“Wait,” he insisted, his arm tightening around her. “Listen to me. Vytet asked for more time, that’s all. She’s concerned. She and the Engineer can cross-check each other’s work, but no one has ever cross-checked the Bio-mechanic’s knowledge base. Vytet wants time to confirm his studies, his experiments, his conclusions. That makes sense, doesn’t it? It makes sense to take the time to confirm our knowledge base before launching a major, invasive project.”
Her hand slid back up his chest, came to rest beside his throat. “You’re saying you want to confirm six hundred years of studies and experiments?”
“It’s not me,” he protested. “Vytet asked for more time. That’s all.”
“And you gave it to her because you don’t trust the Bio-mechanic?”
“I do trust the Bio-mechanic. I wouldn’t be alive if the Bio-mechanic made mistakes.”
“Then why are you doing this?” Her fingers pressed a little too hard into his flesh.
“Vytet asked for more time,” he repeated, wriggling to escape her grip. She let him go. Even gave him a little push. “She just wants to make sure there are no mistakes,” he explained.
Clemantine said, “It feels like you’re trying to delay the project.”
A dark scowl. “And end up with your hand at my throat?”
She held up her hand, palm out. “Tell the Apparatchiks they can start the project. If it’s going to take years, we need to get started.”
“Fine,” he snapped. “It’s done. Whatever you want.”
“Thank you.”
He had drifted against the opposite wall of the little chamber, where fresh trousers had already budded. He tugged them on. A shirt appeared next. He grabbed it, put it on.
She felt a little guilty. She’d been wrong about him. He wasn’t trying to delay the project. He’d just been accommodating Vytet’s obsessive concerns. And still, she’d shaken him up with that line, I trusted you. She’d seen a flash of guilt—but whatever weighed on his conscience had nothing to do with the construction of the gee deck.
“I do trust you,” she said aloud, just to see how he would react.
This time he was ready, his signature half-smile, taunting her. “It’s not like you have a choice.”
She hissed. His grin widened—a dangerous delay before he darted for the gel door. She dove, intercepting him before he could make his escape, slamming him against the waving wall-weed. “Ah, son,” she crooned, biting at his earlobe as they bounced back across the chamber, “don’t ever underestimate me.”
He laughed and protested, “I was joking. Ow!”
“Of course you were joking.”
“I was.”
Even so, it was true she had no choice but to trust him—which put the obligation on her to verify that trust.
Clemantine sent a ghost to the library to confirm that the process of construction had truly started. The Engineer and the Bio-mechanic surprised her by appearing within their frames a moment after she arrived. Always before, they’d come only when summoned.
She cocked her head, looked from one to the other, wondering if Urban had ordered them to be there. “You’ve begun?” she asked.
The Engineer gestured. A huge, translucent, three-dimensional model of the ship appeared, with the planned gee deck ghosted in. Dashed ribbons, brightly colored and branching like tributaries, linked the construction site to the stored matter at the ship’s core. “We’ve begun,” the Engineer confirmed.
The Bio-mechanic explained, “I’ve initiated the growth of matter channels to transport required material to the construction site, and carry undifferentiated tissue away.”
She nodded, eyeing the ribbons. “This is the easy part.”
“Easy for me,” the Bio-mechanic agreed acidly. “Easy now, after the centuries I’ve spent studying this system.”
Clemantine gritted her teeth. “I meant that this phase uses only Chenzeme biotechnology, so you don’t need to be so careful. The dangerous part comes when you begin defining human spaces.”
“Ah,” the Bio-mechanic said. “I will keep that in mind. Do you have other advice? I do so value the advice of those wholly lacking in expertise.”
Clemantine rolled her eyes. “You’re a sensitive flower, aren’t you?” she asked.
The Bio-mechanic’s eyes narrowed. His image changed, fading into the complex background of his frame—removing himself from the conversation in a fit of pique?
She shrugged, offering no apology, making no plea for him to stay. A flicker of surprise on his part and in moments he restored himself. In a crisp voice he informed her, “I know what I’m doing.”
“I’m confident of that,” Clemantine answered. “And I won’t insult you with amateur advice, but I do have an instruction.”
“Any change in the basic structure will slow the process,” the Engineer warned.
“Exactly,” she said. “That’s my instruction—or call it a request if the idea of an instruction exceeds whatever authority I might have. Allow no changes in the basic design. Nothing that will delay completion of the project. If someone attempts to introduce such a change, let me know.”
“All actions and relevant discussions are recorded in a log file,” the Engineer informed her. “Including this one.”
“Good,” she said. “I’ll set a DI to monitor that log—and all the others.”
She should have done it before, but she’d been lax, overwhelmed during the early days of the voyage by newness, and by the immediate demands of creating a home within the hostile body of this alien starship.
No more surprises, she resolved. She needed to comprehend her environment, understand the operation of the ship, know when tasks shifted, and when orders changed.
And she needed to discover whatever sordid detail it was that Urban didn’t want her to know, even though she suspected she’d be happier not knowing.
She left the library, leaving the Apparatchiks to their work, but she did not return to her atrium. Instead, she entered the complex of Dragon’s neural bridge, intent on continuing her mission of verification.
The bridge was a cross-linked web of neural filaments extending throughout the ship, studded with cardinal nanosites—tiny processing nodes that tracked and monitored the surrounding tissue. The cardinals supported a limited virtual environment that allowed Clemantine to access the data they’d collected, in numeric and text form and also visually, so that she could see the structure of the tissue surrounding each node.
But the cardinals offered no representation of Clemantine’s physical presence. She existed only as a mote of awareness, a disembodied will. It was a state she heartily loathed. Although the cardinals were easy to instruct and she had no trouble moving between them, the absence of even an illusion of physical existence left her plagued by an underlying panic, in quiet terror of being trapped in that disembodied state.
She thought of Urban. She could not sense the presence of his ghost but she knew he was somewhere on the bridge. He was always on the bridge. It dismayed her to think he endured this state all the time. She wondered if he’d edited his psyche to do it, or if his brash confidence was enough to fend off the doubt that haunted her.
Despite her doubt, her fear, her aversion to that mode of existence, she continued her inspection, moving from cardinal to cardinal, assessing the function and status of the ship’s diverse array of bio-mechanical tissues, sensing its metabolic heat, aware of the incessant probing of Chenzeme nanomachines, and the firm push-back of the defensive Makers that guarded the bridge. She let herself feel it all, and she began to fit it all within a mental map, verifying what she’d been told about the structure of the ship.