by Tony Daniel
“Remain lucky.”
His family gone. His brother and sisters. Aunts, uncles, cousins. His parents. His grandparents. You didn’t ignore the loss. You sidestepped it, you dodged it, you darted. Above all, you learned from it. Any moment, the same thing could happen to you.
Coalbridge shook his head, answered ENGINE. “Work with the fact that absolutely nothing turns out like you thought it would. Use uncertainty instead of running away from it.”
ENGINE did not reply.
“Twenty seconds,” HUGH reported. It was almost a whisper. “Beta-transfer protocols established with Guardian of Night. Fifteen seconds.”
HUGH didn’t continue the countdown after that.
Coalbridge pictured a roulette wheel spinning. The servants and personas of the Humphreys gathered round. Their geistly hands trembling, wavering. Then slowly and inexorably sliding all of their chips—all of humanity’s chips—to one color or the other. Red or black.
Red or—
The Guardian of Night
Ricimer ordered the halt, the drop into N-space. It was like a thousand other commands he’d issued before. Sol burned bright in the distance. The stars around him. The stars beyond.
The simple universe of matter and light.
Less than the space of a breath, and—
“Protocol transfer from Humphreys complete,” said Lamella. “Initiating jump.”
Jump back into Q. The zoom effect, as the heavens readjusted themselves to quantum possibilities. As some stars, some galactic clusters, grew instantly closer, others, unentangled with any bit of matter in the Milky Way, receded.
Then, an amazing sight.
Passing through the Guardian of Night, passing through the bridge itself, the ghostly outline of the bomb tug. Passing before Ricimer’s eyes.
A great creature of the deep on some liquid-covered planet, it appeared. Its metallic side was dull blue. Ricimer could see through it to crew members on the other side of the Guardian bridge. And he could see—
The tug pilot. She—it was a she—with muzzle flared wide. Screaming victory, death. Ricimer could almost smell the carbolic stench.
He reached out, tried to touch the pilot. His hand passed through nothingness.
And then the tug was past.
The stars zoomed out.
N-space.
He was alive. Was the vessel in the correct position? No time to check.
No time.
Jump.
The whipping recoil of simultaneity.
He was a million kilometers away. The Humphreys had taken his place.
Ricimer only checked the readouts out of habit. He was certain what he would find. The quantum wake was created; the suture was closed.
Equations balanced as a tiny ripple in space-time surged, then stilled.
The stars burned on, as indifferent as always.
Walt Whitman Station
Sam stood by the main viewport aboard the Walt Whitman, desperate to catch a glimpse but not expecting to see much. She was aware of what was happening, probably more aware of the theoretical intricacies than Coalbridge and possibly even Ricimer.
The battle was on in the Kuipers at last report—a real battle, and not, thank God, a hopeless last stand for humanity—but this end run could make the whole thing moot. A cobalt bomb could make what remained of habitable Earth uninhabitable, destroy an ecosphere already in desperate straits, and drive those humans it didn’t kill outright into space as refugees to be hunted and exterminated at the sceeve’s leisure.
You’d never know it from the state of affairs below. Instead of everyone girding up, there was a censure movement sizzling through Congress. The president was undergoing what amounted to a no-confidence vote led by the Quietists, Tillich—the former admiral who had become the party’s poster boy—and various fringe interests.
Frost stood beside Sam, seemingly unperturbed by what was going on in Dallas. Sam supposed she knew how Taneesha Frost felt. Everything hinged on living, actually physically surviving, to fight another day. But then a blue-green flash beside Frost, and her aide KWAME was standing there, whispering into the president’s ear.
She smiled.
“We squeaked by,” Frost said to no one in particular. “The Quietists bet everything on an up or down vote, and lost. Big loss in the House. And fifty-two forty-eight in the Senate.” Frost turned her attention back to the viewport. “Now, let’s live to celebrate.”
Sam, too, looked out. And at that moment, she saw it. Saw a flash, like a tracer bullet. Headed down, down toward the blue Pacific below.
Then it simply seemed to bounce away. Away in new trajectory toward the Moon.
All of this within a second at most. Sam blinked. No more spark, flash, trace.
“Was that it?” she heard Frost asking. “Was the bomb diverted?” The president was looking straight at her, at Sam, trusting her judgment on the matter.
“I think so, Madame President,” Sam said. “I think our boys have done it.”
The Guardian of Night
The cobalt-ion device had been sucked out of its trajectory, sucked by nonexistence, a vacuum within a vacuum.
Due to the quantum wake, the bomb barge vectored away from its path. Vectored toward Earth’s moon.
The bomb must somehow have been armed before separation from the tug, else the tug pilot would not have been able to separate tug and barge within the Q. This was not ordinarily done—was never entrusted to lower ranking officers—and would have required a security override greater than admiral.
Who had piloted that tug?
The barge dropped into N-space just before it arrived at the Moon.
Ricimer imagined the simple decision algorithm within the craft attempting to correlate a firing solution.
Evidently, it came to a decision. A silver, needlelike cylinder separated from the tug.
This was the bomb itself.
The separation blast from the bomb’s retaining brackets sent the barge tumbling away, to find either a fiery death in collision with a planet or to become a simple piece of space junk forever wandering the Sol system.
The bomb, meanwhile, headed for the Moon.
It didn’t take long. The cobalt bomb collided with the surface.
Flash of light.
Puff of lunar debris speeding into space.
A new crater bloomed.
No one died.
“Christ! Ricimer. We’re alive! You’re alive!” It was Coalbridge. Even without the translation, even with the sound and no smell, Ricimer could tell how excited he was. If he were younger, he’d have felt the same.
Perhaps this feeling of escape, of exhilaration, was common to the young of most species. Perhaps it was even a universal principle, an emotional reflection of survival’s logic. As was justice. As was love.
The voices of the ancestors, the hum of the gid, formed a low vibration of satisfaction with Ricimer.
You have found a way through this tunnel of darkness for our line. We are with you. Perhaps all is not lost. Perhaps our memories will not die.
Perhaps the road lies open ahead, child of ours. Because of you.
You are our cutting edge across the vacuum, etching all that has been forgotten back into being. Our word spoken, but a word that speaks itself truly, as well.
You are heir of a great line. We are proud of you, our son.
Yes. To come out alive. The poets could spray their perfumed songs about the good and noble way to die as they might.
Survival was the true victory that allowed them to spray at all.
He’d have plenty of time to think on this paradox, he supposed. Time to think was the survivor’s reward.
“Ricimer, listen.” It was Coalbridge. “That bomb barge is still out there.”
“It is no longer a threat. The bomb was ejected. We should now attempt to hunt down the tug and its pilot, then return to aid your fleet.”
“Yeah, I know. But I may have a better idea.”
&nb
sp; “Go on.”
“We don’t know where the tug is, but the barge is in N-space. I’ve got a good lock on its position.” Coalbridge hurriedly continued onward with his thought. “Ricimer, we could use it. Put another servant copy aboard exactly like last time on the Powers. Take it back out to the Kuipers with us. Is that artifact on your vessel recharged?”
“Yes,” said Ricimer.
What was Coalbridge considering?
Battle logic dictated—
But then Ricimer’s muzzle widened to a smile. “Yes, I see what you mean, Coalbridge. You humans learn very quickly. Yes, this is a good idea.”
TWENTY-THREE
20 January 2076
Sol System
Kuipers
BETA BROADCAST BEGIN
Hail, all vessels. Hail the armada.
We, the Human-Mutualist Alliance, speak.
We speak in the name of the Poet and in his spirit.
You will have noticed the eye of the armada hemisphere is destroyed by a weapon recently gleaned from the species Kilcher. Some of you will have heard of this through unofficial channels. Some of you will not have known of its existence. Now you have seen one of the effects of this weapon. We have, very simply, created a small exploding sun. An ensuing attempt to eradicate the resident species of Sol C by irradiated bomb was eliminated.
As for this secondary action, what sort of justification could there have been for such a course? Think on it—to make a world uninhabitable for any species? To create a world that cannot be parasitized? By your own oath of office, by your own beliefs, this is supremely unjust. It is wrong.
In any case, your current operation is over.
Leave this system. Do not return unless and until you understand. Regulation has destroyed families, hypha. It has replaced the truths we know in our gid, in our very sense of self, with its own logic of power, its own zero-sum game. Regulation has reached its inevitable end point.
We Guardians have become our own parasites.
We proclaim to you that the galaxy cannot be regulated. We tell you that if you continue to seek domination, the universe itself will rise up and cast you down.
We say to you that we, human and Mutualist together, will burn you, blast you, and disassemble you down to subatomic particles. We will create a floating ring of the dead to circle around a dozen suns as a reminder for all species who come after.
Do not do as the Administration did.
Do not seek to regulate what you cannot begin to understand.
Live in symbiosis.
And if you cannot do that, then do the universe a favor and exit in dignity.
For exit you will.
We will see to it.
Leave this system or face the consequences. Remain and you will become so much stardust. This is a warning, not a threat. It is inevitable. And every Guardian should know not to tempt the inevitable. The acid rains fall on the regulated and the unregulated alike. This cycle it has fallen on you.
Down with the Council.
Down with the Administration.
Thrive the United States of America.
Thrive the Symbiosis.
MESSAGE END.
USX Petraeus
SIGINT was crackling with the St. Elmo’s fire of appearing and disappearing geists, messages, and chroma relays, and Japps was in the middle of it all. Her adrenaline was pumping, sure, but there was a calm that came with knowing and executing the duties of her post, finding the readouts and remote sensing what the vessels of the fleet needed at each moment, routing them to the destination where they would save lives. Kill sceeve.
It felt good to be back. Back on the job. Back in her native habitat, now with her field promotion to chief and the promise of a pay raise and an ungodly amount of new audio gear. She had a long list, and she was going to take pleasure in checking each item off.
First, of course, she had to survive this in order to get to the music store.
The sceeve had—she quickly totted—a little under a thousand vessels remaining. Most had been on the hemisphere’s periphery when the Powers of Heaven had exploded in its supernova fury. The blast had obliterated a good nine thousand craft.
Which left the Extry fleet’s two thousand and two hundred with a two-to-one numerical advantage over the sceeve survivors. But the sceeve had more firepower per vessel in general and were now in as desperate position as the humans.
For both sides, it was a battle for survival.
Even scattered and broken, the armada remnant was proving a formidable foe. The big advantage the Extry had was that it was sitting on the Kuipers and was able to rearm its kinetic weaponry at will.
For a time it was shooting fish in a barrel as the sceeve battlecraft careened in individually at the fleet in what turned out to be suicide runs. Then they got smart, or, more likely, somebody intelligent took command, and they regrouped. It was clear whoever was in charge was trying to make a flank run up and over or down and under the Kuipers—and head toward Earth. That was the one thing everyone knew the fleet couldn’t allow, and so the Extry moved to counter by surrounding the concentrating sceeve, about four hundred vessels strong by this point.
A furious fight ensued. Japps, whose intelligence-gathering billet aboard the David Petraeus put her at the center of the fleet’s sensing nexus, experienced it all. The Battle of the Kuipers they’d probably call it, if anybody lived to give it a name at all.
The way things were going, Japps could believe that both sides might annihilate one another.
Nukes flew, surged into firework expansions. Rocks and rods tumbled through the void at velocities so extreme they were physically foreshortened by relativistic effects and got smaller as they sped away with a rapid effect that had nothing to do with their distance from the observer.
Vessels flowered in flame and agony of destruction. Rescue craft zipped hither and yon attempting to save what survivors they might.
And, damn it, the sceeve were winning. Because winning meant breaking out, breaking through. And they were doing it. The sphere of the Extry fleet was crumbling as one vessel after another guttered in flame and death and careened off into the nowhere between Neptune’s and Pluto’s orbits.
And then everything changed.
A message from Earthward.
“Fleet, this is Guardian of Night. We are closing on your position with encoded torpedo in tow. Please provide fire solution for torpedo. Fleet confirm?”
Familiar voice on com. It took Japps only a moment to mark it as Coalbridge’s.
The crackle of reply from the admiral on Flagship Petraeus. “Get in here, Guardian! We’ve been waiting for you!”
OVERZAP, the main weaponry command, fed the Petraeus’s SIGINT station the firing coordinates and Japps squirted them over the beta without running strong encrypt and therefore adding the millisecond of delay such a process would have entailed.
She figured the sceeve knew where they were.
“Bomb-tug torpedo away!” said Coalbridge.
Japps watched as the device threaded through the fleet sphere, its tiny reaction plume speeding toward the heart of the sceeve knot of resistance.
They must be laughing at such a tiny threat, Japps thought. Sceeve, at least some of them, she knew, could laugh—particularly at grim jokes. The grimmer the better, actually.
The torpedo bleated its location. Japps routed the signal and the Guardian locked on.
“Guardian activating artifact,” said Coalbridge. “Good luck, LOVE-2.”
Then nothing.
No death ray. No plume of energy.
Nothing.
Nothing for one second. Two.
Then something.
Something huge.
A star.
A momentary star.
A second sun in the solar system.
And then that sun went nova.
21 February 2076
The Shiro
Central Council Chamber
“And you are certain it
was the entire fleet?”
“I tell you they are gone.”
“How is this possible?”
“I have no answer,” said Gergen. “The surveillance drones returned with the images. All of their telemetry was cross-checked, confirmed.”
“So the humans have the weapon?”
“I do not know,” said Gergen. “What I do know is that they have somehow learned to create the energy of a star and use it as a weapon.”
The Chair considered for moment. Surely this fact must give her pause. Make her question her own certainties.
But no.
She finally spoke. “So, they have become more powerful. We’ve dealt with strong enemies before. In the end, they fall to us. They fall to us because we are the embodiment of will. We are the congealing of a thousand million years of desire for order.”
Gergen knew he should say no more. In a thousand similar circumstances he would have held his tongue. What prompted him to speak further was beyond him. Perhaps he’d caught an alien virus merely by drawing near to the humans. He’d put himself in the enemy’s shoes. Into humanity’s mind, as best he could.
And, curse her, he’d liked it there.
Free, but not weak. Free, but assiduous, competent, disciplined, unrelenting.
The logic was inescapable. If liberty could produce such qualities, then the entire foundational structure of Regulation must be called into question.
And so Gergen spoke the truth as he saw it, knowing as he did so that he was dooming himself. “It may be best not to underestimate them, Madame Chair. They have this new weapon. They likely have the Kilcher artifact. Their demands for our surrender claimed as much. And, if so, they now have Guardian support in the traitor . . .” For a moment, Gergen hesitated. But he was laying the truth bare, was he not? Shriving himself. Attempting to help the Chair to see. To understand the strategic situation her Administration now faced. He was an ally, even at the end. Gergen completed his thought. “The support of Ricimer.”
I’ve sealed my fate.
The slightest whiff of distaste from the Chair.
She wasn’t taking this well.
All for naught.