Guardian of Night (17 page)

His senior officers were handpicked. He’d served with them all over the years. He’d been careful to approach only those whom he knew to have bitterness against the Administration, but not against the Sporata in particular. The Sporata certainly had its problems, but it wasn’t actively malevolent. In any case, Ricimer had nothing against it.

The Administration, on the other hand, was ruthlessly efficient in all things political. Ricimer was no democrat. He didn’t consider himself a Mutualist, either, with their quaint belief in symbiosis and interspecies innovation. Ricimer supposed, if pressed, he would say he had no political leaning but was merely opposed to institutionalized murder.

Especially when his family was the victim.

His own motive, he had decided, was revenge. And he had only begun to exact it.

Ricimer entered the bridge and briskly returned to his atrium. He had barely toed into his virtual-feed grid when his XO, Talid, turned to him with a report. “Captain, we have a problem.”

“What’s that, Commander?”

“We’ve got two atmospheric sensors that are registering low levels of contamination.”

“Radiation?”

“Churn, sir,” said Talid. “Lieutenant Frazil, report.”

Frazil was the Craft Internal Systems Officer, the CISO.

One of mine,
Ricimer thought.
Trained him from a plebe.

Ricimer turned to Frazil. “What are we looking at, CISO?”

“Captain, I’ve sent crews for a physical examination, but as of now Lamella and the autonomous monitoring routines cross-check. Both confirm contamination in atmospheric ducts Aft 13 and Aft 57 with point three ppm military-grade churn.”

“Any evidence of activation?”

“Not at this time, sir.”

Which, under different circumstances, would have been an enormous relief to all who heard it. An engineered nanotech plague attack on the material structure of the vessel was the nightmare scenario of any Sporata vessel. The threat could take so many forms and, like a rapidly mutating biological virus, could be extremely difficult to eradicate before it infected and destroyed everything in its wake.

“Those are officers’ quarters ducts, are they not, CISO?”

“That’s correct, sir,” Frazil responded. “We’ve projected a path back to the churn stores and have isolated two possible routes.”

“Then shut them both down, Lieutenant.”

“Already done, sir,” said Frazil. He seemed appalled that Ricimer could believe he might neglect such a basic action. “But officers are present in quarters, and I wasn’t certain—”

“Quarantine the area. Seal them in—including your crews. Then get me a list of who we’ve got in there.”

“Aye, sir.” Frazil bowed his head, concentrated. Ricimer knew he was furiously sending a barrage of shutdown orders through his virtual feed.

“Do we have a timeline and list of possible contaminated personnel, CISO?”

“Coming up right now, sir.” The crenelations that were Guardian written language rose under Frazil’s hand on his console, and he quickly rubbed his gripping gills across the surface, releasing the digitized esters to his muzzle. “Last clear reading was 1.7
atentias
ago, Captain. I’ve got a list of officers who have been in and out of quarters since that time, sir.”

“Very good, CISO. How many?”

Frazil quickly counted. “Twenty-seven, sir.”

Good. Twenty-seven was exactly the right number.
Every one of “his” officers had secret orders to stay out of the officer sector for the past two
atentias
.

“Get the potentially infected officers into isolation and scan them one by one,” Ricimer said.

“Sick bay can’t handle that many, sir,” said Talid.

“The only place big enough to isolate them is Cargo B,” Frazil added.

Ricimer nodded. “Very well. Order each of those officers to activate exterior excursion fields immediately and report to Cargo B. And get a quantum amplification generator into Cargo B. I want the area sealed subatomically.”

“Aye, Captain.”

Ricimer turned to the officer in charge of SCAN, the vessel’s exterior sensor array.

“Lieutenant Roth, what are we tracking on the beta? Any of ours around?”

“No, sir, I don’t think so.” Roth checked his sensors momentarily, then reported back. “If we’re looking for transport, sir, the nearest thing I see is
a merchantman hauler. She identifies as the
Basalt Plain Colonizer
under army contract.”

“Empty or full?”

“She’s headed out empty to pick up a tech load on 111 Tauri D.”

“Perfect,” Ricimer said. “She’ll have a big hold.”

Roth moved his hand deeper into the bulkhead, motioned up further information on his visual display. He was also receiving verbal feed directly to his nervous system through the nerve ends in his hands. “That she does, sir. She’s on registry with a crew of fifteen. Twin commodity bottles set for electrostatic maximum. She’s not a supertanker, sir, but she’ll do if you plan to . . .”

Roth was set to continue but realized he was about to overstep his bounds hazarding a guess as to what step his commanding officer was considering next.

“Yes, she will do,” said Ricimer. “Thank you, SCAN.” He turned to Talid. “Set a course, Commander. And give the
Colonizer
a single-burst beta, compressed and encrypted, to let her know we’re coming. Nothing more. Do not identify. She’ll know we are Sporata by the signal strength.”

“What if she turns tail and runs, Captain?”

Talid had a point, and it was a good suggestion even though they both knew the
Colonizer
was going nowhere.

This rendezvous had been arranged one
molt
ago, about six months.

Yet it was important to keep up pretenses. Trader craft lived in constant fear of the Sporata and had been known to flee contact. It was seldom a good thing to have the space navy coming down on you. At the very least, it probably meant a complete search for contraband and possible smuggling charges. Even if you were clean, something could always be found that was against Regulation.

“If she runs, we’ll reel her in, Ms. Talid,” said Ricimer. “That vessel doesn’t know it yet, but she is ours now.”

“Aye, Captain.”

“And keep us quiet, XO,” Ricimer added. “Craft Orders must come first.” Ricimer disengaged himself from the atrium. “I’m going down to Cargo B to see to my officers. The bridge is yours, Commander. Notify me when we’re in range of the
Colonizer.”

“
Aye, sir.”

“Thrive the Administration.”

“Thrive the Administration, Captain.”

TEN

5 December 2075

Vicinity of Beta Geminorum, aka Pollux

Guardian of Night

SCREECH!
 

Pressure waves throughout the craft. Sudden compression of atmosphere even on the bridge, where Ricimer occupied the captain’s atrium. No vessel, no matter how well-built, was meant for such a craft-to-craft docking as he was now performing, and there was bound to be strain.

He only hoped Lamella’s calculations did not have a missing or incorrectly input variable that had pushed the docking craft beyond their tolerances. There was no chance of Lamella making a mistake in her computation, of course. She was the soul of mathematical precision.

POP! CLANG!

The sheering tension of hull against hull as force fields collided. The ozone odor of electrical fire, of particles occupying the same space with one another in positions that could not
be
in any natural order, forced into dimensions that did not exist, the cracks between cracks pulled open by paradox.

“Captain, we’ve got the
Basalt Plains Colonizer
in hold state,” reported Talid. “We should have hull integration in fifty
vitias
.”

Ricimer nodded. “Have the infected crew ready.”

“Aye, sir.”

Ricimer tightened his foot grip on the grill beneath him and allowed the image feed from Cargo B to flood into his mind.

A crowd of officers clumped together near a bulkhead. A few clutched personal items. Some were naked, rousted from the Guardian “sleep” of tagona-quiescence and herded to this bay without warning. For those who had old-fashioned “half-hypha” hybrid blood in them, nakedness revealed the black stripes on their thighs that marked them as socially inferior, whatever their rank. This uncovered sight was considered deeply humiliating, although Ricimer didn’t give a damn. A good officer was a good officer. Most were very frightened. A churn infection was no joke. If the bug found a way through your defenses, you’d be dead in an instant. And it could happen at any time if you left the situation untreated. Today. Tomorrow. Many cycles from now. The churn worked according to its own inexorable timetable.

Sizzle!

The wall dividing his craft from the merchantman dissolved in a flicker-field integration, and a portal opened up into the other craft’s cargo hold. It was huge, dark, and empty. After a moment, its electroweak-gravity normalized with that of the cargo bay.

Time to get the show underway.

“CISO Frazil, get those officers off the craft,” Ricimer said.

Frazil, who was in charge of the cargo-bay team, took in his order. He wore a contamination suit and held an ester broadcaster in one hand. He could not communicate through the suit’s skin, which was impermeable to the quark level, but he could pass a signal to the broadcaster to do so. With a loud blast of command ester, he ordered the “infected” officers forward. One by one, they stepped into the portal, moved over and out of the craft. Ricimer counted.

Twenty-five . . .
 

Twenty-six . . .
 

And twenty-seven. They were all off his craft and safely in the commodities bottle of the merchantman, where they’d be transported home—and then torn practically apart and reconstructed to be sure there was no lingering plague hidden within them.

Which would be uncomfortable in the extreme for them, but was better than being dead.

“Officers of the
Guardian of Night
, I salute you,” Ricimer said, using Lamella to amplify his esters and express them into the air of the hold. “Your sacrifice will not go unnoticed. Honor be upon you, and Thrive the Administration.”

He watched as the departing officers turned to face the portal through which they’d come.

“Thrive the Administration,” said Curdek, the highest ranking among them. “And good luck, Captain.”

Suddenly, above Ricimer, an alarm light began to flash. Information esters infused the cargo bay through a series of powerful nozzles. “Alert, alert. Military-grade churn contamination detected in crew quarters. Point four ppm. Alert!”

Ricimer turned to Frazil. “What is going on? Was one of these officers in contact with the crew on the way over here?”

“No, Captain, not to my knowledge,” Frazil answered back. He looked frightened. Good.

“I’m going to get to the bottom of this. Leave that port open, Frazil,” Ricimer said. “We may have more to send over.”

“Aye, Captain!”

Ricimer cut the video feed and turned to Talid on the bridge beside him.

“What have we got, XO?”

“One of the officers was out and made a circuit of the vessel before returning to quarters. He wiped his trace from primary records, but we pulled it up on a secondary log.”

“Where was—never mind,” Ricimer said. “It’s a false liaison, isn’t it, Talid?”

“Seems so, Captain.”

The dirty little secret of the Sporata. Officers could and did have sex with rates while those crew members were under the control of Governess. There was a backdoor into the program that allowed the computer monitoring to overlook such transgressions—

Or call them what they are,
Ricimer thought:
rapes.

—a backdoor that Sporata technology division was always planning to close but somehow never got around to. The excuse was that the crew members usually had no idea what was happening. Governess kept them believing that they were sleeping or at some other minor duty and usually supplied them with a pleasant daydream while the liaison was going on to explain away their elevated bodily reactions: the intense tingle in the hands for females, the uncoiling of the corkscrew-shaped positor in males. Both sexes of officers engaged in the liaisons, with the females choosing a multitude of partners and the males usually sticking to one crew member they had their eye on.

It was true that most crew members didn’t remember a liaison. Except, that is, when females suddenly turned up pregnant while on shore leave. Or males must explain where they acquired a venereal disease to an incredulous lover or mate. Everyone knew it went on, and on which vessels it was out of control. Ricimer had always run a tight vessel in that regard and kept his officers on the straight and narrow as much as possible, but only the computer could be everywhere at once—and the computer was programmed not to care.

“Who was the officer?” Ricimer asked.

“Ensign Bronin, sir,” said Talid.

“Female. Damn. Multiple partners.”

“Yes, sir.”

“How much of the craft has been compromised?”

“That’s just it, sir. She took the main accessway. Governess was ignoring her excursion. So all of it.”

“Most unfortunate.”

Another spraying, flashing alarm. “Alert. Point five ppm churn compromise. Vessel contaminated. Repeat: vessel contaminated. Strain isolated as MGC-250575. Melt-away risk imminent!”

The automated systems had made the announcement. Now it was up to him to make the decision.

Ricimer did not hesitate. With a tap on the small COM control patch on his uniform sleeve, he switched to a craft-wide channel.

“Abandon vessel,” he said. “All hands, abandon vessel. Crew first. Officer assist with head counts. All report to Cargo B. Do it now!”

He deactivated the communications channel and turned to Talid.

“Over five hundred people, Captain,” she said. “Are we absolutely sure the
Colonizer
can handle that many?”

He’d examined the specs of the
Colonizer
and well knew she was capable of taking on his crew and the “infected” officers. But Talid hadn’t been in on that stage of the planning. Compartmentalize and survive—the motto of all covert operations.