Riffan’s ghost would follow him in, and then the rest of the data gathered during the fly-by.
He turned to Clemantine, who lay asleep beside him in the bed they shared in her cottage. It was ship’s night outside. Quiet but for a few crickets, and dark. If lights were on in the other cottages, they were hidden behind window screens. He triggered a slight glow in the walls, enough to see her shape. He kissed her cheek until she awoke.
“What is it?” she murmured.
He purred deep in his throat, and then confessed, “God, I’ve missed you.”
She pushed him away, far enough that she could sit up. “You’re back, aren’t you? Tell me what you saw.”
So he did, while the data streamed in—chemical analyses, spectral analyses, log files, video, and his own brief summary of his findings—all downloading into Dragon’s library.
Clemantine willed the lights to a brighter setting. She studied him, looking skeptical, worried. “I don’t like to think of your avatar gone like that, into the hands of some… monster.”
“I terminated.”
“You know that?”
“You know I would have.”
“But there’s no record of it. No data on how you were taken down—and that leaves us vulnerable. Without data on what happened, how do we improve our defenses for the next time?”
That was the problem he’d been wrestling with throughout the return journey—and not much to show for it. But he was saved from having to answer when a query reached his atrium. “Hold on,” he told her. “Vytet wants to talk. I’ll link you in.” Then to Vytet, “Go ahead.”
“I’ve read your summary,” Vytet said—a feminine voice tonight, though her tone was flat. A mask for anxiety? “I think we’ve got an immediate problem.”
“What kind of a problem?” Urban asked. “The data’s not corrupt?”
“No. The data is good, what I’ve seen of it, anyway. I haven’t had time to go over it in detail, but so far it all—”
“What’s the problem, Vytet?” Clemantine said, cutting her off.
An audible sigh. “The mission summary. It concerns me. The shipwrecks—at least the two human ships—Urban, you think those crews scuttled their ships to keep the entity from escaping.”
“Yes. That’s how it looked.”
“But you got away untouched?”
“Yes, because only the probe went into the system. Elepaio never got close. No data viruses got into the library.”
“Yes,” Vytet said, and now she sounded impatient. “Yes, all that should have meant you were clean, but there is a glamour surrounding the returning outrider.”
Clemantine looked at Urban, her fine eyebrows raised in question. “A glamour?” she repeated. “What does that mean?”
“Come to the library,” Vytet said. “I’ll show you.”
Vytet had become a female version of the dark-haired man she’d been, her black eyes glittering as she turned to greet Urban and Clemantine. The Apparatchiks were with her in the library, all six of them. A rare gathering, signaling a critical issue.
“Here,” Vytet said, gesturing at a large frameless window. “Have a look.”
Like all the outriders, Elepaio was stealthed. As it returned to the fleet, its position had been unknown until the data came in. But as soon as Vytet received its position information, she’d turned Dragon’s telescopes on it.
The image she’d captured showed the expected faint infrared signature of Elepaio’s hull, but there was also an indistinct blur encircling the bow.
“It’s not surprising you didn’t notice it,” Vytet said. “The outrider’s hull cameras are designed to see distant objects. This… fog, this mist, I think it’s indicative of something caught in the field of Elepaio’s reef and energized by that interaction. The outrider is so small, you see, that the reef’s effect extends beyond its hull.”
“This is not a processing error?” Clemantine asked. “Or a flaw in the lens?”
“I hoped it was only that,” Vytet said. “Or degassing from the bio-mechanical tissue, caused by impact damage.”
“There was an impact,” Urban said. “There were two.”
“Yes. I saw that in the summary. I asked the Apparatchiks to evaluate the finding.”
“There is no flaw in the lens,” the Astronomer said.
The Engineer crossed his arms. “If the aura was the result of impact, I would expect to see an uneven mix of particulate elements and frozen gases. What we see here is an evenly distributed particulate cloud.”
“Ah, shit,” Urban whispered.
He composed a message to Elepaio, ordering it to stand off, to approach no closer to the fleet. That might not make a difference. The light-speed lag meant the message would take time to reach the little ship and then Elepaio would require additional time to arrest its momentum and change its course. But he had to try.
A submind shunted his consciousness to the high bridge, plunging him into a weave of fuming, muttering dialogs, the philosopher cells edgy and suspicious as they debated the idea of the returning outrider.
Their interest was a bad sign. Long ago, Urban had instilled in the cells an acceptance of the outriders. He’d hooked into their instinctive concept of ancillary ships, training them to regard the outriders as harmless companions that should be tracked but never targeted. Now, this rule was being questioned.
He perceived an image only a few seconds old, recurring among the braided thoughts. Distinct, bright points of heat like a necklace circling the bow of Elepaio.
Vytet had called it a glamour, a mist, a fog. The hull cells saw it more clearly. A swarm of tiny devices that had hitched a ride in the propulsion field spilling over from Elepaio’s reef.
Urban had seen pits open on the rogue world but he’d had no hint of their purpose. Now he knew. The pits had opened to allow an inner mechanism to shoot millions, maybe billions, of small projectiles across his path. Elepaio had been struck twice, high-energy collisions that rattled the hull. At least one had successfully released its cargo.
He’d never suspected.
A submind arrived from the library, bringing a memory of Vytet saying, It’s significant that the devices did not attempt to infiltrate Elepaio, but instead used it to get close to the fleet.
Sooth. The heavily armed coursers had been the target all along and he had transported the alien devices, provided them with a means to reach the fleet.
Anger spiked—at himself, at the situation, at the entity on the Rock. The philosopher cells welcomed his anger, amplified it. Anger was their baseline state; it drove their murderous instinct.
A proposition was offered: <kill it>
Urban agreed to this without hesitation: – kill it –
Why not? Each device in the swarm surely carried data, along with molecular tools to translate that data into physical form once it reached an appropriate substrate. Each device, a seed to resurrect the entity.
– kill it! –
It was the only logical response in the face of potential alien invasion.
Consensus swept across the cell field.