined venture.

They, at least, would have a chance to start again on Griffin . He hoped they would do better than he had done.

A microsecond to sequester his grief, his fury, his despair.

He messaged Clemantine, letting her know: *It’s over.

One more task.

Alone on the high bridge, Clemantine strove to grasp what had happened, what was still happening.

Dragon ’s velocity, boosted by the burst of acceleration, was dangerously high, but she did not try to bring it back down. Not yet. It was enough that the cells, having failed to detect any perceivable threat from outside the ship, were settling into a watchful state, allowing her to focus on the ship’s interior.

DIs rotated in and out, bringing reports that assured her the active boundaries between human and Chenzeme tissue remained stable and that the entity had made no move to expand the containment capsule or claim more territory within the ship.

Reports came in from the cardinals, marking the passage of Urban’s fleeing ghost.

A submind arrived from the gee deck. It brought visual testimony of the ruin that had been made of her home, but it also brought the welcome knowledge of imminent retribution.

Through it all she held tight to a cold animosity that bled into the cell field, unifying it, and bringing it fully under her control.

Then came a message from Urban: *It’s over.

Her composure shattered in a flash of white-hot denial: Not yet! It was too soon to give up. She messaged him back: *It’s not over! We are not done fighting!

He didn’t answer.

Urban abandoned the cardinals, instantiating in the library. The place felt hollow and wrong, empty of any sense of the Apparatchiks’ presence. But not abandoned. Other ghosts were there. He glimpsed them, tiny figures separated from him by an emotional distance—Clemantine, Kona, Pasha, Vytet. They would be working to stabilize the ship, not realizing Dragon was overrun and already lost.

No time to warn them. He had time only to ensure their future on Griffin . He did it—his last task. He triggered a preset radio message to clarify for that other Clemantine the irretrievable nature of their situation: commence termination of Dragon ; commence termination of Dragon ; commence termination of Dragon—

Here at last, echoing the choice of those crews who had scuttled their ships at the Rock—except that he meant to escape.

Alone among the ship’s company, Urban did not keep an archived ghost on Griffin . Instead, he kept copies on the outriders where they remained under his direct control.

He created a submind, bundling all his recent memories into it. To escape Dragon , all he had to do was hold off the predator long enough for that submind to slip away through the data gate. Not towards Griffin —that way was closed—but towards Elepaio and the vanguard of outriders.