“Was the ghost active?” she asked.
“It was on the verge of waking.”
She closed her eyes in relief. No ghost in Griffin’s archive should have been able to wake on its own. “So it was corrupt.”
“Yes. I’m undertaking an inspection of the entire archive to ensure no other ghosts are affected.”
“Good. Clean out the archive on Artemis too.”
She radioed a response to Dragon: “It’s done. We have no backup of Riffan. Repeat: We have no backup. What is going on over there?”
Her own voice answered her, “Stand by.”
Just seconds had passed since Clemantine issued a general warning to the ship’s company to evacuate the gee deck. Queries came back to her, too many to answer, but people were responding. Confused chatter filled the gee deck as they emerged from their homes, most asking, Is it real? A few firm voices rose above the general indecision, Shoran’s and Alkimbra’s among them:
“Everyone! Go to the warren!”
“We meet at the warren!”
“Move! It’ll take time to get everyone through the transit gate.”
Turning from the ruined threshold, she encountered Kona.
“What do you know?” he demanded.
She told him the dire news brought by her latest submind. “Lezuri got into the network. Released a predator there. I don’t know if we can contain it.”
Pasha came running up, yelling in indignation that verged on panic, “You haven’t answered any of my queries! Neither has the Bio-mechanic! I need to know. Do we launch?”
Clemantine drew a shuddering breath. The Pyrrhic Defense would do nothing to counter the attack on the network; it was designed only to eliminate the physical presence of the entity from the ship. And once launched, there would be no going back, no stopping it. It would gut the ship, cripple Dragon, and leave them with hundreds of days of repair and reconstruction.
She met Pasha’s gaze. “Yes. Trigger it. Now.”
The Bio-mechanic understood the end had come.
The initial radio transmission had alerted him. Clemantine’s message confirmed the imminent emergency.
He extended his senses throughout the ship and throughout the network, gathering data. He hunted the entity’s avatar, but found no trace of it, even the cocoon had dissolved. He detected an imbalance in the quantity of matter flushed through the gee deck’s circulatory system along with a drop in the deck’s atmospheric temperature. And he registered a surplus of computational activity in the library. This last commanded his attention.
He instantiated within his window in time to see the predator reveal itself. He witnessed the assault on Urban’s ghost. He watched the predator turn its attention to him—and he smiled the bitter smile of a cynic whose worst expectations have come to pass.
The enemy had entered the network undetected—something he had dared to believe was impossible. This was the final insult. It was the end. The end of sixty-three years of unceasing effort aimed at beating the entity’s nanotech arsenal. Sixty-three years of maddening defeat.
He alerted the other Apparatchiks, warned them of the intrusion, instructed them: Face it one at a time. Learn what you can before you die. And then he added, I’ll go first.
He meant to trigger the Pyrrhic Defense, to deny Lezuri full possession of the ship—but the predator shifted location so swiftly he did not have time to act. It popped into existence right beside him, invading the isolated virtual world contained within his window—and buried a fist in his gut.
He let his extended senses collapse around him. He drew in all of his intellect, the complexity of his structure, to meet this intrusion, to enfold it, concentrating his efforts on the creation of a map that recorded details of the predator’s structure, even as it ripped through him.
With his sense of self dissolving, the Bio-mechanic used his last microseconds to dump the partial map into a submind. Addressed it to Urban on the high bridge. Released it.
Griffin was safe, but Urban did not have time to enjoy the news as another submind dropped in, this one originating with the Bio-mechanic. He did not normally trade memories with his Apparatchiks, but he could do it. He allowed the submind to merge.
Shock swept through him as he absorbed the memory of the Bio-mechanic’s last moments: a vicious attack, an ugly defeat, defiant anger, and a resolve to wipe his failing ghost before the predator could learn from it.
The Bio-mechanic was gone! But his anger remained. It became Urban’s anger and it bled into the cell field.
Urban did not try to hold it back; he didn’t have the resources. His focus was diverted by the gift the Bio-mechanic had included in his final submind: a partial structural map of the predator. He acted quickly, distributing the map to the surviving Apparatchiks. *Use it! Find a counter attack.
Acknowledgments came back from the Engineer, the Astronomer, the Scholar, the Mathematician—but the Pilot sent him a submind. Urban did not want to accept it. He feared what it contained. But he needed to know, so he let it in.
It brought cold confirmation of what he’d guessed. The predator had defeated the Pilot. Two Apparatchiks already gone.
Unlike the Bio-mechanic, the Pilot’s last submind contained only a remote emotional imprint. It helped to cool Urban’s swirling rage. It also brought him an updated version of the map, with additional details of the predator’s structure.
He forwarded the expanded map to the survivors. Then he replicated his ghost, sending it into the network to hunt.
*What are you doing? Clemantine asked.
*Learning to defeat that thing.
The ghost fed data back to him, critical glimpses revealing more and more of the predator’s structure. Then it sent a submind.
Urban did not hesitate to let it merge, but he should have. Unlike the Pilot, his ghost had not censored its emotions. Packed into that submind was the memory of his demise: his wild anger, his frustration as the predator tore him apart, his swift decision to dissolve that ghost, end his own existence. But the submind brought insight too, additional data that further expanded his map.
His understanding of the predator grew.
Again, he distributed the revised structure to the Apparatchiks. The Scholar and the Mathematician acknowledged receipt, but not the Engineer and the Astronomer. Instead, their last subminds came to him—mercifully stripped of emotion.
Desperation focused his mind and quickened his response time as he compiled the new data, created another ghost, and sent it out to face the predator.
He found it in a cardinal, or it found him. In that environment they met as two disembodied forces. Urban strove to trace what he could of the predator’s computational shape, holding out against its probing assault until he felt his sense of self begin to crumble. End it! He generated a submind to carry back what he’d learned and then he wiped yet another broken version of himself.
It became a cycle—another ghost, another hunt, another crushing defeat, a fragment of mind all that could get away. But each returning submind expanded his knowledge of the predator’s structure, and each conflict lasted a little longer as his defenses evolved. He strove to shield the last two Apparatchiks—the Scholar and the Mathematician—by putting his own ghost in the path of the predator. That ghost went down so he sent another. Too late. Both Apparatchiks were already gone.