Линда Нагата - Edges

She could not help them, not yet, but she could hunt the entity.

“Okay,” she said to the Engineer. “ Dragon ’s behind us. The field is clear. Have you got anything?”

“No, you were right,” he conceded. “No radar returns at all.”

“Then lock it down,” she told him. “We’re going stealth too. I’m taking the hull cells dark. We’re going to track his reef and I don’t want him to see us coming.”

The bundled memories comprising Urban’s last generated submind slipped through the data gate, bound for Elepaio . Transmission protocols ensured no copy was left behind.

Elepaio was closest in the vanguard of outriders, but it was still ninety light-minutes distant. Ninety minutes in which either the entity had secured its hold over Dragon or Clemantine had destroyed the ship.

The submind’s arrival at Elepaio ’s data gate woke an archived copy of Urban’s ghost. Mind and submind merged. He instantiated in the outrider’s library with the memory of all that had happened aboard Dragon . Predominant in his memory: the predator and its relentless pursuit of him in all his variations.

He issued a command to close the data gate to incoming traffic—too late. Something had come through.

He knew there had not been time for all the data needed to define a fully realized ghost to transit through the gate, and he assumed a far larger quantity of data would be needed to define the entity. Still, something had arrived behind him.

The predator might be a fragment of the entity or it could be a manufactured weapon that did not represent the entity at all. Whatever it was, he already had a partial map of its structure. He used that to devise a probe to further investigate its configuration.

The thing winked into existence on the library floor. Riffan again! he saw in disgust. The predator still wore Riffan’s aspect like a protective shell.

Urban’s probe instantiated around it: a shimmering translucent column that shot up from the library floor, trapping the predator within as it rose an infinite distance overhead. Immediately, the diameter of the column began to shrink. It compressed around the predator, probing it from all sides, passing all the structural data it discovered back to Urban, at the same time overwriting everything it touched.

The predator reacted by withdrawing the Riffan mask—a bizarre transformation as the façade was sucked off, twisted, and then compressed into a geometrical point where it vanished. Left behind was a tremulous, vaguely man-shaped cloud, that appeared to be composed of tiny virtual machines. Battle ready now, the predator struck back.

Chaos boiled up around its feet. The base of the column disintegrated. Chaos climbed the column, consuming it, while a separate wave of chaos swept across the library floor, catching Urban before he could retreat.

Chaotic forces swirled around his ghost feet, climbed his body. He was conscious of his own disintegration, an onslaught of mindlessness, meaningless disorder, overwriting the programmatic structure that defined him. He sensed the same wave of chaos at work consuming the library’s computational strata, destroying the virtual grid and the archive where he’d kept the backup copy of his ghost.

He could not stop the destruction. Only microseconds left to create a submind. He focused on that one task and when it was done, he bundled his memories into it and sent the submind through the data gate, addressed to the next outrider in the fleet.

Ninety-three minutes later Khonsu received the submind and woke an archived copy of Urban’s ghost. Their memories merged. His first coherent thought: Close the data gate!

But the integration of mind and submind had taken a measurable quantity of time, enough to allow the predator through the gate before he could close it to incoming traffic.

It instantiated, wearing Riffan’s aspect again. With a sharp shock, Urban realized it had to be that way. The predator could not pass through the data gate without using its stolen permissions.

Again, Urban launched his probe, updating it with structural knowledge hard-won in the last encounter. Riffan’s aspect disappeared as the column formed—hidden away by the predator, which must be eager to protect it. So Urban compiled a second probe. This one had the single goal of locating and dissolving all identifiers associated with Riffan.

But chaos broke past the column before he could launch it.

He created a submind and sent it to the outrider Lam Lha .

It arrived, ninety-one minutes later. Mind and submind integrated. Urban emerged from the archive just as the predator arrived through the data gate.

This time, he was ready for it. He launched both probes as it instantiated. One assaulted the Riffan-shell, partly overwriting it before it could be withdrawn. The other trapped the predator within the column, holding it there long enough to dissolve another layer of its structure before chaos broke loose to ravage the library’s computational strata and its archive, and to overwrite the structure of Urban’s ghost.

He sent a submind to the outrider Pytheas .

This time, surely, he knew enough about the predator to defeat it. His prior encounters convinced him it was not a sentient thing, but a tool. And given that the method of its attack never varied, it was not adept at learning. Still, the entity had designed it and Urban had not broken it yet.

It came through the data gate—but was it a microsecond slower this time?

It instantiated. Urban saw that the Riffan-shell, damaged in their last encounter, had been restored. Instantly, he shifted tactics, directing both probes to attack the shell.

He did not need to destroy the predator. He only needed an interval of time to get ahead of it and then he could close the next gate, trap it behind him.

He’d already slowed the predator’s transit once by forcing it to rebuild the stolen permission structure that let it pass. He gambled that an increase in the level of damage would slow it more.

The probes ripped into the Riffan-shell. Swaths of it dissolved before the predator drew it in beneath armored layers. This time, Urban cast his submind across the void even before chaos broke free of the column.

Ninety minutes later he reached the last outrider, Fortuna . He closed its data gate before anything else came through.

Urban instantiated aboard Fortuna amid the austere architecture of the library. He stood alone on a white path winding away across a glassy blue plane of data, the color deepening with distance. This library was a copy of the one that had been carried aboard Dragon , but the only archived ghost that existed there was his.

If Urban had been a physical avatar, the running battle with the predator would have left him shaking with exhaustion, but a ghost did not feel fatigue. Now that he was safely locked behind a closed data gate, he took up the task of editing out the useless emotional detritus of fear and panic that lingered in the wake of this latest brush with death.

And then he went further. He created for himself a machinelike calm, walling off the fury and frustration that arose from the certainty that he’d lost Dragon .

The entity’s assault against him had left him with no choice but to call for termination. If Griffin had received that radio message, then Dragon was gone, blown apart, reduced to vapor and debris.

All sixty-five of the ship’s company gone with it. His last words to Clemantine: It’s over .

Grief seeped past his machine calm. And fear. He wondered, Was it over?