“Other ships?” Clemantine asked. “What other ships?”
“Right,” he said. “The only ships you’re ever going to see out here are Chenzeme coursers. I hunt Chenzeme coursers. I’ve done it twice before.”
Clemantine ducked her chin. Her eyes narrowed. Urban imagined he could taste her fury. Instinct warned him to open the distance between them, but he stayed.
“You can’t be serious,” Kona said.
“I am.”
Clemantine said, “I didn’t see anything about this in the ship’s history.”
“I know. I kept it hidden.”
Her hand squeezed into a fist. “You promised me you’d kept nothing hidden.”
“Nothing about the Null Boundary Expedition,” he said weakly.
Her eyes widened, shock and hurt and a sense of betrayal in her gaze. “So this is it,” she said acidly. “This is what you’ve been hiding, what you’ve been afraid to tell me. I knew there was something.”
“I couldn’t tell you.”
“Why not?”
“You wouldn’t have come.”
Seconds passed as she considered this. Then she nodded slowly—“You’re right”—her anger unabated.
“It’s different now,” he said quickly. “You’re different. You’ve been on the high bridge. You’ve commanded the ship. You know we can do this. You can do it. Destroy another courser. Take it apart. Ensure it never attacks another world, never takes another life. You can do that.”
He held out a hand to her, hoping she would yield, that she would concede him some measure of forgiveness, but she refused. “You asked me to trust you,” she said.
Kona scowled fiercely. “So this was your plan from the start?”
“Yes,” Urban confirmed. “It was always the plan.”
“How can it work?” Vytet demanded to know. “Dragon is a hybrid ship. If you take us close to another courser, it’s going to recognize our alien nature. It has to—and it will do all it can to kill us.”
“I know how to put on an acceptable appearance,” Urban insisted. He hesitated at the irony in this claim, but then he pushed on. “Our target won’t know what we are until it’s too late.”
He turned to Clemantine again. “You know how it works. You’ve seen it before. One courser. That’s all we need, and we’ll be able to fill up our reserves, grow new outriders, finish the gee deck, resurrect everyone in the ship’s company, and still have a margin for future projects. We have to do this. There’s no choice in it. It would be dangerous to go into the Hallowed Vasties without reserves. It would be foolish. We have no idea what we’ll find there, no idea what kind of ancillary defenses we’ll need. We need to be ready.”
“There is a choice,” Kona said, looking thoughtfully at Clemantine.
She nodded her agreement, turned to Urban, and said, “There is the choice to go back.”
His heart boomed. He couldn’t read her, couldn’t tell if she meant it. “Is that what you want?” he asked, low-voiced, hearing his own resentment. “Retreat?”
“No,” she said in a dangerous purr. “You’re right. It’s different now that I’ve been on the high bridge.” The hard line of her lips curled into a snarl… or maybe she meant it as a smile. “Let’s hunt.”
Dragon followed a navigational path that would bypass the clustered stars of the Committee. Chenzeme ships had hunted first among those stars, scourging inhabited worlds. Historians believed the Chenzeme had pushed on from there, venturing ever deeper into human-settled space, just as Urban was doing. He felt sure he would be able to find a courser still prowling among the star systems that lay along his route to the Hallowed Vasties.
The four outriders kept watch over the Near Vicinity. Adapting to their reduced numbers, they coordinated scopes and sensors to continue their ongoing survey of the void.
A DI combed the collected data. It updated the library’s star maps, logging positions of the myriad red dwarfs that were everywhere in the galaxy. It also sought anomalies, looking specifically for the spectra of luminous philosopher cells and for gamma-ray bursts that might be a grim indication of a new assault against some surviving settlement. The DI looked for gravitational perturbations too, in an effort to detect the presence of a stealthed courser powered by a zero-point reef.
Urban also searched with Chenzeme senses. On the high bridge, with Clemantine observing, he entered into a conversation with the philosopher cells. As always, they were immersed in an instinctive hunt for other lifeforms. He shifted their focus by introducing a new argument:
– find another –
This was an instinctive task too and the cells consented without protest. Their luminosity was always a signal to other Chenzeme ships and might be enough to draw one in. He hoped so. Let the other ship take the risk of acceleration.
*Now we wait, Urban told Clemantine.
*It might be years before we find one, Clemantine said.
Urban warned her, *It might be centuries.
*If we don’t find one, we’ll need to set up a mining operation somewhere, like Kona said.
*It’s an option, but I don’t want to take the time. Better to take out one of our enemy’s ships. Don’t you think? That, after all, was the argument that had persuaded her to stay.
*Sooth, she agreed. *I thought I never wanted to see another Chenzeme courser. Now I hope we find one soon.
FOURTH
You are formidable.
Three shipwrecks now orbit your world. As you had guessed, the first ship came to ensure your demise and pick over your bones. You surprised that one, breached its defenses, attempted to take control of it—but its autonomous synthetic mind destroyed its propulsion mechanism and then destroyed itself. You remained marooned.
The second ship carried a human crew of ancestral form. Their forebears had escaped the Communion. They, like you, had seen the synthetic’s ship. They’d watched it from afar, seen it decelerate in the middle of nowhere—and then never saw it again. This piqued their curiosity and because they were a people both wealthy and adventurous, they sent a ship to investigate, with no idea what they might find.
You admired these people. You admired their bravery, their fortitude, even their decision to disable their starship rather than let you take it.
After that, nothing, as billions of seconds passed. You used the time to recover more and more of yourself and to grow ever more formidable. In time, you decided you were strong enough to risk making your presence known. You called out to the void and your call was answered by an alien starship.
That was not an event you anticipated. Nowhere in your shattered memory was there mention of such a thing. Such a beast. You survived only because it delayed its attack as it sought to ascertain just what you were before it killed you. Even so, it was a hard-fought encounter that left you nearly undone again.
More repairs.
But when you recovered sufficiently, you sent an avatar to investigate the ruined hulk of the alien ship and you learned much from it. You learned enough to be ready should such a chance come again.
Chapter
13
Clemantine’s ghost awoke from dormancy. A submind slipped into its pattern, integrating, so she knew things she had not known before: Dragon was over three hundred ninety years out of Deception Well—almost 80% of the way to the edge of the Hallowed Vasties; ahead of them an anomalous radio signal had been detected.