Линда Нагата - Edges

Against a starscape, a smudge of white light. A faint gleam, devoid of detail. Notable, because it had not been present when that sector of the Near Vicinity had last been surveyed by the array of telescopes in orbit around the Deception Well star system.

So it was something new, although not unknown.

A Dull Intelligence, assigned to analyze astronomical data, had observed such phenomena five times before during its twelve hundred years of existence. Knowing what that gleam portended, the DI tagged the object with a unique identifier: Transient Hazard 6 or TH-6.

The DI felt no excitement, no fear—it was capable of neither—only a simple, satisfying sense of duty as it confirmed its initial assessment by formally comparing the object’s spectral signature with database records. This exercise produced multiple matches of both luminosity and the spectrum of emitted light, providing unassailable confirmation of the object’s identity as a Chenzeme courser: an ancient robotic warship of alien origin.

“Chenzeme” was a human-coined term. No data existed on who or what the Chenzeme had been. They had originated—and likely vanished from existence—long before the human species evolved. But their robotic ships continued on, an autonomous fleet with genocide its singular purpose. For thirty million years, Chenzeme warships had patrolled this region of the galaxy, hunting for newly emerged technological lifeforms—and wiping them out.

The Dull Intelligence directed two telescopes to monitor the courser and determine its heading. It did not expect the courser to enter the Deception Well system.

The Well was a trap for such starships. It was a highly engineered star system consisting of only the central sun, a single planet, and an enveloping nebula. The nebula was artificial: a vast-and-slow thinking machine operating on a molecular scale. A weapon. One developed long before the beginning of human history, its purpose to infect the deadly Chenzeme starships, rewrite their motives, and quell the violent instinct that drove them.

The Chenzeme ships knew this—at least their behavior suggested they did. They were autonomous machines capable of learning and of communicating what they learned to one another—and not one of the five prior ships sighted by the DI had dared to enter the nebula despite obvious signs of technological life thriving on and around the solitary planet.

Still, the discretion shown by those past warships was not to be relied upon. This courser might choose to attack. If it did, the mechanism of the nebula would operate too slowly to ensure the safety of the Well’s human inhabitants.

The DI acted according to both instinct and its instruction set, sending out emergency notifications to the security council and to the Defense Force stations.

The people of the Well had not suffered a Chenzeme attack in the fifteen hundred years since they’d settled in the system—but they had not forgotten their history. They’d emigrated to the Well only after a massive Chenzeme assault left their beloved home world of Heyertori uninhabitable and their people on the edge of extinction. So alongside the ancient, protective mechanism of the nebula, they maintained twin warships— Long Watch and Silent Vigil —stationed opposite each other on the nebula’s periphery. Both ships were dark and stealthy and fearfully well-armed. If the courser made a sunward run, threatening the world of Deception Well, those ships would work together to blow it out of the sky.

Riffan Naja rarely thought of himself as a military commander. Really, he was an anthropologist. The study of human society was his specialty, his passion. It was the reason he’d sought a position aboard Long Watch .

Any position aboard either Silent Vigil or Long Watch required extensive Defense Force training—after all, the primary duty of both ships was to guard the Deception Well system against Chenzeme incursion—so Riffan was qualified as a military commander. He had just never expected to use his military training.

No one had expected him to use it because seven centuries had elapsed since the last time a Chenzeme ship was sighted. It had been even longer—twelve hundred years—since a human starship visited the system. Career Defense Force officers had long ago deemed duty aboard either ship too dull to endure.

So over time, Silent Vigil and Long Watch became scientific platforms as well as watch posts. Career officers were no longer posted to the remote duty. Instead, the position of commander rotated among each ship’s senior scientific staff.

Riffan happened to be in command when the emergency notification arrived.

He was alone in the hexagonal chamber of his study, eyeing a complex display of charts and evolving schematics that described the observed orbital motion of debris around an abandoned planet in a distant star system. He hoped a thorough analysis of the data would reveal some anomaly that could be explained only through the presence of a technological lifeform—specifically, human survivors, finally recovering from an assault that had ravaged their system centuries ago.

The alert shattered his concentration with a triple warning-tone that bleated across his brain. His whole body recoiled, his bare foot kicking free of the loop that had anchored him in place in the zero-gravity environment of Long Watch .

He scrambled to catch a hand-hold as the display refreshed and the calm, familiar voice of the astronomical Dull Intelligence spoke into the artificial neural organ of his atrium: *Alert. Alert.

His atrium’s tendrils wound throughout his brain tissue, linking his senses to the ship’s omnipresent network, allowing him to hear the DI, even though the workroom remained silent.

As the Dull Intelligence continued to speak, a text version of its words appeared on the display:

*A newly sighted object, designated Transient Hazard 6, confirms as a Chenzeme courser. Approximate distance, nine light-hours beyond the periphery of the nebula.

Riffan finally caught a hand-hold. He squeezed it in a painful grip. “ No ,” he whispered as additional data posted to the display. “No, no, no . Love and Nature and the Cosmic First Light, this can’t be right. This can’t be happening. There has to be a mistake.”

*There is no mistake , the DI assured him in its calm way.

“Well then, damn it, why now ?” he demanded. “Why me ?”

The DI knew better than to attempt an answer and after a moment, Riffan settled the question for himself: “You fool, it had to be someone, didn’t it?”

Seven hundred years was a long span on a human scale. The absence of sightings for all that time had led some to speculate that the ancient robotic warships had already won this latest phase of their endless war of extinction, that Deception Well, nestled within the weaponized nebula, was the last surviving human settlement. With no viable targets left to hit, the warships had withdrawn—so the theory went—to wait with machine patience for the emergence of some future technological species whose history they would subsequently cut short.

Riffan was aboard Long Watch to prove this theory false. He refused to believe Deception Well was the last refuge of humankind. He’d aimed his studies at detecting signs of a surviving human presence, though he’d been unsuccessful, so far. A Chenzeme vessel appearing on his watch struck him as cruel irony. Its existence disproved the theory, without offering hope of other survivors.