Guardian of Empire

by Kylie Chan

  I stared at the display, trying to broadcast disbelief. ‘I have never seen anything like that before.’

  ‘This is completely new, we have no records of a weapon like this,’ the other cat said, and I did my best to hide my relief. They hadn’t seen the gates that destroyed the black hole on Earth.

  Have they found it yet? Twofeathers said. She’s had the gate open a long time. We’re nearly at full atmosphere here, and we’re moving people across.

  They’re just standing around looking at it, confused, I said. They can’t even get into the warp room, and they’re unaware of the gate in the hold.

  ‘We’re ready for you,’ the Senator said to me. ‘This ship has multiple separate atmospheric systems in sealed sections so the chilli can’t spread. We can stop you.’ He turned to the medical cat. ‘Inject her with nanos anyway. She’s ours.’

  The medical cat manhandled me onto the table, secured me with wrist straps, and began to hook monitors onto me. The Senator left the room with the others.

  How many more humans to go? I asked. They’re about to inject me with nanos – I really need to get out of here!

  Fifty. Twenty. The last few stragglers . . . that’s all of them. She’s on her way. Ready, Captain?

  The cat doctor raised the syringe with the nanos active inside it like a living liquid, then grinned at me. He moved behind my head. ‘This will cause some discomfort.’

  Right now is good! I said direct to Miko.

  A gate appeared next to me and Haruka and Miko charged out. Haruka used his momentum to tackle the medical cat to the ground while Miko undid the restraints and helped me off the table. She half-carried me into the gate, and everything went completely silent around me – my ears rang in the silence. I was stretched impossibly long and thin, and my vision filled with a pale pink fog. Noise rushed back, and I stepped into the room where they were holding Masako. She was lying prone on a cat sleeping platform, her stomach bloated with death, and from the smell coming off her she’d been dead for a while.

  ‘There isn’t a mark on her, but her brain is mush,’ Miko said, as if from a million miles away. ‘Whatever made you unconscious killed her.’

  Haruka staggered out of the gate behind us. ‘No,’ he wailed. ‘No.’ He fell to his knees next to her. ‘My love.’ He looked up at us. ‘Where’s her stone? We need to find her stone.’

  I hunted around the room. It was bare and featureless. ‘No stone here.’

  ‘We need to leave, my Prince,’ Miko said. ‘She wouldn’t want you to die as well.’

  ‘Go,’ he said, and bowed his head. ‘Go without me.’

  ‘Nope,’ I said, took three big strides to him, and grabbed his arm. I wrenched him to his feet and marched him towards Miko. ‘Is the gate ready?’

  ‘Wait,’ she said, and the glass ball changed from grey to black to bright green, and then to grey again. ‘Go.’

  Haruka didn’t fight me, he seemed dazed. I dragged him to the gate and stopped. ‘Listen to me,’ I said to Miko. ‘Don’t even think about staying here and causing a distraction. We still need your gating ability. The warp engines are disabled, so we can come and go as we please. We may need you to carry us somewhere else if we can’t contact home. You’re the only one not affected by the octopus weapon. You are much too valuable to sacrifice, so get your little yellow tail moving and follow me through this gate.’

  Miko’s eyes had gone wider and wider as I spoke to her. ‘Uh,’ she said. ‘Yes, ma’am.’

  ‘Come on,’ I said, and dragged Haruka into the gate. I was stretched again, and stepped onto the bare stone floor of the interior of the asteroid. It was so cold that my breath caused a fog in front of me, and the only light was coming from Miko’s gate. The humans were sitting on the floor and checking on each other. I turned to ensure that Miko followed me, and she didn’t. Her yellow shape was moving on the other side of the gate, but she didn’t come through.

  ‘Come through right now before they work out what we’re doing!’ I shouted at the gate.

  She said something unintelligible from the other side.

  ‘Miko! Move!’

  It seemed forever before she leaped through and the gate closed behind her, leaving us in darkness.

  Blake touched my shoulder, then helped me lower Haruka. ‘Thank god you made it.’ Fabric rustled as he checked Haruka. ‘Is he injured?’

  ‘Grieving. Masako’s dead,’ I said.

  ‘That’s awful. Miko, are you here?’

  ‘I’m here, Admiral.’

  ‘You are remarkable. Why hasn’t anyone told us about this gift before?’

  ‘They’re not allowed to do it,’ I said. ‘If they get it wrong, they can break reality.’ I turned towards her voice and glared at the darkness. ‘What took you so long?’

  She touched me with her nose. ‘I took some of Masako’s scales. I have about a dozen of them. I hope one of these will work – not many of her scales are entangled; she doesn’t have any other spouses.’

  I grabbed either side of her head and kissed her hard on the snout. ‘You are magnificent. Well done.’

  We passed the scales around. Haruka sat to one side, sobbing without restraint and lost in his grief. Blake sat with me and Miko next to the wall and we sorted out our assets. The rest of the humans huddled together in the cold and dark, tapping Masako’s scales and hoping for a response.

  ‘Can you keep a gate open to the stars to give us some light?’ Blake said.

  ‘I’m sorry. I can’t hold a gate open permanently, it’s exhausting,’ Miko said. ‘I need to rest; if I tire too much I may make a mistake, and that would be messy.’

  ‘I wouldn’t call the end of the universe “messy”,’ I said.

  ‘Pfft,’ she said. ‘That would only happen if I put one end of a gate inside the other and turned the universe inside out. Normally all that happens when I get a bit tired is that my accuracy fades and extra matter comes through when I don’t want it. I have never overlapped each end of a gate, and none of my sisters have either.’ She lowered her voice. ‘Not that we’d risk doing it.’

  ‘Wait . . . a single mistake wouldn’t destroy the universe? Your sisters are wrong? Marque lied?’

  ‘Well, yeah,’ she said. ‘Marque lies all the time. It keeps telling everybody that gating is too dangerous, and they believe it. Even the other goldenscales believe it.’

  ‘But Marque must know that you’ve been doing it successfully for five hundred years – why didn’t it tell them?’ I answered my own question. ‘For the drama when they do find out.’

  ‘All of this is beside the point if we’re dead in twelve hours,’ Blake said. ‘We need to deal with the cold. We’ll die of exposure if we can’t either warm the cavern or find some blankets.’

  ‘I can put one gate closer to the black hole and another one near the potato, and warm it with the energy flare,’ Miko said. ‘Can you guide me, Captain? Tell me when it’s warm enough?’

  ‘Potato. I like it,’ I said. ‘I can help you.’

  ‘Are you sure you won’t suck the planetoid into the black hole?’ Blake said.

  ‘Yes, of course.’

  ‘I need a physicist!’ Blake shouted.

  None of the humans responded.

  ‘You have a physics question?’ Miko said.

  ‘Yeah, about heat loss, and whether we’ll lose heat from the walls once you close the warming gate. And I want someone to confirm that we can use the black hole.’

  ‘If I warm the interior to thirty degrees Celsius your measure, it will remain above zero for . . .’ Miko was silent. ‘. . . Fifteen hours.’

  ‘You just worked that out in your head?’ I said.

  She didn’t reply, then said, ‘Oh. Yes.’ Her voice filled with chagrin. ‘I’m nodding and you can’t see me.’

  ‘Can you see me?’

  ‘Yes. I can see all of you, and space for about a light year around us.’

  ‘Damn.’

  ‘When the temperature drops
too low I can just reopen another gate and warm you up again,’ she said. ‘Trust me, I won’t go close enough to the black hole for it to hurt you.’

  ‘How long do we have before we suffocate?’ Blake said. ‘It’s possible the cats are using our communications scales to tell the Empire that we’re fine, and it will take a while for them to realise we’re in trouble.’

  ‘I’ll gate some fresh air in from the cat ship,’ Miko said. ‘I can see inside it; I can gate to a location on the ship with no cats nearby.’

  ‘Good. After that our main need is water,’ Blake said. ‘We can only survive a maximum of three days without it.’

  ‘All right, let me look. No, no . . . here it is. I found a comet. I’ll have to bring it in frozen chunks for you to drink cold, because I have nothing to hold it when it melts.’

  ‘You have this remarkable ability,’ Blake said. ‘You can do major calculations in your head. You’re smarter than the rest of us put together. Are all goldenscales as good as you?’

  ‘I’m average,’ she said.

  ‘And the other dragons use you as servants,’ I said.

  ‘They’re exponentially better than us. They can’t destroy reality, their folds are so much more useful . . .’

  ‘I wouldn’t say that,’ I said. ‘I wish you could have children. You at least deserve that. You’re magnificent.’

  She didn’t reply and the space around her filled with regret.

  ‘Oh, no way,’ I said. ‘You’re capable of having children as well?’

  ‘That’s beside the point because it will never happen,’ she said. ‘My sisters would see me dead first. Now give me a few minutes to get my breath back and I’ll warm your cave up and capture a comet for you.’

  ‘That’s our immediate needs taken care of,’ Blake said with confidence. ‘We should have contact with home through one of these scales before we need to worry about food. With their warp drive wrecked, the cats aren’t going anywhere, so we can scrounge resources off them. We haven’t travelled far from the treaty location, so somebody should find us soon.’

  ‘I’ll make the warming gate,’ Miko said. ‘Let me know when it’s warm enough in here.’

  ‘We’ll check everybody over and sort ourselves out,’ Blake said.

  *

  I woke in the darkness with Miko’s smooth scales next to me. I had my arm thrown protectively over her as she lay with her four legs wrapped around me. I moved my hand over her and touched cloth – she was sandwiched between Haruka and me on the stony floor of the asteroid. The heat left the air quickly and we were staying close to keep warm. Miko was like a smooth, warm comforting blanket.

  She put her head on my shoulder and whispered into my ear, the sound becoming lost into the darkness of the cavern. ‘He’s still unresponsive.’

  ‘Give him time.’

  She nodded into my shoulder and sighed against me. ‘I’ve never been held like this. It feels good.’ She nuzzled into me. ‘I have no mistress now. Perhaps when we return – if I survive – they will permit me to break tradition and serve the Captain of the Guard instead of one of my coloured sisters.’

  I ran my hand over her and she trembled. ‘I will never permit you to serve me.’

  She filled with disappointment and rubbed her head over my shoulder. ‘I understand.’

  ‘You will be a friend and an equal and I will give you many gentle hugs.’

  She stiffened slightly, then relaxed. ‘Please don’t say things like that. It hurts.’

  ‘Respect and affection hurt?’

  ‘I have been admiring your brilliance since I first saw you,’ she said. ‘A life as your equal sounds glorious, but it is impossible. If I am lucky I may be permitted to serve you.’

  ‘Some of your goldenscales sisters seem to revel in their servitude.’

  ‘They hate themselves. They hate what we are. We can’t fold, we’re a second-class colour, we’re not good for anything. Serving others is the only way we can atone for our failure.’

  ‘You consider yourself a failure?’ I said.

  ‘It is difficult to see myself that way after what we just achieved,’ she said. ‘Forfeiting my life to have experienced such success is a small price, Captain.’

  ‘Jian.’

  ‘There it is again.’

  ‘Hurting you by being kind?’

  She nodded into me. She raised her head, then quickly disentangled herself and pulled herself to her feet, waking Haruka who grunted on the other side. ‘The cats have launched a shuttle. It’s not in warp; it has to clear their ship first. We need to hurry.’

  ‘About time. Let’s take it,’ I said.

  ‘Clear a space for the gate,’ Miko said.

  I woke the people nearby to move them as I shouted across the cavern. ‘Blake, we have a shuttle.’

  ‘How many can go?’ he said from across the cavern. ‘Who do you need?’

  ‘It’s small,’ Miko said. ‘Two people and me is all I can fit into it with the gate.’

  ‘Me and Griffith,’ I said.

  ‘No,’ Haruka said, and bumped into me. His voice filled with menace. ‘Me. I’m bigger, stronger, and I have some real motivation here.’

  ‘How many cats on board?’ I said as the gate appeared in front of us.

  ‘Two. Ready?’

  We charged through. We used our momentum to hit the cats hard, and Haruka audibly broke the neck of the one on the right with a crunch. I wasn’t as strong as Haruka, and my cat had half-fallen from his chair. He struggled to pull his legs under him and staggered to his feet, only to be punched in the face by Haruka, who then crushed his throat with the blade of his hand.

  ‘Is that Japanese martial arts?’ I said, looking with shock at the two corpses on the floor.

  ‘Yes,’ he said, and sat in one of the control chairs. ‘Do you remember how the cat flew this?’ He turned to Miko. ‘Can you gate the whole thing?’

  ‘No, my gates are limited to the size you’ve seen.’ She took two-legged form and sat next to him. ‘Let me see these controls.’ She flicked a few switches. ‘This is a basic interface; I shouldn’t have any problem with it.’ She shook her head. ‘My gate broke the ship’s warp drive, but the other engine is good. We’ll have to move it to the potato with its docking jets. This will take a while.’ She looked up and saw our faces. ‘What?’ Her hand fluttered to her mouth. ‘I wasn’t even thinking, I just did it. Please don’t tell anyone.’

  ‘You . . .’ I began, but I was lost for words.

  Her two-legged – human – form was small and delicate. She would probably only reach my shoulder when she stood. Her face was ageless and ethereally beautiful, neither male nor female but a charming mixture of both. Her skin was deep gold – more golden than natural for a human – and her long, thick hair was a paler shade of yellow that frizzed around her head. Her eyes were still huge and liquid and full of intelligence. The rest of her softly curving naked body was also neither male nor female – she had minimal pert breasts and I thought I glimpsed a hairless small penis between her legs. It was difficult to allocate a specific gender to her. She smiled sadly at me, causing her cheeks to dimple. ‘Please don’t tell anyone I took this form. We’re not supposed to have one.’ Her voice was the same; high-pitched and sweet.

  ‘You are the cutest damn thing I have ever seen in my life,’ I said. ‘Your coloured sisters look like huge muscular men or women. You look like a freaking pixie.’

  ‘What’s a pixie?’ she and Haruka said in unison.

  ‘Uh . . . never mind.’

  ‘Do you see me as male or female?’ she said, her smile going coy. ‘I’d love to know.’

  ‘Neither,’ I said. ‘Both.’

  ‘Definitely female,’ Haruka said. ‘Large breasts, long hair, uh . . . yeah all the features are female.’

  ‘I don’t see that,’ I said, grinning at him with mischief.

  ‘Well, we need to move this ship and connect it to the potato,’ Miko said. ‘I can drive it
up using the docking jets, but to create a gate between the ship and the potato I need to go outside.’

  ‘How long will it take?’ I said.

  ‘Just a second, the main ship is pinging us. I sent a confirmation code back.’ She looked over the control panel. ‘There’s the waste disposal control – can you put these poor cats in there while I work out the logistics of connecting the ship to the potato? I need to think about it.’

  ‘With pleasure,’ I said. Haruka and I stood and picked up one of the cat corpses with one of us at each end. The interior of the ship was five metres across and ten deep, with cat sleeping platforms bolted to the wall and a kibble and water dispenser next to them. The warp drive took up the entire back wall of the ship, and a neat line was cut in a gate-sized circle around its centre.

  We carried the cat’s corpse to the waste disposal chute next to the warp drive. Miko opened it, and we placed the body inside. We collected the other one, put it into the chute, and she crushed and jettisoned them. Haruka took two big strides to the water dispenser, put his hand under the tap, and took a huge drink from it. He moved back and I did the same. He pushed the lever to dispense some of the kibble, and stared glumly at it, then popped a handful into his mouth. He gagged with his hand over his mouth, chewed a few times, and swallowed.

  ‘It tastes like blood.’

  ‘Don’t eat it, Jian,’ Miko said without looking away from the control panel. ‘See if Haruka has any adverse reactions to it first. He’s tougher than you are.’

  Haruka pulled himself into the other control chair. He studied the controls and shook his head. ‘Completely beyond me.’ He looked back at me. ‘Take my place.’

  ‘No need, I can fly it,’ Miko said.

  ‘Do you need to eat and drink, Miko?’ he said.

  ‘I will after I’m happy with our trajectory,’ she said. ‘Uh . . . it will take nearly a day to move the ship to the potato with its docking jets.’

  ‘I’ll tell Blake,’ I said, and sat on one of the sleeping platforms. ‘What about the cold in the cavern?’

  ‘I can leave the ship here and warm the cavern with a gate if needed; the shuttle will stay on course. Once I’ve docked this ship with the cavern and created a hole using a gate, we can use it to warm the cavern, provide you with air, light and water, and perhaps even provide you with food.’