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Prelude: Arrival

Against a starscape, a smudge of white light. A faint gleam, devoid of detail. Notable, because it had not been present when that sector of the Near Vicinity had last been surveyed by the array of telescopes in orbit around the Deception Well star system.

So it was something new, although not unknown.

A Dull Intelligence, assigned to analyze astronomical data, had observed such phenomena five times before during its twelve hundred years of existence. Knowing what that gleam portended, the DI tagged the object with a unique identifier: Transient Hazard 6 or TH-6.

The DI felt no excitement, no fear—it was capable of neither—only a simple, satisfying sense of duty as it confirmed its initial assessment by formally comparing the object's spectral signature with database records. This exercise produced multiple matches of both luminosity and the spectrum of emitted light, providing unassailable confirmation of the object's identity as a Chenzeme courser: an ancient robotic warship of alien origin.

"Chenzeme" was a human-coined term. No data existed on who or what the Chenzeme had been. They had originated—and likely vanished from existence—long before the human species evolved. But their robotic ships continued on, an autonomous fleet with genocide its singular purpose. For thirty million years, Chenzeme warships had patrolled this region of the galaxy, hunting for newly emerged technological lifeforms—and wiping them out.

The Dull Intelligence directed two telescopes to monitor the courser and determine its heading. It did not expect the courser to enter the Deception Well system.

The Well was a trap for such starships. It was a highly engineered star system consisting of only the central sun, a single planet, and an enveloping nebula. The nebula was artificial: a vast-and-slow thinking machine operating on a molecular scale. A weapon. One developed long before the beginning of human history, its purpose to infect the deadly Chenzeme starships, rewrite their motives, and quell the violent instinct that drove them.

The Chenzeme ships knew this—at least their behavior suggested they did. They were autonomous machines capable of learning and of communicating what they learned to one another—and not one of the five prior ships sighted by the DI had dared to enter the nebula despite obvious signs of technological life thriving on and around the solitary planet.

Still, the discretion shown by those past warships was not to be relied upon. This courser might choose to attack. If it did, the mechanism of the nebula would operate too slowly to ensure the safety of the Well's human inhabitants.

The DI acted according to both instinct and its instruction set, sending out emergency notifications to the security council and to the Defense Force stations.

The people of the Well had not suffered a Chenzeme attack in the fifteen hundred years since they'd settled in the system—but they had not forgotten their history. They'd emigrated to the Well only after a massive Chenzeme assault left their beloved home world of Heyertori uninhabitable and their people on the edge of extinction. So alongside the ancient, protective mechanism of the nebula, they maintained twin warships—Long Watch and Silent Vigil—stationed opposite each other on the nebula's periphery. Both ships were dark and stealthy and fearfully well-armed. If the courser made a sunward run, threatening the world of Deception Well, those ships would work together to blow it out of the sky.

Chapter One

Riffan Naja rarely thought of himself as a military commander. Really, he was an anthropologist. The study of human society was his specialty, his passion. It was the reason he'd sought a position aboard Long Watch.

Any position aboard either Silent Vigil or Long Watch required extensive Defense Force training—after all, the primary duty of both ships was to guard the Deception Well system against Chenzeme incursion—so Riffan was qualified as a military commander. He had just never expected to use his military training.

No one had expected him to use it because seven centuries had elapsed since the last time a Chenzeme ship was sighted. It had been even longer—twelve hundred years—since a human starship visited the system. Career Defense Force officers had long ago deemed duty aboard either ship too dull to endure.

So over time, Silent Vigil and Long Watch became scientific platforms as well as watch posts. Career officers were no longer posted to the remote duty. Instead, the position of commander rotated among each ship's senior scientific staff.

Riffan happened to be in command when the emergency notification arrived.

He was alone in the hexagonal chamber of his study, eyeing a complex display of charts and evolving schematics that described the observed orbital motion of debris around an abandoned planet in a distant star system. He hoped a thorough analysis of the data would reveal some anomaly that could be explained only through the presence of a technological lifeform—specifically, human survivors, finally recovering from an assault that had ravaged their system centuries ago.

The alert shattered his concentration with a triple warning-tone that bleated across his brain. His whole body recoiled, his bare foot kicking free of the loop that had anchored him in place in the zero-gravity environment of Long Watch.

He scrambled to catch a hand-hold as the display refreshed and the calm, familiar voice of the astronomical Dull Intelligence spoke into the artificial neural organ of his atrium: *Alert. Alert.

His atrium's tendrils wound throughout his brain tissue, linking his senses to the ship's omnipresent network, allowing him to hear the DI, even though the workroom remained silent.

As the Dull Intelligence continued to speak, a text version of its words appeared on the display:

*A newly sighted object, designated Transient Hazard 6, confirms as a Chenzeme courser. Approximate distance, nine light-hours beyond the periphery of the nebula.

Riffan finally caught a hand-hold. He squeezed it in a painful grip. "No," he whispered as additional data posted to the display. "No, no, no. Love and Nature and the Cosmic First Light, this can't be right. This can't be happening. There has to be a mistake."

*There is no mistake, the DI assured him in its calm way.

"Well then, damn it, why now?" he demanded. "Why me?"

The DI knew better than to attempt an answer and after a moment, Riffan settled the question for himself: "You fool, it had to be someone, didn't it?"

Seven hundred years was a long span on a human scale. The absence of sightings for all that time had led some to speculate that the ancient robotic warships had already won this latest phase of their endless war of extinction, that Deception Well, nestled within the weaponized nebula, was the last surviving human settlement. With no viable targets left to hit, the warships had withdrawn—so the theory went—to wait with machine patience for the emergence of some future technological species whose history they would subsequently cut short.

Riffan was aboard Long Watch to prove this theory false. He refused to believe Deception Well was the last refuge of humankind. He'd aimed his studies at detecting signs of a surviving human presence, though he'd been unsuccessful, so far. A Chenzeme vessel appearing on his watch struck him as cruel irony. Its existence disproved the theory, without offering hope of other survivors.

"Focus, you idiot," he ordered himself.

Academic arguments didn't matter. Other worlds didn't matter. Not now. All that mattered now was the defense of Deception Well.

He closed his eyes a moment. Drew a deep, calming breath. Then another. Sliding into the role he'd trained for: Defense Force commander. If this Chenzeme courser approached the system, it was Riffan's duty to direct Long Watch against it.

He sent his first order out over the ship's network, his voice mostly steady: "All senior crew report to the bridge now. Everyone else, summon your external equipment and see that it's safely stowed. Secure your internal gear, and configure your quarters for acceleration."

Then he punched out through the gel membrane that served as the door of his study, shooting into a round-walled passage. Two worried-looking students and a maintenance drone scrambled to get out of his way as he launched himself toward the bridge.

<><><>

Deception Well was the farthest outpost of the human frontier in the direction known as swan, named for the still-distant supergiant star, Alpha Cygni, brightest light in the constellation of the swan as seen from old Earth.

The first Chenzeme ships ever sighted had come out of the swan, probably originating from somewhere far beyond Alpha Cygni. This newest courser had come from that direction too.

The luminosity of a Chenzeme warship's hull was a known factor that allowed the astronomical DI to work out the courser's distance from Long Watch, while the Doppler shift provided a rough estimate of its relative velocity. The implication was ominous.

Riffan reached the bridge just behind the ship's senior astronomer, Enzo Hui. "You've seen the numbers?" Enzo asked in a low voice.

"They don't look good," Riffan murmured.

He kicked off the wall, shot through a detailed holographic projection of the Near Vicinity that filled the central volume of the chamber, and then arrested his glide at a workstation on the opposite side of the room.

In its current configuration, the bridge held four workstations evenly spaced in a ring around the plane of the designated floor. Enzo took the station on his right. Exobiologist Pasha Andern already occupied the station to his left.

Without looking up, Pasha said, "I'm going over the historical record. Transient-Hazard 6 is closer to the periphery of the nebula than any previously recorded Chenzeme ship."

"Understood," Riffan said as he shoved his bare feet into stirrups that would hold him in place at his workstation. "Its velocity relative to the system also appears significantly slower than past sightings."

The door drew open again. Past the holographic projection, Riffan saw the ship's engineer, Zira Lin, glance around the chamber, her eyes wide, lips slightly parted.

Riffan sensed her fear and shared it. His heart raced. His hands trembled, though he strove not to show it. He had a role to play. The amateur acting he'd done helped him to keep his voice steady as he addressed his companions.

"This is serious, friends," he told them, watching Zira take her place at the station opposite him. "In our sixteen-hundred-year history at Deception Well, no Chenzeme ship has ever tried to enter the nebula. I hope TH-6 will pass on too, but right now it is not behaving like any courser we've observed before."

"Its behavior is frankly ominous," Pasha interjected, a hard edge to her voice. The exobiologist had spoken without looking up, her right hand moving in steady rhythm as she scrolled a display on the slanted surface of her workstation. "Why would its velocity be so low, unless it intends to come in? We know that can happen. It's happened at least once before."

Riffan grunted agreement. The evidence of that long-ago incursion haunted Deception Well's night sky. Caught in the planet's gravity well was the dead dark hulk of a swan burster—a gigantic, ring-shaped Chenzeme warship far larger than a courser—easily visible despite its high orbit.

Like all swan bursters, this one had once carried a gamma-ray gun capable of boiling oceans and burning off planetary atmospheres. It was harmless now, but in some long-gone, pre-human era it had penetrated the nebula and reached Deception Well intact.

Riffan said, "If TH-6 tries to come in, we'll work with Silent Vigil and do what's necessary to stop it."

"We've got time to work out what it's doing," Enzo said. "Maybe days. The courser is slow, but it's not slow enough to survive the nebula. It'll have to dump velocity if its target is Deception Well."

That was true. If the courser entered the nebula at its current speed, its mass would be quickly eroded by continuous micro-collisions with the nebula's tiny grains of debris, and eventually it would be destroyed. That was the good news. The bad news, Riffan thought with a sinking feeling, was that this awful encounter could stretch on for days.

"It might not slow down," Zira said in a trembling voice. "Not if this is a kamikaze mission. Depending on its angle of entry, it might be able to survive long enough to deploy its gamma-ray gun against the space elevator, or worse, aim its mass at the planet. With enough momentum, a collision could shatter the crust and destroy the atmosphere. One courser is a small sacrifice if it means wiping out the last surviving settlement anywhere on the frontier."

Love and Nature! Leave it to an engineer to find the worst-case scenario.

"We are not the last surviving settlement," Riffan said. "There are others out there, somewhere, and someday we are going to find them. And there is no historical record of Chenzeme ships ever employing a suicide attack."

"Because they've never had to?" Pasha wondered. "Our situation here is unique. Chenzeme tactics might prove unique too."

"I agree," Enzo said, eyes half-closed as he communed with the ship's information system.

Riffan nodded. "We'll keep that possibility in mind, but right now, Enzo, we need you to calculate the courser's trajectory. That will tell us if we've got a fight coming."

"I'm working on it," the astronomer assured him. "But it's going to take time."

"Understood."

To work out the courser's trajectory, Enzo had to map its relative motion against background stars—and at its present distance many minutes would have to elapse to detect any motion at all.

Riffan looked across the holographic projection to the engineer. "Zira, I want you to reconfirm all systems. Ensure everything's in peak condition. But keep us silent. Don't give our position away."

She sniffed a little, and nodded. "All systems are in peak condition, but I'll run the checks again."

"Thank you." He turned to his left. "Pasha—"

"I've already run system checks on the gamma-ray gun," she said crisply. "All nominal."

In ordinary circumstances, Pasha spent her hours studying the tiny artificial lifeforms that inhabited the nebula, but for the extent of this emergency, she would serve as weapons officer. Cool and unruffled, she appeared particularly well-suited to the task—though she'd never had an opportunity to fire the weapon. Over the centuries, the laser had been test-fired only three times. The security council feared the weapon would be a beacon to draw the Chenzeme—but they would use it if they had to.

Riffan sighed, now that the first panicked flurry of activity was past. His gaze drifted over the holographic projection, really seeing it for the first time since he'd entered the bridge. It was a high-resolution, three-dimensional model of the Near Vicinity. At the center, a tiny bright sphere represented Kheth, Deception Well's star. The vast scale of the projection gave an illusory impression that the solitary planet was nestled very close to its sun. The blue-green orb was shown as a dot, far smaller than Kheth, but still exaggerated in size to make it visible on this scale. A silver wisp represented the column of the space elevator that linked the planet's surface to the orbital construction yards. The city of Silk, mounted on the elevator column, was indicated by a glint of golden light.

Extending far beyond the orbit of the planet was the artificial nebula, its outer boundary represented by a translucent, spherical green shell. A blue flag at the edge of the nebula marked the position of Long Watch. Another indicated Silent Vigil, on the opposite side of the sun.

Vastly farther out, the Chenzeme courser. A red flag marked its position, making it clear that Long Watch was situated to encounter it first—if it was bound in-system.

And if it was inbound? He worried it was not alone.

Warships like this one were known to run in pairs, with one ship dark. Cold and dark and therefore invisible, its propulsion reef quiet as it coasted through the void on a pre-planned trajectory designed to bring its gun into position to deliver maximum destruction. A trajectory detectable only if it chanced to eclipse some background object while the narrow eye of a telescope was turned its way.

He linked to the astronomical DI. *Re-examine all survey imagery. Look for any indication of a second ship, running dark.

*A re-examination is already underway.

Good.

He turned to the astronomer. "Enzo? We really need that trajectory. A rough estimate, at least."

Enzo shook his head. "Not yet. Not for a while. But if we put another telescope on it—"

"No, I don't want to do that," Riffan said. "We know where the courser is. What we don't know is whether or not it's alone. Now more than ever, we need to continue the standard full-sky scan."

Pasha must have picked up on his worry, because she spoke in a voice so firmly determined Riffan knew it was a play to shore up his confidence. "If there is a second ship, we'll find it and we'll hit it—or Silent Vigil will—before it knows we're here. It doesn't know we're here, Riffan. We're dark, too."

Not entirely true. Long Watch had a heat signature. It was unavoidable given that the ship had to provide an environment warm enough to sustain biological lifeforms. And they potentially advertised their position every time they engaged in bursts of laser communications with the head office in the city of Silk—although such communications took place over a narrow beam unlikely to be detected even with some scattering from the nebula's dust and debris.

"We need to get this right," Riffan said quietly, speaking as much to himself as to the bridge crew. He did not feel adequate to the task but that didn't matter. The task was his.

"Oh," Enzo said. A soft solitary syllable, dull with fear. His head was cocked, his eyes unfocused as he contemplated some newly arrived data visible only to him. "Oh," he repeated. "This is not good."

He looked up, looked around, looked at Riffan. "I put a DI to the task of analyzing recent data from the gravitational sensors. It's found a series of perturbations. Faint. Very faint. But real. A swarm of them, each with a signature that suggests a propulsion reef."

"A swarm?" Riffan asked, his stomach knotting painfully. "Does that mean multiple objects?"

Enzo's lip stuck out. He scowled, he shrugged, then finally he nodded, conceding the distasteful truth: "Six discrete sources of perturbations. I'm assuming six distinct objects."

By the Pure First Light!

"Do you have locations?" Pasha snapped. If she felt any fear, she kept it firmly locked away.

In contrast, Enzo's voice shook when he answered her: "There's data enough to triangulate, to chart their recent movement. All six objects appear to be following roughly parallel paths, separated by intervals between one and two light-hours. I'm going to show you estimated trajectories. Posting on the display . . . now."

Six thin lines, bright orange in color, popped into existence on the projection of the Near Vicinity. The lines curved, suggesting paths that dipped slightly toward the sun. In his mind, Riffan imagined another curved line, one that connected the still-unseen objects in the swarm. Extended outward, that line pointed in the general direction of the courser.

In a subdued voice, Enzo said, "Note that less than a light-hour separates Long Watch from the closest object in the swarm."

Pasha spoke aloud the obvious conclusion. "That proximity can't be coincidence. It knows we're here."

<><><>

Clemantine woke from her latest sojourn in cold sleep, brought slowly to awareness by the ministrations of her body's complement of Makers—complex nanomachines programmed to sustain her at peak physical condition and to defend her body at a microscopic level.

She did not allow her Makers to affect her mood, so they did nothing to ease the anxiety that arrived with awareness.

Her first thought: How much time has gone by? Impossible to know if days had passed, or years—or centuries?

She'd left a personal Dull Intelligence on watch, charged with overseeing the integrity of her cold-sleep chamber and instructed to awaken her only for a short list of explicit reasons:

If her personal security was threatened.

If there was an existential threat to Deception Well.

If ever there was a visitor or news of events from beyond the system.

She did not try to guess between these reasons. As her thoughts quickened, she assumed the cause of her waking encompassed all three.

The transparent mucilaginous tissue of her cold-sleep cocoon pulled away, retreating in shimmering streams along the ribbons of its anchoring umbilicals, leaving her adrift in the zero-gee of her tiny chamber aboard Long Watch.

Clemantine was not part of the ship's small crew. She was but an elder legend, an artifact of a tumultuous past, a hero to her people, and as such she was granted certain privileges—like the privilege of maintaining a private sanctuary here on the edge of the system. Forgotten by most as she was ferried forward in time through the routine of cold sleep, always awaiting some word, some echo of salvation from those who'd left long ago on a quest to find the source of the Chenzeme warships. They'd been just a small company of adventurers. She'd been one of them, once, and an avatar might be one of them still in an alternate life. A better life than this one? Or a worse life? A life already ended? No way to know.

"How long?" she asked, speaking aloud to the empty chamber.

The DI that had wakened her answered in its familiar voice, speaking through her atrium:

*Seven hundred twenty-three years, one hundred twelve days, two hours, thirty-two minutes.

"By the Unknown God," she whispered, taken aback at such a span of time. Far longer than any she'd ever spent in cold sleep before.

The Dull Intelligence made no response to this comment, commencing instead on a status report as its instructions dictated it should do, brief line items spoken in a nurturing masculine voice audible only to her, summarizing the centuries so as to orient her in this age:

Deception Well's active population had slowly increased, tripling in size. Many still lived in the capital city of Silk, built around the column of a space elevator, 320 kilometers above the planet's surface. Many more now lived on the planet, in scattered villages.

The inactive population had grown as well: more people in cold sleep, and many kept only as library records.

The orbital construction yards remained dormant, their last products the twin warships, now more than eight centuries old.

A long untroubled time.

But the DI would not have wakened her only to say that all was well.

"Get to it," she said, wiping the last of the mucus off her smooth brown skin. "What's gone wrong?"

The DI told her of the Chenzeme courser. In its reassuring voice it said:

*The warship's heading is still being determined. It is not yet known if it will enter the Deception Well system. But there is an additional threat. Gravitational sensors have detected faint perturbations approaching this sector of the system periphery. These signals are consistent with known effects generated by propulsion reefs, suggesting the presence of an inbound swarm of artificial objects, estimated six in number.

Fear shot through her, bitter cold. "Give me details. What kind of objects are we talking about?"

*Unknown. The telescopes have been unable to resolve an object in any wavelength.

So the objects were stealthed. They had to be weapons. What else could they be? Running silent and dark.

"Has there been an order for a radar sweep?" she asked, knowing her revival would have required nearly half an hour following the initial alert. Time enough for the bridge crew to take action.

*Negative. That strategy is presently under discussion.

Despite her lack of any official position, Clemantine intended to be part of that discussion. Caution had always been the guiding principle of their little civilization at Deception Well. Caution, always—and they were a long-lived people. Change came slowly. She didn't doubt that even now someone on the bridge was insisting that using radar was a mistake, that the courser would detect it, and interpret it as confirmation that some fragment of a technological civilization still existed in the Well, while passive observation would give away nothing.

But we are not hidden from any who bother to look!

Clemantine intended to argue for aggressive action. Every Chenzeme encounter recorded in their broken and fragmented histories—whether with courser or swan burster or plague—was a testament to the ruthless nature of the Chenzeme killing machines. It must be assumed the stealthed objects were associated with the courser—and anything associated with the courser had to be a weapon aimed against them.

It was up to the crew of Long Watch to locate and destroy the intruding swarm before it could deliver its payload in-system.

Clemantine looked around to find freshly compiled clothing budding off the walls. Puffs of air propelled the clothes toward her. She dressed quickly in a gray-green shirt with a patterned weave and dark-gray leggings—surprised and grateful at the return of such a simple, practical fashion. She ran her palms over her scalp, smoothing black hair that had been modified at the roots to never grow to more than a stubble. Then she kicked at the wall, propelling her muscular body toward the door.

"Open an audio channel to the bridge," she told the DI. "I want to hear what's going on."

Chapter Two

Like Long Watch, Deception Well's array of telescopes orbited on the periphery of the system, beyond the nebula's obscuring dust. They formed a great circle, so far from the central star a single orbit required two and a half centuries to complete.

Riffan had pursued his position aboard Long Watch to gain access to those telescopes. He'd undertaken the requisite two years of Defense Force training to earn time on them and he'd used every minute he'd been allotted.

Half his telescope time had gone to searching the stellar frontier. The other half he'd used to look much farther back along the route of human migration, turning the lenses toward that distant region of space known as the Hallowed Vasties, where the human species had begun.

Great civilizations had once existed there, but all observational evidence suggested those civilizations were gone, lost in a catastrophic collapse centuries ago, though they were so far away no one knew what had happened or what might be left. No one had gone back to look because the resources of the frontier had been consumed in the long defensive struggle against the Chenzeme's robotic ships.

Riffan, gazing at the projected line of unidentified objects on track to enter the nebula, could no longer doubt he was about to engage in an action in that war.

His gaze shifted to take in the span separating Long Watch from Deception Well. Nearly six light-hours lay between them. It would be hours more before the security council even knew there was a threat. Riffan could not receive timely orders or advice. Whatever action he took he would take under his own authority, and the fate of his people could very well depend on the choices he made over the next few hours.

He ought to be frantic under that burden, on the edge of meltdown, yet he felt strangely detached. In shock, he supposed. He was aware of being afraid—muscles taut, heart running in a giddy beat, his breathing a little ragged—but as he weighed the array of threats they faced his mind felt clear.

Despite the known hazard of the luminous courser and the potential threat of a hypothetical dark twin, the line of six undefined objects worried him most.

The Defense Force training they'd all undergone had covered every known means of Chenzeme attack, but had failed to describe an attack like this one. Pasha had searched the library, seeking any mention, any hint of such a phenomenon, but she'd found nothing so far.

"Working hypothesis," Riffan said aloud, his voice trembling only a little. He gestured at the orange lines marking the widely separated paths of the anomalies. "These objects originated with the courser but are now independent of it, powered by their own zero-point propulsion reefs. They are likely small, stealthed, designed to penetrate the nebula while carrying some specialized weapon of unknown capabilities."

"That unknown' aspect," Pasha said heavily. "That part's brutal. Is it unknown because it's new? Never been used against anyone in our branch of history? Or is it unknown because no one survived the encounter?"

"Right," Riffan said.

History was understood to branch. Given the distances between settled worlds there had never been much trade in information and after the war with the Chenzeme had gotten underway there had been none. So the history they possessed was only that branch lived by their ancestors. Distant worlds around the frontier would have their own legacies—if those worlds still survived.

Many worlds had not—a stark fact that compelled Riffan to say, "It doesn't matter which it is. Either way, we do what is necessary—whatever is necessary—to prevent the devices from reaching the nebula."

He looked across the chamber to Zira. "If you could get a DI working on navigational options. Develop a course that will bring us within effective range of the intruding devices, optimized so we can hit all of them over the smallest possible span of time. I don't want to have to chase them down."

She drew back, looking horrified at this request. "Riffan, if we move the ship while the courser is in position to observe us, that could give it incentive to come in-system."

"Right," Riffan said again. "I understand that and I agree it's a risk." He realized he was responding as an academic rather than a military officer, but given Zira's obvious emotional fragility he thought that might be best. "We are a warship," he reminded her. "We have fire power. We were designed to take on the Chenzeme." He called on his acting skills again, making sure to sound confident—though neither Long Watch nor Silent Vigil had ever been tested in battle. "Anyway," he added quietly, "if there's a dark courser already in-system, we need to draw it out."

"I agree," Pasha snapped. "We need to act. But let's remember that this projection is showing us estimated positions. Until we know what's out there and exactly where it is, we've got nothing to shoot at. Right now, what we need more than anything is data. We can get that by using active radar. If we illuminate the unknown devices, we can pinpoint their locations, map trajectories and velocities. And maybe expose the dark courser, if one is out there."

"No," Zira said, hovering over her workstation with fist clenched. "Active radar is too much of a risk. It will expose us. It will pinpoint our position."

"We'll have moved position long before the signal reaches the courser," Pasha countered.

Riffan considered it, considered what he knew of Pasha. He'd known her all his life. They were a similar age. They'd gone to school together. Even so, she had never been more than a casual friend, someone to say hello to. The truth was, Riffan had always found her uncomfortably blunt, even acerbic. Intimidating, too. But he'd never seen her rattled, and he was glad to have her on the bridge.

He said, "Pasha, I think you're right. We've got too many unknowns. Zira, I want you to plot that course, and Pasha, I'm authorizing the radar scan."

"On it," she said, cool and professional.

Riffan hoped it was the right decision. Every order he gave was automatically relayed in-system. Any order he gave could be countermanded by the Defense Force chief, but if that happened, he wouldn't know about it for twelve hours.

To Riffan's surprise, the bridge door snapped open, the luminous white material of the flesh-soft wall retracting to create an oval entrance.

Apart from the bridge crew—already present—there were only six students aboard Long Watch. All should have known to stay clear of the bridge during this emergency. Riffan opened his mouth, ready to remind the transgressor of that, but then he caught sight of the intruder and realized she was not one of the students.

The gentle reprimand he'd intended died on his tongue as an unknown woman glided in. She was tall and muscular, her skin golden-brown, her hair black and very short, her features bold, strong. Tiny gold tattoos glinted on her earlobes. She reached back for a hand-hold that sprouted from the wall just in time for her to grasp it, arresting her momentum with expert grace.

He cocked his head, trying to puzzle out how she had come to be there. They were isolated. On the edge of the system. Visitors did not just drop in.

Gasps and astonished protests greeted her entrance:

"Whoa."

"What?"

"Where did she—?"

Riffan's atrium automatically queried hers for an identity, but he didn't need its help. "I know you," he said, pushing away from his workstation to get a better look at her past the projection of the nebula. "At least . . . I know of you." He'd never seen her before, not in the flesh, but he knew who she was. Everyone did. She was a figure out of history, out of mythology. "You're Clemantine," he concluded in astonishment.

Clemantine had been part of Deception Well's founding generation and later she'd ventured into Chenzeme space, part of the Null Boundary Expedition. She'd been the only one of a four-person company of adventurers to return home. The zero-point propulsion reef had been exclusively a Chenzeme technology until Clemantine brought it back with her, giving the people of Deception Well the means to defend themselves—giving them the technology to build warships of their own.

He'd had no idea Clemantine kept an avatar on this ship.

<><><>

Clemantine had followed the conversation on the bridge through an open audio channel, so she knew where things stood. Gambling her celebrity would give her some measure of authority, she said, "Get that radar sweep underway. We need to know what's out there—and given the distance, it's going to take hours to get any returns."

"Yes, ma'am."

This response came from a woman, identified by Clemantine's DI as Pasha Andern, an exobiologist. Short, white-blond hair floated in a layered halo around Pasha's alert face. She had the slim, slight body type of those who favored efficiency over raw physical strength, an impression reinforced by the beige tunic and pale-green leggings she wore: simple, pragmatic clothing. Pasha added, "It's an honor to have you here, ma'am."

In contrast to Pasha, the ship's commander-of-the-moment, Riffan Naja, had some size to him—well-muscled and emphatically male without being pretentious. Riffan agreed, "It is an honor. But why are you here? How long have you been here? Oh . . ." His confusion gave way to realization. "You were waiting for this day, weren't you?"

"For the day the Chenzeme returned?" Clemantine asked him, startled at the bitterness she heard in her own voice. "Yes."

"Then you knew they'd come again." This was spoken by the engineer, Zira Lin. Each syllable sharp with anger, her words an accusation.

"Of course," Clemantine answered. "Did you let yourself believe otherwise?"

A warm flush rose in Zira's cheeks. She looked away, rolling a shoulder as if to deny such a naive thought. But truth was in her words. "We hoped," she said. "Some of us dared to hope, anyway. It's been more than seven centuries since the last sighting."

Clemantine had no patience for such a limited perspective. "What are seven centuries," she asked, "when the Chenzeme have waged their autonomous war for thirty million years? A war of that duration won't end in your lifetime or in mine, however many centuries we might survive."

"At least we have survived," Zira answered, though she sounded chastened. "Here in the Well. Some say we're the last to survive. That between the Chenzeme and the collapse of the Hallowed Vasties, the human age has come to an end."

She paused as if to give Clemantine an opening to argue, but Clemantine did not. Riffan spoke up instead, "I don't believe that."

"Do you believe that?" Zira pressed as if Clemantine owed her an answer.

Clemantine consented, giving all the answer there was: "No way to know."

The truth was, hunkered down as they were in the shelter of the nebula, not daring to venture beyond it, not since the Null Boundary Expedition anyway, they were abysmally ignorant of the status of other star systems. Still, Clemantine did not hold much hope.

Deception Well survived because of the nebula's ancient inhuman technology. No other reason. And no one knew how far the robotic Chenzeme ships had ventured in their war of extermination. They might have pushed past the frontier, in among the star systems of the Hallowed Vasties. If so, had they found anything left there to destroy?

"It doesn't matter if we're the last or not," Clemantine concluded. "Our duty is the same—to survive."

For Zira, this was answer enough. Tears shone briefly in her eyes, crystalline, trembling in the zero gravity until she wiped them away.

<><><>

Forty-nine minutes later Riffan had an update on the courser's relative velocity and a solid estimate of its trajectory. Together, those figures assured him that it would bypass the Well. At closest approach, TH-6 would still be light-hours beyond the measurable edge of the nebula with a velocity too high to be captured by the system's gravity or to survive passage through the nebula's debris field.

It might still try to dump that velocity. Turn about and return. But such a maneuver would require months, maybe years. Someone else would be designated as commander of Long Watch by then. So Riffan put the courser out of his mind, focusing instead on the suspected weapons swarm.

He watched and he waited, enduring the slow unfolding of time as radar waves propagated outward, moving at the speed of light but still requiring most of an hour to reach the nearest target, and an equivalent time for the reflected waves to return to Long Watch.

At last the first faint signals arrived. A DI compiled them into a blurry image, revealing the shape and size of the leading object in the swarm. They all studied it—Riffan and Pasha, Enzo and Zira, and Clemantine.

Zira spoke first: "It looks too small to be well armed."

The object was like a dart, thin and elongated, only seventy meters from bow to stern and just a few meters in breadth.

Zira said, "It's large enough to house a zero-point propulsion reef and enough bio-mechanical tissue to insulate a thin core of computational strata—but not much more than that."

"Maybe it's a plague ship," Enzo suggested grimly.

Pasha proposed another possibility. "Maybe the swarm is meant to scout the system, chart our defenses and our weaknesses."

Both suggestions sounded plausible to Riffan. He turned to Clemantine, wanting her interpretation, knowing that she'd endured a more harrowing experience of the Chenzeme than anyone else alive. He was taken aback by the shock he saw on her face. "Do you know what it is?" he asked her.

She bit her lip. He heard a hoarse tremor in her words as she said, "I've seen the form before."

Pasha, eyes half closed in mad linkage with the library, said, "It's the same dimensions as the ship that brought you home!"

"Oh, hey!" Enzo shouted in excitement, one hand tapping and stroking his control panel. "Riffan, I've got a radio transmission."

"Radio?" Riffan echoed in confusion. Communications out of Deception Well came by laser relay—and it was far too soon for that.

Enzo said, "It's a repeating segment. Voice. Human voice. Not encoded. Here, listen." He touched a finger to the screen of his workstation and a man's voice emanated from hidden speakers: Don't shoot. Don't shoot. A repeated phrase spoken in the language of Deception Well, but with an accent like Clemantine's, only heard among the older generations:

Don't shoot. I mean no harm. My name is Urban, formerly of the starship Null Boundary. Like Clemantine before me, I've come home. Then he laughed and added, Are you listening to this, Clemantine? I know you made it home, that you brought them the zero-point reef because I've detected its signature here. We won, Clemantine. We learned how to beat the Chenzeme. This courser you see? It's mine. I took it. I hijacked it and made it my own. So don't shoot. I've sent small outrider ships in-system as a communications relay. They're harmless, but through them I can send you the history of the Null Boundary Expedition. You'll want that. Respond to this. Open a data gate. And set up a resurrection pod. I'm sending my pattern through. Do it quickly. I won't be in range for long.

A tonal signal followed, indicating a break, and then the message started to repeat: Don't shoot. Don't shoot. . . .

Riffan's heart hammered in shock, in suspicion, in a desperate hope that it was all true.

He had not been born when Clemantine returned from the Null Boundary Expedition. In those days the Well had possessed only paltry defenses, but even so, Clemantine had approached cautiously in the tiny ship Messenger.

Excitement cut across this line of thought. The object picked up by radar had the same dimensions as Messenger—corroborating evidence that the radio transmission was true. Only someone familiar with the Null Boundary Expedition could have known what those dimensions were.

Clemantine had made her presence known months before she came into range of Deception Well's orbital guns. Her ghost—an electronic version of her persona—had preceded the ship itself and a physical avatar had been grown for her. She'd testified to the history of the expedition up to the point she'd left it, she'd delivered a library of data, and she'd brought the propulsion reef that powered both Long Watch and Silent Vigil.

She'd been accepted for who she was, but Clemantine had not come back in the company of a Chenzeme courser.

Riffan turned to her as the voice continued to speak its repeated message. "Is it a trick?" he demanded.

Her eyes were closed, her lashes trembling against the pressure of a flood of emotion. "It is probably a trick," she said in a husky murmur just audible over the recorded laugh. Her head tilted back as she drew a gasping breath like a swimmer surfacing after some long time underwater. "But it is his voice, his inflections, his attitude." Her eyes opened. She listened—they all listened—until the message finished again.

As the tonal interlude began, she turned to Riffan. In words now sharp and sure she said, "Reply to him. Quickly. As quickly as you can. He can't be allowed into Silk, not yet. Not until we're sure. But we can bring him here. Give him the access code to a data gate, accept his pattern. We can examine it while his avatar is assembled. If there's anything suspicious in it . . ."

A slight hesitation, that Pasha filled. "Then we end the process," she said. "And wipe the avatar before he's live."

Clemantine's gaze fixed on Pasha, as if really seeing her for the first time. Riffan thought she must be angry, but after a few seconds she acknowledged Pasha's words with a slow nod. "Yes. Exactly." Stern approval in her voice.

Then she turned again to Riffan. "In the meantime I suggest you adjust this ship's course, take it closer to the swarm, and find the best angle for the guns." She kicked off the wall and glided toward the still-open doorway.

Before she passed through it, Pasha spoke again. "This is why you're really here, isn't it? This is why you've spent centuries in cold sleep at this remote post. You were waiting for him, or them . . ."

Riffan hissed at her, appalled at the impertinence of such a question. Too late. Clemantine caught the edge of the doorway and turned back. Riffan braced for an outburst, a reprimand.

But Clemantine sounded only downcast, not angry. "Not knowing what became of them has been hard," she confessed to Pasha. "If it is him, I will be grateful to hear his story. But to come here after so long, after all he must have seen, and in such circumstance—" She gestured at the projection. "Who is he now? Not the man I knew."

With that she went out, and the sides of the door swept in, sealing shut behind her.

The message continued to repeat as Riffan turned to Enzo. "Do as she said," he instructed. "Reply to him, and send him the key to a data gate."

"On it."

"We'll need to isolate all data that comes in," Riffan added. "Create a new library for it, separate from ship's systems."

Zira said, "I'll set that up."

"Thank you, Zira," Riffan told her. "I'll work on our trajectory."

He was grateful they had time to prepare. Given the light-speed delay, it would be nearly two hours before the pattern that defined Urban's physical incarnation came through—if it was him at all, and not some Chenzeme trick.

This thought cast a shadow on his mind. Even so, he recalled a subset of the words Urban had spoken: We learned how to beat them.

By the Pure First Light, Riffan hoped it was true.

Chapter Three

For nearly six hundred years Urban had existed as a pattern of data, an electronic ghost, a virtual entity, a complex ever-changing simulacrum of his biological self that ran on a web of computational tissue grown within the Chenzeme courser. An army of highly evolved defensive Makers guarded the perimeter of his holdings, preventing all attempts at incursion by aggressive Chenzeme nanomachines.

This ghost could imagine itself as the inhabitant of a physical body, or as pure mind, or it could adopt the senses of the courser.

Urban had secured his control over the warship by replicating his ghost over and over again and then editing and pruning each electronic avatar to create a new, machinelike personality incapable of distraction or boredom. These artificial ghosts became his staff, his crew, each designed to embrace a specific task—navigation, calculation, astronomy, library research, Chenzeme bio-mechanics, and engineering, including the propulsion and weapon systems.

He named these assistant personalities the Apparatchiks, an ancient term whose connotation of blind devotion to assigned duty he found amusing.

Urban had synthesized an army of Dull Intelligences too, to assist the Apparatchiks and to handle all the simple, repetitive tasks each day required—not that he experienced night and day, but he held tight to the tradition of measuring time according to the days and years of Earth though millennia had passed since any news had come from there and maybe, most likely, humanity's birth world was gone to dust.

He'd like to know if that was true.

Urban had also created small outrider ships, based on the design of Messenger, the little ship that had taken Clemantine's ghost back to Deception Well. He'd named his outriders after ancient gods and guiding spirits: Khonsu, Artemis, Lam Lha, Pytheas, Elepaio, and Fortuna. None were armed, but they extended the reach of his senses and his communications.

He'd grown the fleet of six from raw materials carried by the massive warship, matter originally intended for the ship's own bio-mechanical reproduction.

For most of their existence, the outriders had run ahead of the courser in a long, staggered line, spaced ninety light-minutes apart. All were equipped with small telescopes enabling them to observe across the spectrum. Combining the data they collected gave Urban a detailed view of distant objects. And each outrider held backup copies of his library, and archived copies of his ghost.

Replication was a form of insurance. Even in the void of deep space there was a potential for collision with some bit of rubble. The courser, with all its mass, might be able to survive the huge energies of a high-speed impact, but the tiny outriders could not. Over the centuries, two of them—Khonsu and Artemis—had been destroyed.

Urban had grown new ships to replace them, giving them the same names.

He did what was needed to survive and he endured, but he did not let himself forget who and what he was. He took care to guard his core persona, that most-human version of himself. To endure the years, he modified his time sense, ensuring that neither the events of his past nor his hopes for the future ever seemed too far off as the ship coasted in a centuries-long passage through the vastness between stars.

As he finally drew near to Deception Well, he copied his core persona: one version to stay aboard the courser, another to replicate through the chain of outriders, establish communication, and eventually pass through a data gate aboard the warship stationed at the periphery of the nebula.

If all went well, these two ghosts would ultimately recombine into one. Until then, they operated independently, separated by light-hours from one another.

<><><>

For the first time since he had hijacked the courser and made it his own, Urban rose to consciousness inside a physical body. His eyes snapped open. He heard the beat of his heart. Felt the touch of cool air against newly made skin and a faint electrostatic charge lofting the sparse black hair on his forearms.

He stretched the arms, legs, neck, back, even the feet of this avatar, newly grown aboard the warship, Long Watch. A fully rendered version of himself. Sleek and lean and comfortingly familiar. He curled long-fingered hands into fists, unfolded them again. Relishing the details of mass and resistance, of existence itself. So many years spent in simulated reality he'd forgotten how different it felt to be alive. How glorious. A pleasure just to breathe again, to feel the rumble of his stomach.

Hungry. Not just for food. Instinct stirred, sending blood towards his groin in an ancient tide. Desire as a homecoming rite, an affirmation of place. He'd been alone so long.

Was he still alone?

He shifted his focus outward. Found himself adrift in a zero-gravity environment, nude, confined within a transparent membrane just large enough to contain him. Strokes of light curved across the membrane's shifting surface and across his dark-skinned body.

What was the membrane for? It might be just a gel cocoon left over from his resurrection, although in his experience those were designed to dissolve and drizzle away.

It might be meant to confine him.

Beyond the membrane, a dark undefined space.

His atrium sought a network connection. Found none. Not a surprise. Still, his isolation made him uneasy.

He peered past the cocoon. Was someone there?

Certainly there would be cameras on him, watching, evaluating. And his body would have been studied in detail as it was grown and assembled, confirming he was truly human. He expected no less.

The people of Deception Well—whoever they were in this era—were taking a chance by communicating with him at all. It was a risk on his side too. So much time had passed since he'd left the Well he could not claim to know his people anymore. His heart beat faster as he wondered: Have I made a mistake?

Aloud, he asked, "Why the darkness, the silence?"

No answer, but beyond the gel membrane darkness yielded to a barely perceptible blue light emanating from the walls of a small spherical chamber. As the light brightened, it picked out the edges and curves of a woman's drifting figure. A familiar silhouette.

"Clemantine," he growled in a low, victorious voice. The light became whiter, revealing the woman he'd come to find.

She had not changed, not physically. They'd been lovers once and he remembered every curve of that long, strong, well-muscled body, the feel of full breasts in his hands, the spicy scent of her skin. Her face was the same too: a broad, beautiful, balanced face with a flat nose and full lips. Serious in its expression, even now.

His heart hammered as he gazed at her; his hands shook. The joy of meeting her again almost overwhelming. He longed to reach for her, ached for her physical reality, skin to skin. He held back only because he did not see any similar joy on her face.

Instead, she looked distraught and defensive. "Who are you?" she asked. A demand phrased as a question. The chill in her words froze him.

"You know me," he answered.

"I did once. But who are you now? Did they turn you?"

"They?" he asked. "There is no they. The Chenzeme—whatever they were—they're gone. We found remnants. Artifacts. That's all. But we learned. Like I told you in the radio message, we won. We learned how to beat their ships."

"If you won, where are the others? You said I've come home.' Not we. What happened to them?"

The fear and suspicion in her eyes was more than he'd expected. "They stayed behind," he told her. He made no effort to hide the bitterness these words brought him, but she was unmoved by it.

"Why?" she insisted.

He shook his head. "I'm not going to tell you that story, Clemantine. It's in the library files that I've transferred over. I haven't hidden any part of it. Not from you. Relive it there if you want to. I don't want to. I want to talk about you. I came here to find you."

Raising a hand, he probed at the membrane, pressing his fingers through what proved to be delicate tissue. Tore it open.

She watched him, unmoving. He didn't doubt that she'd left instructions to disassemble them both down to their constituent atoms if something went wrong and he proved to be a Chenzeme weapon after all.

"How did you get here so soon?" he asked her. Then he held up a palm to stop her reply. "No, I already know. You were here. Do you keep an avatar aboard the second warship too? Waiting on the system's periphery for some word from us, for someone to come back. I think you hoped it would be someone else, and not me."

Her golden-brown cheeks warmed with a flush. "No. Urban . . ." Her eyes glistened. "I never thought to see him again. I never thought I'd see any of you. But if I'd ever considered that only one of you might make it back, I would have guessed it'd be you." Her voice shifted, becoming low and feral: "But a Chenzeme warship, Urban. No one else—"

"That's right," he interrupted. "No one else dared to do it, to come all this way in a Chenzeme ship. Not even that other version of you. But here you are on a different timeline." He reached out a hand to her. "Maybe you'll make a different choice."

To his surprise, she took his hand, pulled him into a tight embrace. He reciprocated, the warm scent of her an aphrodisiac exploding across his brain. He kissed her neck, her face. He remembered the pretty chains of tiny gold irises tattooed on the edges of her small ears; he found them and kissed those too. Glittering tears broke free and writhed in the cool air.

"This avatar is not really you, is it?" she asked.

"No. It is me. This is the core." He got his hand up under her shirt, kissed the corner of her mouth. "Please," he whispered. "Have mercy for once. It's been a thousand years."

Her throaty chuckle jacked him even harder than he'd been before. Unbearable.

The chamber shrank around them, squeezing out the glint of camera eyes, leaving them enclosed in a hollow just large enough to contain them. No way out. No way in.

Clemantine helped him peel off the thin layer of her clothing and then they locked together, his fingers embedded like claws in the soft wall to hold their position, her fingers hard against his back. Reminding one another of what it was to be physical beings, man and woman. To be alive.

<><><>

Later, but still too soon, he told her, "I've got only hours before I have to go."

He held her close, her body against his, a physical connection unbroken since they'd begun.

She leaned back in his arms and eyed him sleepily. "You have forever," she countered. "You're home. This avatar, anyway. This is your home."

"No. I won't stay." Her body tensed in his arms, her embrace tightened as if she would hold him there. "I made that decision long ago," he reminded her. "I'm here now for you—and to trade information. I've already transferred the full history of our expedition. Now I need data from Silk's library. Everything known about the Hallowed Vasties. Their history, and current observations. I've got only hours to make the exchange. You're tracking the courser so you know this is a fly-by. I wish it could be longer, but it would have taken years to dump enough velocity to achieve orbit—and if I'd tried it, this warship or the other one would have blown me up."

"You sent the swarm ships instead," she mused. "We thought they were some kind of weapon, plague ships maybe."

"Just communications relays to extend my reach, give me more hours here."

She shook her head. Sighed deeply. "Damn you, Urban. After so many centuries, to have no time. And you don't stay, you won't leave even a ghost. Because no version of you wants to be trapped here?"

"Sooth," he agreed.

Bitter now: "Some things never change."

"You know me, Clemantine. I'm in possession of an immensely fast and powerful starship. What version of me would ever give that up?"

She sighed again. "No version I know. So you're going there? To the Hallowed Vasties?"

He nodded, wanting her to share his excitement. "Our origin lies in the Hallowed Vasties. Our beginning, our earliest days. But it's all changed. All of it unknown now. That makes it a new frontier, an inverted frontier, because the unexplored region lies inward from the edge of settled space. I want to see what's there, what's left, voyage all the way to Earth if I can."

The outward migration from Earth had unfolded over thousands of years. Robotic probes went first, exploring and mapping tens of thousands of stellar systems, looking for those with sterile worlds orbiting within habitable zones. Those worlds were re-engineered, made viable and beautiful for the people who came to possess them.

It was as if the galaxy had been given to humankind by an unknown god, theirs to nurture and to slowly fill with new generations.

Frontier populations were never great in number, but they were enough that an innate restlessness drove some portion of them onward to still newer worlds. Always, they were the individuals who made a choice to engage in life, in the reality of physical existence.

That choice served as a filter in a selection process dividing them from those who chose to stay.

And when they looked back across space and time, they wondered what they'd left behind as megastructures enclosed the stars of the earliest inhabited systems.

On the frontier, those distant star systems came to be known as the Hallowed Vasties. Frightening rumors crossed the void, describing a behavioral virus run wild, one that spurred massive population growth and an evolutionary leap to a group mind, a Communion that was more than human.

Too far away to worry about. That was the consensus on the frontier and people pushed on—until the Chenzeme warships found them.

In those tumultuous centuries as the frontier collapsed, the Hallowed Vasties too began to fail. The stars that had been hidden within cordons of matter emerged again, and no one knew why.

Urban wanted to know why. It was the goal he had set for himself: to learn what had happened to the Hallowed Vasties and what was left. If there were only remnants and ruins, he wanted to see them. If something had grown up from the ruins, he wanted to see that too. He wanted to see it all with his own eyes.

"I've watched the Vasties for centuries," he told Clemantine. "Every star ever known to have been mantled by a Dyson swarm is visible again. We thought that meant failure. Civilizational collapse on a massive scale. Death. But there are signs of life. Transmission spectra confirm the presence of oxygen, water, organic molecules. I want to know what was there, what happened, and what's come after. And I don't want to go alone. I want you to come with me."

She closed her eyes, giving him no answer. He nuzzled her neck. "What are you thinking?"

"The past and the future," she whispered. "Both are so very far away. That last time I saw you—you and him—a thousand years ago. And another thousand years to Earth, even in that great beast you've stolen."

"It is a great beast," he agreed. "And I've named it after a great beast. I call it Dragon. And time doesn't matter to us. So what if it takes a thousand years to reach the Hallowed Vasties? If the time drags, we sleep."

"How peacefully can we sleep aboard a Chenzeme courser?" she asked him.

He told her, "Don't think of it that way. It's a hybrid ship. Its neural structure is heavily modified. It's under my control. And I want you with me again. You. After all those years we spent together, you are part of me . . . and I am so hungry for human company. Don't abandon me again."

Her eyes narrowed. "I think that other version of me made a smart choice to stay behind."

"No. I think she regrets her choice. Because you're her. You're the same. You haven't changed. You don't have another life, do you? No new lover, no children. All you've done is wait. You've skipped over these years, passed them in cold sleep, waiting for us to come back."

"I needed to know," she said defensively. "But you—you seem the same too. That's on purpose, isn't it? You want me to believe you're still that same smart-ass pirate, but Urban, you can't be. Not if you've grafted yourself on to that alien killing machine."

A tremor of guilt. A shrug. A confession: "This is me. My human core. I keep this persona because I want to remember who I am and what matters. But I'm not alone. I remade myself multiple times. My Apparatchiks are highly edited, each with a different technical skill. They're based on me, but they're not me anymore. Some of them are insufferable and sometimes we argue among ourselves, but no mutiny so far."

"All ghosts?"

"Yes."

"And what is it like to be the master of an alien killing machine?"

He tapped his chest and told her the blunt truth: "For me, this version of me, it's fucking miserable. Soul-annihilating loneliness. Out there, coasting in the void between stars, awake and aware and so far from anywhere or anything, any human thing, knowing with utter certainty that I'm alone and not even the mind of the Unknown God could find me. It's terrifying."

"That's not a very persuasive argument if you're trying to convince me to come with you."

"I need you."

"I don't want to live as a ghost."

"We don't have to. It's a big ship. There's room. There are resources. We can be physical when we want it—and god, I want it. I want you. And when time becomes unbearable we can retreat into cold sleep to speed the transit, like we did before. Think about it. Please."

"I am thinking about it," she admitted. She stroked his arm, his cheek, considering what he'd offered. "An inverted frontier?"

"Yes. That's how I think of it."

"I like that."

Curiosity was awake within her—an almost forgotten feeling. And he was right that she had no attachments, no obligations of honor. She'd spent three-quarters of a millennium asleep, waiting for some word.

She told him, "It was unbearable not knowing what had happened out there. I would have turned around and gone back after you, but I was afraid that no matter how long I looked, I would never find a sign of you. That seemed the likeliest outcome."

"This time we'll be together. No doubt about what happens. We'll know."

She nodded her tentative agreement. "I want to send a ghost to your ship, now, to verify what you're telling me."

"Due diligence," he agreed. "You've got the address."

She shifted her focus inward, using her atrium to create the ghost, and then she sent it on its way. If this turned out to be a trap, the ghost could dissolve itself. If it didn't return, she would know.

"It's a long round trip," he warned her.

"I can wait."

"I want you to go over the library files too," he said. "Make sure they're legitimate, consistent, human."

"I've got a DI working on it," she assured him.

He nodded shortly, then confessed, "I've sequestered some of the data. Nothing critical. Just some of the raw details. Things too personal to share in full—mostly at the end. That cache is open to you, but no one else."

"All right." Her voice, suddenly hoarse. She feared what she might find when she accessed that privileged data. It might be enough for her—it might be best—to know in only a general way what had happened.

She allowed herself one question: "We lost him in the end, didn't we?"

"Yes."

A soft sigh. She had always known it.

"Nineteen hours," Urban warned, "before we lose data coherence."

"Okay."

Time enough. If he was lying, if this was subterfuge, if his apparent sincerity was a false front for a Chenzeme weapon, the history he carried would surely reveal it.

He must have guessed her thoughts, because he looked at her with that pirate half-smile of his, so familiar, taunting her away from melancholy, and he asked, "You still don't trust me, do you?"

She replied very seriously, "In the madness of these hours I don't trust myself."

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