Guardian of Night

by Tony Daniel

  Receptor Transel.

  “What is the meaning of this, Captain?” Transel squirted as soon as he caught sight of Malako. “In the name of the Directorate, I demand these officers release me.”

  Malako sighed wearily and stepped from his atrium. He motioned for the guards to drag Transel to stand before him. The DDCM officer grunted as he was jerked forward and put into place. Malako, who was a half hand taller than Transel, stared down at him.

  “You have forfeited the authority of the Directorate with your recent actions,” Malako said. “You have put this vessel and the armada in danger by your rashness, and I have been forced to invoke Verdict Three Protocols—”

  “Verdict Three?” Transel sprayed forth a repugnant carbolic cloud of amazement. “Verdict Three! I am the only officer aboard authorized to enforce Verdict Three protocols. This is insubordination of the highest order!”

  “Now, that’s not quite true,” Malako answered calmly. “Regulation states that when the craft receptor displays behavior that might otherwise lead to a culling offense, the vessel sub-receptor”—Malako flared his muzzle into a smile—“that would be me, is authorized to apply Verdict Three protocols in such a way as to eliminate that threat, up to and including confinement of craft receptor under such circumstances.”

  “You must have medical officer and Governess approval!”

  “True, except under contingency of immediate threat.”

  “What threat?” screamed Transel. “I eliminated the threat myself when I tossed the traitor out the airlock!”

  “Just that,” Malako replied. “As captain, I’ve become convinced that Mutualist vessels are indeed in the vicinity and intent on massive insurrection. I can only conclude that your reason for spacing the traitor Gitaclaber was to cover up your own part in this conspiracy.”

  “What!” Transel’s exclamation emerged from his nasal passages in a half-formed, snotty effusion that dribbled down his face.

  “The logic that leads me to this conclusion is crystal clear,” Malako said. “I’m left no choice but to invoke Verdict Three protocols.”

  Suddenly Transel laughed. “I understand. I understand you now,” he said. “He was your friend. He was your friend, this Ricimer. You’re going to ignore orders. You’re not going to rejoin the armada. You’re going to continue the hunt for the Guardian of Night on your own.”

  “Be careful what you say, Transel.”

  “Yes, that’s it! You hope to wipe the stain of your association with this Ricimer away by personally capturing or destroying him.” Another hysterical laugh issued from Transel. “You black-striped spawn of impurity—you really think you will be forgiven? They’re going to strip you of command, Malako. And after that, they will likely strip you of your life. Your gid will be burst and spread into emptiness!”

  Malako motioned to the guards who held Transel. “Place Receptor Transel in the bridge holding chamber,” he said.

  “May your seed disappear from the stars!”

  With a motion of Malako’s foot against a nubbin of metal next to his atrium, a section of the bridge deck opened up, uncovering a narrow space five hands wide and fifteen hands deep. The holding chamber was a long-established feature of Sporata design that was now seldom used. It was a legacy of the ancient Guardian days of smuggling and piracy, the time, more than a thousand cycles ago, before the hypha had been united, before the finalization of Regulation. The chamber’s purpose was to provide an area off the vessel’s scanned grid for secret cargo to be carried—and to serve as a brig where dangerous passengers or crew might be tucked away during transport. Malako—and most captains, he was well aware—used the chamber to smuggle home bits of stolen technology from conquered species, technology they would later sell on the Souk, the Shiro black market, to supplement their income and provide incentive bonuses for their officers. The practice was endemic to the Sporata and considered by officers as necessary to buy the necessities that a reasonable standard of living required back in the Shiro. The Administration was known for constantly underpaying the military and transferring the lion’s share of Depletion energy credits to the upper-level bureaucrats of the departments and committees.

  I’ll finally be putting the holding chamber to the use for which it was intended, Malako thought. He nodded his head in the direction of the hole in the deck. “Put him in there,” Malako said.

  The guards dragged Transel kicking and squirting imprecations to the chamber and, with a quick shove forward, forced him in. Before the receptor could claw his way up, Malako touched the opening toggle again with his foot, and the deck plate—half a hand thick—slid shut, immediately cutting off the flow of Transel’s words. Blessed silence returned to the bridge.

  “You two are dismissed,” Malako said. “I do not believe our unfortunate former receptor will require further restraint.”

  “Thrive the Administration, sir,” the guards answered in unison. They saluted, turned, and left the bridge.

  Malako walked over and stood on top of the holding chamber covering. He wondered if he would be able to perceive the motion of Transel below. He was sure the DDCM officer was kicking up quite a fuss down there in the darkness. Malako had no intention of letting the receptor out until he’d successfully completed this mission and returned to the Shiro. Transel would be able to survive for several tagato without sustenance. Guardians were a tough species, bred for the starkness of space. And after that?

  Whatever he says or does either won’t matter or I’ll be dead, Malako thought. In either case, Transel was finished as a threat to derail Malako from his desire. His destiny. His pleasure.

  To hunt down and destroy the traitor Ricimer.

  His friend.

  The Poet had provided the answer. Whether or not Malako could decode the Poet’s message, he had no doubt that the humans were somehow complicit in the disappearance of the Guardian of Night. Ricimer was behind the Poet, and the Poet had been attempting to relay information to a human vessel of espionage, a vessel Malako had been ordered by Transel to destroy.

  He did not have the Poet, but he did have the transmission. He would find the trail there, he was sure of it. In the meantime, he must avoid rejoining the armada. And to circumvent that order, he would keep Transel stowed away for as long as it took.

  “Captain, we are within ten vitias of the down-arm Vara Nebula,” said Malako’s navigator.

  Malako turned his attention back to the bridge view-screen panels.

  “Take us to the Tau Ceti gate,” said Malako. This ingress and egress point took its name from the brightest star that one making the traverse could see as he exited the central pathway through the nebula. There were three such tunnel-like openings into the bowels of the nebula, and Malako judged that the middle tunnel exit would be as good a rendezvous point as any for Ricimer and the Mutualists. It is where he would stage such a meeting, after all, were he a rebel commander.

  Suddenly, a scented alarm squirted from the bridge bulkhead. “Alert, alert. Vessel ahead.”

  Malako’s muzzle tightened. “Really?” he said. “Analysis, VISION?”

  “She’s a large trader,” said Lieutenant Raripan, Malako’s officer in charge of remote sensing. “Beta is all over the place. Captain, I believe we have located a Mutualist vessel.”

  “Very well,” said Malako. “NAV, drop us in on the very edge of conditioning range. I want full vessel silence.”

  “Aye, Captain.”

  “SIGNAL, check with Lamella. Have we got the Guardian of Night identification key?”

  “Computer reports we have it logged, sir.”

  Malako touched a hand to his lower muzzle, stroked a membrane, considering. Yes, it would work. The Mutualist captain was not a trained warrior. He would expect nothing.

  “Very well, SIGNAL,” said Malako. “I want you to identify us as the Guardian of Night to that vessel. Has she got a name?”

  “She’s tweeting as the Efficacy of Symbiosis, sir.”

  “How qua
int,” said Malako. “Send the identification signal.”

  “Aye, Captain.”

  “Sir, if I may.” It was Raripan at the VISION station.

  “Yes?”

  “I’m registering a large contingent of occupants on the vessel. They’re packed in there.”

  “Species?”

  “Us, sir. Guardians. Many sizes, fluid dispersal rates showing up.” Raripan looked up from his readout. “I would interpret this is as children, families. Sensors indicate over five thousand individuals.”

  “Identification acknowledged,” said SIGNAL. “They are asking why we are here and not at the designated rendezvous location at Vara Eridani.”

  Amazing. Utter amateurs. How had the Mutualist resistance held out for one variado, much less for an entire two cycles?

  Malako shifted his head into a Guardian nod. “Take us toward them NAV. Slowly. SIGNAL, keep bleating. Tell them . . . tell them we have engine problems. Tell them the artifact has interfered with the Q-drives and computing systems. We may require assistance.”

  “Aye, Captain. Transmitting.”

  “Captain, there are more than five thousand people on that vessel.”

  “Thank you for the information, VISION.”

  Raripan took a step toward Malako. He was smallish, a bit of a nebbish who had long relegated himself to sensor duty. “But, Captain, you must consider all those lives—”

  “Efficacy replies again,” SIGNAL reported. “Explain why not at rendezvous. Why not at Vara Eridani gate?”

  The Eridani gate of the Vara Nebula. The rendezvous point with the Guardian. He had it.

  “Captain, please consider a surrender request.” A florid odor. Raripan’s irritating perfumery of feeling was leaking into his words.

  Malako turned, stared into Raripan’s eyes. “You forget yourself, Lieutenant,” he said. “Do not make me remind you of your position within the craft command structure by ordering a full shriving. Is protecting a load of Mutualist scum really worth your career? Your life?”

  Raripan looked as if he might take another step, might even charge Malako. But he faltered. Stood still. After a moment, he returned to his work station. Malako almost forced him to say “no, sir” in answer but decided against pushing the matter further. Raripan had rediscovered his position well enough.

  “WEAPONS, load our rocks. All slings. Half throw weight.”

  “Done, sir.”

  “Very well, very well.” Malako waited. Curse N-space. It took so long sometimes to get within throwing range.

  “Efficacy is putting on speed toward us, Captain,” said Raripan.

  “Happy to see us, I suppose,” said Malako to no one in particular. “Are we in range, WEAPONS?”

  “In three, two, one—range, sir.”

  “Then throw.”

  And the rocks were away. Blips on Malako’s screen. So slow, they seemed. Many kilometers to cross.

  Converging with the bright dot that represented the Efficacy.

  So happy to see you, too.

  Converging.

  Converged.

  Across the bridge, a half-squirt of sandalwood anguish from Raripan, quickly repressed, fanned away.

  And the Efficacy and its thousands of souls were blasted to smithereens. Destroyed without firing a shot in her own defense.

  “Perfect,” Malako said. He turned to NAV. “Now take us to the Vara Eridani gate. We’ll wait there.” Malako ran a gripping gill along his atrium’s guardrail.

  And then I’ll have you, Ricimer.

  Five thousand Mutualists. If he’d accepted surrender, he’d have had to escort the vessel to captivity.

  Not a chance. Not now.

  Five thousand essentially useless traitors, destined for the dismemberment knives in any case.

  Not a bad sacrifice to catch one extremely dangerous Sporata traitor. The Mutualists had chosen their doom long before, after all. He was merely an instrument, carrying out orders.

  Wasn’t he?

  Silence on the bridge. Malako looked around. No one met his gaze.

  Wasn’t he?

  As usual, Malako took refuge in the thrill of the chase. It was all he had. What he wouldn’t let anyone take away.

  I’ll have you, and I’ll blast you from the sky for what you have made me become, Arid Ricimer.

  I know where you are hiding.

  THIRTEEN

  1 January 2076

  New Pentagon

  Skyhook Capture Platform

  There was no doubt—the Skyhook could be a hell of a rattling experience for the uninitiated. It was disconcerting enough for Coalbridge, and he was a jaded veteran of the process at this point. The enormous apparatus had been a sceeve instrument of war—their most devastating—but was now converted to a cheap, incredibly efficient method of transportation by humans.

  First, of course, it had to be taken from the sceeve. That task had cost thousands of lives in itself. A fleet-sized assault on the command center, with the sceeve defenses firing back in full force—drop-rod clouds launched at relativistic velocities, antimatter devices delivered inside missiles harder than the hardest diamond, Q-bottled nukes that exploded with massive destructive energy in their atomic unravelings. Whole crafts, along with their crews, had blinked out of existence in an instant during the onslaught.

  Of course, the battle had been nothing in comparison with the devastation the Skyhook had wrought on Earth.

  The Skyhook was, in essence, a rotating windmill of destruction. It used the same principle as a space elevator. If you suspend a super-strong cable out into space far enough—with its center in geosynchronous orbit—it will hang in the sky. Such a construction will not be pulled down by gravity but will “fall around the Earth” in the same way that satellites do.

  You can then build infrastructure on the cable, which is as stable as anything else on the planet, and have yourself an elevator, transport pipes for life-support, power-boosting, and transfer stations along the way—all the makings of a massive transportation corridor.

  But if you accelerate the ends of such a cable, twirl the cable like a baton around a giant invisible finger at its center, if you make it a little longer than geosynch to the Earth’s surface, you get . . .

  Death from the sky. A weapon capable of carving a canyon-sized trough through the landscape.

  The Skyhook had been constructed within the solar system, out of material gathered from the asteroid belt—an asteroid belt that was now ten percent less dense than it had been before. It was homegrown terror. Applied like a diamond-tipped scourge to the Earth’s surface, it had reworked much of the landscape of Central Asia, destroyed Europe and Russia, cut South America to shreds, and turned the entire Far East into a beaten, striated wasteland, with entire portions remade, new mountains and valleys formed. Billions had died. Entire cities had been hacked out of existence by a massive knife from the sky.

  What was most insidious and terrible was the fact that the Skyhook was maneuverable. It could be used multiple times.

  The apparatus moved slowly—its mass was that of a Galilean moon and required incredible motive force, even by sceeve standards, to budge it—but it was possible to reposition. In fact, it precessed naturally by its own gyroscopic force, and, with additional impetus from massive N-space, mass-driving engines, it was possible for the Skyhook to destroy, say, Beijing in January of 2067, and then Seoul the following February. It was not only possible. It had happened. The sceeve aimed for capitals, for centers of government, and not industrial areas. The industrials were the resources they were after—and the reason they did not simply destroy the Earth entirely.

  Coalbridge had led a portion of the raid to take the Skyhook central hub. The team had been small enough to be under the command of a lowly lieutenant commander of the Extry, and he’d been chosen. It had been a daring plan. A single-man craft deployment that approached from beyond the orbit of the Moon, scattered, slowly closing in. Most of his team of ten was made up of former SEA
Ls, Marine expeditionary units, and transferred members from other special-assault groups from various branches of the armed forces. Coalbridge, as former mainstream navy, figured he’d been given command of the assault team by virtue of his reputation for pulling together disparate disciplines and congealing a team during his days as a defensive-weapons officer onboard the ancient surface-ship aircraft carrier the Gerald R. Ford. Coalbridge, despite the drumming of engineering discipline he’d received in IAS at Houston, had always been something of a generalist and had a real curiosity in all areas of warfare.

  Most of all, there had not been a moment in his life when he did not want to win, even if the attempt seemed hopeless.

  And this mission was practically the definition of hopeless.

  His team had been scattered into position over two weeks before, set adrift individually by a tiny unmanned craft that had then quietly destroyed itself.

  And then, they’d floated. Their suits fed them nutrients through an I.V., processed their waste. On they floated. Separated by tens of thousands of miles. Slowly making their way toward the central hub of the rotating Skyhook.

  The idea was to distract the Skyhook defense with a massive assault coming from Earthside, while the actual boarding team approached from the relatively quiet spaceward direction.

  Their assault suits were all they wore. Propulsion was hydrazine, a single-thruster. Slow but steady. Minimal physics profile, a Newtonian approach all the way. The sceeve had an accurate and deadly detection mechanism—most of which was not understood at the time—for Q.

  Things had started to go wrong early and often. Telemetry on one marine’s suit had scizzed out. She’d attempted to plot a course herself, had gotten an input backward—and had headed out to deep space. A minesweeper had found her months later, frozen solid and on the way to Venus, trailing the faint vapor trail of a human comet.

  Throughout, the marine—

  Her name had been Allison something, Coalbridge remembered. Wessel? Yes.

  —Wessel had maintained beta silence, even though there was a transmitter built into the suits. Amazing willpower not to call for help even as she was dying. Coalbridge wasn’t sure if he could’ve pulled it off.