Guardian of Night

by Tony Daniel

  Sam clicked her slide. A human eye.

  “I assume you are all familiar with the principles behind the chroma,” she said. “Salt in the eye projects images on the retina that are the precise frequencies of light that the corneal salt filters out. It is a miniaturized version of the old green screen used in filmmaking special effects. This is, for instance, the way that servants are able to represent themselves as geists.”

  A few baffled expressions. They’d have to stay confused about that, so long as her main point came across.

  Click. The Escher print of the hands reaching out from a piece of drawing paper, drawing one another.

  A few bullet points. Here it was. The central idea.

  “What we project that we will be able to do is to modify the disentanglement weapon’s beam. We will modulate it in a manner similar to the projection methods used to create the chroma. We will, in effect, create a sort of chroma within the disentangled substrate, a virtual reality of virtual particles that are entangled within their frame of reference, that do retain their information. They will be, in fact, entangled with one another and not with any exterior event, process or substance.” Sam took a breath, continued. “We’ll be able to green-screen in a special effect.”

  “And what will that effect be?” asked Coalbridge. “Godzilla?”

  Sam smiled. “Not exactly,” she said. “We believe that we can encode a servant into the artifact’s region of effect.”

  “A servant,” Ricimer said. “An artificially intelligent agent?”

  “That’s correct,” said Sam. “A servant on either end—the artifact would, in a sense, be fired through the servant. On the receiving end, the duplicate servant would then be shielded by the information ‘shadow’ of the first. It would not become informationally disintegrated. This servant, now present in the newly unentangled material, would then be able to determine the reapplication of information to the affected substrate.”

  “A Maxwell’s demon,” Leher said. “A little bugger that determines the state and properties of every particle there is.”

  “Precisely,” said Sam. “But within a confined area. Otherwise such a servant would become—”

  “God,” Leher said.

  “Something like that.”

  “But within this confined area, the servant could make whatever you shoot that thing at into whatever you want?” said Leher. “As in, turn lead to gold. Broccoli to pizza?”

  “A lump of material into an antimatter annihilation event,” Sam said.

  “A supernova,” said Ricimer. His muzzle was flaring widely, and the lemon scent was again in the air.

  “Sure,” Sam said. “The complete conversion of say—”

  She made a few rough calculations in her head.

  “—a sphere about a quarter-kilometer in diameter into force-mediating particles. Energy, I mean. You’d get something equivalent to a smallish supernova. We make the beam smart, we can make stars. At least for a little while.”

  “A quarter-kilometer?”

  “Depending on the density.”

  “Say . . . a spacecraft.”

  “Yes, probably, although—”

  Ricimer glanced over to Coalbridge. “We happen to have a spacecraft to spare, do we not, Captain?”

  Coalbridge thought for a moment, then broke into a smile. “Indeed we do. The Powers of Heaven. We incorporated her Q and towed her back, of course.”

  Again Ricimer slapped his hand down on the table beside him. This time his huge eyes were directly on Sam. “You’ve done it,” he said. “I knew you would, but I couldn’t possibly predict how.”

  “Done what?” Sam asked. “We’ve merely played around with some of the implications of the information with which you provided us.”

  “Yes,” said Ricimer. “My mother once told me an ancient tale of my kind. It is called ‘The Bright-Dust of Teshinaw.’ It was a moment when we Guardians still possessed the quality you humans term ‘play.’ Somehow we lost it. But now you have brought it back to us.”

  Again the box was laughing.

  TWENTY-ONE

  20 January 2076

  Sol System

  Kuipers Outbound

  USX Powers of Heaven

  Coalbridge was in command of the Powers of Heaven. She was his now. His sceeve vessel.

  She was alive again. Well, a sort of hybrid-mutant life with a human servant and a sceeve computer program acting as the vessel’s nervous system. The computer aboard the Powers of Heaven at the moment—a Pocket Palace Plus, which contained a copy of the servant LOVE and the Lamella programming from the Guardian—was busy preparing for the Powers’s final chapter of existence. Neither LOVE nor Lamella could travel into the Powers’s computational matrix, because there no longer was such a thing on this vessel. The nuke next door had burned the last vestige of craft churn away. The computer system therefore didn’t have the data-crunching power to control Q, to navigate, and to helm. Coalbridge’s unaided human brain and intuition would have to serve for steering.

  Maintaining course manually was nerve-wracking, but it was also kind of cool. He’d freed the emergency-control stick—it had been exactly where Ricimer had said it would be—from its stowed position in a tubelike structure on the side of the enclosure, and it had swung into place before him like a safety bar on a roller-coaster ride, horizontally at about shoulder height—which would be waist height to a sceeve, but there was no adjusting for that problem. He’d called up a large exterior-display screen for the wall directly in his sight line and was now piloting the Powers in manual-override mode. Ricimer had given him instructions on how to go about it, but, apart from training sessions, Ricimer himself had never used the manual pilot on any craft he’d captained, and he’d told Coalbridge that he doubted any of the currently serving Sporata officers had either.

  “It’s a vestige of another time—a design era before we had gleaned trustworthy computer technology from a conquered species,” he said. “But Sporata vessel designs change extremely slowly, if at all. The normal course of action when constructing a new craft is to layer on new technology rather than make wholesale changes.”

  Thank God for hidebound sceeve engineering, Coalbridge thought. The old tech was now allowing a human to fly one of their spacecraft without computer assistance.

  So far so good.

  He was flying in a tight triad formation with the Guardian of Night and the Joshua Humphreys. Only a few meters separated the craft. The Powers was attached to the Guardian with a docking collar that must be retained intact if he and Leher—who was with him aboard the Powers—were to be able to return to safety once the Powers met her destiny. All three vessels were, at the moment, in N-space, ramped up to a significant percentage of c. Extry craft had no such built-in manual capability, at least not one that was wholly under the control of one individual. This may be the fastest speed a human unenhanced by wiied computer algorithms had ever piloted a vessel. He’d have to check when he got back home.

  If he got back home.

  The vessels were purposely tied close together so that only a careful scan of their beta signatures would reveal that their Q-drives had been kept separate on a quantum level. On the trip outward, back toward the Sporata armada’s lines, the two vessels were, in Q-terms, three craft concealed as one, with all the vessels employing separate, nonentangled drives. Of course, now that they were in N-space, there wasn’t a question of entanglement. Each employed separate reaction-mass engines to move along.

  All part of Ricimer’s plan.

  Coalbridge had worried that perhaps he’d gotten the situation all wrong, had failed to understand some duplicity on the sceeve captain’s part. That his current action might be a fantastically complicated setup to subjugate the Earth once and for all. In this nightmare scenario, Ricimer would hold back when they reached the Sirius armada, establish contact instead of attacking. He would jettison the Powers along the way and call for her destruction—and then use the distraction to be on hi
s way to his sought-for Mutualist enclave—making his escape while the Sporata armada was kept busy taking on the United States Extry.

  Coalbridge had confided his fears to Leher, who had shrugged and agreed it wasn’t a bad plan at all. “If Ricimer is merely intent on reaching the Mutualists, that is,” Leher said, “and assuming he doesn’t mind the mass betrayal and genocide that would follow. Not to mention the nine-hundred-plus hostages he’s left us with on Walt Whitman.”

  “I’ve learned to never trust a sceeve,” Coalbridge replied. “But the thing that gives me comfort is that I think this guy is playing a deeper game. One you and I haven’t quite figured out yet. But I will. We will.”

  Leher nodded. “Been thinking along the same lines,” he said. “But, like he said, I think he needs allies right now.”

  Coalbridge smiled. He was beginning to feel that he and Leher weren’t merely fighting the same enemy—but that they shared a set of goals at a basic level. That they were becoming a team, a good one.

  It had the makings for a goddamn friendship.

  If they lived.

  And then Coalbridge’s doubts were put aside. The moment for attack came—and Ricimer struck the Sporata armada with a stunning but intelligent ferociousness.

  No betrayal. The fight was on.

  Although Ricimer had readied his new weapon, he did not immediately use it. He elected to come in near the apogee of the armada sphere both because this would be unexpected and because, if they were lucky, they could threaten and maybe disrupt the command-and-control flag vessel which Ricimer assured Coalbridge would be precisely at the sphere’s center.

  “It is by the book,” Ricimer had said. “There has never been a commanding admiral who sticks closer to the book than Blawfus,” he added. “We can trust him to do exactly as expected. I can’t answer for the other armada captains, however. I trained a good many of them, so some will not be tricked into a fatal mistake, no matter how well we set the trap. Expect any survivors to attempt to rally.”

  The basic idea was to go into the center of the approaching hemisphere of Sporata vessels, hitting them at about an AU out of the solar system primary plane with guns blazing—this intended to prevent the armada from getting to the Kuipers and using those rocks and cometary fragments as a resupply point to arm up with more kinetics.

  The disadvantage with such a direct approach was that it exposed the Powers-Guardian-Humphreys triad to intense crossfire.

  Which shouldn’t matter, if the rest of Ricimer’s plan worked. Otherwise, it was madness.

  They made their first salvo with catapulted rocks. But before the throw, Ricimer came out of Q a good distance behind the armada and ran his reaction speed up to nearly point five of c before he let loose.

  The strike was devastating—and undetectable on beta, since they were entirely N-based and required no coordinating communication.

  Coalbridge and Leher watched it all from the bridge of the Powers of Heaven on a chroma display that was minimal and barely a notch above an ancient video game. The LOVE-Lamella hybrid really was taxed and could not spare the computing to give them better virtual. But she—they, whatever—gave him and Leher the gist of the operation in visual display.

  The surprise kinetics put an array of five sceeve vessels—part of the flag-vessel convoy—out of commission.

  “I think he burnt his bridges, no matter what happens,” Coalbridge said. “Now it’s time to see if the clever human female’s idea pays off.”

  “It’s Sam,” said Leher. “It’ll work.”

  The smart bomb to end all smart bombs, thought Coalbridge. Better than a kamikaze or a suicide bomber, because both were always limited by the technology they employed. Despite all the metaphors for oneness with their weaponry, it had always been just that—a metaphor.

  Until now.

  The prep, which required course setting and direct programming only a human presence could accomplish, was almost complete. Soon he and Leher would need to make their way to the docking collar and get the hell off this vessel. The Humphreys was standing by to accept them afterward.

  Leher gestured around the bridge. “Nice ride. You gonna miss it?”

  “If this works, I’ll name my first child after her,” Coalbridge replied.

  “‘Heaven’ if it’s girl?” Leher asked. “‘Powers’ sounds more like a boy name.”

  They turned their attention back to the monitor that made up one of the bridge bulkheads.

  FLASH. FLASH. Twinkle and FLASH went the vessels on display.

  Like a Perseid meteor storm. But the careening chunks of silicon and metal from the Guardian throw were not burning up in a planetary atmosphere. They were bending and breaking fields of force, cutting their way through metal and sceeve flesh, rending to pieces all in the wake of their terrible inertial charge.

  FLASH, FLASH.

  WINK of light.

  Darkness.

  Fifteen craft destroyed, two disabled, said the accompanying readout overlaying the visuals.

  And then the fireworks really started. Crossfire from a thousand sources.

  LOVE’s geist flickered in his peripheral vision.

  “You ready?” Coalbridge asked.

  “Of course,” she answered.

  “And it doesn’t bother you, LOVE? Either of you?”

  “I can only answer for myself,” said LOVE. “And yes it does, to the extent that I would not do it if a better choice were available. But something similar happens every time I copy myself from one repository to another and erase the copy I have left behind. You don’t have to be coy about the current state of affairs, Captain. Both myself and the Lamella copy are aware this is a suicide mission.”

  “I’m not, I just—”

  “If it helps any, I feel the same way about humans when they go to sleep,” LOVE cut in. “Creepy disconnect. Are they the same person when they wake up? Who knows?”

  “We become a grumpier version of ourselves—in the male’s case, one that really needs to take a piss,” said Leher.

  “Which is where we find the will to get up every the morning,” Coalbridge added.

  “Highly efficient, when you think about it,” LOVE commented.

  Sarcasm from a servant? Well, that’s one way to pass the Turing test.

  And she’d earned it.

  Coalbridge kept an eye on the view screen as he spoke, moving the emergency-control stick as carefully as possible. Standing nearby, Leher passed his hand over the Pocket Palace, adjusting an unseen keyboard. Even if the churn had survived, there was no chroma on the Powers. What they had was a product of the Pocket Palace entirely. The sceeve relied on physical contact with the craft’s surroundings for communication. Even the officers were not wiied into the computer in the manner that humans were.

  Leher was the only one who needed chroma displays for the final computational calibration. His task was to be sure that the LOVE-Lamella hybrid in the Powers’s computer and the Palace was a match for the same hybrid program stored aboard the Guardian. Leher had been through an hour-long crash course in IT-calibration technique while Coalbridge had been acquiring his sceeve pilot’s license from Ricimer. He supposed a couple of tech specialists or even a sceeve officer from the Guardian might have been sent in their stead, but Coalbridge had requested quite vociferously that it be he and Leher aboard the Powers. Because you never knew what might turn up, what might need doing at the last minute. And they were the two available who knew the most about starcraft and sceeve, respectively.

  In the end, President Frost had made the call. And, like that, he and Leher were in.

  Now, to not fuck up.

  A sweet smell suddenly suffused the bridge, not unlike the fruity tang of cherry pie fresh from the microwave. It was communication from Ricimer on the Guardian. Leher didn’t need a translation device to decode it.

  “That’s initial signal acquisition, Captain,” Leher said. “The Guardian is standing by to zap us.”

  “Let’s get it
done then,” Coalbridge replied. “You ready?”

  “I’m at ninety-eight percent pattern match, and ninety-five is within parameters,” Leher said, looking down at the Palace. Then he glanced up, caught Coalbridge’s gaze, nodded affirmatively. “We’re a go, Captain.”

  Coalbridge turned to the LOVE geist. “Will you signal the Guardian of Night then, LOVE?”

  “Aye, Captain.”

  All hell broke loose.

  It was the damndest thing. A portion of the deck slowly irised open. Coalbridge was stunned for moment. What could this accessway be? He’d personally gone over a scan of the entire vessel to confirm a hundred percent kill ratio. Nothing, no one, had survived that unshielded nuclear blast the Powers had endured. All that remained were negative shadows on the walls. Bright spots shielded by a body for a moment—long enough to leave a record—before the sceeve officer or rate disintegrated.

  Whatever that port was, it had not registered on the scan. It simply had not existed.

  But now it did. And there was nothing he could do. He had to drive.

  Up from the deck underneath rose—

  A sceeve.

  Coalbridge couldn’t tell if it was male or female, but it wore the black of an officer’s tunic. And in its hand—what was that thing? It looked very much like a mace. With knives protruding from it. The sceeve raised the device—the weapon—up behind Leher.

  “Griff, watch out!” Coalbridge shouted.

  Leher turned toward the sceeve, and as he did so, the sceeve brought the weapon down. It sunk into Leher’s shoulder. Leher let out a cry of pain but had the presence of mind to turn and fall away, wrenching the weapon from the sceeve’s grasp.

  If I let go and go after that thing, I’ll lose control of the craft, Coalbridge thought.

  “LOVE, distract it!” he shouted.

  For a moment, the geist wavered, as if she were a stain on the atmosphere that was slowly dissolving. Then a powerful deathlike stench suffused the cabin, emanating from the Palace. It wiped out the cherry-pie scent and filled Coalbridge with alarm and disgust.

  He didn’t speak sceeve, but he was pretty sure LOVE was shouting: “Hey, over here, motherfucker!”