Guardian of Night (33 page)

Acne,
Coalbridge thought.
She looks like a teenager with a nasty case of untreated acne.

Blech.

She was roughly spherical. She was metallic, but with only a faint luster. Face it, she was downright
dirty
. Which meant she’d probably come from a planetary atmosphere recently. Which meant—God knew what it meant. He’d never seen a sceeve craft this large that was capable of planetary operations.

“Bring us into an approach tangent with that . . . vessel,” Coalbridge ordered Katapodis, his helmsman.

“Aye, sir, solution indicates fifty-five degrees at point eight-eight
c
,” Katapodis answered.

“Okay, take us in,” Coalbridge said. “Rocks on line yet, ZAP?”

“Armed and dangerous, Captain,” Sakuda answered. Coalbridge had a special spot in his heart for Sakuda and all of his ZAPs, though he tried not to let it show overmuch. In addition to having been his own Extry specialty, ship defensive weaponry had been his first assignment in the navy aboard the
Gerald R. Ford
.

“Very good.”

Coalbridge turned back to the sceeve vessel. Under normal circumstances, in very short order he would attempt, and very likely succeed, in blowing this thing to Kingdom Come.

Leher’s geist appeared before him on the bridge.

“Lieutenant Commander, input please,” Coalbridge said.

Leher’s blue-green semitransparent face was smiling. “Been monitoring the bridge feed, Captain,” Leher said. “Think I can tell you something about that vessel.”

Coalbridge motioned to the display tableau hanging above them in the chroma.

“So, Mr. Leher,” he said. “What have you got?”

“She identifies as the
Efficacy of Symbiosis.
I’ve actually found reference to her in the Skyhook registry,” Leher said. “She used to be a freighter of some sort. Foodstuff. That goo the sceeve absorb through their feet. What it
appears
to be is a freighter that the Mutualist converted to a transport, if all those life-sign readings are right.”

“They’re cross-verified,” Coalbridge said. “We’ve got a vessel full of sceeve over there. Not your standard crew profile, either. Various sizes. Never seen that before. Are there dwarf variants of these things?”

“Could be children,” Leher said.

“I’ll be damned. What an idiot I am,” Coalbridge said. He seemed genuinely abashed at himself. “Of course they’re children. That never occurred to me.”

“You thinking about blowing them out of existence?” Leher asked.

“The thought had crossed my mind,” Coalbridge answered. “But no. Not unless they become a direct threat.”

“LOVE, can you give me a trace on the Schism report?” Leher subvocalized. LOVE instantly instantiated as a geist beside Leher. She kept herself short—maybe five two or so—but LOVE filled herself out nicely.
Very
nicely, Coalbridge noted.

“Okay, you know that sceeve vessels always have a bicameral computer system, right?” said Leher.

Coalbridge nodded. “Sure. They’re freaks for redundancy. So are we, in our way.”

“Partially, that’s true,” Leher said. “But a sceeve craft computer is modeled on the sceeve nervous system.”

“They have two brains. You kill them by taking out the
gid
. You take out the other, they’re liable to take
you
out before they die of blood loss—or whatever that milky crap is that runs through their veins.”

“Exactly,” Leher said. “In one way, the
gid
is like the medulla in humans. It controls their autonomous bodily functions. But that’s only the half of it.”

“How do you mean?”

“It’s where they store their collective memories. Their hypha memories. Every sceeve has the memories of his whole family line packed in there somewhere.”

“That’s tens of thousands of years.”

“Well, it’s more like they’ve got the highlight reels,” Leher said. “A sceeve can decide what gets stored in his own
gid
during the course of his lifetime. So there are basically two personalities in a sceeve individual. One is in charge, and you can think of it as something like the conscious mind. The other is the hypha memory—the
gid
.”

LOVE coughed—a strange sound coming from a servant geist. “If I may cut straight to the point, sir?”

Leher shrugged, nodded.

“It’s analogous to epilepsy,” LOVE said. “One or both of the craft’s systems sends a huge amount of nonsense signals to the other. There’s an automatic answerback that occurs—like a public-key encryption system acknowledging a secure connection. This reflective process sets up massive feedback, and basically the afflicted vessel has a seizure.”

“An epileptic seizure.”

“The analogy is surprisingly robust, from what we can tell from the databases.”

“So you’re telling me that Mutualist craft out there has epilepsy?”

“The state is called ‘the throes’ by the sceeve. Based on our research, Captain—”

“
Her
research,” Leher put in, indicating LOVE. “LOVE is Xenology Division authority on sceeve a.i.s.”

LOVE glanced at Leher and gave him the slightest of smiles, but enough for Coalbridge to notice. Something else there? That was always the question with servant emotional displays.

“Based on the research,” LOVE said, “what you’re seeing is an exact match for the way the condition is described in the databases.” LOVE nodded toward space. “The spin she’s displaying is characteristic of the malfunction. On the other hand . . .”

LOVE looked to Leher. Leher seemed about to speak, then held back.

“On the other hand,” said Coalbridge, “The Poet said we would find a Sporata vessel of war when we got here, which is why we’ve been riding here hell for leather for the past eight days. And that thing, whatever it may be—”

“I think it’s the
Guardian
,” Leher said softly.

“You do?” said Coalbridge.

“Camouflage,” Leher said. “LOVE and I have been parsing her transmissions since we got within beta range. Made some adjustments suggested by your friend Japps, too,” Leher said with a wry smile. “She’s using the same code as the Poet. The cinnamon ester marker. Look.”

Leher popped up a shared a screen in front of Coalbridge and himself. It displayed a series of chemical symbols that meant nothing to Coalbridge.

“Now, if I put a matte over it,” Leher said, waving his hand and placing a cutout overlay onto the symbols. “I get this.”

Still made no sense. “Translation, please,” said Coalbrige.

Leher smiled. “Tell him, LOVE.”

“Captain, it’s a repeated message. It says ‘Guardian of Night’ over and over again in the Long-arm hypha sceeve variant preferred by Sporata. The same variant spoken by the Poet.”

“There’s one sure way to test the hypothesis,” Leher said. He shrugged. “I don’t know if you want to take the chance on our being wrong, though.”

“We ask,” said Coalbridge.

Leher nodded. “So, Captain—feel like knocking on heaven’s door?”

Coalbridge turned to Katapodis. “Helm, take us abaft that vessel. Angle us to port around her equator, and then give me a polar section.”

“Aye, Captain, turning forty-five to port,” said the helmsman.

“I want to get a full scan on this vessel,” Coalbridge said to himself, then with a touch on the hovering toolbar wiied SIGINT. Petrovich, SIGINT chief warrant officer, was on duty and his geist appeared as an iconed triple stripe hovering in Coalbridge’s vision. “SIG, I’m going to want to send a single blip with the beta. We’ll let them know where exactly we are and nothing more. On my mark—”

Suddenly, Petrovich’s icon expanded into a full-faced geist. “Sorry, Captain, we’ve just—”

Petrovich glanced down, offscreen, looked back up. “Incoming beta signal, Captain,” he said. “It’s another sceeve vessel, Captain. She’s blasting the beta, identifying herself.”

“Who is she? Does she know we’re here?”

“No, sir. It doesn’t appear so. Captain, she’s identifying as the
Efficacy of Symbiosis
.”

“What? Wait, that’s the
other
ship.”

“I know, sir. I doesn’t make sense. But she’s clearly identifying as the
Efficacy.
Broadcasting it over and over again.
”

“She’s the real one,” Leher put in. “This is the rendezvous point, after all.”

Maybe.

But it didn’t add up.

None of it.

Everything about this was wrong, wrong, wrong. Coalbridge’s every instinct told him so.

Choose,
Coalbridge thought.
Choose, choose, choose. I want information!
“DAFNE? Tactical report.”

“Working.” In a half second, she popped up a visual display. Coalbridge scrutinized it.

Warcraft. Sceeve. This time there was no mistaking. Coalbridge had seen the configuration all too often.

And was it?—yes. Fuck. He had seen
this vessel.

He’d seen these red, yellow, and plum markings—whorls of color spread around her scythe-blade-shaped bow like henna tattoos. He knew her, all right.

“DAFNE, tell me I’m right,” Coalbridge said. “Tell me that’s the
Powers of Heaven
.”

A moment’s processing, then a quick reply. “Yes, Captain. It is the
Powers.”

And then Coalbridge smiled, let out a short laugh as the situation fell into place in his mind. He knew what to do.

“DELTA, got a POSVEC on her?”

“We’ve got position. Working on velocity,” said HUGH from across the bridge.

“DELTA, is she still in Q? Get me her delta-v!”

“On it,” HUGH replied. “Preliminary. Q-space, but slowing. Approximately two light-minutes. Position Bootes two o’clock.”

“DAFNE, tactical assessment,” said Coalbridge. “Does the
Powers
even know we’re here?”

A pause. Then a smile. “I don’t think so, Captain,” DAFNE said. She pulled down the scenario display, pointed to their current position. “We’re partially occluded by the
Efficacy
—or whomever that is—relative to the approaching Sporata vessel at this point. Even if we aren’t one hundred percent beta silent, I think he won’t have time to distinguish that we’re here.”

Coalbridge thought the same thing. He looked into his XO’s steady, semitransparent eyes. Then he focused
through
them, focused on the stars beyond.

“DAFNE, still think we can pull off a suture?”

A second. Two. DAFNE flickered.

Must be some massive calculation going on,
Coalbridge thought.

Then she chuckled.

Moments like this, you sometimes doubted. A computer talking, sure. But laughing? Real or programming? Yet it didn’t sound simulated. Not in the slightest. There was simply no way to tell. And if you can’t tell the difference, the Turing is passed. Yeah, DAFNE was a person. He’d bet his life on it.

“I can,” DAFNE said. “I can calculate and actuate it.”

Coalbridge nodded. “Let’s do it.”

“Fun,” DAFNE said. After only a second or two she was ready. “Regional snapshot complete, demons in place.”

Coalbridge smiled a wolfish smile. “Sun’s rising somewhere on Earth,” he said. “It’s a new day. Let’s make a little Extry history, XO.”

“Aye, Captain.”

NINETEEN

19 January 2076

Vara Nebula

Eridani Gate

A.S.C.
Powers of Heaven

So, Companion Arid, you are a fool after all. Either that, my friend, my competitor, or you have gone insane. In any case, a complete disappointment to me. A sadness upon my
gid
.

Cliff-clinging-icefall Malako, captain of the Sporata attack vessel
Powers of Heaven,
gazed out at the starbright heavens and pondered his next move. He swayed in his command atrium and let the data on the Mutualist transport flow through him via Lamella, while another part of his mind, the part he never showed to computers, to his wife—not that she would understand if he did—in fact, to no one except a select few, brooded over the dark and upsetting complications of his recent life.

He’d lost a friend, an old, dear friend. Arid Ricimer had been one of those—few and far between—with whom Malako occasionally opened up. They’d been top-level students together at the Sporata Academy.
 

Ricimer with his purebred hypha hadn’t disdained someone from a lichen-infested hybrid hypha but had seen in Malako a kindred spirit. Malako, for his part, had been extraordinarily grateful, and his gratitude had turned to lasting friendship after Ricimer time and again disdained getting by on his heritage and proved himself to be a deep thinker—and as much of a clever trickster as Malako knew himself to be.

Together, they’d solved the final problem of the professors and won the Culmination Award for their graduating class.

They’d been more than friends back then. Almost hypha mates, especially for Malako, who’d never belonged to a real family and had finally found one in the Sporata.

My closest brother.

Ricimer. The poor dead slob.

What broke your mind, old friend?

It was the death of Del and the children, no doubt, that had first sent Ricimer over the edge. Which was understandable. Malako had known and been half in love with Del, too. Her kindness, her understanding of the sailor’s life. And a keen intelligence that was perhaps not as honed as Ricimer’s but was deep and wide. The loss of her
gid
, and the wisdom therein, would be felt by her hypha for generations.

But the Administration had its reasons, and the greater needs of society must be served.

That we can endure such refining and emerge the stronger species—this is why we are Guardians.

And Mutualism? The worst sort of heresy to be involved with. Ultimately, Del must have turned into one of those soft-minded imbeciles herself and pulled her mate along with her.

Ricimer had lost touch with history. It was the only rational explanation for his behavior. He’d been absorbed in the opiate of myth and unlearned the great lesson of the Guardian past.

Winners write history.

Be a winner or be written out.

And Guardian history was punctuated by massive genocidal wars. The accounts of those wars were intricate and varied, but a continuing theme was the choice between parasitism and symbiosis. It was a staple of Guardian historical education. The wars had been waged by “resource groups” that controlled particular sources of elemental wealth. These resource groups eventually coalesced into the sceeve shiros, or nation-states.