Guardian of Night

by Tony Daniel

  The bomb was armed. She selected the coordinates, jumped to Q.

  Keep it slow, under c. Must not overshoot. Must not miss the target.

  But the human children. Gazing up into a rain that would turn their bodies to sores, their lungs to radioactive mantles. Their lives to pain and then death.

  She must not think of this.

  Yet she couldn’t get those alien children out of her thoughts.

  As DDCM Officer Unspeth Blacksalt Fritgern—aka Sweetbreath—screamed toward Earth, she felt shame. Shame for her personal weakness.

  Perhaps she didn’t deserve that Council seat, after all. Her weakness was likely to spread, as such things did, to compromise her effectiveness. Perhaps where she was now was exactly the height to which she was meant to rise. To prove her worth, to go out in a flame of glory.

  To write her name across the sky of a doomed planet.

  The Joshua Humphreys

  The fleet was out of position to intercept. Coalbridge could see that clearly without the need of a tactical-display pulldown.

  The hope was that a bloody and debilitating blow at the outset of battle would stun the sceeve into a calculated retreat. Yet if the gambit with the artifact did not work, or if the remains of the armada decided to continue the attack, then the fleet must be in position to defend.

  The weakness of the plan, as all acknowledged, was that the fleet, barely a match for even the surviving sceeve armada, could not easily react to contingencies.

  And, as every Extry officer had pounded into their skulls at IAS and then by bloody experience on the Fomahault Limit—there were always contingencies.

  And now one of those contingencies was headed straight for the unprotected side of Earth.

  “Target is moving carefully, avoiding debris that might throw off the vector. She’s at half a c,” Taras reported to Coalbridge. “Estimate seventeen point six minutes to Earth’s magnetosphere.”

  “HUGH, give me our own arrival time.”

  The Humphreys was decidedly not flying blind through a solar system. This was Sol system. All known debris was plotted. This data had been transferred to the Guardian of Night, as well. They could not charge in at 900 c, but they could go substantially faster than the sceeve vessel they were tracking, which must slow within Q-space to avoid popping into N-space at relativist speeds and perhaps run straight into an unmapped systemic debris field.

  “Arrival in three minutes, Captain.”

  “Where will the target’s vector take her in?”

  “Projecting . . . without course change, and assuming a drop to N-space in near-Earth orbit—”

  “Negative on that,” Coalbridge said. “Assume she drops to N when she’s gone stratospheric.”

  The upper reaches of the stratosphere were the last possible place a Q-based vessel could come out of the Q and remain operational even for a microsecond.

  “With that assumption, the location is over the Pacific Ocean. Lat twenty-three degrees thirty-four minutes. Long one hundred sixty-four degrees forty-two minutes. Near Necker Island in the northern Hawaiians, sir.”

  “Show me.”

  A display of Earth blinked up. A red dot marked the possible impact position. Why there? Random?

  “Real time,” said Coalbridge. “Show me the weather.”

  The Earth clouded over. The area was nightside. And there was a system there. A big cyclonic system, quite visible from space.

  “What’s that happening on the surface?”

  Coalbridge touched the Earth, touched the storm. Its data popped up beside it.

  Category Four typhoon. Named storm. Roke. Wind speed one hundred forty-five m.p.h. Aseasonal, but intense.

  If it were me, Coalbridge thought, I’d use that thing for dispersal.

  Had to be. But dispersing what? The sceeve had to know that their churn attacks were mostly under control, so it wouldn’t be military nano.

  “SIG, get me Captain Ricimer on beta. And on a secondary channel shoot him the data I’m viewing.”

  “Aye, Captain.”

  Moments later, Ricimer’s geist flashed into existence before Coalbridge. Despite his sceeve appearance, no longer grotesque to Coalbridge’s eye, it was the height that surprised him every time. Coalbridge was used to being the tallest guy in space.

  “Captain Ricimer, our breakaway is headed for a storm system on Earth, which sounds like a dispersal attack to me. Do you have any idea what the specific weaponry might be?”

  Ricimer moved a hand over his muzzle, completely covering it for a moment—what Coalbridge now recognized as the sceeve version of being lost in thought, the uptilted head with finger on chin position in humans. Or was he taking in the data from a mental feed? Both at the same time, probably.

  A spray of fine mist from Ricimer’s muzzle—a half-second pause and . . . translation.

  “This vessel is towing a weapon barge. The barge has no Q drive but is powered entirely by reaction mass. Normally the barge’s weapon is deployed using a gravitational slingshot effect with a Q-enhanced railgun. In this case, whoever is aboard is using the weapon’s backup tow, a small craft that converts the weapon’s own mass to fuel.”

  “What is it towing?”

  Whizz. Momentary translation delay.

  “Fusion bomb calibrated for maximum radiological atmospheric dispersal, I imagine. A cobalt-zinc isotope surrounding a fusible core.”

  “Shit,” said Coalbridge, “it’s a goddamn cobalt bomb. Do you know the yield?”

  “Maximum is about”—Ricimer’s geist reached somewhere unseen, presumably calling up a dataset—“five hundred thousand of your kilotons, but the yield can be scaled. We call it the Scourge.”

  “And I don’t suppose the Kilcher artifact is ready for a second use, Captain?”

  Ricimer glanced to the side at another unseen display. “We are one atentia, 1.5 of your hours, away from adequate complication to fire the weapon. Besides, the artifact only produces its effect in N-space. But you know this, Captain.”

  “Yes, damn it,” Coalbridge said. “Ideas, Captain?”

  Ricimer cocked his head to the right, combined it with a shrug. A sceeve nod.

  “There is the possibility to reroute the towed weapon in the Q.”

  “Intervessel interactions in the Q are impossible in principle, right? Otherwise, we’d wage battles in the Q, not the N.”

  “That is correct,” Ricimer said. “But there are indirect interactions that may be achieved There is a method that we—the Sporata, I mean—have used on occasion to dispose of a free-floating bomb that has become somehow unmoored in the Q. It is a way to create a moment of elasticity in space-time within a small region.”

  “Like a slingshot?”

  Ricimer waited for the full translation. Made the sceeve nod. “Exactly,” he replied.

  “And you think it will work?”

  “The probability is roughly the same as sacrificing ourselves in the planetary atmosphere, I would judge.”

  Did he trust the judgment of a sceeve? No. Of this sceeve.

  “Let’s do it, Captain,” Coalbridge said. “Tell me how.”

  “Very well,” Ricimer said. “The principle is simple enough. Stretch out the uncertainty of location of a vessel like a rubber band between gripping gills. Decide which hand ‘lets go’ first only after entering the state. This, in effect, allows a vessel to be in two places at once for a while.” Ricimer demonstrated with his hands. He’s in full teaching mode, Coalbridge thought. I’ll bet he was a hell of an instructor for the sceeve plebes. “Now imagine two elastic binders—”

  “Rubber bands.”

  “Yes. If both hands release simultaneously, with the left hand releasing one strip of elastic and the right hand releasing the other. One will jump precisely to the other’s possible position.”

  “And what does that get us?”

  “The sudden disentanglement creates something like a ‘wake’ trough in the quantum foam that underlies space-time. It c
reates a vacuum within the vacuum, so to speak.”

  “You mean there’s, uh, less space there?”

  “That is my meaning,” Ricimer said. “But the trough required to deflect or accelerate a weapon is extreme. We will need to be at the correct tangent to its path when it arrives, or we will merely direct it to another target on your planet.”

  “Not good.”

  “This is all a matter for the machine intelligences to calculate.”

  “Done,” said ENGINE, speaking geistless. Coalbridge laughed. Of course he’d been listening in. It was an officer-open channel.

  “This would have required longer for our computers,” Ricimer said. “If the numbers are precise—”

  “They are, sir,” said ENGINE.

  “We must depend on your being correct,” Ricimer said. “The two vessels will need to cross paths, come within a hand’s breadth of one another, while traveling at superluminal speeds. Shall we engage?”

  ENGINE had already fed the coordinates to the helm.

  “Let’s rock and roll, Captain,” Coalbridge said. He chuckled. That phrase was going to translate into something interesting, now, wasn’t it? Better explain. “By which I mean, let’s commence this maneuver.”

  Ricimer laughed. Coalbridge imagined the short lemony whiff he would be smelling if he were in the actual physical vicinity of the sceeve skipper.

  “I agree,” Ricimer said. “Let us rock and roll, Captain Coalbridge.”

  The Joshua Humphreys

  Earth Orbit

  They had arrived ahead of the bomb tug. But there would be no way to engage it in N-space if it—or, rather, the pilot of the tug—were determined to drop out of Q right at the stratosphere.

  So, we need to make a massive wake in Q-space to push that thing out of here, Coalbridge thought. Only problem is, Q-space isn’t made of water. It isn’t made of anything, not even emptiness. Q-space is the very definition of nothing in particular.

  Yet Ricimer said he knew how to make it bend.

  And so, theoretically, did Coalbridge.

  So now it came down to what had all the appearance of a game of chicken at twice the speed of light. Coalbridge faced forward on the bridge, toward the direction of actual travel. His display was set to minimal data enhancement. All he saw was the onrushing Guardian of Night.

  Maybe he should have been full of trepidation, Coalbridge reflected. Instead, he was having the time of his life.

  This was great!

  Hell, it could only get better if I could feel wind whipping through my hair, he thought.

  He was made for a run like this.

  On the Humphreys and the Guardian came, the Guardian of Night growing larger and larger, its greenish-bronze hull gleaming to a mintlike sparkle in the Q. What a beautiful vessel she was, he had to say.

  “Fifty seconds to crossing.”

  “Feed in the final corrections,” he told ENGINE.

  “Aye, Captain,” replied the servant’s dry voice.

  “We’re going to pass within feet of one another, aren’t we?”

  “Inches, sir,” ENGINE grumbled. He really didn’t like talking, did he?

  “God almighty. And you’ve taken into account any N-space effects? Gravity, that sort of thing?”

  “Aye, sir. I’m no pus-bag junior-grade exly, totting up sums on my meaty fingers—” ENGINE checked himself. “I mean, aye Captain, I’ve taken all known factors into account.”

  “Very well. Thank you, ENGINE.”

  “Good luck to us all, Captain,” ENGINE replied. “Fifteen seconds.”

  Coalbridge breathed in sharply. Held his breath. No. Calm. He had put together the best crew in the galaxy. If they couldn’t do it, no one could. Furthermore, he believed he and Ricimer were cut from the same stripe when it came to captaincy. He deliberately breathed out, took a final, normal breath, let it go.

  The Guardian was immense, all he could see in his overhead view. It was as if two small planets were set to collide.

  And then they didn’t.

  At that crossing, the first turbulence wave was formed. Two Q bottles grazing, quantum-tunneling effects stripping photons not only of their spin information, but of any spin and charge whatsoever.

  Leaving that charge and spin in Q. A wake. A barrier of turbulence which would inevitably curve the next object that encountered it along the lines cut by the previous vessels in their passage.

  As ENGINE had warned, the cross proved to be the nearest of near things. But now the two vessels were behind one another, speeding away. In the Humphreys’s case, speeding off into the void. In the Guardian of Night’s case, roaring away in the general direction of the Moon.

  Coalbridge would swear to his dying day that he had somehow felt the other vessel’s passage.

  “SIG, direct beta sensors aft. Show me the cobalt bomb.”

  Coalbridge pulled down the display from the command crown, maximized it. Instantly, his view of space was replaced by the looming bomb tug and bomb barge. The barge, which no doubt carried the weapon, was ten times larger than the little tug.

  The Scourge.

  And something, some faint speck at some distance from it. At first he thought it might be the Guardian of Night, already tens of thousands of kilometers away.

  Something else, his instincts told him. Something on the beta, so it was sceeve or human.

  He pointed to it. “What’s that?”

  “No correlating information. Maybe an afterimage, a beta echo? Analyzing.”

  “It’s the bomb tug,” Coalbridge said with growl. “Bastard detached from the barge in the Q. Kept separate Q from the barge from the first jump. Way I would’ve done it. Barge is headed for Earth. Tug is headed for the Guardian on a collision course. Get me Ricimer.”

  “Yes, Captain?”

  “We’ve got company. The tug’s vectoring in on you.”

  “I guessed this may be too easy.”

  Too easy! Coalbridge would hate to see hard.

  “You can outrun it if you keep going,” Coalbridge said.

  “Naturally. But the wake formation maneuver requires that I come to a standstill in N-space. As must you.”

  “I know that, damn it. But when you do—the tug slams into you. And the barrier is destroyed along with you at the anchoring end.”

  “Or you,” said Ricimer, “depending on its velocity. Remember, we will trade places exactly in the recross.”

  The calm voice of HUGH in his ear. “Bomb barge vectoring toward Earth on target, point five c. Barrier encounter in two minutes twenty-three seconds. Tug is traveling at point six c. Estimated tug impact is well within Guardian of Night current localization. Analysis indicates our maneuver was anticipated.”

  So, whoever was piloting the tug was no amateur.

  “I may have a solution, Captain Coalbridge,” Ricimer said.

  “I’m all ears.”

  “The timing would be extremely delicate, and only determinable in the moment. I will need to use the Humphreys’s computational speed, I believe—”

  “You’ve got it.”

  “Very well,” said Ricimer. “The idea is to . . . we have an expression. When one is attempting to be in several places at once.”

  “Yeah, we call it spreading yourself thin,” Coalbridge answered. He was trembling. We’re all going to die in seconds! He could imagine Ricimer had driven more than one student insane with his patience, his desire to make any experience a teaching experience.

  “I like that,” said Ricimer. “We call it leaking out of one’s own skin.”

  “Captain, what are you thinking to do?”

  “I’ve contemplated this before. It was rejected during our war games as even possible to attempt.” Ricimer emitted what was translated as a harrumph of pique.

  “Ricimer, let’s do it, whatever it is!”

  “Very well. We shall combine the wake maneuver with a suture. If I leave and return within what you would term a Planck-second of my exit, then the wake man
euver will be completed. The barge and its bomb will be diverted. Because I will have existed at the completion point for that quantum event to take place. So if I enter N-space, compute a jump that will take my vessel into our final destination coordinates at the exact moment as the tug, reenter Q, drop to N-space . . .”

  Coalbridge felt his head spinning trying to grasp what Ricimer was saying. Yet he had to. And for someone who had spent years mucking around in the Q, it didn’t take long for the idea to gel.

  “Yes. Yes, I see,” he said. “You won’t be there for—well, for less time than can be measured by any known means—when the tug arrives.”

  “Precisely,” said Ricimer. “And then I will essentially materialize within the tug. But not truly within, for the tug and my craft will be sharing the same quantum space. I will superimpose myself upon it.”

  “So what happens then?” Coalbridge asked.

  “Two bodies appearing in the same place at the exact same time. Impossibility.”

  “You mean they’ll destroy one another.”

  “Or remain completely unaffected by one another,” said Ricimer. “Otherwise . . . let us say that I have long wondered about the possibility of a simultanaeity performed in combination with a suture. Our current situation would make for an excellent empirical test.”

  “The precision of the timing—”

  “Would have to be slightly better than a light-clock, that is, a smaller increment than a photon passing between mirrored edges in the quantum foam.”

  “We don’t have anything that precise.”

  “But you do have one thing,” Ricimer said. “A computer program that has developed mathematical intuition. I have seen slaves. These servants of yours are no longer slaves. I believe they might arrive at the correct solution.”

  “ENGINE, can you do it?”

  “I am uncertain,” ENGINE said. “There are nonalgorithmic maths some of us have played around with.” His voice came quietly, softly. “Perhaps if DAFNE were here, yes. With HUGH’s help, and the other personas, I am not sure. If it is possible, the computation will not take long.” A pause. “How do you do it, Captain Coalbridge?”

  “I don’t understand. Do what, ENGINE?”