Guardian of Night

by Tony Daniel

  Lining the streets, or overturned on the rubble where there had once been sidewalks, were the battered and rusted remains of cars, trucks, and minivans: Fords, Sonys, Apples, Quicks. And for color, here and there some brave soul had attempted a bit of civic improvement. Along Field Street, a line of the burned-out hulks of cars still parallel-parked in the places their owners had left them twelve years ago had been coated on the roof of each car with a layer of potting soil. The soil was, in turn, sprinkled with a hardy strain of nanotech protectant and fertilizer—one of the new varieties of crunch that DARPA and some of the private firms had developed, Coalbridge figured.

  Growing on the car roofs of Field Street—flowers. Daffodils, geraniums, chrysanthemums. All were in full bloom. Either nobody had programmed into the crunch the idea of winter, or perhaps whoever engineered this display had thought blossoms made the place look more Christmassy and had turned them on for the month.

  They looked like zombie daffodils, Coalbridge thought. Undead mums and nasturtiums. Not allowed by the crunch to rest, to wilt, to die off, to proceed through the natural cycle of birth, death, and resurrection. Held in stasis by Frankenstein bugs and the human desire to find some way to spruce up even a hellhole of a place.

  One car, an Apple Rhombi minivan, was completely roofed in poinsettias. Maybe his Christmas theory had been right. But the Rhombi didn’t really look Christmassy.

  Looks like a grave is what, Coalbridge thought. They all do. Like a country graveyard on Decoration Day.

  For a moment, Coalbridge considered how many graves, how many pulverized home sites, how many dunes of human-charnel curd, he’d have to visit to properly honor his dead on Decoration Day.

  Have to be magic like Santa Claus. Need some flying reindeer, too.

  The thought of one day retiring to become a stockman with a herd of flying reindeer made Coalbridge smile. He’d long ago found ways to ward off the crushing weight that came from knowing that everyone—every last one of his relatives—was gone.

  The sceeve invasion had killed ninety-eight percent of humanity. Coalbridge was part of the two percent remnant that had, by luck or chance, somehow survived. He was his family’s last representative among the living.

  Coalbridge had celebrated Christmas alone by cooking himself a complete holiday dinner.

  Ah, hell, thought Coalbridge, it’s the holidays for one more day. Why not get into the spirit? He found himself liking the weirdly vibrant car tops. Dallas was still alive. Okay, Paw Paw: like you did Praha, I’ll call her she. She was alive. And fighting her way out of sickness and despair. People lived here. This broken, blasted ruin of a metropolis was the home to two million souls, three million if you counted nearby Fort Worth. It was the most populous city on planet Earth.

  Coalbridge turned a corner.

  And there they are, he thought. Some of them, at least.

  Peepsies.

  As he’d seen on the news feed that morning, the antiwar protesters, the Peepsies, were out in force today. Even with reports of fresh drop-rod attacks on Sydney and Nairobi, the organizers had evidently decided the protest must go on. They probably didn’t believe the news anyway.

  He’d been warned to start early for his meeting downtown but hadn’t expected this: the entire Capitol complex was cordoned off by a line of beaten-up school buses stretching from Field to Elm to St. Paul to Commerce, squaring off at Field once more. Paper scraps were plastered on the buses—Coalbridge couldn’t make out what they were and assumed they might be slogans or announcements. They flapped in the breeze.

  Around the buses milled hundreds of Peepsies: students in the new retraining programs out on winter break, the professionally disgruntled, paid “volunteers” working for various antiwar NGO interests, and the hard-core contingent of the permanently deranged and hopelessly bereaved.

  The Capitol complex was surrounded.

  One hundred eighty million human beings left on the planet—barely enough to keep civilization from collapsing around itself, maybe not enough—an imminent attack by a rapacious enemy on its way, and this was how these people chose to spend their time? It was strange to think that they were some of the people he’d spent the last twelve years defending with his life. Yet . . .

  He couldn’t hate them. He could only feel pity for the Peepsies.

  All of these people had lost most or all of their friends and family. Earth’s population hadn’t merely been devastated; it had been treated to an extinction event.

  Asia had been the first target. The sceeve were after resources and technology. At least, that was the theory. Their choice of what to take and what they left behind was often bizarre. Entire mountains of limestone taken. The contents of a gypsum mine sucked out. As far as technology went, they sought out the most pedestrian means of production—the factories of China, those of the Asian Tigers. After pacification, their “harvesters” would arrive and begin gleaning the landscape, disassembling manufacturing plants, carting them off to space.

  There was no attempt to “collect” any human, scientist, innovator, or entrepreneur. The sceeve did not seem to care about the human brain trust, the universities and corporate campuses, the industrial-park concrete boxes and basement labs, where the ideas came from. These they merely destroyed. They seemed to regard ideas as some sort of epiphenomena, a by-product of technology instead of its generator. Every continental coast was devastated, but the tech that was “sceeved” was always a fabrication plant, a car lot, a copper pit. And retail stores. Every Best Buy store up and down both coasts was dismantled and taken away, every Home Depot, Duggers Lifescience, every Amazon and Walmart warehouse looted. Humans themselves were inconveniences—but not too lowly to destroy at every opportunity. In the end, only the United States managed to put up effective resistance. Earth’s military was now the U.S. military.

  Then, after four years of devastation, the sceeve had left. Suddenly. Mysteriously. Left with the Earth only partially “harvested,” as far as anybody could tell.

  Oh, the sceeve were still out there. The war continued as humans were hemmed in, cordoned off from systems at a distance greater than twenty-five light-years from Sol, the so-called Fomalhaut Limit.

  And now, just as suddenly, they had decided to return. All the signs were there in the heavens. Over the past year, the Fomalhaut Limit had shrunk as the sceeve began to move their blockade inexorably toward Sol system.

  The armada had not arrived yet, but it was coming. And as for the Peepsie protestors Coalbridge was now confronted with, all most of them had experienced directly was the fact that they were the inheritors of a destroyed Earth. The ones responsible—the sceeve—had vanished from the planet surface itself eight years ago.

  Maybe you couldn’t blame people for thinking it was all a ruse, or believing that the automated attacks that still got through were somehow the creation of the government. People could convince themselves of all manner of things to make some sort of sense of a senseless situation.

  Yet I lost everybody I loved, too, but that didn’t turn me into a political idiot.

  What the cordon of buses encircled was not physically the U.S. presidential residence and Capitol complex. The buses were at street level, after all, and merely cordoned off the old First National Bank building, now empty. The actual Capitol was many feet underground, ensconced in the intricate system of century-old tunnels that lay beneath downtown Dallas. The bus-fortress was there to screen off exterior access to the First National block, including the main Capitol entrance at Field and Pacific, which was where Coalbridge was headed.

  Puffs of smoke suddenly wafted toward him, and Coalbridge’s eyes began to water. What was that smell? Something was cooking. The air was thick with a meaty odor. Coalbridge had skipped breakfast for the first time in weeks and was hungry. Although it was plainly too early for anyone to be cooking lunch, in the back of his mind he idly assumed he might be smelling barbecue.

  Coalbridge’s main hobby was cooking—and anybody who suggested
that this made him somehow less of a warrior wasn’t worth the time to beat the shit out of. Despite the traumatized economy, there were still an amazing number of ingredients and spices still available in Dallas. The human instinct for trade had found a way. He’d spent whatever free time he’d been able to snag while on shore duty cooking up a storm, with usually only himself or a friend or two from work to feed. One thing he hadn’t had time for while planetside was an old-fashioned night-long grilling session. Barbecue was one of his main indulgences when eating out, however, and he’d been planning on at least hitting his favorite joint, Rudy’s, up in Denton—which he’d heard still existed and which was as close to Oklahoma-style barbecue as you could get in these parts. But so far there had been no time, and it didn’t look like he was going to make it now. Most of the past month he’d spent groundside had been underground in the New Pentagon’s Extry command.

  Coalbridge turned the corner of Elm and Field and all thoughts of eating barbecue disappeared from his mind—perhaps for eternity.

  A dozen Peepsies were burning to death in the middle of Elm Street.

  “Aaaaaaaaiaaaaaaaaaah!”

  The smell? Human barbecue, thought Coalbridge. Oh, God, that’s what it was.

  The Peepsies were sitting in meditative fashion—or, as his sister, Gretchen, a kindergarten teacher dead in the first wave of the invasion, had called it: sitting crisscross-applesauce.

  Something familiar . . .

  Then it came to him: they were mimicking the Tovil Exorcism, the group of Buddhist monks and nuns who had set themselves alight in protest of the United States’s occupation of Sri Lanka back in the 2040s. Sri Lanka didn’t exist as a recognizable landmass anymore, much less a country.

  Shit. Coalbridge tamped down the adrenaline surge he’d just endured and took a mental moment to stifle his immediate urge—which had been to go and rescue somebody.

  He took a longer look at the self-immolators. Looked like three men and three women, from what he could tell. Young. Dressed in Peepsie counterculture garb, now aflame. He took a closer look. Very young. They were teenagers. Aha.

  Nobody was dying here.

  These kids were protected by dermal churn—called “salt,” after the military version of the same nanotech. Salt itself was not extremely expensive—Coalbridge had a coating—but the charger subscription necessary to make it effective day in and day out was not cheap. Coalbridge didn’t know how much such subscriptions cost these days, but he’d bet his captain’s bar that these were rich kids, the children of doctors, lawyers, NGO brass, and government bureaucrats, probably, whose families could afford the kind of electrostatic subscription and advanced coating that would permit such a display of political theater.

  Salt could be set to deliver or to stifle nerve stimuli, pain in particular, through the coating. Yet salt wasn’t magic. Even if the kids had turned off their nerves, salt could hardly prevent the heat damage from a gas flame.

  Hence the charming barbecue smell, Coalbridge thought.

  But the nanobugs were repairing the damage as fast as it occurred, and probably insulating the inner body parts below the skin from further damage. The kids would suffer from the fire they were applying to their bodies, but in the end they weren’t going to be disfigured. Or burn to death. Or even be terribly inconvenienced.

  Which was good, Coalbridge reflected. You did dumb shit when you were a teenager. Unfortunately, the teenagers weren’t doing a very good job at copying the Tovil monks’ calm indifference to pain.

  “Aaaaaaaaiaaaaaaaaaah!” Their heads tilted back, agony in their throats, the teen screams continued—loud and annoyingly piercing.

  It’s like a goddamn coyote yowl, Coalbridge thought. Haven’t heard one of those in ages.

  As Coalbridge looked on, he saw one of the girls break from her position, try to crawl from the street toward the gutter, but another flaming boy reached for her.

  For a moment the two tussled on the pavement, both engulfed in flames.

  Coalbridge’s impulse to help kicked back in. He took a step toward the two. This was insane. If the girl wanted out, hadn’t realized the pain she was getting herself into, it was his duty to aid her.

  But before he could move any farther, the boy succeeded in throwing himself atop the flaming girl and holding her in place.

  Coalbridge quickly made his way toward the two—only to pull up short. Now he was close enough to see what was up.

  He’d misinterpreted. The two weren’t actually fighting or struggling at all. They were locked in a kiss.

  And were they . . .

  Yep.

  Coalbridge turned away, amused and disgusted. He chuckled. If this really was the end of the world, what a third-rate apocalypse it had turned out to be.

  Another glance toward the sky.

  No drop-rod attack seemed imminent. But the longer he lingered outside, the more exposed he felt.

  Coalbridge made his way back to the side of the Elm Street cleared corridor. As he walked on, any contempt he’d felt dissipated. He felt suddenly tender toward the burned kids. He’d been an adrenaline junkie when he was that age. He’d strongly considered taking an aviation route when he graduated from Annapolis.

  And he’d jumped at the Extry, and spacecraft duty, the minute his transfer had been approved.

  Of course, aircraft were now obsolete militarily—at least so far as the war with the sceeve was concerned.

  Fate had led him out to sea on surface vessels and then driven him in another direction entirely—one in which there was plenty of adrenaline to be had. That was good, because he still jonesed for it. All the time. Kept his mind off things.

  Like his mom and dad turned to curd by sceeve churn. His brothers. His sister. Cousins. Friends. Grandparents, greats, great-greats—beaten into the Oklahoma red earth by metal rain.

  A fucking lot of things.

  Nearby a Peepsie crowd lining the north side of Elm was shouting encouragement and cries of sympathy for the teens. Somewhere an incomprehensible bullhorn blared agitation. Coalbridge rose on tiptoes to his full height—a good six foot two—and surveyed the crowd. A sea of dazzed T-shirts scrolling through preassigned messages. A few homemade signs. And a score of placards, most of them on display-changing dazz paper, the signs featuring similar messages to their T-shirts.

  “The Real Parasites Are in Dallas!”

  “Make Our Solar System a Salt-free Zone!”

  “The Sceeve Were Right: We ARE an Unjust Species!” And the even more direct: “Humans: We Got What We Deserved!”

  There were even a few vintage signs strewn about. A yellowed “Condi = War-Criminal-in-Chief!” And was that . . . yes, it was: “Stop Global Warming!” Well, that problem was taken care of, thank you very much. Humanity’s carbon footprint was about the size of a three-week old fetus’s these days.

  A few clumps of Peepsies had signs he agreed with: “Reformat Act = Jim Crow!” “Repeal all Expiration Codes!” “Free the servants!” Generally the civil-rights folks stood a bit away from the others and were clustered around their own tables of literature and bumper stickers, the material weighed down with rocks and bits of brick against the Texas wind. Servant rights were controversial. The enormous shortage of workers to keep up the basics of civilization had been solved by the introduction of artificial agents, but at a price. Servants had performed too well. They had all but eliminated manufacturing jobs for regular people and had taken over many of the service jobs, as well.

  Suddenly: BAM! A stinging blow against his chest and an explosion on the dark black wool of his coat. He looked down.

  Red, red, red!

  I’m hit. Something somehow got through my shirt.

  Coalbridge’s reflexes took over, and he was instantly on his hands and knees scrambling for cover.

  He reached into his inner coat pocket for the Extry officer’s weapon, his service truncheon—a nasty device that looked like a police baton but was oh-so-much-more. Coalbridge was an expert with it
. In fact, he’d personally taken out fifteen sceeve and counting with this very trunch.

  He glanced down to survey the damage to himself.

  Should be okay, he thought.

  He’d taken the hit in his chest, so the crunch, the embedded smart fiber woven into his uniform shirt, probably stopped the main impact of the bullet. But there was blood, and sometimes a lucky shot got through the nano activators, so—

  Hold on. Don’t shit your pants quite yet, little Jimbo.

  Paint. It was red paint.

  Christ.

  He stood up, dusted himself off.

  “The sceeves should kill you for real!” someone screamed nearby.

  He looked over. Dungarees and checkered Vans. A tight Chavez T-shirt topped by a flowing, hand-crocheted sweater vest left open. A red bandana holding back a bundle of curly brown hair. Distressed jeans that looked like they’d been water-boarded multiple times.

  She was hot. Total retro-hippie vogue, like Joan Placid in that viral that was going around, the one that every red-blooded exper male had set to permanent repeat on his Palace.

  A look which he had to admit he found kind of attractive.

  And now he was going to pull off the seduction of the century? Turn his enemy into his lover on the mean streets of Dallas?

  God, two months without a woman, Coalbridge thought. It was beginning to tell on him.

  Forget all that. On this day of all days, he had to get to work! This situation was ridiculous. He had to find a way through these buses and get into the Capitol complex.

  “Just let me by, dear, and I’ll come back and pass a pipe around the campfire later,” he said. “Hell, I’ll bring the THC. Got sources you wouldn’t believe. Just move aside for now—”

  “Fuck you,” said a male voice, close to his ear. He turned to see a pencil-thin guy in his late twenties. He wore an old-fashioned punk getup, with sewed-on pegged jeans and a black leather motorcycle jacket over a T-shirt. “You think you can go around dressed like that”—he nodded toward Coalbridge’s dress uniform—“and get away with it? Children are dying in Africa because of you fucking Extry baby-killers.”