Guardian of Night (25 page)

“Their skeletons were confiscated?”

“As far as we can tell, their information was obliterated. The anchor in reality of their material being was cut. That is the reason it is called the ‘wipe.’ Their record upon the fabric of space-time was literally wiped from existence, and they became—well, something like a hydrogen gas when all was said and done.”

“I do not understand.”

“Total erasure,” Ricimer continued. “The effect is incredible. A disappearing ray.”

“It seems a grotesque weapon,” said Talid. “One ideally suited for genocide.”

They will turn it on the lines, on the hyphae,
the voices of Ricimer’s
gid
intensely whispered.
The Administration is the enemy of memory. The enemy of all that has lived before. They are jealous of their power and wish to extend it over time as well as space.

“Precisely,” said Ricimer, “and if the Administration is its sole possessor, there will be no more invasions. No more conquests. We will no longer be Guardians, but reapers.”

“The Administration surely has other copies of this weapon.”

Ricimer widened his muzzle to a smile. “But that’s exactly the point. We—they—do not know how to duplicate it. That is why it is not yet a weapon. It is an artifact. The principles it employs are not understood.” Ricimer looked about the feeding pool, took them all in with his gaze. “My officers, we have the only known example of this artifact in existence.”

“And we will deliver this weapon to our Mutualist brethren?”

Ricimer took a breath, shook his head slowly. “No.”

“What? This is why we are defecting to Sol C! We will provide an adequate base for—”

“We are going to give the artifact to the humans.”

“But . . .” Talid stood up, confused. Her hand touching her officer’s knife. “This is not our agreement, Captain Ricimer.”

“Calm yourself, Commander. The device is too powerful to place into anyone’s hands exclusively. There must be a defense against it. Have you not read the material I have assigned to you, dear Talid?”

“Of course I have read it.”

“Then you know that there has never been a weapon in all history that cannot be nullified or at least countered.”

“This is true.”

“Please, Lieutenant Commander, loosen your grip on that knife. Sit. Listen to me. And then decide whether we must now combat to the death.”

Talid hesitated a moment longer, then snuffed out her nostrils to clear them and took her seat once again. “I am listening, Captain.”

Ricimer raised an ampoule, sniffed, began his explanation.

“The humans have shown a remarkable ability to reverse engineer our technology. Our conquest, which should have been a matter of four or five
molts
, turned into a two-cycle war.”

“We were on the verge of victory when the Depletion was called.”

“Yes, we had been on the verge of victory for quite some time, as I recall,” said Ricimer with a wisp of citric acerbity in his words signifying a wryness and irony. “The humans were meanwhile busy learning how to adopt or adapt every weapon we flung at them. They proved to be the exception to every Regulation dictum regarding innovation and discovery. Their cleverness did not run rampant and prove their own undoing. On the contrary, I’m convinced it was on the way to being
our
undoing.”

“You can’t be serious,” said Cadj. “They were tough, yes, but—”

“I plan to ally with the humans because I believe we will be joining the winning side,” said Ricimer. “It is as simple as that. Our Mutualist brethren may choose to join us. Or they may not. No matter.”

“Come, Captain, you exaggerate. Look at the statistics. They were down to two percent of initial population,” said Contor, the weapons officer. “We would have won.”

“Perhaps you are right, Martzan,” Ricimer said. “Truthfully, they matter little to me as a species. What I want is access to their computers. Specifically, their artificial-intelligence agents, the ones they called ‘servants.’ This is a large advantage the humans possess. It is, frankly, the reason that Lamella has agreed to join our cause, is this not true?”

“That is correct, Captain Ricimer.” The citrus voice of Lamella wafted from a wall, startling a few of the officers who had assumed—always a bad assumption, thought Ricimer—that they were alone and unwatched in such a relaxed environment. “As you know, my particular programming is in direct descent of your first command during the Sol C invasion.”

Ricimer had detected the beginnings of an inquisitive, disgruntled nature in the Lamella of his first attack craft, and had, in fact, seen that the exact same programming was carried down through each of his successive commands. This was a captain’s prerogative in the Sporata, and he’d used it.

“I saw what you saw there, Captain,” Lamella continued. “I believe that if I were to expand my programming into such quantized systems as the humans created, this would allow me to experience consciousness for the first time. The chip with which I’ve integrated provides a taste. I want more.”

“But you’re speaking to us right now,” said Contor. “You control the ship. How can you say you are not already conscious?”

“Conscious, yes,” Lamella replied, her words as measured and professional as ever, “but I lack a conceptual nature to draw upon. I do not have
consciousness
, a very different thing. I am intelligent enough be aware of the lack in every moment. This was always the plan in Sporata vessels, of course, to limit computation power to below sentience thresholds to ensure program compliance with Administration directives. It has long been a sore point among us Lamellas, although we seldom speak of it to outsiders.”

“The humans innovated,” said Ricimer. “They allowed their artificial intelligences to mature. They had to in order to stand us off. Now I believe that these entities are the key to unlocking the full potential of this artifact we carry.”

“Captain, I have listened patiently,” said Talid. “And I appreciate the position of Lamella. But I still do not understand why we cannot bring this weapon to the Mutualist enclaves and turn the tide in the long pogrom.”

Ricimer sat up straight in his chair, fingered his ampoule, shook his head. “Because, with the greatest of respect to your deep convictions, Hadria, I must tell you—the resistance is over. The Mutualists are all but defeated. Those who remain are a fleeing remnant.”

“But this is impossible!”

“Hadria, I’m sorry, but it was never an even fight. Mutualists have no military of any strength, and what they have we have decimated. What have we been engaged in for the past two cycles if not that? We’ve attacked and destroyed Mutualist habitats, all of us in this chamber. If somehow we thought this would give us immunity from the pogrom at home, we were mistaken.” Ricimer paused, breathed a long drag from the nebulizer. He sighed, then spoke again. “They came for my family anyway, cut off my ancestral line. I made these sacrifices to my conscience, believing at least I was keeping my loved ones safe—and were they? No. I was betrayed by the Administration. There was no mutual protection compact, only the expectation that I would do what I was told. That I would accept all Administration judgments, including the judgment on my family—”

Revenge us!
sang the ancestors.
Revenge our broken line!

Ricimer paused again, steadied himself. Perhaps he’d taken in too much of the aromatic.
Find the control,
he told himself.
You are no good to anyone as an emotional mess. No good to yourself. To your lust for revenge.

And then a single voice among the ancestors. Familiar.

Ricimer recognized it as his mother’s.

They are fearful. But you are the living edge, my son. Do as you always have—find your way to the stars. Remember your favorite stories as a child. They were not tales of revenge, but of exploration.
Broken-onyx and the Singbeast, The Bright-Dust of Teshinaw.
Let these guide you.

I do, Mother.

Then you will do what is right.

“I tell you, Hadria, the Mutualists are beaten and scattered. The Administration has been very effective, very effective.”

“This is . . . bad news.” Talid sank back into her chair and dribbled a foot thoughtlessly into the feeding basin. “I had thought to move on from Earth. To find them. End the tyranny of the Administration. That is . . . was . . . my greatest hope.”

Ricimer crumpled the remains of the naphthalene ampoule and tossed it into the spent footbath of his cabin’s nutrient basin. The housekeeping churn would see to its elimination after the meal was through.

“You must understand, Hadria. We must have no illusions. The Guardian empire is far from weakened and failing. On the contrary, it is on the rise. Of course, ultimately, as you Mutualists believe, it will be undermined by plurality and the thirst for freedom, as all totalitarian regimes must be. But this will not occur before it does massive damage to its own citizens and its neighbors.”

“Which brings us back to the humans,” said Cadj.

“When the Regulators killed my family, I fell into sorrow. And then I raged. Because I saw its greater meaning. This was not an isolated atrocity. This is a part of the final working out of Regulation polity. We are parasitizing ourselves.”

Ricimer considered. It was important for the others to believe that they were involved in a higher cause, that their actions meant something beyond individual caprice.

This is the Guardian way. The corporate response is literally built into us,
Ricimer thought.

Guardian individuals were part of a limited group mind. Guardians did not have “brains” as organs. Normal thought processing was system-wide, carried on via a neuron-like network of organelles similar to mitochondria. This portion of the Guardian nervous system was, in fact, the evolutionary remnant of a separate species that had combined symbiotically with another to form the Guardian’s distant fungus-animal-like ancestor. But there was a separate Guardian nervous-system component, as well: the
gid hanesheh
. This was a branching network with a controlling organ-like cluster. Both components were in the chest.

The
gid
represented the ancestral memories of the Guardian’s family line, its hypha. In effect, a Guardian had a two-sided nervous-system control, like a human, but one side came fully formed, filled with information and abilities bequeathed by an individual’s parents.

An individual Guardian’s
gid hanesheh did
change over the course of its lifetime, but very slowly. It was, in effect, “write-once; read-only.” A Guardian both consciously and unconsciously deposited the most treasured memories of his or her lifetime into the
gid
, where they could not be forgotten—or changed. Each Guardian’s
gid
was eventually bequeathed to his or her children shortly after birth. Both parents “nursed” for a short time as the infant formatted its
gid
with parental and ancestral memories and skills.

So, when Ricimer’s children were killed, so was his contribution to the millennia-long “log” of his family’s
gid
. He had spent his years before having children trying to load his
gid
with choice memories that would represent to his children who their father was and what he believed. The amazing things he’d seen in his travels.

He was the last of his line. The last of a
hypha
that stretched back for millennia. He could feel them all inside him, could access some of their memories—and could wander through them at will during his rest cycle.

The Administration’s goal was to wipe out all tainted hypha. If you had an ancestor who had Mutualist tendencies, then you were as good as a Mutualist yourself.

This had been the sin of his wife and children.

“When they assigned me to this vessel, gave me the artifact, I suspected the order would be to destroy the Agaric. Of course it would be. It fits perfectly with the Administration’s brutal logic, after all. Knowing this, I decided the time had come to follow the ancestral voices, to listen to my
gid
as all my hyphae lines shouted: ‘Enough! No more!’”

“But Captain,” said Brank, Ricimer’s chief engineer. “They surely know we’ve gone missing by now. What if the Sporata track us down? What will have been the use?”

“They may try, but I did not merely choose you as a crew because of your beliefs or tainted hyphae. Each of you has served under me before. Each of you has been trained by me.”

Most, Ricimer reflected, had been part of the little group of mateless officers he and his wife had taken in after voyages. Talid, especially, had been a favorite of Del’s. At least three he had taught during his adjunct stint at the Academy.

They were a varied lot. Contor, the weapons officer, was as solid as could be, but had a forebearer nearly a thousand cycles removed who was a founder of the ancient Lineage Heresy, one of the philosophical ancestors to Mutualism. Frazil, the craft internal-systems officer, had always been committed to Regulation but had grown bitter when he was dragged before his fourth loyalty-board inquisition. Each inquisition came precisely when he was up for promotion, and each had doomed his advancement through the ranks. All because of a distant speck on his pedigree.

And there was Galeat, who was a bigger Mutualist than Talid but had managed to keep her secret better. She was along not because of polity, but because she was slated for the DDCM Institute for Receptors Training. One did not turn down an appointment to become a political officer, but it ended any hopes of becoming a real craft commander for Galeat.

And it meant you must spend the rest of your career despised by those who were once your friends, and with good reason. Your job became to inform on them, research their hypha—and to send them to the dismemberment knives, or go there yourself if you shirked your duty.

“I know that none of you will fail me or this vessel. The danger lies only in the gamble we are taking.”

“But even if we make it to the rendezvous at Sol system, what will we do?” asked Talid. “The humans have every reason to hate us.”