Guardian of Night (23 page)

The punk was likely dead, Coalbridge reminded himself. Beyond crediting or blaming another now. Silent forever.

It turned out that humanity’s ace in the hole was subversive computer programming. Yet DAFNE’s personality was nothing like the amoral, emotionless spy he’d imagined. Instead, she was actually a happy sort.

Which was maybe not a surprise when you learned that DAFNE had started her life as the controlling artificial-intelligence algorithm on a roller coaster at Six Flags Over Georgia.

DAFNE had torn down the Skyhook’s churn defenses as if they were so many gauze curtains. From there, she’d invaded the Skyhook’s dual computer system, turning one part of the sceeve “brain” against the other.

In many ways, his eight-man team’s physical invasion was merely a mopping-up operation. Nevertheless, it had been intense. He’d made mistakes, hadn’t understood the difference between sceeve officers and enlisted—at least that was how he thought of the two classes. One was chained to the computer system, and was sluggish when disconnected, unable to take initiative—at least for the crucial first ten minutes of the raid.

The officers were a different story. They were individuals, clearly not under computer control. They were well trained. And they’d proved almost unkillable.

The team had gone for headshots on Coalbridge’s instructions. Unbelievable. Nobody had known at the time that the head was practically a sceeve’s least vulnerable spot. Individual sceeve didn’t have “brains” as organs. To take out a sceeve quickly, you needed to shoot it in the black-colored organ, the
gid hanasheh
as the creeps had translated the sceeve designation for it, located in the chest.

“Shoot low and take out the
gid
.”

He’d said these words so many times since, but that day—the day when it first counted—he hadn’t known to say them. And half his team died as a result.

So he’d discarded his rifle and drawn his officer’s truncheon. It was a cross between a cop’s nightstick and a cattleprod—but filled with a very nasty combination of churn-based attack nano, a high-voltage electric charge, and a tiny dollop of antimatter. A trunch set to high would cut through any material known to man.

Including sceeve organs. Especially sceeve organs.

And after the team killed twenty very surprised sceeve officers—all of whom had fought to the death, using either the effective sceeve sidearm, later named the painter, or, as a last resort, their ceremonial knives of rank—the Skyhook was his. Property of the United States of America.

Coalbridge had made his name in the Extry with that one, although he’d had to suffer through an inquest due to his large casualty rate. His name was merely mentioned as one of the “attacking soldiers” in the Earth news media. Too much secret equipment and tactics had been in use, and command was deathly afraid—with good cause—that the sceeve would rapidly figure out how the feat had been done and guard against it.

The Skyhook was captured, its devastating attacks halted, and it could now be repositioned for human use as an orbital-transport mechanism with a far lower energy cost than any before available.

And he was about to use that transport he and his force had secured in—Coalbridge looked at his watch—T minus ten minutes seventeen seconds and counting.

The “collection” team he’d sent to Leher’s apartment bustled in with the personal effects he’d sent them after, as well as the sceeve “printer” that Leher had requested.

Now where the hell was Leher? Had he decided to miss his hook, after all? Coalbridge considered for a moment that maybe he’d misjudged Leher. He’d thought that presenting the new assignment as a challenge—and as a choice—would intrigue Leher enough to engage him in his new job.

Well, if he doesn’t come, we’ve got all his stuff.

The exper crew finished loading two suitcases of Leher’s personals into the puck.

The puck was officially called the Planet to Orbit Delivery Enclosure. It was a single craft with a froth of Q-bottle pseudogravitational stabilizers, only a few of which were “real,” and most of which were created by a virtual chain of imaginary entanglement, on all sides of the passengers and cargo. When you got inside, you had left Earth’s gravitational field for all intents and purposes.

Which was good, because when the Skyhook came down to snag the gimlet on top of the puck, if there was no Q weirdness in place, passenger and cargo would be smeared along one wall like a micro-thin pancake due to the sudden and extreme acceleration, akin to being fired out of a cannon at ten times the speed of sound. As it was, the initial jerk and takeoff were rough enough. The bottle dampers were controlled by a feedback algorithm, since the random currents of the atmosphere were beyond even a quantum computer’s ability to accurately predict.

Coalbridge wouldn’t vouch for what would happen if these particular bottle dampers passed through a Texas thunderstorm, either. Things could go wrong with this method of transport. They had.

The puck looked like just that—a giant black hockey puck with an eyehook on top. The Skyhook’s end held an open grappling hook that latched into the puck and . . .
 

Away you’d go.

The platform was a simple corrugated-steel structure built on the flattened field of what had once been the southwest corner of the Texas Instruments corporate campus. It was heavily reinforced on the spin side—the side designed to catch the next puck when it came back down in its counterclockwise direction—but the catch mechanism had been lowered for the uptake of the currently operational puck on the platform.

Like the deck of an old-time aircraft carrier, the platform was spare, utilitarian, and dangerous to be around if you didn’t know what you were doing. All very low-tech and Newtonian. Unlike a carrier, there were no attendants. No guardrails. Nothing but the derrick-like structure and a warning signal that was a repurposed traffic light.

For Coalbridge the setup itself was exhilarating.

The traffic light mounted on a pole at the edge of the platform changed from green to yellow, marking five minutes until the hook arrived. It was time to load into the puck.

Where the hell was Leher?

Coalbridge motioned for his crew members to get aboard. He stood on the platform’s edge and craned his neck out to see the concrete enclosure that housed the elevator that led to the actual New Pentagon complex belowground.

Finally, the elevator door slid open. Leher emerged, followed by two creep expers who were lugging big suitcase-like containers. Leher himself was carrying a briefcase that had been hastily closed and still had the edges of documents poking out. Sceeve documents, from the looks of them.

“Hurry up, Lieutenant Commander!” Coalbridge yelled. “The Skyhook waits for no man!”

Leher trotted across the fifty feet separating the elevator house from the Skyhook platform and huffed up the stairs, his helpers following after.

“You expect us to bring all that?” Coalbridge said. “We’ll have to space a couple of crew for that kind of baggage!”

“This is the absolute minimum I need for a proper Xeno station,” Leher said breathlessly. “You have no idea the value of what I’m leaving behind.”

Coalbridge eyed the load for a moment, then nodded his head.

“All right, damn it, pack that crap into the puck, you guys, and hurry up with it. We’ve got”—again he checked his watch—“three minutes and fifty-two seconds before we’re blown to bits by a sonic explosion when that hook gets here.”

His words put a spring in the creeps’ steps, and they soon had Leher’s suitcases on board.

The traffic light turned to red.

“Two minutes,” said Coalbridge. “You gentlemen need to get off the platform.” The creep expers—Coalbridge noticed belatedly that one was
not
a gentleman at all, and fairly curvaceous—scurried away. Coalbridge turned to Leher, who was facing the door to the puck but had not made a move to enter. “Mr. Leher, it’s time to catch our ride.”

When Leher didn’t answer, Coalbridge looked closer. Leher was trembling.

Rumble. A small, dark line in the northeastern sky. The Skyhook was descending.

“Leher. Griff. We have to go!”

He took Leher by the arm, but the other man shook him off. “No,” Leher squeaked.

“Yes!” Coalbridge took Leher firmly by the shoulders, spun him around, and looked him in the eyes. “I swear to God we’ll find this Poet for you and let you talk to him in person. Or I’ll catch another of those sceeve fuckers. This billet will be worth your while. I’ll see to it. How’s that? Griff!”

Coalbridge gave Leher a shake for good measure.

The rumble increased, and Coalbridge felt a pressure wave building in the air about him. His ears popped.

The line in the northwest grew into a shadow-stripe perpendicular in the sky.

Leher shuddered, seemed to come back to himself from a long way off. “Talk to one,” he said. “I think I could do that. I think I really could pull it off.”

“Come on, Leher.”

“You stood up to Tillich,” Leher said. Coalbridge tugged on Leher, and the other let him lead him to the door. “You’re not an idiot.”

“No, I’m not,” Coalbridge said. “We have to get inside!”

With a final shove, Coalbridge got Leher into the puck, and he dove in after. The door sealed behind them and disappeared as the embedded churn quickly did its hermetic work. The other expers had already taken their seats within and fastened their seat belts. Coalbridge sat Leher into an empty slot, clicked him in as he would a child—

“Five seconds,” said a calm female voice.

“You’re not an idiot,” Leher said, nodding and agreeing with himself vehemently. “People do this all the time. This is going to be all right.”

Coalbridge bounded over to his own seat, latched in.

His hand found the built-in handles on either side of him. He wrapped his fingers around them. . . .
 

The rumble outside, even muffled by the ultrahard composite material of the puck that surrounded them, grew to a freight-train roar.

The interior of the puck was utilitarian. Rough black wall and floor, exactly the texture of a hockey puck. Bolted-in seats that looked like they could’ve come out of an ancient airliner and probably had. Window plexiglass stretching around the cylindrical walls at about eye-level when seated, but now covered by exterior blast shields. A couple of fluorescent lights in metal cages on the ceiling.

“Pseudogravity engaged,” said the computer voice. “Contact in three, two, one—”

BAM!

Coalbridge’s stomach got a jolt—the sudden rush of ultimate acceleration that couldn’t quite be quelled by gravitational dampers, not by technology. It was primal. The PG gripped him in place and dampened the inertia shift enough to keep him from coming apart, but Coalbridge felt a lurch within him, as if a sudden high tide were running through one side of his body and a neap tide through the other. It was the greatest carnival ride in history, and he had a ticket!

Arcing up. Though his speed remained constant, Coalbridge felt the curve of acceleration, the delta-v of exhilaration.

And then the containment bottle fully engaged and the windows opened. He could see!

Mighty Earth curving away below, perceptibly growing smaller, more distant.

He was going back to his real home. He was getting his own command! And he was riding a bronco all the way up to the stars.

“Good God.” Leher was staring out in horror, hyperventilating. “Oh no, no.”

He glanced over at Coalbridge. “You killed me! We’re dead!”

“You’re not going to die, Commander.” Coalbridge had to speak loudly. The puck rumbled like a train through the lower stretches of the atmosphere. After they left the air behind, all would be quiet inside and out. “At least we’re not going to die
here
.”

Leher looked at Coalbridge, wild-eyed. The others in the puck carefully turned their gazes away, content to let Coalbridge handle this minor drama.

“We’re not?” said Leher.

“No,” said Coalbridge. “Hold on. It’ll be over soon. Let me enjoy this, will you?”

Leher gulped, squeaked out “Okay.”

Three and a half hours later, the puck was at the apogee of its rise, 52,398 miles above the Earth’s surface and the other end of the Skyhook’s reach.

“Release in ten seconds,” the calm computer voice announced. All of the details of the puck’s release were handled by the crew in the Skyhook hub and the servants, whose physical programming was spread out in the churn.

Leher suddenly looked up. “What if it doesn’t release?” he blurted out. “Would we just keep going around and around and around?” He put his hand over his mouth. His beard over the greenish cast to his face made his head look like a moldy, rotten mango to Coalbridge.

“Don’t worry.” Coalbridge pointed toward the puck’s ceiling. “See that yellow loop?”

There was, rather absurdly, a small plastic loop colored bright yellow dangling from the roof of the puck.

Leher glanced up. “Yes.”

“Emergency release.”

“What? Somebody could just
pull
it?”

Coalbridge smiled. “No. Yanking on it won’t do anything unless you know the code phrase for the day.”

“Nobody told me the code phrase!” Leher said. “What if I have to pull it?”

“You won’t,” said Coalbridge. “It’s senior officer aboard’s task.”

“So you know it?”

“Yep.”

Pain. Brain. Insane. Blackout.
Somebody was having fun coming up with such stuff back in Richardson. If he spoke the phrase clearly, pulling the strap would activate a manual release of the puck that would send it flying off on whatever vector it happened to be on at a given moment.

“It’s meant to be used only in a downswing and take us in for a crash landing on Earth.”

“So we’d basically dig our own graves?”

“We’d be protected by the pseudogravity bottles upon impact. Might possibly survive.”

The computer voice again. “Separation in three, two, one—separation.”

And they were off. After a moment of floating, the puck’s interior pseudogravity asserted itself convincingly.

“Acceleration’s over, Leher, if that’s what was bothering you. We’re on a constant vector all the way in to Walt Whitman
.
”