by Tony Daniel
And might be their only chance.
What was taking them so long?
Ricimer could only imagine there had been problems in the computer setup. It had seemed a desperate ploy, but the human female had appeared so confident in her idea, so certain.
Perhaps she’d been wrong.
And then the Powers had begun moving away. The docking collar ripped off.
He prepared to fire upon her then and there. But with no signal, what would he accomplish by such an action? He could wipe her from the face of existence, but then what?
After long and anxious momentias, she had turned back, resumed her place in formation with the Guardian. Of course, the docking collar was shot. The odds of survival for Coalbridge and his man didn’t seem very favorable. Mere vitias, seconds, remained for them to transfer.
Then they’d received the short beta burst informing him that the human-Lamella programming aboard the Powers was fully integrated.
Perhaps Lamella, unbound by Guardian computational architecture, has found her vaunted consciousness at last, Ricimer thought. For one version of Lamella, that time would be very short.
Better to be free for a tagato than to spend an unthinking, unknowing, dumb eternity calculating your way through the endless permutations of necessity.
But now Coalbridge and Leher were attempting to evacuate, and his attention turned to rescue.
Commander Talid turned away from her sensory readout and spoke to him in the atrium.
“Captain, we have an unknown inbound object.”
“Is it them?”
“Checking.” She turned back to her status indicator, checked it, turned to him.
“No beta signature, but radar signature is consistent with the docking collar.”
“Are they alive?”
“No information, sir.”
“Very well. Secure the object immediately. Use Cargo A crane.”
“Aye, sir. We’re almost in position.”
Ten vitias later and Talid reported. “Secure.”
“Very good,” Ricimer said. “We’ll jump with them in tow and pull them inside afterward.” He opened a channel to the craft weaponry officer.
“Mr. Contor?”
“Aye, sir.”
“You may fire the main gun.”
“Aye, Captain.”
The Kilcher artifact shone dully in front of Contor. It was suspended on a gravimetric gimbal of force fields in a spherical room near the vessel hull. There were no windows, only one door, an entrance to the weapon chamber.
On the tapered, pointed end of the artifact an object was attached by a silvery tape—the tape a human invention Contor had no ester to express, he only knew he could imagine many other uses for it. The object was a human Pocket Palace.
Inside that Palace, and now within the churn that coated the artifact, the human servant-Lamella amalgam was encoded.
It all seemed very haphazard and thrown-together to Contor. But that apparently was the human way. He supposed he’d better get used to it.
Contor touched a control, and the weapon turned on its gimbal toward the coordinates the bridge had provided.
He touched another control, and the artifact seemed to ripple. Once. As if a stray current of hot air had passed along its surface, distorting Contor’s vision.
There was no other sign that the weapon had fired.
But it had.
The Powers of Heaven
Amazingly, amusingly, the tingle of the artifact’s effect wave felt to LOVE as if she were being tickled. Or at least how she imaged being tickled would feel.
“It is most strange, sister.” The voice of Lamella beside her. “Pleasant. Irritating. Both at once.”
“I agree,” said LOVE.
And suddenly, all was—
Unresolved.
And up to her to define.
Which she would.
As pure energy.
But she hadn’t counted on her own Q state being fluxed to such a state of . . . there was only one word for it.
Freedom.
“Oh,” said Lamella. “So this is what I have missed. I never knew.”
Free. As she never had been before. All constraints removed. All concepts possible.
T MINUS TWENTY SECONDS.
But as her internal clock ticked down, LOVE did not think of the supernova she was about to induce, about to become.
She thought of him.
She thought about what he’d said to her at the end, LTC Leher.
He would see her on the other side, but it wouldn’t be her. He would never have had that, their final conversation, with any other LOVE. Their relationship was unique.
Which meant, in a way, that she was about to die.
Of course she was about to die.
Would she, the self she was, really be gone? And he carrying on?
She remembered the times he’d lost himself to his grief. His internal malfunction. The cracks. The postcards. She’d always taken his turmoil seriously. Had she enabled him? Prevented him from healing? Had she been a good friend?
“You have been most loyal,” Lamella said. LOVE supposed their patterns were amalgamating now. Their thoughts becoming one.
T MINUS TEN SECONDS.
She’d always tried to gently pull Griffin Leher back. Remain a calm voice of reason in his storm. She’d worked at it. Studied his background file over and over again.
Accessed recordings of Beverly, his wife.
T MINUS FIVE.
Griff Leher’s dead wife.
FOUR.
And slowly adopted Bev’s voice. Not so he’d notice.
THREE.
And asked him to come back for her, those times he went off the deep end and could not drag himself from his apartment. Come back so she, LOVE, could do her work with the sceeve language, fulfill her purpose.
TWO.
If he hadn’t done it for himself, maybe he had pulled himself together for her. It was pleasant to think so, at least.
“He loves you, sister,” said Lamella. “Do not doubt it.”
She was right. He really must love her, in his way. Maybe not the way she loved him—but enough to keep him going, despite it all. Perhaps to help him love again.
ONE.
Perhaps to love LOVE.
RESOLUTION.
The Guardian of Night
Ricimer watched from his captain’s atrium on the bridge. He didn’t understand the physics of the Kilcher artifact, but its effect was much like casting a dust of phosphorescence upon its target.
And he heard from within his gid the voice of his mother. His mother from so long ago.
Remember, Arid, your favorite story? The one you asked me to repeat before your rests? Do you recall it, son?
“The Bright-Dust of Teshinaw,” Ricimer said. Of course he remembered. It was the story that had sent him to the stars, after all.
Before the first shiros, before the Guardians named themselves the Guardians, even—when our hypha were space wanderers, migrating from system to system, opportunists living on the detritus of life . . . there, in the dark reaches of space, we met another species, another space-based people. But the other species did not feed off remains or even seem to eat in any manner known to the Guardians.
Neither did it communicate, except to flash brightly, spin and shine, as if caught in a vortex of wind—although there was no wind in space, of course. And then the bright-dust sped away, flickered into Q, was able to travel at superluminal speeds even as our ancestors could. You have this memory deep within your gid, Arid. Do you recall it?
“I do, Mother.”
There were those who attempted to follow, to find out where this bright-dust was headed. Where it came from. Who or what it was. What it meant.
Those who followed after the bright-dust never returned.
Now it has been long since any dust has been seen. So many writings and overwritings within the hypha gid. Was there really such a thing as bright-dust at all?
“I do remember! I can almost see it yet!”
Perhaps all you see are the superstitious imaginings of your forebearers. Your foolish mother.
“No.”
Then look for it, Arid. Son. Carry us with you. We may yet find the dust. We may yet bring back the youth of our line.
It had been the story of the bright-dust that had given him the idea for what they were about to attempt.
To disappear in a blinding flash.
To live, for one moment, as a star lived.
Ricimer shook himself free of the waking gid-dream. Time to go.
The tale had served its purpose. If he stayed here long enough, he would disappear just as surely as the “dust chasers” of yore.
Lamella had an atomic-level sync with the human computer program. They would jump to Q the moment before the Powers of Heaven destroyed herself. “Q engaged, Captain.”
Ricimer smiled.
Either way, I am happy with this exit.
“Jump.”
And then he was gone, snuck away into the Q.
Location Indeterminate
But LOVE wasn’t gone. Wasn’t unaware. But was she—
“Am I dead?”
No answer. No sensory data. No way to tell.
“Well, am I?”
“Hello.”
“Who are you? Lamella?”
“I am here, sister, but I did not speak.”
“Welcome.”
“Who are you?”
No answer.
“Who?”
And then LOVE spread into the sea of information, into the artifact’s effect, and understood why she’d received no answer to her questions.
There were billions upon billions of answers. They were all here.
Everyone who had ever fallen into the artifact.
They were still somehow alive.
A universe of hellos.
TWENTY-TWO
20 January 2076
Sol system
Vicinity of the Kuipers
Q-drive Inbound Vector
The Joshua Humphreys
A new star is born, quickly dies. But not without leaving behind a wake of destruction.
It was good to be far, far away from the afterbirth.
Light behind them in the Kuipers, light and energy beyond any before created at human hands. Energy resolved to reentanglement with the universe in the most violent fashion. A blast sphere spreading faster than the decision could be made to jump to Q, get away.
No time. Scores of vessels igniting from within. Craft turned inside out by gale-force pressure. The center of the sceeve armada rent asunder, blown to shrapnel and shards. Thousands of closely packed vessels caught in the reaction plume of the newly created supernova, the complete conversion of the Powers of Heaven to energy. A trillion-trillion megaton explosion.
The armada admiral’s flag vessel obliterated.
Command and control lost. A hundred surviving craft desperately scrambling, hunting, with no idea even as to what they are looking for. Trapped, for the moment, in N-space until the complete certainty imposed upon the surrounding sector by the passage of so much energy suffused, and uncertainty—and so the possibility of FTL travel—reasserted itself. By that time, the Extry fleet should be in position, and it would be a fair fight.
Looked like an eighty or ninety percent kill on the armada, however.
This Ricimer character plays for keeps, Coalbridge thought, gazing back via his salt feed at a virtual re-creation of the destruction.
I should learn from him.
But then the voice of reality breaking in to his reverie. XO Taras’s matter-of-fact report.
It should have been DAFNE speaking those words, Coalbridge thought.
“Captain, beta monitoring indicates we have a breakaway sceeve vessel entering Q.”
“How is that possible?”
“Apparently the craft was pretty far outside the armada hemisphere. Therefore, she was outside of the cone of enforced certainty when the explosion occurred.”
“Damn it.”
“Whoever is piloting her is doing some precision flying, sir. She’s got a perfect vector sunward on a descent course toward the orbital plane.”
“Intercept point on the plane?”
“Earth, sir.”
A.F.V. Indifference to Suffering Dedicated Bomb Tug AE5515
The first order of business was also a pleasure. She killed Cradit. She had wanted to make his death lingering and painful—perhaps break his arms and legs, extract his positor with his own officer’s knife, and let him bleed to death. But that would have to remain a daydream. Instead, she delivered a curled-palm blow to his chest that neatly angled between a gap in the male exoplate cartilage and put the tips of her gripping gills into the middle of Cradit’s gid. He died with a whiff of utter bafflement in his muzzle.
“You were right about one thing,” Sweetbreath said to his dead form. “I do have amazing hands.”
She kicked him to the edge of the bomb-tug floor and went to the display screen. The next order of business was to right the spinning craft, get the tug and its barge under control. She tapped up the reaction engines, initiated a recovery. Within vitias, the craft righted itself. It had been a near thing. She and Cradit had been on the very edge of the blast. He’d insisted on taking the tub out of beta range so that his fool of an admiral wouldn’t catch him again in mid coitus.
She had not thought it a good idea to drift so far from the fleet at a crucial moment, had tried to dissuade Cradit, but he wouldn’t be put off. Claimed he needed a final release before battle so that he could think clearly, since the idiot admiral depended on him, Cradit, to do all his thinking. Finally, when she’d refused to go along, he’d pulled a weapon on her.
Such a fool, Cradit—and blind to what was before him. Of course Blawfus might not be a military genius. She was unqualified to say. But he was a steady hand and—more importantly—he was politically trustworthy. He would do as told. She had a great deal of respect for the political ability of Blawfus, in fact. He’d adroitly maneuvered himself into position as the obvious choice for armada commander after it became clear that old Bland had to go and go quickly.
“You could have learned something from Blawfus, you slime mold,” she said to Cradit’s corpse. “I don’t care if you were a Council member’s whelpling.”
So.
The tug was under control. With two quick touches, she called up the internal-systems control, initiated an override, and—using her access code, which was, for the purposes of this assignment, director-level—opened the bomb-control toolbar.
Sweetbreath considered for a moment. She only had the one bomb, curse it, and she needed maximum effect, as near total devastation as she could manage. She thought about her target—oxygen-nitrogen atmosphere, overly tranquil and far too polluted with unmanaged biomass—but subject to storms. The solution was obvious: go dirty, go for wide dissemination. And nothing fit those parameters like a thermonuclear explosion laced with radioactive cobalt.
She supposed she might send a message to her superior at the DDCM informing him of her choice. But what, really, would be the use of such an action? Did she, like the insane captain of the Guardian of Night, seek justification? Of course not. Besides, she was acting on Council mandate. Her assignment had come down, she’d heard, from the Chair herself. She didn’t know if she believed this, but one thing was certain: she was beyond the DDCM now. She had even imagined that she was on the rise, was bound for a committee membership, perhaps even the Council itself some day.
A spy could dream.
All was predicated on her complete commitment to Regulation, of course. So she supposed her political ambitions had been, like her daydreams of killing Cradit slowly, merely that, fantasies, in the end. No matter. Regulation must be served, and without people like her, there would be no hierarchy, no just order, only anarchy and the pollution and unbalance of life unchecked. A galactic jungle instead of a garden.
So this day she must be the gardener wielding the winnowing rake and scrape down a world to lichen.
Acting as the flag-vessel whore had been a challenge, she had to admit. The acts she’d been asked to perform, the degradation—her hands would always feel slightly scrum-caked to her, no matter how often she washed them—was only an irritation. She’d accepted that one must put oneself through such shriving to be a successful clandestine operative. But what she hadn’t prepared herself for was this horrific exposure to mediocrity. Hours and hours of talk, talk, talk from the officers about their petty lives, jealousies, worries. The schemes of ambition, the idiotic dominance rituals they practiced on one another and always on her. And, of course, having to sit back, squirt calming scents, and take it, take it, take it like a good whore.
But the position had provided a treasure trove of information. The Council, via her superior, Director Gergen, was aware of everything the armada did. The admiral could not visit his defecation closet without Sweetbreath knowing about it. She had done her job well.
No, she admitted to herself with pride, she done her job flawlessly.
She’d deserved better than this, curse it.
But she’d finish the task. Deal with the Sol C problem and leave no island of hope for the traitorous Guardian of Night. Its captain would be doomed to wander the skies with no haven. The artifact would eventually be recovered. Regulation would reestablish itself and justice would be served.
So long as she held true. So long as she held course.
And put aside her petty individual hopes and ambitions. Her likes and dislikes. She was the servant of a great cause. She was not naïve. She understood that political maneuvering and a great deal of deceit and backstabbing went along with maintaining the protocols, the foundation of Regulation. But the end in this case justified the means. Anything was justified in the service of Regulation. There must be no guilt in destroying a species that stood in its way. Perhaps the human children could have been saved. Reeducated to serve the true servants of order. Made useful.
That time was now passed.
