Shoran grinned. “So we’re going to make it?”
“Yes,” Clemantine affirmed. She couldn’t celebrate it. Not in the face of Urban’s absence. But it was true. “Yes. We are going to make it.”
Urban continued to monitor the status of Dragon. He watched the debris cloud disperse into invisibility and the battle scars on its hull slowly fill with luminous cells as the ship healed itself.
The entity had taken his ship. No way to know if anyone among the ship’s company was left alive… Clemantine, Kona, Vytet, Riffan, Shoran, and all the rest. Lezuri might have let them live… or at least captured their patterns.
Urban searched his mind, he searched the local library, desperate to devise some way to take his ship back, but the predator’s ferocity haunted him. It was like a promise from Lezuri that he would put Fortuna under the gun if ever he suspected Urban’s presence there.
Lezuri wanted to reach the ring-shaped world.
Verilotus. That was its name. Lezuri had wanted to go there armed with the coursers’ weapons. Urban’s refusal to do so had triggered disaster. Everything that mattered, lost, because he’d promised himself he would not return a broken god to its seat of power.
He decided that promise still held. If he could do nothing else, he would do that.
He watched and he waited as Dragon continued to coast, its velocity only slightly higher than Fortuna’s and its course, so far, unchanged.
If its course shifted, if it turned away from Tanjiri and towards Verilotus, that would be final proof that Lezuri controlled the ship. Then Urban would change course too. He would need to reach Verilotus ahead of Dragon, and once there, do what he could to block the ambition of a broken god.
Chapter
41
Clemantine made a cautious return to the fleet, keeping Griffin dark and silent as the Astronomer used the telescopes to study Dragon and map its ravaged hull.
“There is some regeneration in the cell field,” the Astronomer concluded. “And a new radio antenna has been deployed on the hull.”
Good news. Someone was alive in there.
“Anything else?”
“Nothing visible.” Then he added, in answer to her unspoken question, “No sign of the entity’s capsule.”
She turned to the Engineer. “Let’s use radar again. Map the debris field. Look for anything that might be in our way.”
Radar revealed Griffin’s presence. The response was immediate, a low-power radio hail from Dragon, her own voice demanding, Identify yourself.
She answered, “The iris will bloom again.”
A long pause and then a question: Did you kill him?
“I couldn’t find him.”
Another pause, then: Urban is gone.
“What do you mean?”
There may still be a copy of his ghost on one of the outriders—we lost contact and can’t confirm—but he’s gone from Dragon.
“I’ll establish contact.”
No! Don’t. We need to be cautious. The predator followed him out there. It may still be there.
This time the pause in the conversation was on her side as she processed what her counterpart had just said: Urban was gone.
Aboard Dragon, Vytet lobbied for Griffin to open its data gate. “That will allow us to copy the Apparatchiks back. We need their help, their knowledge, their expertise.”
Clemantine agreed that having the Apparatchiks would speed the recovery, but opening the data gate would put Griffin at risk. “It’s too soon. We need to clean up first, ensure Lezuri is truly gone.”
The entity had left hazardous matter behind.
When the tendrils serving as conduits to the containment capsule ripped free, they had not parted cleanly. Fragments remained—and each piece had begun to regrow.
Vytet’s engineers attacked the problem. In the library, they found a design for a small, snakelike, laser-wielding robot. They grew a prototype, skinned it in Chenzeme tissue, and sent it to hunt the fragments.
Clemantine expected the device to succumb to the entity’s lingering molecular defenses, but the vigor of the initial infestation was gone and the laser snake succeeded in vaporizing its first target. Cheers of success broke out in the library, and the engineers set about creating more of the devices.
The ship’s network still worried Clemantine. She had already inspected it, but she sent a DI to examine it again to ensure nothing of the predator remained. When the network proved clean, she sent the DI into the library to inspect all recently updated files. It found nothing of concern.
There was still one more place she needed to inspect.
She instructed a DI to waken Riffan from his resurrection pod. When it opened, she was there in the warren, waiting.
Riffan emerged, looking worried and confused. His gaze settled on her. “Why am I here? What happened? I remember a terrific noise, and then nothing.” His face scrunched in a frown. “Why can’t I access the network?”
She said, “I’ve locked you out of the network until I have assurance you’re clean.”
“What? What do you mean?” Clothes budded from a generative surface beneath the wall-weed, but he ignored them. “Tell me what’s happened!”
“Lezuri acquired your access to the network.”
“No. That’s impossible.” His frown deepened. “I did allow him to use my tablet. Maybe through that he somehow…” His voice trailed off. His eyes grew wide. “Did something bad happen?”
“Yes,” she said in an icy tone. “Bad things happened. Now I have a question for you. Is it possible there’s a remnant of Lezuri secreted in your atrium?”
His focus turned inward. He looked chilled, pinched with cold.
She sliced the air with the edge of her hand. “Go see Vytet and Naresh. They’re waiting for you. You’ll give them full access to your atrium so they can confirm you’ve got no parasites there. Until that’s done, you’ll stay out of the network.” Her tone softened. “Stay off the gee deck too. It’s dangerous there.” She gestured at him from head to toe. “This is the only version of you. There’s no ghost in our archive, on Artemis, or on Griffin, so be careful, okay?”
His eyes widened in shock. “But how? Why?”
She waved him off. “Go see Vytet and Naresh. They’ll answer all your questions.”
Throughout it all, she remained on the high bridge, overseeing every aspect of the recovery. At her request, Griffin remained dark, a tactic to prevent its philosopher cells from reacting aggressively to the sight of Dragon’s weakness. And Griffin kept its data gate closed, while she fully confirmed the integrity of her ship.
Her ship. It had come to that.
Pasha thought it strange, the way people apportioned blame. She had conceived and designed the Pyrrhic Defense—facts she’d made clear—but everyone angry at the way the project was handled put the blame on Clemantine, saying “She could have stopped it.”
“I could have stopped it too,” Pasha declared every time she heard the argument, whether in the warren or the library. “We both understood the risk, and decided together to go forward—and we succeeded. Lezuri is gone and the ship is clean.”