Silver - Inverted Frontier Book 2 Read online

  Inverted Frontier

  book 2

  Silver

  Linda Nagata

  Published by Mythic Island Press LLC

  Kula, Hawaii

  This is a work of fiction. All the characters and events portrayed in this novel are fictitious or are used fictitiously.

  Silver

  Copyright © 2019 by Linda Nagata.

  All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced, distributed, or transmitted in any form or by any means, including photocopying, recording, or other electronic or mechanical methods, without the prior written permission of the publisher, except in the case of brief quotations embodied in critical reviews and certain other noncommercial uses permitted by copyright law.

  ISBN 978-1-937197-29-2

  Cover Art Copyright © 2019 by Sarah Anne Langton

  Mythic Island Press LLC

  PO Box 1293

  Kula, HI 96790-1293

  MythicIslandPress.com

  Chapter

  1

  Riffan Naja existed, at present, as an electronic entity, a ghost inhabiting the virtual library of the outrider, Artemis. The library provided a simulation of physical existence so that he perceived himself as sitting alone, comfortably situated in a cozy chair within a reading room, the surrounding walls lined with stacked files. A tablet floated in front of him at perfect reading height. It displayed the text of an ancient academic paper: Experimental Social Systems of the Expansion Period. A fascinating topic! Or it would have been, if not for his simmering anxiety and pessimism as he waited for the Pilot to announce the next stage of the mission.

  At last, the moment came. The Pilot’s disembodied voice spoke directly into Riffan’s sensorium: “Our initial alignment is complete. We are in position, and ready to attempt contact with Pytheas.”

  “Oh, finally.” The tablet dodged out of the way as Riffan sprang to his feet. He was desperate to move forward, and yet he dreaded what he might find. “There are so few chances left,” he murmured. “Let this be the one.”

  The Pilot, who had not been designed to engage at the level of human empathy, made no reply. Riffan had spent time enough in his company, that he did not expect one.

  He turned to the reading room’s door. Sensing his attention, the door shimmered and then vanished, leaving an open portal. Riffan stepped through it, to the boundless blue-gradient plain of the main library floor. His arrival attracted the invisible presence of a Dull Intelligence. It hovered on the periphery of his sensorium, ready to fetch files or execute searches at his command. But he had not come to conduct research.

  He turned instead to the waiting Apparatchiks, each isolated within a frameless window. Riffan had brought three of them: the Pilot, the Bio-mechanic, and the Engineer. He’d chosen them over a human companion, because as artificial entities they were more efficient in their use of Artemis’s limited computational resources. The three together could operate in place of a single fully realized human ghost.

  Riffan didn’t regret choosing the Apparatchiks . . . not really. Still, he never felt easy in their presence, and they always appeared to be annoyed in his.

  The Pilot reported, “We are an estimated 912.3 kilometers from Pytheas.” As always, he presented himself as a mysterious figure, no more than a black silhouette against a background three-dimensional star map.

  “Which means,” the Bio-mechanic explained in a dull tone, “that at long last we are close enough to pinpoint Pytheas’s receiving lens.” His talents had not yet been required on the mission and his appearance reflected that. He’d faded within his frame, becoming translucent, almost invisible as he floated in a sea of motile tissue, as if to suggest he might soon wither away from boredom.

  The Engineer had also been superfluous so far, but he at least remained solid and attentive. Dressed in tan, he stood with arms crossed, his brow creased in an impatient scowl. He said, “Our angle of view shows no external damage, and Pytheas’s hull temperature is normal.”

  “Just as expected,” Riffan said, knowing the damage would be on the inside.

  During the fiery war for possession of the fleet’s primary starship, Dragon, contact had been lost with all the outriders except Artemis. The war was successful in that the entity Lezuri was cast out, but Urban was lost too.

  Urban!

  He had been the soul of the starship, its commander, its very mind—until Lezuri’s electronic predator wiped him out, erasing all the copies of his ghost that had existed aboard the courser. And then the predator had departed Dragon to destroy the archived ghosts Urban kept on every outrider in the vanguard of the fleet.

  Riffan’s mission was to determine whether or not the predator had succeeded. He’d begged for the privilege of undertaking that task. He saw it as a step toward atonement, after he’d allowed his credentials to be appropriated by Lezuri. He still did not understand how that had happened—but it had happened—and Lezuri had used that access to introduce the predator into Dragon’s network.

  The Pilot, sounding impatient, summoned him back to the present moment, reminding him, “The next step is yours.”

  “Yes, of course.”

  Any of the Apparatchiks could have handled the next phase, but Riffan had reserved communications for himself.

  He opened a small window, arranging it at a low angle so that it mimicked a physical console. A swift tap against a green button initiated a procedure that had come to feel routine. The first step: a burst from the communications laser. With no discernible delay, the data gate on Pytheas returned a responding code.

  “Contact confirmed,” Riffan said—unnecessarily, because the Apparatchiks had access to the same data he did. But saying it out loud made him feel part of a team. “Response code affirms the data gate is closed to inbound and outbound traffic. Sending safe-mode override, now.” He touched the next green button.

  Safe-mode allowed limited data transfers. Nothing so complex as a ghost or a predator would be able to slip through. “Safe mode confirmed,” Riffan said, reading from his window. “Initiating diagnostic function.”

  He had already visited the outriders Elepaio, Khonsu, and Lam Lha. Like Pytheas, they had not deviated from their assigned course toward the Tanjiri star system, despite the loss of communications. Each had been located at its calculated position. Finding them had been a simple matter of catching up.

  Simple, except that a gulf of roughly ninety light minutes separated each outrider from the next, leaving Riffan 6.4 billion kilometers from his home aboard Dragon and from anything human—a distance further magnified because the fleet was no longer bound for Tanjiri.

  Both Dragon and its companion courser Griffin had changed trajectories to pursue Lezuri to his home system of MSC-G-349809 and the ring-shaped world of Verilotus.

  Riffan closed his eyes. He refocused his thoughts, knowing he had to be careful. It would be so easy to fall into a debilitating hyper-awareness of his own utter isolation.

  Stay on task, you idiot.

  He had run the diagnostic function on each of the first three outriders. Their data gates were vested with a hard-coded routine, used to analyze and inventory the associated computational strata. Every report had come back the same: Nothing found.

  No archives. No files. No structure. No activity. No readable data, not even fragments. No hint of Urban’s ghost. The mind and memory of each outrider had been wiped clean.

  Riffan wanted to stay hopeful, but so far, nothing about Pytheas suggested its condition would be any different. Once the diagnostic report confirmed it, he would send a tool to wipe the computational strata a second time, and a third time after that, ensuring that if anything nasty remained scatter
ed in the chaos of the empty strata, it would be denatured and utterly erased.

  After that, he could safely open the data gate in standard mode, allowing essential systems to be copied over from Artemis. A Dull Intelligence would follow, and Pytheas would once again be endowed with cognitive life. The DI would undertake a thorough physical inspection, ensuring the outrider carried no functional alien matter. Only when that task was successfully completed would it adjust the outrider’s course, returning it to the fleet.

  Long before then, Riffan would be on his way, in pursuit of Fortuna, to repeat the process one last time. Such was the future he envisioned—but Pytheas shattered his gloomy expectations. It awoke, responding to the activity at the data gate by sending a request to establish full communications. The message brought Riffan a brief shock of hope—until he saw it was signed with the credentials of one Riffan Naja.

  “Corruption take us!” he swore. “And chaos too.”

  From the Apparatchiks, a chorus of grim chuckles.

  “It’s you,” the Bio-mechanic said in cynical amusement.

  “Credentials out of date,” the Engineer noted.

  “We’ve found the predator,” Riffan concluded. That should have been grim news, yet it brought him a resurgence of hope. “The predator is here.” And since every data gate’s default protocol was to leave no copy of a transiting ghost behind—“That means it’s not on Fortuna. Maybe it never reached Fortuna?”

  If so, they were sure to find a copy of Urban’s ghost cached on the last outrider!

  The Engineer swiftly pointed out the flaw in this happy scenario. “If Fortuna avoided the predator and remained undamaged, it would have returned to the fleet when communication was lost. It did not. So something happened to it.”

  Hope collapsed, leaving Riffan teetering on the edge of a steep slide into despair. His chest expanded as if to draw in a deep calming breath, but a ghost did not breathe, and the action produced no relief. His anxiety ratcheted up instead, as a new thought intruded.

  “We’re lucky we found Pytheas at all. It’s strange the predator didn’t hijack it, and use it—”

  To do what? Attack the fleet? Riffan rejected the idea. Clemantine would have destroyed Pytheas if it approached without proper credentials. Follow Lezuri, then? No, Lezuri surely would not care what happened to the predator once its job was done.

  “It wasn’t luck,” the Bio-mechanic told him. “The predator is very likely a limited tool designed for a singular task.”

  “The task of erasing Urban from existence,” Riffan said bitterly.

  “Just so,” the Pilot agreed. “Not a goal requiring general intelligence.”

  “I suppose not. So the predator has been trapped here? Is that the conclusion?”

  “Trapped between here and Fortuna,” the Engineer clarified.

  Riffan winced at this reminder that he must not place any hope in Fortuna. “All right then. Let’s move on to the next task. We have to get rid of the predator.”

  The Bio-mechanic had developed a plan to do that. He would introduce an array of Makers to physically dis-assemble and then re-grow all of Pytheas’s computational strata.

  Contemplating this, Riffan found himself speaking his deepest fear aloud: “What if there’s a copy of Urban’s ghost still archived aboard Pytheas?”

  “It will be erased,” the Bio-mechanic answered.

  “Yes, exactly,” Riffan said.

  “It has already been erased,” the Engineer assured him. “The predator will have destroyed it.”

  “I agree that’s likely, but the predator could not have wiped all the strata or it would have wiped itself. So it is possible a hidden archive has survived.”

  The Bio-mechanic shrugged. “If so, we cannot access it.”

  The Engineer nodded his agreement. “To try, would be to risk the predator gaining access to this ship, and once here—”

  “It’ll wipe us out too,” Riffan concluded.

  And if he allowed that to happen, then Artemis, Pytheas, and Fortuna would all be lost and no report would ever get back to the fleet.

  Even so, Riffan felt reluctant to order the destruction of Pytheas’s computational strata. Once done, it could not be undone—and if Fortuna did not harbor a copy of Urban’s ghost, then Urban would be gone forever. Unrecoverable. Dead, in the ancient sense of the word. And Riffan would wonder forever if he had ordered the last copy to be erased along with the predator.

  But wiping Pytheas was the only responsible decision, and in the end, he ordered it to be done.

 

  On to Fortuna:

  Artemis accelerated, taking Riffan farther still from Dragon. He tried not to think about that or to succumb to doubt. He tried to be hopeful as they closed in on the coordinates where the Pilot calculated Fortuna must be. Riffan set about hunting for the gravitational signature of its reef . . . but he could not find it. He used radar to search, but turned up nothing, not even a debris cloud to indicate Fortuna had been destroyed in a collision.

  Eventually, he had to conclude, “It’s not here.”

  A sense of wonder filled him. “It must have gone somewhere else. Fortuna ignored its directive to return to the fleet and it went somewhere else instead.”

  He turned to the Pilot. “Would Fortuna’s DI have the capacity to undertake such an independent action?”

  “No,” the Pilot answered. “Only a fully realized ghost could have directed the outrider to follow a new course.”

  Riffan smiled in quiet triumph. “I thought so.”

  At last, he’d found evidence that Urban still existed.

  Chapter

  2

  Before Lezuri, Urban had known optimism. He’d been driven by a spirit of discovery. Confidence hard-won from overcoming the threat of the alien Chenzeme had let him believe he could tackle the Hallowed Vasties next and unravel the mysteries of what had happened there.

  Now all such hope was gone to bitter dust.

  He’d been forced to flee Dragon in a running battle that left him isolated on Fortuna. And when he’d turned the outrider’s telescope to look back, he’d seen the fallout of war: Dragon de-gassing within a cloud of debris and Griffin gone altogether.

  While Dragon slowly self-repaired, the victor in that brief war remained unclear. But when the courser shifted its heading away from Tanjiri and toward the nameless star MSC-G-349809, Urban had to conclude Lezuri was in control. No one else could have known the significance of that destination—a conclusion reinforced when Dragon disappeared from view, the light of its luminous hull cells quenched as it entered stealth mode.

  Had Lezuri allowed the ship’s company to survive? The question haunted Urban. He wanted desperately to believe that when he recaptured Dragon he would find them still aboard. He had no way yet to recover the ship, but he hoped for a solution among the bizarre artificial structures of Lezuri’s home system.

  That system’s star was similar to Earth’s Sun, but instead of inner planets, it had the Blade. Lezuri claimed to have made it—a thin fracture in space-time, locked in a perfect circle, bleeding white light, and vast in size. Six hundred fifty thousand kilometers in diameter, the luminous ring moved in a stable orbit around its sun.

  At the geometric center of the Blade, far smaller but still planetary in scale, was the ring-shaped artificial world of Verilotus. If Lezuri could be believed, time ran more swiftly there than in the wider Universe.

  Urban intended to reach Verilotus and use every bonus minute that time differential allowed, to prepare for Lezuri’s arrival.

 

  The Dull Intelligence that handled the details of Fortuna’s operation could not suffer boredom, distraction, or despair, so Urban relied on it to continuously survey the MSC-G-349809 system throughout his years-long approach. He endured the time by switching off his consciousness for twelve hour intervals, staying awake only long enough to review any updates compiled by the DI and, rarely, to issue it new instructions.

&nbs
p; Astronomical records recorded two gas giant planets in the outer system. The DI calculated their positions and quickly located them, but it could not find the tiny moons that should have been orbiting those worlds. This concerned Urban. Lezuri had spoken of a partner entity—a being as powerful, or more so, than him.

  “If those moons still exist, I need to know where they are,” he told the DI. “I need to locate every rogue planetoid and large asteroid in the system—anything resembling the Rock where I found Lezuri.” If there really was another entity, it might be occupying a similar world.

  “Understood,” the DI responded. But it found nothing on a scale that Fortuna’s single telescope could resolve.

  Hungry for better data, Urban cannibalized some of Fortuna’s limited mass, using it to assemble a trio of probes. As he neared the system, he sent them ahead, one at a time, boosting them to velocities he did not dare approach himself.

  And he continued to watch.

  The Blade never varied in size, but it did wax and wane in brightness. He guessed that it brightened when tiny amounts of matter contacted it and were converted to energy, or shed energy on the way to another reality. Lezuri had said the Blade was a mechanism used to invert gravity and slice apart worlds. Urban took that as a warning, and resolved to stay as far from it as he could, on his approach to Verilotus.

  The probes radioed their findings at regular intervals. Their signals could not be hidden, but that was not an absolute disadvantage. If there was a defensive architecture in the system, he hoped it would detect the probes, react to them, and reveal itself.

  Two hundred ninety-seven days after the first probe was launched, the DI woke his ghost early, informing him, “Alpha probe has failed to report as scheduled.”

  Urban had long ago limited the emotional range of his ghost, and still he felt a stirring of trepidation. “What about the others?”