Guardian of Empire

by Kylie Chan

  ‘They don’t hurt the children, though? They’re just little playmates?’ the Empress said.

  ‘The alien kids are maimed and killed all the time. And again: celebrated. “This exceptional child gave his life and happiness for the safety and comfort of his family. What a hero”.’

  ‘Our humans are here,’ the Empress said. ‘The cats sent them in a warp ship on the express agreement that we stay out of each other’s space and never speak to each other again.’

  ‘I don’t think that will be a problem,’ Oliver said.

  ‘Marque will self-destruct to avoid the nanos, then I’ll dock with the cat ship and we’ll bring them physically across.’ The Empress turned to me, her bright blue eyes full of approval. ‘Well done, you two. You freed the humans, and gave us extremely valuable insight into cat culture. Your courage is unparalleled.’ She turned back to the cat ship, which was losing its glow as it returned to normal space. ‘Please reconsider my offer, Jian. I think my guard are right.’ She disappeared, then reappeared on the ship’s nose to guide it to dock with the cat ship.

  ‘Right about what? What offer?’ Oliver said.

  ‘Ugh. They voted me Captain of the Imperial Guard, and they want me to lead them.’

  ‘Don’t you dare.’

  ‘I know.’

  Masako’s ship shuddered as it connected to the cat ship. There was a loud clang and the ship shuddered again.

  The Empress appeared next to us. ‘Without Marque here we’ll have to open the hatch manually. Hands on me and we’ll go down to the docking level.’

  The Empress carried Oliver and me to the belly of the ship, where Marque had constructed a round, physical docking airlock.

  ‘This is so hard without Marque,’ she said. ‘We take it for granted. I’ll pop outside and shift us into position.’ She disappeared.

  ‘Without Marque there aren’t even inertial compensators,’ Oliver said. ‘They really are reliant on it.’ His ears twitched. ‘How do dragons move short distances through space anyway? I’ve always wondered. They look like they’re swimming through the vacuum.’

  I smiled. ‘You don’t know?’

  ‘Another gap in my education because I’m a cat. I suppose action and reaction, so they must be expelling something. Pooping or farting or pissing through space.’

  I nodded.

  He turned to me, incredulous.

  ‘Farting,’ I said. ‘They have their own manoeuvring jets. They wiggle their bodies, like they’re swimming, to produce the gas.’

  He grinned. ‘That is an awesome party trick.’

  ‘No, it isn’t; if they do it inside it stinks. Worse than Endicott.’

  ‘Ew.’

  The ship shifted and there was a loud clang as we connected to the cat ship. I went to the airlock controls and pressed the button that Marque had labelled, ‘This one first to engage the clamps’.

  More clangs made the ship shudder as the clamps engaged.

  A green light went on, under a label that said, ‘You can press the second button to open the inside door now’.

  I pressed the second button and there was a loud hiss of escaping air.

  ‘That doesn’t sound good,’ Oliver said.

  A sign appeared that said, ‘If you can hear hissing, move your asses. You have two days before the ship loses all its air.’

  ‘Marque really adores its drama,’ Oliver said, as the airlock hatch opened to reveal the pale, traumatised faces of twenty human captives on the floor of the airlock.

  Oliver and I helped them out – physically carrying many of them – and placed them on the floor of the belly of the ship. The escaping air was on the far connection, so it produced a stiff breeze around us.

  ‘I think we should just open the far side without doing any hygiene,’ Oliver said. ‘We’re losing air anyway; may as well hurry it up.’

  I studied the buttons. ‘Marque didn’t leave us that option.’

  ‘Well damn,’ he said. He checked the airlock. ‘Clear.’

  ‘I’ll go inside and help them,’ I said.

  ‘No,’ he said, and pressed the button that said ‘Close and cycle the airlock when everything is working.’ The door closed and the breeze stopped. ‘There’s a small chance that you’ll be stuck in there if the mechanism jams – and it’s leaking. I won’t risk you.’

  ‘What he said!’ one of the captives shouted.

  I rounded on them. ‘Proceed further into the hold, please, to make room for the next batch.’

  ‘Ma’am,’ the captive said, and Oliver busied himself helping them to move.

  The light went green above the airlock door and I opened it again.

  9

  Runa dropped me onto the click homeworld, and Rapclick was waiting for me under the enormous trees.

  I clapped my hands at Rapclick. ‘May your shell be shiny. I came as soon as I could.’

  It clicked its front pincers at me. ‘May your bones be solid.’ It lowered its pincers. ‘You didn’t need to rush, dear one, the babies are growing well and they won’t moult and separate for at least a couple of your years. I’m sure the Empress has you busy with important work in the aftermath of what the cats did to your people.’

  ‘Not really. The hostages are recovering with their families and receiving therapy. If the cats try to attack us again, it will be years before they reach the edge of their space and we have to worry about them. The Empress started harassing me to be Captain of the Guard again, so I left.’ I looked around. ‘Where are they?’

  ‘This way; they’re in a growth cell protected from predators.’

  I followed Rapclick through the enormous trees. The knee-high moss was too soft to walk on top of, and I ploughed through it, glad for the oxygen bubble around me that protected me from the liquid methane. The click moved swiftly on its jointed legs over the mossy brush and stopped to let me catch up. We were on the edge of the growth cell; a round hole a hundred metres across stretched before us.

  ‘Down here,’ it said, and scuttled down a ramp that curved away as it fell, matching the interior wall of the cell. Twenty metres down there was a viewing gallery of packed earth with windows overlooking the mossy interior of the cell.

  Snapclick and Terrclick’s five young were still in their proto stage; juvenile, of low intelligence, and not yet sentient. They’d already had soulstones fitted, but it would take four more years before the stones were attuned. The babies were half the size of the adults, and their colours were a soft mix of Snapclick’s pink and Terrclick’s violet. The three bodies that would separate when they reached adulthood were connected at the head, making the resulting creatures look like Earth spiders with three bodies and far too many legs.

  The juvenile clicks seemed to manage their weird connected state without difficulty; they moved slowly over the surface as they grazed on the moss.

  ‘They ingested their parents successfully,’ Rapclick said. Several simple baskets made of woven click-spit sat along the bottom of the window, and it reached into one to pass me a shining pink piece of shell. ‘Even though you could not serve as post-ingestion for these outstanding young ones, we wish to honour you.’

  I held the piece of Snapclick’s shell between my hands and lowered my head over it. It still had some of the delicate silver filigree that the clicks had etched onto it to honour Snap and Terr when they performed their dance. My throat was thick as I nodded to Rapclick. ‘Thank you. This means a great deal to me.’

  A grey cube, five centimetres to a side, rolled down the stairs and stopped next to us. Another followed, and I watched incredulously as a third appeared.

  ‘You were not invited,’ Rapclick said, its voice full of irritation that I had never heard in a click before.

  ‘We observe,’ one of the cubes said, and it expanded to a spacesuit that appeared to be four legs without a visible body or head, with the join of the legs at the height of my waist.

  An energy creature that looked like a blue-white spark emerged fro
m the lights above and hung down over our heads, roiling with energy. ‘What the fuck are you assholes doing here?’ the spark said. ‘I cannot believe how rude you are. This is a private, invitation-only viewing for close family friends.’

  The other two cubes expanded to suits that were the same size as the first, and all three approached the window.

  ‘We observe,’ the first suit said again.

  ‘Intensify their social filter, Marque,’ I said. ‘They sound like psychopaths.’

  ‘They are psychopaths,’ the spark said.

  ‘That’s the best I can do,’ Marque said. ‘They’re not really psychopaths, they’re just radically different from you. I don’t have much to work with when it comes to communication between your species.’

  The spark hung below the light. ‘Please don’t for a moment think that their behaviour is typical of us energy types, honoured sentients. These guys are the essence of bad manners.’ It retracted back into the ceiling.

  ‘I don’t believe we’ve met,’ I said to the spark. ‘I’m Jian Choumali. I used to be in the Earth forces.’

  ‘Six Eighty Four Hertz,’ the spark said. ‘I was good friends with Terrclick on the dragon homeworld, where we were joint spouses of Silver. I miss Terrclick, we had some good times.’ The spark flared brighter. ‘Don’t worry, if these suited fuckers decide to try something, I’ll stop them.’

  ‘Can you handle all three?’ I said.

  ‘With a hundred volts tied behind my back, to use an expression your Earth soldiers taught me,’ Six Eighty Four said. ‘I love you humans, you’re so small and so squishy and you have a great sense of humour.’ It swung down from the light fitting again. ‘What are you observing, lightning strikes?’

  The suits went smaller at the insult, then grew again. ‘We observe. Small things.’

  ‘I can see you’re watching the babies, but why?’ Six Eighty Four said.

  ‘Speculate. Cut. Mature. Quick,’ the suits said.

  The click scuttled to stand between the suits and the window. ‘Touch these babies and I will ensure that you are expelled from the Dragon Empire.’

  The suits stood in front of the window, swaying in the air, then all three of them folded up into cubes and shot back up the stairway so fast that they left a methane breeze that lifted the mossy leaves in their wake.

  ‘Marque,’ I said. ‘What the hell was all that about? Did they want to cut up the babies to make them mature more quickly?’

  ‘They thought it would help,’ Marque said.

  ‘Are they really that stupid?’ Six Eighty Four said. ‘You keep telling us that they’re intelligent and sensitive. What they just did is neither. Hell, I’m just as much an energy being as they are, and I would never consider performing surgery on a physical-manifest child without the parent’s permission.’

  ‘If I cut you into three pieces would it hurt you?’ Marque said.

  ‘Well, no,’ Six said. ‘But I know damn well what it would do to one of my pet breks.’

  ‘They don’t have physical pets,’ Marque said. ‘They don’t even know what physical-manifest is; they can’t see their home stars’ planets. They have trouble processing the existence of physical beings because the nature of matter is outside their realm of understanding.’

  ‘And a dragon had sex with that,’ I said, incredulous.

  Six went a darker shade of blue. ‘When the dragons take energy form, they look so . . .’

  ‘I know,’ I said wryly. ‘They do it to us, too.’

  There was a thump above our heads and I peered up through the window. The cubes had attempted to enter the cell and Marque had blocked them. One of the creatures oozed out of its suit onto the energy barrier above the cell. Six Eighty Four was a brilliant blue-white light; the creatures without their suits were a deep orange-red flickering spark.

  ‘Tell them again,’ Rapclick said. ‘If they enter the cell they are banned from the Empire.’

  ‘To be honest, I wouldn’t mind if they were,’ Marque said, sounding exasperated. ‘I’ve tried to explain the properties of matter to them, and they refuse to understand. It’s like trying to explain the dragons’ four-dimensional manipulation to three-dimensional people. Impossible.’

  The other two creatures exited their suits and the three of them sat on Marque’s barrier.

  ‘Six . . .’ Marque said.

  ‘I’m on it,’ Six said, and retracted into the light fitting.

  The energy creatures oozed through Marque’s barrier as if it was a minor hindrance, then dropped onto the floor of the cell and disappeared.

  ‘Six won’t let them near the babies,’ Marque said.

  ‘You sure Six wasn’t overestimating its abilities?’ the click said. ‘Three against one?’

  Marque was silent, then said, ‘I’m putting an alert out on the network. There has to be another energy citizen within light-travel range; there are a few of their preferred habitat stars around here.’

  ‘I can’t see anything,’ I said. ‘Their frequency is outside my range of vision.’

  The interior of the cell glowed and the energy creatures became visible. Six was still blue-white, and had stretched itself like a curtain in front of the click babies. The three red creatures were floating on the other side of the cell in the shape of flexible cylinders that were joined at their middles into a single star-like cluster.

  ‘I think they’re discussing how to make it through Six to get to the babies,’ Marque said.

  ‘Call a dragon to evacuate the babies,’ Rapclick said. ‘We must save them!’

  I ran back up the stairs and stood on the edge of the hole. ‘Neutralise my higher gravity,’ I said.

  ‘You can’t do anything to stop them: they’ll carve straight through you like you aren’t there,’ Rapclick shouted from below.

  ‘I can give them a demonstration,’ I said. ‘Stay there and wait for backup, Rapclick.’ The gravity around me lessened and I jumped into the cell. One of the babies, spooked by the presence of the suits, scuttled into my landing zone and Marque shifted me sideways so I wouldn’t hit it.

  I moved to stand next to Six Eighty Four. ‘If you cut up a physical creature, it will be harmed.’

  ‘I don’t think they understand the concept of harm,’ Six Eighty Four said. ‘We can’t be hurt in any meaningful way: we’re either alive or dead, nothing in between.’

  ‘Then tell them that the babies will be killed. Did they kill their dragonspouse when she first arrived?’

  The suits separated and hovered in front of me.

  ‘Yes, they did,’ Marque said. ‘She went straight back to them, so they didn’t see it as death. She was fascinated; they were the first energy creatures she’d encountered, and she’d heard how good the sex was with them.’

  ‘You killed a dragon,’ I said to the suits.

  ‘What is “killed”?’ the suits said.

  ‘You destroyed your dragonspouse.’

  ‘We will not destroy dragons,’ the suits said.

  ‘I’m coming in as well,’ Rapclick said from the other side of the glass.

  ‘No, stay out there, you may need to provide medical attention if things go sideways,’ I said. I turned back to the suits, who hadn’t moved. ‘And I’m more disposable for a demonstration.’ I spread my arms in front of the suits. ‘Do to me what you are planning to do to the babies. You will see how much physical people are destroyed by being separated.’

  ‘I will see,’ one of the suits said, then rushed straight through Six Eighty Four, and sliced my torso horizontally in half with an energy extension. I was still in shock at the speed of the attack when I hit the moss face-first, the bubble around me broken and methane burning my skin.

  The air filled with high-pitched screams that sounded like a sports whistle, and my face was full of burning moss.

  ‘Destroyed,’ all the suits said at the same time.

  ‘The same thing will happen to the babies if you do this to them!’ Six Eighty Four said
.

  I wanted to loudly agree with it but breathing the methane was killing me. I was too busy screaming anyway.

  *

  Marque lifted me out of the medical table in my new body to be greeted by the sight of an enormous opalescent spider with way too many legs and a blue and silver kerchief tied around its hairy abdomen. I hopped off the table and walked up and down, making sure all the bits were working again, as it towered over me, nearly touching the three-metre ceiling.

  ‘Hello, Captain Graf,’ I said. ‘Did we save the babies?’

  ‘You were remarkable,’ Graf said. ‘The entire Empire watched you throw yourself in front of them and die a painful death – just to demonstrate what death is.’

  I glared at it. ‘Did we save them?’

  ‘Oh.’ It lowered itself on its legs with shame. ‘Yes, you did.’

  ‘I take it you’re here because the Empress wants to see me,’ I said.

  ‘Yes. You’re in her Palace right now. The Senate attempted to censure the suits about their behaviour and tell them that they’re risking expulsion from the Empire, but failed to break through the communication barrier,’ Graf said. ‘The suits rarely interact with matter, and they have trouble understanding it, so the Senate has delegated the task to the Empress herself. She requests your presence for the hearing.’

  ‘Let’s go, then,’ I said.

  Graf escorted me from the medical centre to the Empress’ hearing room. The room was a secure hall within the complex, three storeys high, with an arched roof plated with silver and walls painted sky-blue. Rapclick and Six Eighty Four were already present in front of the Empress, and four of the suits were standing as far as they could from the click.

  ‘Good, here you are, Jian,’ the Empress said. ‘Have you recovered?’

  ‘Thank you, Majesty, I have,’ I said.

  ‘We are about to replay the incident,’ she said. ‘Would you prefer not to watch?’

  I waved it away. ‘I’m fine. Go ahead.’

  ‘Marque.’

  Despite my casual dismissal, the recording was unpleasant to watch. The suit effectively disembowelled me when it sliced me in two, and I lay screaming on the moss, bleeding out and turning livid purple. Eventually I made some horrible choking sounds and expired. On the image, Six Eighty Four moved in front of the babies, and said, ‘If you separate the babies this will happen to them.’