Guardian of Night

by Tony Daniel

  The SECEX nodded sadly. “But to the MDR. It’s a very simple message, really. From a SIGINT petty officer, seems to be. The MDR states that there is one human alive on that pod.”

  “Some good news,” Coalbridge said.

  “One human,” said the SECEX, “and one sceeve. Both alive.”

  “A sceeve? Sharing the same atmospheric mix? How the hell is that even possible?”

  “That’s a question we would very much like an answer to,” said the SECEX. “Along with just who or what this sceeve actually is.”

  Coalbridge considered. “You’re saying that sceeve is the Poet, sir?”

  “So says the MDR.”

  “We have the Poet.” Coalbridge let out a low whistle. “I’ll be damned.”

  “Unfortunately, at this time, we do not have the Poet. What we have is a sceeve invasion. I cannot afford to send the Extry, a significant chunk of the Extry, or even a small task force, to find out who or what is in that lifepod.”

  “I suppose I can see the logic in that, sir,” Coalbridge said. “But a sceeve that doesn’t immediately commit suicide by gid deliquescence the moment we capture it, sir. That’s a turncoat. Never happened before. That’s the Poet out there. I’ll bet my command on it.”

  “You’re about to.”

  “Pardon, sir?”

  “I’m sending you.”

  “Me?”

  “You and the Joshua Humphreys,” said the SECEX. “I could send a scoutcraft, but what could it do? Turn around and head back? I want you to investigate and act, Captain. Full latitude.”

  “How old is this MDR, if I’m permitted to ask, sir?”

  “Eight hours. Came in this morning just before the RAMP meeting. Only Maggie and I knew about it.” Camaroon chuckled. “We were terrified that Tillich had gotten wind of the info and would threaten the president with it.”

  “I don’t follow, sir.”

  “Don’t worry about it,” the SECEX said. “We dodged that particular bullet.”

  Coalbridge wondered if the president herself had been informed at that time. He knew better than to ask.

  “So, I’ll be leaving—”

  “Walt Whitman projects a departure time in forty-eight hours with full provisioning and final systems burn-in.”

  “She’s already stocked, sir. I’ve seen to it.” Coalbridge wondered how to put this delicately and without getting anybody in trouble.

  “Have you?”

  “Back channels, sir. That sort of thing.”

  The SECEX shook his head. “Maggie was right. She says you’re a half step away from DTSO, Captain.”

  DTSO was Extry slang for “danger to yourself and others.”

  “I hope not, sir.”

  “She also told me you had a brilliant mind underneath that bull head of yours.” Camaroon shrugged. “Anyway, no burn-in, no additional provisioning, and a DT in twenty-four.”

  “And the destination?”

  “82 Eridani.”

  Coalbridge totted up a quick estimate in his head. “Ten days.”

  “Yes.” The SECEX sat back again. “As I mentioned, I’m sending you with open orders. If there’s any truth to this Poet craziness, act on it. This is fourth and long, son. You’re the Hail Mary. You get that?”

  “Yes, sir,” said Coalbridge. “I get it.”

  “Have any problem with it?”

  Coalbridge flushed. He was either getting his dream assignment—or he was about to be sent to the ass-end of nowhere on a wild-goose chase and miss the greatest battle ever fought in humanity’s short history of space flight. And maybe return to a burned-out, blasted Earth.

  “No place I’d rather be, Mr. Secretary.”

  “We’ll try to hold the sceeve to the Kuipers, then fall back from there if necessary. When they attack, it’s not going to be pretty.”

  “No, sir.”

  “You know I grew up in Kansas, right?” said the SECEX. “Suburb outside of Topeka.”

  “Yes, sir, I think I knew that.”

  “Let me tell you something, Jim. You grow up in Kansas, you learn to feel a storm coming. And right now—this whole situation has the smell of tornado weather. So let’s pray to God that that lifepod does yield up something.”

  “I’ll do my best to find out, sir. If I may put in a few special requests for crew additions before my departure time?”

  “You got somebody in mind?”

  “Lieutenant Commander Griffin Leher, sir. The Depletion Report creep.”

  “Thought you might say that,” Camaroon replied. “Done.”

  “Thank you, sir.”

  The SECEX shook his head. “Goddamn, this is the wrong time for this to be happening. One more year. Even six months. But Tillich slowed me down. I haven’t got my vessels.” The SECEX suddenly looked tired. Old. His fleshy, jovial face sagging into a worried frown.

  “We have days. Maybe hours. Let’s make them count, Captain,” Camaroon said. “Let’s make them count.”

  “Yes, Mr. Secretary.”

  A message scrolled across the dazz-paper pad on the SECEX’s desk, and he glanced down at it. Coalbridge couldn’t make it out, but it was highlighted with a red priority flag. “Okay, I’ve got to take care of this,” the SECEX said to Coalbridge. “Good luck to you and your crew, son.”

  “Aye, sir.”

  “And take the night off and get some rest, Captain. You’re going to need it,” said the SECEX. “That’s an order.”

  Coalbridge stood, saluted.

  “Dismissed.”

  As he turned to leave, Coalbridge suddenly knew exactly how he planned to obey the final orders of the SECEX. Relaxation? Yes. Sleep. Less likely. To do so would, however, require a little persuading. But she was most definitely worth the effort.

  Yep.

  A captain’s work was never done.

  1 December 2075

  Vicinity of Beta Geminorum, aka Pollux

  Guardian of Night

  The cleanup of Milt’s body was surprisingly easy. The craft was equipped with very efficient nanotech for such tasks, and Storekeep Susten had brought along a “gut bag” from the processing lockers. In no time, Milt became a pasty goo in a clear container, and V-CENT was once again spotless. The churn even cleaned and freshened Ricimer’s bloodstained uniform in the process. The churn’s controlling program would log its entire process with Lamella and Governess—which ordinarily would have triggered an alert, and vessel marines to be dispatched to arrest him, had Lamella not immediately overwritten all the data.

  That left the problem of what to do with Milt’s two DDCM subordinates who were also aboard. And, more importantly, the portion of the crew not in on Ricimer’s plot—which amounted to nearly thirty of his fifty-five officers. Too many to risk imprisoning them. Besides, what would he do with prisoners in the end? He wasn’t going to kill them, but Sporata starcraft were not equipped with lifeboats in which to set them adrift. Lifeboats were for weak-willed traders. For lesser species.

  Ricimer pondered the solution he’d come up with on his way back to his bridge.

  The vessel was under his command, but not yet under his control. The rates were Lamella’s task. She was a constant presence in their minds. She was not all-powerful, of course, but she had each rate on continual virtual feed and could modify his or her perception of reality by additions and subtractions of sensory input and, more importantly, with plausible explanations for almost anything out of the ordinary.

  His senior officers were handpicked. He’d served with them all over the years. He’d been careful to approach only those whom he knew to have bitterness against the Administration, but not against the Sporata in particular. The Sporata certainly had its problems, but it wasn’t actively malevolent. In any case, Ricimer had nothing against it.

  The Administration, on the other hand, was ruthlessly efficient in all things political. Ricimer was no democrat. He didn’t consider himself a Mutualist, either, with their quaint belief in symbiosis and interspeci
es innovation. Ricimer supposed, if pressed, he would say he had no political leaning but was merely opposed to institutionalized murder.

  Especially when his family was the victim.

  His own motive, he had decided, was revenge. And he had only begun to exact it.

  Ricimer entered the bridge and briskly returned to his atrium. He had barely toed into his virtual-feed grid when his XO, Talid, turned to him with a report. “Captain, we have a problem.”

  “What’s that, Commander?”

  “We’ve got two atmospheric sensors that are registering low levels of contamination.”

  “Radiation?”

  “Churn, sir,” said Talid. “Lieutenant Frazil, report.”

  Frazil was the Craft Internal Systems Officer, the CISO.

  One of mine, Ricimer thought. Trained him from a plebe.

  Ricimer turned to Frazil. “What are we looking at, CISO?”

  “Captain, I’ve sent crews for a physical examination, but as of now Lamella and the autonomous monitoring routines cross-check. Both confirm contamination in atmospheric ducts Aft 13 and Aft 57 with point three ppm military-grade churn.”

  “Any evidence of activation?”

  “Not at this time, sir.”

  Which, under different circumstances, would have been an enormous relief to all who heard it. An engineered nanotech plague attack on the material structure of the vessel was the nightmare scenario of any Sporata vessel. The threat could take so many forms and, like a rapidly mutating biological virus, could be extremely difficult to eradicate before it infected and destroyed everything in its wake.

  “Those are officers’ quarters ducts, are they not, CISO?”

  “That’s correct, sir,” Frazil responded. “We’ve projected a path back to the churn stores and have isolated two possible routes.”

  “Then shut them both down, Lieutenant.”

  “Already done, sir,” said Frazil. He seemed appalled that Ricimer could believe he might neglect such a basic action. “But officers are present in quarters, and I wasn’t certain—”

  “Quarantine the area. Seal them in—including your crews. Then get me a list of who we’ve got in there.”

  “Aye, sir.” Frazil bowed his head, concentrated. Ricimer knew he was furiously sending a barrage of shutdown orders through his virtual feed.

  “Do we have a timeline and list of possible contaminated personnel, CISO?”

  “Coming up right now, sir.” The crenelations that were Guardian written language rose under Frazil’s hand on his console, and he quickly rubbed his gripping gills across the surface, releasing the digitized esters to his muzzle. “Last clear reading was 1.7 atentias ago, Captain. I’ve got a list of officers who have been in and out of quarters since that time, sir.”

  “Very good, CISO. How many?”

  Frazil quickly counted. “Twenty-seven, sir.”

  Good. Twenty-seven was exactly the right number. Every one of “his” officers had secret orders to stay out of the officer sector for the past two atentias.

  “Get the potentially infected officers into isolation and scan them one by one,” Ricimer said.

  “Sick bay can’t handle that many, sir,” said Talid.

  “The only place big enough to isolate them is Cargo B,” Frazil added.

  Ricimer nodded. “Very well. Order each of those officers to activate exterior excursion fields immediately and report to Cargo B. And get a quantum amplification generator into Cargo B. I want the area sealed subatomically.”

  “Aye, Captain.”

  Ricimer turned to the officer in charge of SCAN, the vessel’s exterior sensor array.

  “Lieutenant Roth, what are we tracking on the beta? Any of ours around?”

  “No, sir, I don’t think so.” Roth checked his sensors momentarily, then reported back. “If we’re looking for transport, sir, the nearest thing I see is a merchantman hauler. She identifies as the Basalt Plain Colonizer under army contract.”

  “Empty or full?”

  “She’s headed out empty to pick up a tech load on 111 Tauri D.”

  “Perfect,” Ricimer said. “She’ll have a big hold.”

  Roth moved his hand deeper into the bulkhead, motioned up further information on his visual display. He was also receiving verbal feed directly to his nervous system through the nerve ends in his hands. “That she does, sir. She’s on registry with a crew of fifteen. Twin commodity bottles set for electrostatic maximum. She’s not a supertanker, sir, but she’ll do if you plan to . . .”

  Roth was set to continue but realized he was about to overstep his bounds hazarding a guess as to what step his commanding officer was considering next.

  “Yes, she will do,” said Ricimer. “Thank you, SCAN.” He turned to Talid. “Set a course, Commander. And give the Colonizer a single-burst beta, compressed and encrypted, to let her know we’re coming. Nothing more. Do not identify. She’ll know we are Sporata by the signal strength.”

  “What if she turns tail and runs, Captain?”

  Talid had a point, and it was a good suggestion even though they both knew the Colonizer was going nowhere.

  This rendezvous had been arranged one molt ago, about six months.

  Yet it was important to keep up pretenses. Trader craft lived in constant fear of the Sporata and had been known to flee contact. It was seldom a good thing to have the space navy coming down on you. At the very least, it probably meant a complete search for contraband and possible smuggling charges. Even if you were clean, something could always be found that was against Regulation.

  “If she runs, we’ll reel her in, Ms. Talid,” said Ricimer. “That vessel doesn’t know it yet, but she is ours now.”

  “Aye, Captain.”

  “And keep us quiet, XO,” Ricimer added. “Craft Orders must come first.” Ricimer disengaged himself from the atrium. “I’m going down to Cargo B to see to my officers. The bridge is yours, Commander. Notify me when we’re in range of the Colonizer.”

  “Aye, sir.”

  “Thrive the Administration.”

  “Thrive the Administration, Captain.”

  TEN

  5 December 2075

  Vicinity of Beta Geminorum, aka Pollux

  Guardian of Night

  SCREECH!

  Pressure waves throughout the craft. Sudden compression of atmosphere even on the bridge, where Ricimer occupied the captain’s atrium. No vessel, no matter how well-built, was meant for such a craft-to-craft docking as he was now performing, and there was bound to be strain.

  He only hoped Lamella’s calculations did not have a missing or incorrectly input variable that had pushed the docking craft beyond their tolerances. There was no chance of Lamella making a mistake in her computation, of course. She was the soul of mathematical precision.

  POP! CLANG!

  The sheering tension of hull against hull as force fields collided. The ozone odor of electrical fire, of particles occupying the same space with one another in positions that could not be in any natural order, forced into dimensions that did not exist, the cracks between cracks pulled open by paradox.

  “Captain, we’ve got the Basalt Plains Colonizer in hold state,” reported Talid. “We should have hull integration in fifty vitias.”

  Ricimer nodded. “Have the infected crew ready.”

  “Aye, sir.”

  Ricimer tightened his foot grip on the grill beneath him and allowed the image feed from Cargo B to flood into his mind.

  A crowd of officers clumped together near a bulkhead. A few clutched personal items. Some were naked, rousted from the Guardian “sleep” of tagona-quiescence and herded to this bay without warning. For those who had old-fashioned “half-hypha” hybrid blood in them, nakedness revealed the black stripes on their thighs that marked them as socially inferior, whatever their rank. This uncovered sight was considered deeply humiliating, although Ricimer didn’t give a damn. A good officer was a good officer. Most were very frightened. A churn infection was no jok
e. If the bug found a way through your defenses, you’d be dead in an instant. And it could happen at any time if you left the situation untreated. Today. Tomorrow. Many cycles from now. The churn worked according to its own inexorable timetable.

  Sizzle!

  The wall dividing his craft from the merchantman dissolved in a flicker-field integration, and a portal opened up into the other craft’s cargo hold. It was huge, dark, and empty. After a moment, its electroweak-gravity normalized with that of the cargo bay.

  Time to get the show underway.

  “CISO Frazil, get those officers off the craft,” Ricimer said.

  Frazil, who was in charge of the cargo-bay team, took in his order. He wore a contamination suit and held an ester broadcaster in one hand. He could not communicate through the suit’s skin, which was impermeable to the quark level, but he could pass a signal to the broadcaster to do so. With a loud blast of command ester, he ordered the “infected” officers forward. One by one, they stepped into the portal, moved over and out of the craft. Ricimer counted.

  Twenty-five . . .

  Twenty-six . . .

  And twenty-seven. They were all off his craft and safely in the commodities bottle of the merchantman, where they’d be transported home—and then torn practically apart and reconstructed to be sure there was no lingering plague hidden within them.

  Which would be uncomfortable in the extreme for them, but was better than being dead.

  “Officers of the Guardian of Night, I salute you,” Ricimer said, using Lamella to amplify his esters and express them into the air of the hold. “Your sacrifice will not go unnoticed. Honor be upon you, and Thrive the Administration.”

  He watched as the departing officers turned to face the portal through which they’d come.

  “Thrive the Administration,” said Curdek, the highest ranking among them. “And good luck, Captain.”

  Suddenly, above Ricimer, an alarm light began to flash. Information esters infused the cargo bay through a series of powerful nozzles. “Alert, alert. Military-grade churn contamination detected in crew quarters. Point four ppm. Alert!”