Линда Нагата - Edges

“Yes. I made the choice. But we’re still alive, and the ship is ours.”

“At what cost?” Vytet demanded to know. “You have no idea what’s been lost or if we can recover.”

“I think I do know what’s been lost,” Clemantine said. “But we will recover, though I’m going to need your help.”

Tempers were even more heated in the warren, where she quickly found herself in a shouting match with Naresh:

“You had no right to launch an assault on your own!”

“We had no choice but to do it that way!”

“No! You did have a choice.”

“Success required secrecy!”

“You call the wreck you’ve made of this ship success?”

“I do .”

“Does Urban consider this a success? Did you even consult with him? Where is he anyway?”

Grimly, she said, “I don’t know.”

They were in the forest room, and by this time, more than twenty people had gathered around, drawn by the heat of their argument, drifting one above another in the absence of gravity. Kona was among them. He’d been busy in the warren, organizing people and assigning tasks, setting some to grow resurrection pods to restore those too badly injured to heal on their own, and others to organizing meals and quarters, while encouraging as many as he could to retreat to cold sleep, to reduce the draw on the ship’s resources.

Now he looked at Clemantine. “What do you mean? Are you saying you can’t find him? If you can’t find him, wake his ghost from the archive.”

“The archive’s been wiped,” she told him. “Nothing is left there. I think the predator attacked that first, when it emerged.”

This announcement drew gasps and cries of horror.

She turned again to Naresh. “It’s why I came to talk to you. I’m giving you the task of re-establishing an archive, and making sure everyone posts a fresh copy there.”

“Urban will have a ghost safe aboard Griffin ,” Kona said.

She forced herself to meet his gaze. Held it. Not so much to prepare him, but to give herself time to gather her courage. “Urban didn’t keep a ghost on Griffin . He kept his backups on the outriders, in secured archives that only he could access.”

Kona gave a firm nod, as if this answer satisfied him. “We’ll find him on the outriders, then.” His confidence a veil pulled over a terrible fear—a fear she shared.

The data gate kept a log of traffic. It showed Urban had sent a submind to Elepaio , with Riffan’s corrupt ghost following close behind him.

“Where is Riffan?” she asked, aiming the question at no one in particular.

Tarnya emerged from the crowd to answer her. “He was hurt. We had to put him in a resurrection pod. He’ll be out in a day or so.”

“No. Leave him there. He may be the source of a security issue. Leave him locked down until I say so.”

She faced more questions, arguments, and accusations, as subminds cycled in and out. Eventually, she retreated alone to the gee deck.

It was a shambles. Dust and debris drifting everywhere, confused birds fluttering in panic at her approach. At the same time, she listened to Vytet in the library, reporting that an initial inspection of the deck had found the rotation cylinder cracked and the gearing shattered.

Shoran appeared, gliding from beneath the upside-down canopy of a small uprooted tree, its branches bearing withered leaves and faded flowers. “Hey,” she said. “Personnel map’s down, but I heard the flutter of bird wings and thought someone might be here.”

“The guilty party has arrived.”

“Guilty of saving our asses.”

“No, it was Pasha who designed the defense. I only made sure it was implemented.”

“I’ll thank her later.” Shoran gestured over her shoulder. “Some of the generative walls are still working. I started to do some initial cleanup, shoving debris back into the system to be recycled, but I think the vats are full.”

“Or the deck’s circulatory system has stopped working.”

“Or that,” Shoran conceded. “So tell me, where do we really stand? I’ve heard a lot of chatter in the warrens, but what’s the real situation?”

“It’s not so bad,” Clemantine said. “ Dragon is broken, incapable of both acceleration and self-defense. We’re estimating a loss of nineteen percent of our mass and a greater percentage of the philosopher cells. There hasn’t been time to complete a survey, but I can tell you there is extensive damage to the internal transport and communications systems. The ship will have launched self-repair routines, but that activity will rapidly drain core reserves. I’ll be using up more of our limited resources when I start repairing severed filaments of the neural bridge. Oh, and there’s an excellent chance all the repair work will stimulate molecular disputes along all Chenzeme-Human boundaries. But from what I’ve seen so far, it looks like Lezuri is gone.”

Shoran grinned. “So we’re going to make it?”

“Yes,” Clemantine affirmed. She couldn’t celebrate it. Not in the face of Urban’s absence. But it was true. “Yes. We are going to make it.”

Urban continued to monitor the status of Dragon . He watched the debris cloud disperse into invisibility and the battle scars on its hull slowly fill with luminous cells as the ship healed itself.

The entity had taken his ship. No way to know if anyone among the ship’s company was left alive… Clemantine, Kona, Vytet, Riffan, Shoran, and all the rest. Lezuri might have let them live… or at least captured their patterns.

Urban searched his mind, he searched the local library, desperate to devise some way to take his ship back, but the predator’s ferocity haunted him. It was like a promise from Lezuri that he would put Fortuna under the gun if ever he suspected Urban’s presence there.

Lezuri wanted to reach the ring-shaped world.

Verilotus . That was its name. Lezuri had wanted to go there armed with the coursers’ weapons. Urban’s refusal to do so had triggered disaster. Everything that mattered, lost, because he’d promised himself he would not return a broken god to its seat of power.

He decided that promise still held. If he could do nothing else, he would do that.

He watched and he waited as Dragon continued to coast, its velocity only slightly higher than Fortuna ’s and its course, so far, unchanged.

If its course shifted, if it turned away from Tanjiri and towards Verilotus, that would be final proof that Lezuri controlled the ship. Then Urban would change course too. He would need to reach Verilotus ahead of Dragon , and once there, do what he could to block the ambition of a broken god.

Clemantine made a cautious return to the fleet, keeping Griffin dark and silent as the Astronomer used the telescopes to study Dragon and map its ravaged hull.

“There is some regeneration in the cell field,” the Astronomer concluded. “And a new radio antenna has been deployed on the hull.”

Good news. Someone was alive in there.

“Anything else?”

“Nothing visible.” Then he added, in answer to her unspoken question, “No sign of the entity’s capsule.”

She turned to the Engineer. “Let’s use radar again. Map the debris field. Look for anything that might be in our way.”

Radar revealed Griffin ’s presence. The response was immediate, a low-power radio hail from Dragon , her own voice demanding, Identify yourself .

She answered, “The iris will bloom again.”

A long pause and then a question: Did you kill him?