Guardian of Night (34 page)

In the end, inevitably, thought Malako, the parasites won. Regulation, its philosophy, viewed the parasite as the keystone, the highest point, in a galactic ecological web.

It’s irrefutable,
Malako thought.
Wealth cannot be created or destroyed; it can only change hands. Resources are finite. New resources can only enter the economy through discovery and conquest. Parasites are at the top of the food chain. They regulate predation by controlling both predators and prey. They create and enforce
justice
. And I am its instrument. I am the spot where the hand meets the task.

Mutualists were weak. They did
not
understand that the galactic economy was zero-sum. They thought of wealth as some sort of soft-minded, nebulous concept. The role of the symbiot was to aid other species in the creation of new resources.

The Symbiotic Heresy had been defeated, but never died. And now it had taken root once again like a disease, a blight upon the species. When the previous Depletion Tax came in lower than expected, there was no doubt the fault was Mutualism. A pogrom was inevitable.

The moment Del consorted with those scum, she’d doomed herself and Ricimer’s children.

And now Ricimer. Tainted along with his doomed family. As good as wiped from existence.

And for what? Malako couldn’t bring himself to believe that Arid Ricimer had become a soft-thinking Mutualist fool. No, there was only one motive he could fathom. Revenge.

The one emotion Ricimer himself had cautioned his friend never to act on. It broke discipline. It was bad for morale within the vessel and for your own standing without.

It would get you killed.

Malako had listened. Yes, he would take care of Ricimer.

Yet still, Ricimer was clever, never to be underestimated. Here he was disguised as a Mutualist abomination of a vessel. He’d probably fooled the armada into thinking that was exactly what he was—a threat to be dealt with later.

And putting her in the throes? Genius.

One nuke ought to be enough.

“We’ve got her dead to rights, Captain,” said Lieutenant Tercid, Malako’s weapons officer. “Solutions loaded for multiple weaponry options.”

Malako glanced over to his vessel’s political officer, Lavkit, who had been Transel’s second-in-command.

“Receptor Lavkit, do we have permission to proceed?”

Lavkit was a small female but possessed powerful shoulders and big hands. Several of the officers had pronounced her attractive, but Malako didn’t see it. The shoulders took away from whatever beauty the hands possessed. Malako despised her, but she was, to his mind, still a huge improvement over Transel. Besides, she had not shed the tendency to obey. It usually took a while in charge for a political officer to become a complete asshole.

“Proceed at your own discretion, Captain, and thrive the Administration,” Lavkit replied.

“Thrive the Administration,” said Malako and turned to Tercid.

Battle. His element. Away from all the intrigue, the double-dealing back in the Shiro. This was where he was meant to be.

The
Guardian of Night

The Efficacy
, at last!

When the Guardian vessel had first appeared, Ricimer’s
gid
had surged with joy. His goal was completed. He could deliver his charges to safety! He could then with honor seek his fate with the humans.

Relief flooded Ricimer.

But it had taken mere
vitia
for doubts to set in.

Mere
vitia,
but too long, too late.

A quick analysis of the beta transmission. No proper answerback codes.

Visual inspection.

Realization.

Despair.

His gambit had failed. Ricimer felt sadness wash over him. Of course the odds of success had been almost impossible to begin with.

“We have been found out. Take us out of the throes,” Ricimer said to Talid. “All shields concentrate. Vector on the approaching craft.”

Confusion in Talid’s expression. “Aye, Captain. It shall be so.” Then alarm. “We are exposed. Shields will not absorb an attack at this distance.”

“Yes. I know, Commander Talid,” Ricimer said with a quiet jet of measured emotion. “Nevertheless, prepare for battle.”

He’d almost succeeded. The scouts had passed him by, left him as a problem to be dealt with by the armada. And by then, he’d have found a way to off-load his charges, contact the humans.

Yes, he’d fooled his enemies. But he hadn’t fooled his friends.

Oh, he recognized the one he was facing, all right.

Malako.

He had many professional acquaintances—one acquired them over the course of a career through the mere process of doing one’s work, carrying on. Some were pleasant enough, some were useful. But none of these relationships would last beyond a few
molts
. His true friends, his real friends, were with him always, even when they were far away. He checked his behavior according to how they would judge him. He wished to be considered as worthwhile—no, as
good
—in their estimation. These were the friends whose memory he would enfold into his
gid
. Of these, there were only a few.

Malako had been one.

He was an officer of fierce intelligence born to a blasted hypha, his fate predetermined. No, there would never be an admiralty for Malako. Captains must be competent, but above that level, political connections were far more important.

Cliff-clinging-icefall Malako. The other plebes had called him “Clinger” in the Academy, and it was an insult. Malako had always seemed to them to be hanging on to the sheer cliff face of his career in the Sporata by the tips of his gills. But the captain of the Mutualist vessel had from the start called his friend “Ice.” Ice for his perfection, his cool deliberation under pressure. By the end of their studies, his name had won out. Malako was known by all as “Ice.” There was truth in the first name, as well, though, the captain reflected. Malako was as stubborn as they came. As stubborn as he himself had been.

I never imagined it would be you, yet it makes sense, old companion.

Ricimer whiffed at the irony.

Malako had been one of the few for him—a friend of the
gid
.

Now Cliff-clinging-icefall Malako was about to kill him.

The
Powers of Heaven

“Go with a forward bottle,” Malako told the weapons officer. In his intensity of concentration, Malako accidentally breathed in his own words as he spoke. They tasted a bit like the soup he’d absorbed for dinner the night before.

In it also was the odor of apprehension, but not of the flight response. No, his fear had long been well under control. Malako took a deep breath. Another. There. He’d done it, just as Ricimer had taught him when they were scrub ensigns together serving aboard that old battlecraft the
Orthogonal Electrostatic Wave Absorber.

Ricimer’s calming hand on his arm. His mint-like, calming words. “We all feel the panic, Ice. It’s part of our biology. Work through it. Turn it under your feet. Feed upon it for courage.”

But he didn’t feel particularly courageous now. Merely resigned to what must be done.

Because if Malako didn’t make a hero of himself, he had no doubt what awaited him back in the Shiro. He’d been a known associate of the traitor Ricimer.

Malako turned to his vessel weapon’s officer, who had been standing by for the order.

“Fire,” Malako said.

The
Joshua Humphreys

The
Humphreys
rose over the curve of the Mutualist craft—now suddenly
not
a spinning, out-of-control Mutualist craft at all but a shapely Sporata battle vessel. The
Humphreys
rose
like a new moon first revealing itself. Coalbridge estimated that he was no farther than a couple of dozen kilometers from the other vessel, the
Powers of Heaven
. And then she was in sight—and he called out his order to ZAP.

“Throw!”

The electric crackle of the railguns filled the vessel for an instant, then was silent. The recoil from the rock launch hit seconds later.

“Rocks away, Captain,” Sakuda, the ZAP officer, reported.

“Stabilizing thrusters at eighty percent,” said Katapodis at the helm.

“Keep her steady,” Coalbridge said in a low voice. He stared out into space. With bottle armor forward, the bridge was canted too high to have a view of where the
Humphreys
was headed. Coalbridge quickly pulled down a display, placed another, containing more data, on top of it. The two merged, giving him the view he needed. A gyrating spherical object, clear-skinned with a glowing blue center, separated from the sceeve vessel. It looked for all the world like one of the huge, elongated bubbles he’d used to create with the giant wand set he’d had as a kid, the kind that used dishwashing liquid as the fluid dip.

There’s the attack,
Coalbridge thought. Bottle torpedo. He’d know in a moment if he’d guessed right as to its nature. His rocks were represented by a traveling cloud of sparkles, tiny and, he knew, perfectly rendered in position and relative size.

If it were antimatter, his counterattack would be essentially useless, overpowered. But he knew this vessel, this commander. He was supremely efficient with his maneuvers and weapons. Thrifty.

He out maneuvered me the last time we met, that’s for sure,
thought Coalbridge.
Fooled me into thinking his range was shorter than it was, then blasted hell out of us. Lucky we got out of there in one piece.

Coalbridge watched his rocks cross the void toward the sceeve weapon. Closer.

Closer.

The
Powers of Heaven

“Captain Malako, emergency proximity warning,” came the calm, vanilla voice of Lamella. “Alien objects detected afore!”

“Objects? What objects?” spurted Malako. “Recall the torpedo!”

“Not possible.”

“Disarm!”

“Fail-safes are double-trigger beta and electromagnetic. Calculating. No time for wave travel to confirm disarm,” said Lamella.

Malako cursed. Of course. The new electromagnetic confirmation signal. Transel, curse his rotting body in the hole, had required all fail-safes to be fully engaged when the
Powers of Heaven
had destroyed the human intelligence vessel. He normally unlocked them immediately upon mission departure and for control himself.

Thrice curse the receptor.

These rocks had come from somewhere. They had the configuration of an Earth vessel throw. It was all too obvious. He’d been ambushed!

As if she’d read his mind, Lamella confirmed his guess. “Captain, situational analysis indicates human weaponry.”

And he could do nothing to stop it.

Nothing.

“Where? Where is the cursed vessel?”

Malako’s nasal membranes flared in outrage. He stomped on the deck of the bridge. Transel would not hear it. The bridge “hole” was too insulated, guarded against detection.

You’ve killed me, Transel, you stupid, stupid fool!

The bridge atmosphere filled with Malako’s carbolic scream of a command. “All shields forward!”

The
Joshua Humphreys

Rock met nuke, and a momentary star burst into being in the nearby heavens.

Detonation.

And close to the Sporata vessel. As close as he’d planned. The sceeve vessel flowered with blue-white explosions. This he could see perfectly well without virtual enhancement. Coalbridge watched as the sceeve craft suddenly lurched to the left, exposed its long flank.

Here was the chance he’d been waiting for. “Fire!” he called out.

Turning to face him from the phantom gunnery panel, his weapons geist called out the coordinates at which the
Humphreys
’s RADICL chemical-laser bank would strike. “Spread concentrated at twenty-three Alpha, November eighty-six,” ZAP reported. Then, after the briefest pause, “Direct hit, sir.”

A moment of elation, and then a tactical report from DAFNE. “The
Powers
has located and locked on us. Her internal beta chatter is spiking up twenty percent. Analysis: she’s preparing to concentrate fire.”

“All right then,” Coalbridge said. He banded through channels. “Ready, DAFNE? It’s time for the suture.”

“Aye, Captain,” replied the servant.

“On my mark . . . do it.”

“Engaged, sir.”

With a lurching displacement, a stomach-turning feeling of being two places at once, he felt the
Humphreys
let go her hold on one portion of space-time and be whipped—no, instantly transported—to another. It did not feel as if he ceased to exist and then existed elsewhere, which was what had actually happened. His mind tried to tell him he’d traveled the distance in a flash of movement, or at least some sort of distance. He knew there was no actual sloshing of the inner-ear fluids, no trail of light. But his mind compensated by manufacturing just such a sight and sensation of movement, attempting to make the Q through which they travelled fit the N in which human perception had evolved.

And where am I in that instant of transfer?
Maybe it was best not to think on such questions at the moment.

The
Powers of Heaven

“Captain Malako, the human vessel is directly abaft us.”

“
What?
How?”

“Not clear, sir,” said the XO. “She was there above the Mutualists, and then gone. How she got behind us is unknown, sir.”

But Malako
did
know. He’d even done it himself before.

A suture maneuver.

The humans certainly seemed to learn their lessons well.

The
Joshua Humphreys

The sceeve craft was partially eclipsing the
Efficacy of Symbiosis
, which now spun in its crazy rotation
behind
the
Powers of Heaven
.

“ZAP, send the nukes.”

“Aye, Captain. Nukes away.”

“DELTA, all shielding forward!”

“Aye, sir.”

They were no more than ten kilometers from the
Powers,
on her other side now.

This was going to be apocalyptic. Had to be. A nuclear strike was the only sure way to kill a sceeve vessel.

Even with multiple bottles absorbing the blast energy, the
Humphreys
was going to be thrown thousands of kilometers away. There would be no ability to jump. A slingshot maneuver such as they’d performed depleted the immediate quantum neighborhood of uncertainty. It would take several minutes before unobserved phenomena built back to critical mass. Not long enough. He’d have to put on the brakes in the conventional manner.