Guardian of Night

by Tony Daniel

  Now Cliff-clinging-icefall Malako was about to kill him.

  The Powers of Heaven

  “Go with a forward bottle,” Malako told the weapons officer. In his intensity of concentration, Malako accidentally breathed in his own words as he spoke. They tasted a bit like the soup he’d absorbed for dinner the night before.

  In it also was the odor of apprehension, but not of the flight response. No, his fear had long been well under control. Malako took a deep breath. Another. There. He’d done it, just as Ricimer had taught him when they were scrub ensigns together serving aboard that old battlecraft the Orthogonal Electrostatic Wave Absorber.

  Ricimer’s calming hand on his arm. His mint-like, calming words. “We all feel the panic, Ice. It’s part of our biology. Work through it. Turn it under your feet. Feed upon it for courage.”

  But he didn’t feel particularly courageous now. Merely resigned to what must be done.

  Because if Malako didn’t make a hero of himself, he had no doubt what awaited him back in the Shiro. He’d been a known associate of the traitor Ricimer.

  Malako turned to his vessel weapon’s officer, who had been standing by for the order.

  “Fire,” Malako said.

  The Joshua Humphreys

  The Humphreys rose over the curve of the Mutualist craft—now suddenly not a spinning, out-of-control Mutualist craft at all but a shapely Sporata battle vessel. The Humphreys rose like a new moon first revealing itself. Coalbridge estimated that he was no farther than a couple of dozen kilometers from the other vessel, the Powers of Heaven. And then she was in sight—and he called out his order to ZAP.

  “Throw!”

  The electric crackle of the railguns filled the vessel for an instant, then was silent. The recoil from the rock launch hit seconds later.

  “Rocks away, Captain,” Sakuda, the ZAP officer, reported.

  “Stabilizing thrusters at eighty percent,” said Katapodis at the helm.

  “Keep her steady,” Coalbridge said in a low voice. He stared out into space. With bottle armor forward, the bridge was canted too high to have a view of where the Humphreys was headed. Coalbridge quickly pulled down a display, placed another, containing more data, on top of it. The two merged, giving him the view he needed. A gyrating spherical object, clear-skinned with a glowing blue center, separated from the sceeve vessel. It looked for all the world like one of the huge, elongated bubbles he’d used to create with the giant wand set he’d had as a kid, the kind that used dishwashing liquid as the fluid dip.

  There’s the attack, Coalbridge thought. Bottle torpedo. He’d know in a moment if he’d guessed right as to its nature. His rocks were represented by a traveling cloud of sparkles, tiny and, he knew, perfectly rendered in position and relative size.

  If it were antimatter, his counterattack would be essentially useless, overpowered. But he knew this vessel, this commander. He was supremely efficient with his maneuvers and weapons. Thrifty.

  He out maneuvered me the last time we met, that’s for sure, thought Coalbridge. Fooled me into thinking his range was shorter than it was, then blasted hell out of us. Lucky we got out of there in one piece.

  Coalbridge watched his rocks cross the void toward the sceeve weapon. Closer.

  Closer.

  The Powers of Heaven

  “Captain Malako, emergency proximity warning,” came the calm, vanilla voice of Lamella. “Alien objects detected afore!”

  “Objects? What objects?” spurted Malako. “Recall the torpedo!”

  “Not possible.”

  “Disarm!”

  “Fail-safes are double-trigger beta and electromagnetic. Calculating. No time for wave travel to confirm disarm,” said Lamella.

  Malako cursed. Of course. The new electromagnetic confirmation signal. Transel, curse his rotting body in the hole, had required all fail-safes to be fully engaged when the Powers of Heaven had destroyed the human intelligence vessel. He normally unlocked them immediately upon mission departure and for control himself.

  Thrice curse the receptor.

  These rocks had come from somewhere. They had the configuration of an Earth vessel throw. It was all too obvious. He’d been ambushed!

  As if she’d read his mind, Lamella confirmed his guess. “Captain, situational analysis indicates human weaponry.”

  And he could do nothing to stop it.

  Nothing.

  “Where? Where is the cursed vessel?”

  Malako’s nasal membranes flared in outrage. He stomped on the deck of the bridge. Transel would not hear it. The bridge “hole” was too insulated, guarded against detection.

  You’ve killed me, Transel, you stupid, stupid fool!

  The bridge atmosphere filled with Malako’s carbolic scream of a command. “All shields forward!”

  The Joshua Humphreys

  Rock met nuke, and a momentary star burst into being in the nearby heavens.

  Detonation.

  And close to the Sporata vessel. As close as he’d planned. The sceeve vessel flowered with blue-white explosions. This he could see perfectly well without virtual enhancement. Coalbridge watched as the sceeve craft suddenly lurched to the left, exposed its long flank.

  Here was the chance he’d been waiting for. “Fire!” he called out.

  Turning to face him from the phantom gunnery panel, his weapons geist called out the coordinates at which the Humphreys’s RADICL chemical-laser bank would strike. “Spread concentrated at twenty-three Alpha, November eighty-six,” ZAP reported. Then, after the briefest pause, “Direct hit, sir.”

  A moment of elation, and then a tactical report from DAFNE. “The Powers has located and locked on us. Her internal beta chatter is spiking up twenty percent. Analysis: she’s preparing to concentrate fire.”

  “All right then,” Coalbridge said. He banded through channels. “Ready, DAFNE? It’s time for the suture.”

  “Aye, Captain,” replied the servant.

  “On my mark . . . do it.”

  “Engaged, sir.”

  With a lurching displacement, a stomach-turning feeling of being two places at once, he felt the Humphreys let go her hold on one portion of space-time and be whipped—no, instantly transported—to another. It did not feel as if he ceased to exist and then existed elsewhere, which was what had actually happened. His mind tried to tell him he’d traveled the distance in a flash of movement, or at least some sort of distance. He knew there was no actual sloshing of the inner-ear fluids, no trail of light. But his mind compensated by manufacturing just such a sight and sensation of movement, attempting to make the Q through which they travelled fit the N in which human perception had evolved.

  And where am I in that instant of transfer? Maybe it was best not to think on such questions at the moment.

  The Powers of Heaven

  “Captain Malako, the human vessel is directly abaft us.”

  “What? How?”

  “Not clear, sir,” said the XO. “She was there above the Mutualists, and then gone. How she got behind us is unknown, sir.”

  But Malako did know. He’d even done it himself before.

  A suture maneuver.

  The humans certainly seemed to learn their lessons well.

  The Joshua Humphreys

  The sceeve craft was partially eclipsing the Efficacy of Symbiosis, which now spun in its crazy rotation behind the Powers of Heaven.

  “ZAP, send the nukes.”

  “Aye, Captain. Nukes away.”

  “DELTA, all shielding forward!”

  “Aye, sir.”

  They were no more than ten kilometers from the Powers, on her other side now.

  This was going to be apocalyptic. Had to be. A nuclear strike was the only sure way to kill a sceeve vessel.

  Even with multiple bottles absorbing the blast energy, the Humphreys was going to be thrown thousands of kilometers away. There would be no ability to jump. A slingshot maneuver such as they’d performed depleted the immediate quantum neighborhood
of uncertainty. It would take several minutes before unobserved phenomena built back to critical mass. Not long enough. He’d have to put on the brakes in the conventional manner.

  Hell ride on the way.

  Coalbrige had fifteen one-hundred-kiloton nukes, and he’d fired all of them.

  The image of Sakuda tolling the seconds filled the chroma overlay of the entire vessel. All other chatter ceased. “Nuke activation in three, two, one—”

  The Powers of Heaven

  Malako turned his attention from the human vessel. There was nothing to do. He had no time to turn his bottle armor abaft.

  He was completely exposed from that direction.

  Malako looked instead to the Sporata vessel on the view screen. The Guardian of Night stood revealed. Of course it was the Guardian.

  And as the nukes bloomed, one word went tearing through Malako’s mind.

  Ricimer!

  The Joshua Humphreys

  Flash of matter unfurling into energy.

  In his overlay, Coalbridge registered the tsunami of radiation headed toward him.

  Just before the shock hit, Coalbridge reflected that “snap-back and nuke” was a tactic that had never been tried before. If he survived, he might get a nice footnote in the history books for the feat.

  The wavefront hit. The gamma rays of which it was composed ate into the Humphreys’s bottle-shield like a blowtorch turned on a Styrofoam cup. Layer after layer melted away. But like Styrofoam, there were bubbles upon bubbles, layer upon layer. For every “real” quantum bottle generated from the vacuum, there were hundreds of “virtual” bottles tricked off of their physics. When the gamma rays entered each bottle, their frequency was pitched down, their wavelength requirements—and so their very being—lengthened.

  When the deadly radiation reached the crew core, it was nothing more than harsh sunlight.

  So the crew wouldn’t die of radiation poisoning, but the shields must be maintained and dissipating the energy they absorbed down to kinetic energy was another matter. The vessel was wracked and rolled. The conventional reaction rockets, under the control of servant personas, attempted to compensate. Coalbridge could hear the quick, machine-language chatter between DAFNE and her underlings as a low, whistling whine. Then there was a sharp exclamation from DAFNE that he had never heard before.

  It sounded almost like—

  It was.

  Pain.

  The rockets were overcome, and the vessel was picked up and carried like a broken surfboard, churned under and around and around and under again with a spreading shockwave of outraged thermonuclear energy uprooted from its happy home wound inside hydrogen nuclei and flung helter-skelter into another billion years of gypsy wandering.

  Pseudogravity failed. Too many compensation variables flooding the algorithm as at once, it seemed. Pieces of equipment—chairs, consoles—broke loose, careened across the bridge enclosure. Coalbridge felt his own feet coming up off the floor, or the floor moving away from him—it amounted to the same thing. Suddenly a chair sped past him, and its backrest sheered into the arm of Sakuda.

  Barely slowing down, it lopped the arm off neatly at Sakuda’s shoulder crook.

  Blood spurted out in a semispherical fountain as the arm sped away from its body, taking a crazy spin with the fingers flexing and the hand looking for all the world as if it were trying to grab hold of something. Anything.

  As the arm floated past him, Coalbridge made a grab for it, for a crazy moment thought he might actually shake hands with it, but missed.

  Then something slammed into the back of his head.

  Blackness.

  Flicker.

  He recognized the sensation. Concussion. Minor, he judged.

  Awake again—was he out long? No. His body still shuddering from the blow of whatever it was and he reached back to feel and his hand returned clutching—

  A hank of bloody hair and skin.

  Coalbridge smiled. Not skull, he thought. At least not skull.

  “Oh!” said DAFNE. A clicking sound, then an uncharacteristic “Fuck!”

  “What?” Coalbridge said.

  “Absorption overload. Unable to compensate.”

  “DAFNE,” Coalbridge heard himself say. His words seemed to echo in his skull.

  The vessel continued to spiral away with the blast. Grab something, Coalbridge thought. But there was nothing to grab, nothing that wasn’t moving. He was inside a snow-shake toy.

  Except for the DELTA servant, HUGH. His geist remained in place, still oriented toward the surface that had been the “floor” as the vessel turned around them. It was the damndest thing, thought Coalbridge. Like I’m the ghost floating through HUGH’s world.

  DAFNE’s geist was nowhere to be seen.

  He frantically looked about. The snowflakes in the shake toy he haunted were red. They were micro-blobs of blood, flesh, cartilage—

  A sudden lurch, and the contents of the enclosure sloshed toward one wall.

  They had gotten the rockets back under gyro control, he thought. And then he slammed into the new “wall,” which had been the floor not long ago. His breath left him, and he felt another shooting pain in his head. Was his skull coming apart back there? He felt an urge to reach back and try to hold himself together as he might a diced potato or onion before he dropped it into the cook pot. But his arms were pinned by multiple gravities to the wall.

  Then a quick lurch and slosh in the other direction. He flew across the cabin and slammed into the other “wall,” which had been the ceiling. This time the g-forces equalized and he “bounced” away, slowly floating back across the enclosure in the opposite direction.

  DAFNE’s geist visage, only her face, reappeared before him. First it was five times normal human size, like a big Oz head. Then it flickered and reappeared at normal size. “Think I’ve got it,” she said. Then another lurch. “Four-fifths churn radiation wiped. No room.”

  “What are you talking about, DAFNE?” he heard himself say.

  “Sorry, Captain,” said DAFNE. “It’s me or life support.”

  “DAFNE!”

  “No room, Jim. Was an honor.”

  “Come back here, XO,” he screamed. “Come back!”

  And then the pseudogravity clicked back in. Unfortunately, human crew and bridge nonvirtual contents were suspended in the air. All fell together with a crash—bodies, blood, and equipment.

  Coalbridge blinked. Moved a hand. Alive, yes. He sat up, surveyed his surroundings. Looks like somebody dropped us from a great height, he thought. Which is sort of what happened.

  The bridge was a mess. Practically a disaster area.

  He heard a low moan. Sakuda rose, clutching his shoulder. Then his eyes rolled up into his skull and he fainted away.

  Coalbridge stood unsteadily. He unbuttoned his shirt, shucked it off, then stepped over broken plastic and metal to find Sakuda lying on the new floor—a former bulkhead. Didn’t matter. He knelt down, wadded his shirt, and pressed it against the bloody stump of Sakuda’s upper arm.

  Jesus, Coalbridge thought, a goddamn chair back did this.

  At his touch, Sakuda awakened and began to shiver as if he were freezing.

  “Am I o-okay, Captain?” asked the weapons officer in a quavering voice. “I want to leave a v-voice mail. My father. Voice mail if I don’t make it.”

  He attempted to swallow, coughed violently. He attempted to wipe the spittle from his mouth with his missing arm but only succeeded in shifting the position of his shoulder.

  “Hold still,” Coalbridge said.

  “Big chief, sir. Mau Mau in his heart, my father. Fucking sceeve did not get him, no.”

  “Shut up, Sakuda, save your breath,” Coalbridge said.

  “Tell him. Tell him the lion cub is . . . fight like a—”

  “I’ll tell him.”

  Sakuda’s eyes rolled back into his head. His trembling body began to shake as if it had live current coursing through it.

  Then it stopped.
>
  And Sakuda died.

  * * *

  DAFNE was gone. Wiped.

  Dead.

  She’d done it herself, to ensure life support.

  It took the better part of an hour to get damage control underway and take the vessel out of a crisis state. In another half hour, he had a damage report and casualty list.

  Multiple injuries. Four dead, crushed, in a cargo bay.

  Position was not so bad. Despite being flung for thousands of kilometers, they were still relatively close to the scene of the battle. The other personas were fine and working in long-practiced concert with the human crew—this wasn’t the first time servants and crew had faced damaged Q in battle, even if it was probably the worst—

  —it was the worst.

  Coalbridge knew it was bad news when the geist of the Q-drive algorithm ENGINE popped up on the bridge. ENGINE never came to the bridge. Efficiency incarnate, he didn’t like to waste computing power on animating a geist. He didn’t like to speak at all. Language formulation took away valuable calculating capacity, he claimed.

  “My lightstacks have been ruptured,” ENGINE said. “Entanglement is compromised.”

  Coalbridge, still half stunned, asked the obvious. “Surely you can find a stray photon somewhere, ENGINE.”

  “Not with unresolved spin. Not with any unresolved Q. Captain, we’ve lost the whole supply.”

  “We’ve run out of . . . light?”

  “That’s correct, sir,” ENGINE said.

  “Which means we’re dead in the water,” Coalbridge said.

  “We have Newtonian propulsion, sir,” ENGINE replied. “Small supply of reaction mass.”

  Coalbridge rubbed his eyes. “Okay, then,” he said. “Let’s go see what we’ve got to work with back at the scene of the crime.” He turned to Katapodis, who was bruised but whole, at helm. “Take us to the battlezone, helmsman.”

  “Aye, Captain.”

  They weren’t so very far away, after all. Even at N speeds, the return didn’t take long. In an hour, they were there.