A new factor entered her awareness: The gravitational sensor had detected a slight perturbation, separate from those generated by the coursers. The cells sought to discern its source, their attention focused in the direction of Dragon.
When she shared this news with her Apparatchiks in the library, the Engineer said, “It’s the containment capsule. It has to be.”
A dark laugh from the Pilot. “Even if it has a reef, so what? It can’t outrun two coursers. It can’t escape our guns.”
The source of the perturbations was already receding.
On the high bridge, Clemantine proposed an action:
– pursue it –
The cells complied, triggering a surge of activity in the reef. Griffin leaped forward. But Clemantine still could not locate the little ship.
Surely it had moved beyond Dragon’s bow by now? That would make it an easy target, yet Dragon did not shoot.
“Dragon is damaged,” the Engineer concluded, his somber gaze on Clemantine. “It’s up to you.”
She could not shoot what she could not see. Griffin’s gravitational sensor let her track the newly activated reef, but that gave her only an estimate of Lezuri’s position—enough to know he was moving out fast and hard.
Resolving to match that pace, she imposed her will on the cell field:
– pursue it. faster –
In the library, the Pilot objected. “The risk of collision—!”
“I understand it, but our target is small and dark and cooling fast. I don’t want to risk losing it in the void.”
“Radar,” the Engineer said.
“Try it,” Clemantine agreed. “But I think Lezuri will anticipate that and shape-shift his hull to a fully stealthed mode.”
She tried to contact Dragon again by radio, but got no answer.
As she neared the larger courser, its cells—what was left of them—flashed a message of triumphant identity:
<we are chenzeme!>
Within that declaration, a sense of gloating victory over an embedded enemy successfully ejected, and a firm assertion that it retained the strength to self-repair.
Griffin’s cell field responded with what Clemantine interpreted as a warning:
<we are stronger>
The implication: that Dragon must recover or be consumed.
She swept past the larger courser, taking a good look as she did, horrified at the extent of damage, longing to know if anyone was still alive within that torn hull.
She could not help them, not yet, but she could hunt the entity.
“Okay,” she said to the Engineer. “Dragon’s behind us. The field is clear. Have you got anything?”
“No, you were right,” he conceded. “No radar returns at all.”
“Then lock it down,” she told him. “We’re going stealth too. I’m taking the hull cells dark. We’re going to track his reef and I don’t want him to see us coming.”
Chapter
39
The bundled memories comprising Urban’s last generated submind slipped through the data gate, bound for Elepaio. Transmission protocols ensured no copy was left behind.
Elepaio was closest in the vanguard of outriders, but it was still ninety light-minutes distant. Ninety minutes in which either the entity had secured its hold over Dragon or Clemantine had destroyed the ship.
The submind’s arrival at Elepaio’s data gate woke an archived copy of Urban’s ghost. Mind and submind merged. He instantiated in the outrider’s library with the memory of all that had happened aboard Dragon. Predominant in his memory: the predator and its relentless pursuit of him in all his variations.
He issued a command to close the data gate to incoming traffic—too late. Something had come through.
He knew there had not been time for all the data needed to define a fully realized ghost to transit through the gate, and he assumed a far larger quantity of data would be needed to define the entity. Still, something had arrived behind him.
The predator might be a fragment of the entity or it could be a manufactured weapon that did not represent the entity at all. Whatever it was, he already had a partial map of its structure. He used that to devise a probe to further investigate its configuration.
The thing winked into existence on the library floor. Riffan again! he saw in disgust. The predator still wore Riffan’s aspect like a protective shell.
Urban’s probe instantiated around it: a shimmering translucent column that shot up from the library floor, trapping the predator within as it rose an infinite distance overhead. Immediately, the diameter of the column began to shrink. It compressed around the predator, probing it from all sides, passing all the structural data it discovered back to Urban, at the same time overwriting everything it touched.
The predator reacted by withdrawing the Riffan mask—a bizarre transformation as the façade was sucked off, twisted, and then compressed into a geometrical point where it vanished. Left behind was a tremulous, vaguely man-shaped cloud, that appeared to be composed of tiny virtual machines. Battle ready now, the predator struck back.
Chaos boiled up around its feet. The base of the column disintegrated. Chaos climbed the column, consuming it, while a separate wave of chaos swept across the library floor, catching Urban before he could retreat.
Chaotic forces swirled around his ghost feet, climbed his body. He was conscious of his own disintegration, an onslaught of mindlessness, meaningless disorder, overwriting the programmatic structure that defined him. He sensed the same wave of chaos at work consuming the library’s computational strata, destroying the virtual grid and the archive where he’d kept the backup copy of his ghost.
He could not stop the destruction. Only microseconds left to create a submind. He focused on that one task and when it was done, he bundled his memories into it and sent the submind through the data gate, addressed to the next outrider in the fleet.
Ninety-three minutes later Khonsu received the submind and woke an archived copy of Urban’s ghost. Their memories merged. His first coherent thought: Close the data gate!
But the integration of mind and submind had taken a measurable quantity of time, enough to allow the predator through the gate before he could close it to incoming traffic.
It instantiated, wearing Riffan’s aspect again. With a sharp shock, Urban realized it had to be that way. The predator could not pass through the data gate without using its stolen permissions.
Again, Urban launched his probe, updating it with structural knowledge hard-won in the last encounter. Riffan’s aspect disappeared as the column formed—hidden away by the predator, which must be eager to protect it. So Urban compiled a second probe. This one had the single goal of locating and dissolving all identifiers associated with Riffan.
But chaos broke past the column before he could launch it.
He created a submind and sent it to the outrider Lam Lha.
It arrived, ninety-one minutes later. Mind and submind integrated. Urban emerged from the archive just as the predator arrived through the data gate.
This time, he was ready for it. He launched both probes as it instantiated. One assaulted the Riffan-shell, partly overwriting it before it could be withdrawn. The other trapped the predator within the column, holding it there long enough to dissolve another layer of its structure before chaos broke loose to ravage the library’s computational strata and its archive, and to overwrite the structure of Urban’s ghost.