Линда Нагата - Edges

If Griffin had not received that message, or if the other Clemantine had not carried through with it, the situation would be far worse. The entity would have secured command of Dragon .

No .

She would never allow that. She would not take the risk of Dragon turning against her. He remembered her promise: I’ll do whatever’s necessary to protect all of you . He trusted her to protect the archived ghosts she carried, regardless of the cost.

Editing his ghost again, he sequestered his doubt and his grief. He couldn’t help Clemantine. Not now. He had to assess and secure his own situation and then decide on a strategy, one based on fact, not on what he wished things could be.

He knew already he could not go back the way he’d come. The predator had wiped the computational strata in each successive outrider, leaving it nonfunctional. And with Fortuna so far from Griffin , any error in the targeting of the communications laser would be magnified many times over, so that the smallest initial discrepancy would cause the beam to miss its target, possibly by tens of kilometers. The independent motion of both ships made the problem excruciatingly complex. It was unrealistic to think he could get any data through.

But he was not helpless. He had Fortuna , and the little ship should be fully operational. He queried the Dull Intelligence that oversaw its operation to confirm this. “Review current status.”

A gentle masculine voice answered, “Ship’s location is 7.5 light-hours from command ship Dragon ’s last calculated position. Proceeding to target star system Tanjiri at a steady thirty-five percent light speed as measured against the velocity of the target star. Reef function is nominal, though presently dampened to a minimally active state. Internal network and computational strata report healthy. Navigational fuel reserves at 93%. Telescope presently engaged in a survey of the Near Vicinity. Collected data will be held until authorization is received to open the data gate.”

“Don’t open the data gate,” Urban said.

“Understood.”

“And reorient the telescope. Look back. Calculate expected positions for both Dragon and Griffin and locate them with the scope.”

“Understood.”

Urban longed to go back. He resolved that as soon as he confirmed Dragon gone, and Griffin the survivor, he would order the DI to flip Fortuna bow to stern and then dump velocity. Griffin ’s forward progress would close the gap and eventually Urban’s ghost would be able to make the jump between the ships.

A fine plan, shattered by the first image the telescope returned.

The image posted within a library window, its resolution shockingly poor. Urban was used to working with images compiled from data collected across multiple telescopes. Now he had only one. At such a distance even a courser was a minuscule object, its details blurred despite extensive processing. Still, the three-part equation of distance, luminosity, and the known dimensions of both coursers left no doubt that the ship captured in the image was Dragon .

Clearly, it was battle damaged. Long, lightless scars sliced through the luminous philosopher cells and the ship was surrounded by a faint blur, a halo, that had to be a cloud of debris and frozen vapor. “Analyze that,” he told the DI.

“Analysis indicates water, molecular oxygen, carbon dioxide, and an array of metals within the de-gassed cloud.”

Urban felt an automated routine kick in, locking out despair.

“Where is Griffin ?” he demanded.

“A search of Griffin ’s calculated position is presently underway.”

“You haven’t found it yet?”

“That is correct.”

“Keep looking. It has to be there.”

But did it? Did it have to be there? Didn’t Dragon ’s survival indicate Griffin ’s demise?

“Keep looking,” he said again.

Hours passed. Then days, but Griffin could not be resolved.

Griffin hunted the void, full stealth, its philosopher cells dark, its radar dormant, all transmissions silenced.

There was silence too, on the high bridge, with no conversation to endure from hibernating cells. Clemantine had to conduct her search without the benefit of their acute vision, but Lezuri’s ship was so small and dark the cells could not have seen it anyway, unless it came so close that it reflected a glint of their own light.

For Clemantine, the silence was a welcome respite that let her focus on the Near Vicinity as she tracked Lezuri’s propulsion reef. The faint signal cut out for hours and she thought she’d lost him. Then the signal reappeared, shifted intensity, changed trajectory, vanished again. The Pilot calculated where Lezuri should be. They swooped in on a heading meant to intercept his little ship, but did not find him.

Clemantine quieted Griffin ’s reef to minimize its interference while the gravitational sensor felt the void all around, seeking for the faint signal of Lezuri’s dormant reef. She scanned with cameras and telescopes. But there was nothing.

More hours passed.

Time enough to reflect that worlds could be lost in the dark between the stars.

“What if we’ve miscalculated?” she asked the Pilot. “What if Lezuri was decelerating when we thought he was still accelerating? Maybe his goal isn’t to get away. Maybe it’s to linger and wait for Dragon to close the distance, come near enough to try his needles again.”

“Or to wait for us,” the Engineer pointed out. “We’re vulnerable to his needles too.”

If Clemantine had existed in human form, that thought would have given her chills.

The Pilot dismissed these concerns with a contemptuous wave of his hand. “I did not make such a mistake. I cannot pinpoint Lezuri’s exact location but I know his last course adjustment took him away from the trajectory of the fleet, and that his velocity is greater than ours, and that he has used his reef hard. He will not have the power to return, not for some time. And he cannot be hunting us in the same way we’ve been hunting him. His vessel is too small to carry a gravitational sensor. So we are hidden from him, as long as we remain silent and dark.”

“I think there is very little chance now that we will find him,” the Astronomer said. “He won’t give us any more signals to follow. He’ll coast for years before he uses his reef again.”

“It’s what I’d do,” the Pilot agreed.

This assessment brought both guilt and relief to Clemantine. Abandoning the hunt felt wrong, but she longed to return to Dragon , to offer her help, and to learn how much of the ship and its company had survived.

“All right,” she said. “We stay dark, and we go home.”

No easy task to catalog all the damage—especially with the Apparatchiks gone.

Clemantine kept to her post on Dragon ’s high bridge. What choice? There was no one else to do it. From there she sent out an army of DIs to search the network, the library files, the archive, seeking for any sign of the predator… and of Urban.

In the library, she approached Vytet. “I know you’re angry over this—”

Vytet transformed, looming larger than life, features exaggerated, amber eyes now glinting red. “Angry over what? The fact you decided, on your own, to risk all of our futures? That you destroyed any chance of a peaceful coalition with a great being? Or that you blew the ship apart?” She gestured at a projection of Dragon showing the known damage, with vast tracts of the ship still to be surveyed. “You did this.”