Guardian of Night (15 page)

Too late for me? No, too late for
you
, Poet.

He threatens all we hold dear. Destroy him!
The voices of the ancestors were singing inside him.

Yes.

Transel pressed his hand against the bulkhead and ordered the airlock cycled.

Faint hiss of exiting atmosphere.

Transel watched through the viewport as the Poet was pulled along the floor. Gitaclaber’s gripping gills found purchase on the smallest declivities. But the exiting atmosphere was too strong. His hands were peeled away.

A sickening moment when he snagged the exterior frame of the airlock, pulled himself back in.

He was going to cling to his wretched life to the last, the gutworm.

But then the Poet let go. Dropped through the door.

Within moments, his subatomic structure would disentangle from that of the vessel. He’d drop into N-space. Floating without momentum. Aimless drifting in the depths of interstellar space. Alone forever. A poet without words.

It was Transel’s turn to smile.

But then Transel saw something out the viewport. Something that perhaps Gitaclaber had noticed before, but that he, Transel, had
not
. Sharing his vessel’s Q-space, far away—a light. Transel squinted hard, squeezed his corneal lens to greater magnification. Yes, there. A bluish light, no bigger than Transel’s outstretched palm. But he knew what it was. He’d seen enough of such lights before to know.

A craft. Likely a human craft, given their location within the limit imposed on Sol system inhabitants.

As he looked on, the human vessel dropped out of Q-space and disappeared.

What? Where?

Realization dawned.

The humans were going after the Poet.

It was possible, barely possible, that the human vessel would succeed. Transel’s species was extremely resilient to vacuum, having descended from entirely vacuum-friendly ancestors. Gitaclaber would stay alive for quite a while out there.

He
surely
could not be found, though. The Poet was but a speck of nothing floating in nothingness. But on the off chance . . .
 

Transel knew his captain would not wish to destroy this human vessel. Of course, Malako would not hesitate to annihilate
any
human vessel if doing so served his purpose. But Malako was also one who could be too smart for his own good. He might rather bide his time, pick up a clue from the human vessel’s behavior as to the location of his real quarry—at least the quarry he personally enjoyed fighting. Human warcraft.

And this human vessel was merely a scouting vessel, with minimum offensive capability.

Transel would have to issue the order to destroy it.

Captain Malako would be duty-bound to obey.

But it could become unpleasant. Malako might simply scare the vessel away with a shot across the bow, or with a torpedo that went in unarmed, and then attempt to chase the craft back to its base and attack the base.

That wouldn’t do.

The more Transel thought about it, the more he was sure he must take this matter into his own hands. Which meant taking the
Powers of Heaven
into his own hands. He’d order the fail-safes off the weaponry, first thing. There would be no “dud” torpedoes, no scare tactics from the overly clever Malako.

“No one ever said the Regulation of justice was easy, did they, Companion Transel?” his old teacher, the Master Interrogator, had told him. “If you are to assume command, you must make your body and soul open to Regulation. A willing, supple instrument. Broken to the hand like a well-worn glove. And then, you must be willing to
regulate
. To compel obedience.”

Yes, Transel thought. The answer always lay in the teachings. First, he would order Captain Malako to destroy the human craft. Then, once that was done, he would confirm within himself the power of Regulation once again.

He would need to.

He even, he had to admit,
wanted
it.

Sweet
surfaction
.

He would retire to his quarters and give himself the appropriate punishment, the appropriate stimulus to continue with his duty.

Transel warmed to the thought.

He’d use the bladed mace on himself. Yes. It had been his Master Interrogator’s favorite shriving device, and it had become Transel’s favorite, as well.

After all, this
very mace
had been a gift from Transel’s Master Interrogator herself. And a gift from her own master before. One day perhaps he’d pass it on to his own favorite protégé.

But for now it was his instrument of personal balance.

The steel tang of justice.

Transel shivered with delight and anticipation.

Anticipation would see him through whatever unpleasantness lay in store when he confronted the captain, made his orders known.

Ah, yes.
Even now, Transel could feel the bite of steel and pleasure that awaited him.

USX
Chief Seattle
 

As the lifepod sped from the
Chief Seattle
, Japps had the odd sensation that the larger vessel was actually moving away from
her
and not the other way around. Both were practically motionless in comparison to the speed at which they had been traveling moments before—900 times
c
.

Now they had dropped into the N with momentum dissipated by a trick of navigation XO Martinez had once tried to explain to her, but that Japps had not been in the mood to attempt to comprehend. Somehow or another, you could “shudder” your way into Newtonian or normal space, and emerge dead still.

She was moving as if in the deepest deep ocean. Inky nothing. Distant, pinprick stars. No sun nearby, no planets, no nothing except the
Chief Seattle
behind her, out of her field of vision.

“What are you seeing out there, Japps? Anything?” It was the voice of the
Chief Seattle
communication officer, a thin, pasty-faced CPO named Bara.

“Negative, Chief,” Japps replied. “But the homing beacon is pinging him or
it
or whatever it is pretty well. Like the XO said, I’m getting beta reply off something he’s wearing or carrying. As long as that keeps up—”

Then her forward lights picked up something in the black distance. The faintest speck.

“Okay, I’ve got visual contact,” she reported. “Moving in.”

“Roger that, Pod Alpha,” said Bara.

Japps couldn’t believe it. The beta homing circuitry had worked. The forward lights of the little rescue pod picked up something floating against the vast canvas of black that she’d been staring into for the past—what? Twenty, closing in on thirty minutes.

The something was pale white. Exactly the color of a sceeve.

She’d found him. She’d found the Poet.

Now the question was: Alive or dead? She maneuvered nearer to the body—she couldn’t help thinking of it as a body—as it slowly spun in an endless head-over-heels flip. What she needed to do was position herself with the top of the lifepod beneath the body and then activate the “coffin,” the man-sized rescue unit built into the roof’s structure.
Man-sized, but not quite sceeve sized,
she thought. Most sceeve were a little under two meters tall—and eight feet plus was too large to scoop into the open coffin without bending a bit.

She hoped rigor mortis hadn’t set in. But then she chided herself for being ridiculous. This was space. Rigor mortis was from bacteria, right? So you wouldn’t get it in a vacuum, she supposed. But who the hell knew what kind of organisms might inhabit the sceeve? Nobody had ever seen a sceeve burial, if they even had such customs. Maybe they just bloomed into roses or sea anemones or something like that when they died.

She arrived at the body, parked herself “under” it. She used the attitude jets to thrust upward, using the open coffin as a scoop. The sceeve body settled awkwardly in. But there was no possibility she was going to be able to close the lid. There had to be a way. The designers surely would’ve come up with a method to manipulate a victim’s body in the coffin, wouldn’t they?

Or maybe they figured the lifepods would never be used, were more for show and morale, so why bother with actual, functional niceties. Wouldn’t be the first time appearance won out over reality in the Extry, that was for sure.

But in this case, after pulling open a covering box, she discovered a small hole in the roof. That hold led to a glove—arm length—that protruded across the bulkhead, across the lifepod hull. She thrust her arm up into it and carefully pulled the sceeve into the coffin. She folded his legs at the knees, pulling both legs in. Then she signaled the coffin lid to close.

Suddenly, the body wasn’t a body anymore. The Poet squirmed. He evidently saw what was coming down at him and attempted to escape it, get out.

Too late.

The coffin lid shut, self-sealed. Air began flooding into the coffin. The wrong kind of air for a sceeve, she knew. She had something like the right kind—not perfect but workable—in a tank near her pilot’s seat. The Poet, if that’s who this was, would just have to suffer the indignities of Earth atmosphere for a moment.

But now the Poet had gone from shaking to thumping. He wanted out of that coffin, that was for sure.

Japps considered what she had wrought. What she was about to do.

I’m about to save a fucking sceeve’s ass,
she thought,
and I don’t like it one bit.

Too much brooding. You’ve brooded enough for a dozen lifetimes. Why wasn’t I there with them? Why did I survive and my family did not?

Useless speculation. You never got any answers.

Japps pulled the opening lever, and the bottom of the coffin fell away—and the sceeve fell down into the lifepod. She closed the lid, cycled the air out. When she turned back, the sceeve was sitting up. It regarded her with its big, black lidless eyes. And she regarded its smashed-apart excuse for a nose in turn.

What the hell. If this was the Poet, she didn’t want to kill him. He’d offered her too much amusement. Given her a puzzle to solve. The D.J. of the night sky. The sourpuss voice she’d spent hours listening to. Trying to image the smell analogs. Trying to understand the underlying import of his crazy samizdat broadcast.

As the XO had ordered, Japps had brought along a tank of hastily mixed heliox, and she shoved a breathing tube into the Poet’s muzzle, worked it down into his body—Lord knew to where—as if she were putting a feeding tube into somebody’s stomach. The Poet resisted.
Not a chance,
she thought.
You’re too weak to stop me.
The scraping gills of his hands felt like dried paper as he pawed at her arms.

He must be pretty far gone,
Japps thought.

“I’m trying to help you,” she said. Like he could understand those puffs of air shooting out of her mouth. What did her breath smell like, anyway?

She sniffed in her own exhalation.

Pancake-scented burps from her short-stack breakfast. Coffee.

What the Poet really needed—must have eventually if he were to survive—was a pressure suit or pressure chamber. He was not used to the lower atmospheric pressure in human spaces, and he was going to get the helium equivalent of the bends as soon as his rescue bottle ran out of charge—if it hadn’t already. If the helium bends was anything like the bends humans got from diving too deep and surfacing too rapidly in the ocean, the Poet was about to be in a world of agony.

“It sucks to be you,” she told him. He seemed to understand at least the predicament he was in, for after a moment’s more struggle, he lay back and sucked at the heliox hose.

A flash from outside through the small lifepod porthole.

It was no brighter than a flashing camera might be if you were in the middle of a football field in a stadium and someone in the far upper decks was making a picture.

But there weren’t supposed to be any flashes out here. The nearest star. 82 Eridani, was over fifteen light-hours away. They were truly in the waste between stars.

Japps went to the controls, rotated the pod. Toggled in on the
Chief Seattle
beta beacon. Focused, refocused.

The signal wouldn’t resolve.

What the heck.

She overrode the automatic frequency lock, paged through the beta signatures available. Or that
should
have been available. There weren’t any.

She fired the puny reaction rockets on the lifepod and headed toward the
Seattle’
s last-known position.

A blip. Another blip.

Japps breathed a sigh of relief.

Okay, baby, show yourself. Come on—

Blip, blip, blip, blip, blip.

And then Japps was among the blips, and she saw what it was.

A debris field.

Blip, blip, blip, blip, blip, blip, blip, endless, endless . . .
 

The remains of the
Chief Seattle
.

“Oh, God,” Japps said.

The crew. Martinez. Her drinking buddy. Her friend.

Shit.

Shit, shit, shit—it was all happening again. She was losing everything.

Everything.

Even yourself, Melinda. Where do you think you are? This isn’t good.

Hold. Get a hold.

She swiped away her own nascent tears. Squeezed her ducts dry.

No more.

What could she do? What—

Messenger drone. All lifepods had an FTL-capable MDR. Pigeon-sized. Like the
Chief Seattle
was—had been—the drone was capable of the current Q-drive speed limit, 900
c
.

Send it. Send it where?

Japps laughed when she realized that she really only had one choice. She had no telemetry on any other vessels in this region. In fact, there was only one target she had even the slightest chance of hitting, and that by activating the drone’s automatic default trajectory. It was a destination that was ten days away.

Could she survive the month that a rescue might take?

Could the Poet?

Did they have some semblance of food?

Just taking care of a few contingencies
, Martinez had said.
Throw in some of that glucose goo.