He didn’t answer.
Urban abandoned the cardinals, instantiating in the library. The place felt hollow and wrong, empty of any sense of the Apparatchiks’ presence. But not abandoned. Other ghosts were there. He glimpsed them, tiny figures separated from him by an emotional distance—Clemantine, Kona, Pasha, Vytet. They would be working to stabilize the ship, not realizing Dragon was overrun and already lost.
No time to warn them. He had time only to ensure their future on Griffin. He did it—his last task. He triggered a preset radio message to clarify for that other Clemantine the irretrievable nature of their situation: commence termination of Dragon; commence termination of Dragon; commence termination of Dragon—
Here at last, echoing the choice of those crews who had scuttled their ships at the Rock—except that he meant to escape.
Alone among the ship’s company, Urban did not keep an archived ghost on Griffin. Instead, he kept copies on the outriders where they remained under his direct control.
He created a submind, bundling all his recent memories into it. To escape Dragon, all he had to do was hold off the predator long enough for that submind to slip away through the data gate. Not towards Griffin—that way was closed—but towards Elepaio and the vanguard of outriders.
He launched the submind just as the predator instantiated in the library, still wearing Riffan’s smiling face.
Chapter
37
Clemantine’s ghost left the ruin of the gee deck to instantiate in the library.
Immediately, she sensed that something had changed. She froze, looking around. The virtual environment appeared the same but felt sharply different. The extra sense she always gained in the library—the one that let her feel the presence of data—had been truncated. She still perceived the files, and yet some vital aspect was gone.
Puzzle it out later! She needed the Bio-mechanic. She had expected to find him already on deck but he wasn’t there. So she moved to summon him. Only then did she realize his link no longer existed.
That was the missing element.
She thought of the Engineer, the Scholar. But she could find no links to them, either—or to any of the Apparatchiks.
A crowd of ghosts manifested around her: Kona, Vytet, Naresh, and Pasha.
Pasha demanded to know, “Where is the Bio-mechanic?”
“Gone,” Clemantine said. “All the Apparatchiks, gone.”
The absence left her reeling, blinded to the true status of the ship. She reached out to her ghost on the high bridge and traded subminds. Memories merged just as Dragon began bleating a preset radio message authorizing its own demise.
Both versions of Clemantine converged in defiant agreement: Not yet.
From the bridge, she terminated the communication.
In the library, she composed a new message to replace it: “Abort that last. We are still fighting.”
“Where is the predator?” Kona demanded. “Has it been contained?”
“I don’t know,” Clemantine told him. “I don’t know where it is. I don’t know where Urban is. But we’re not done yet.”
More ghosts appeared—Tarnya and Alkimbra and two of Vytet’s engineers, come to find out what had happened, to see if they could help, all asking questions that no one was ready to answer.
Pasha reached out, a reassuring hand on Clemantine’s arm. “We’re okay. We’ll be okay without the Bio-mechanic. He left us the link to trigger the defense.”
“Show me.”
“What defense?” Naresh asked.
And Vytet: “Where are the Apparatchiks?”
Kona summoned a floating three-dimensional model of the ship, with the network detailed and the library mapped. It showed Clemantine’s ghost on the high bridge and the crowd of ghosts in the library. She searched for Urban, searched every part of the map. She asked the map to highlight his position. But he wasn’t there. He wasn’t anywhere.
Pasha’s hand tightened on her arm, a pressure-grip that broke through her numb shock.
“Are you sure we should do it?” Pasha whispered, ignoring the chatter all around them.
Clemantine turned from the devastating evidence of Urban’s absence, to meet Pasha’s intense gaze. “Yes. Show it to me.”
A small window appeared between them. It was tilted so that only Clemantine had a clear view of it. It framed a sliding switch neatly labeled off—on. Without hesitation, she touched the black button, slid it to the right. The button flashed green.
“Ten seconds to change your mind,” Pasha warned.
Clemantine didn’t need a waiting period. She pressed the flashing green button. It turned gray.
“What defense?” Naresh asked again.
Pasha turned to him, speaking bluntly: “The Bio-mechanic set it up for us—and there’s no stopping it now. We’re evicting Lezuri from the ship.” She added bitterly, “We should have done it before.”
The assault began with three small missiles, their casings nearly frictionless, launched simultaneously from stealthed pods hidden deep within Dragon’s bio-mechanical tissue, far beneath the entity’s containment capsule. The missiles drilled through the tissue, tearing open circulation paths and severing communications lines, leaving behind open channels steaming with the heat of molecular repair and the rage of Chenzeme defensive molecules seeking an enemy to dis-assemble.
The missiles were programmed to detonate when they reached the containment capsule, or sooner, if their shells were dissolved or breached along the way.
Pasha enlarged the existing model of the ship. Clemantine watched it closely as it updated in stuttering steps that reflected the intermittent arrival of new data from internal sensors. Additional sensors had been placed to track the path of pressure waves through Dragon’s bio-mechanical tissue. Hull cameras and cameras on the outrider Artemis gave an external view.
A cry of dismay went up from the crowd of ghosts as the three missiles blew in a silent flare of light.
Weirdly silent, Clemantine thought. The model did not replicate sound, but there had surely been something to hear within the ship’s tissue.
“They detonated early,” Pasha observed.
Clemantine nodded. “But they got close.”
“Oh no,” Naresh breathed, peering at the model as it updated to show transient bubbles blasted in the bio-mechanical tissue and a shockwave that reached the philosopher cells. “No, no, this can’t be real.”
Clemantine felt the reality of it. With a train of subminds linking her to the high bridge, she felt the shockwave. She sensed the ensuing confusion of the cells as they strove to determine what had happened, explanations proposed and rejected at furious speed.
Ironic memory surfaced: In the first years of the voyage they had been so careful, so cautious as they grew the warren, worried that any aggressive expansion would overthrow the careful balance Urban had developed along the uneasy borders between Chenzeme and human tissue. Now, all caution had been blown away.
“Who’s behind this?” Vytet demanded, horror on her face.
“We are,” Pasha answered calmly. “Me, Clemantine, the Bio-mechanic, and Griffin’s crew.”
“It was necessary,” Clemantine added. “But you can call for a judicial hearing if you want.”