Guardian of Night (35 page)

Hell ride on the way.

Coalbrige had fifteen one-hundred-kiloton nukes, and he’d fired all of them.

The image of Sakuda tolling the seconds filled the chroma overlay of the entire vessel. All other chatter ceased. “Nuke activation in three, two, one—”

The
Powers of Heaven

Malako turned his attention from the human vessel. There was nothing to do. He had no time to turn his bottle armor abaft.

He was completely exposed from that direction.

Malako looked instead to the Sporata vessel on the view screen. The
Guardian of Night
stood revealed. Of course it was the
Guardian
.

And as the nukes bloomed, one word went tearing through Malako’s mind.

Ricimer!

The
Joshua Humphreys

Flash of matter unfurling into energy.

In his overlay, Coalbridge registered the tsunami of radiation headed toward him.

Just before the shock hit, Coalbridge reflected that “snap-back and nuke” was a tactic that had never been tried before. If he survived, he might get a nice footnote in the history books for the feat.

The wavefront hit. The gamma rays of which it was composed ate into the
Humphreys
’s bottle-shield like a blowtorch turned on a Styrofoam cup. Layer after layer melted away. But like Styrofoam, there were bubbles upon bubbles, layer upon layer. For every “real” quantum bottle generated from the vacuum, there were hundreds of “virtual” bottles tricked off of their physics. When the gamma rays entered each bottle, their frequency was pitched down, their wavelength requirements—and so their very being—lengthened.

When the deadly radiation reached the crew core, it was nothing more than harsh sunlight.

So the crew wouldn’t die of radiation poisoning, but the shields must be maintained and dissipating the energy they absorbed down to kinetic energy was another matter. The vessel was wracked and rolled. The conventional reaction rockets, under the control of servant personas, attempted to compensate. Coalbridge could hear the quick, machine-language chatter between DAFNE and her underlings as a low, whistling whine. Then there was a sharp exclamation from DAFNE that he had never heard before.

It sounded almost like—

It was.

Pain.

The rockets were overcome, and the vessel was picked up and carried like a broken surfboard, churned under and around and around and under again with a spreading shockwave of outraged thermonuclear energy uprooted from its happy home wound inside hydrogen nuclei and flung helter-skelter into another billion years of gypsy wandering.

Pseudogravity failed. Too many compensation variables flooding the algorithm as at once, it seemed. Pieces of equipment—chairs, consoles—broke loose, careened across the bridge enclosure. Coalbridge felt his own feet coming up off the floor, or the floor moving away from him—it amounted to the same thing. Suddenly a chair sped past him, and its backrest sheered into the arm of Sakuda.

Barely slowing down, it lopped the arm off neatly at Sakuda’s shoulder crook.

Blood spurted out in a semispherical fountain as the arm sped away from its body, taking a crazy spin with the fingers flexing and the hand looking for all the world as if it were trying to grab hold of something. Anything.

As the arm floated past him, Coalbridge made a grab for it, for a crazy moment thought he might actually
shake hands
with it, but missed.

Then something slammed into the back of his head.

Blackness.

Flicker.

He recognized the sensation. Concussion. Minor, he judged.

Awake again—was he out long? No. His body still shuddering from the blow of whatever it was and he reached back to feel and his hand returned clutching—

A hank of bloody hair and skin.

Coalbridge smiled. Not
skull,
he thought.
At least not skull.

“Oh!” said DAFNE. A clicking sound, then an uncharacteristic “Fuck!”

“What?” Coalbridge said.

“Absorption overload. Unable to compensate.”

“DAFNE,” Coalbridge heard himself say. His words seemed to echo in his skull.

The vessel continued to spiral away with the blast.
Grab something,
Coalbridge thought. But there was nothing to grab, nothing that wasn’t moving. He was inside a snow-shake toy.

Except for the DELTA servant, HUGH. His geist remained in place, still oriented toward the surface that had been the “floor” as the vessel turned around them. It was the damndest thing, thought Coalbridge.
Like
I’m
the ghost floating through HUGH’s world.

DAFNE’s geist was nowhere to be seen.

He frantically looked about. The snowflakes in the shake toy he haunted were red. They were micro-blobs of blood, flesh, cartilage—

A sudden lurch, and the contents of the enclosure sloshed toward one wall.

They had gotten the rockets back under gyro control, he thought. And then he slammed into the new “wall,” which had been the floor not long ago. His breath left him, and he felt another shooting pain in his head. Was his skull coming apart back there? He felt an urge to reach back and try to hold himself together as he might a diced potato or onion before he dropped it into the cook pot. But his arms were pinned by multiple gravities to the wall.

Then a quick lurch and slosh in the other direction. He flew across the cabin and slammed into the other “wall,” which had been the ceiling. This time the g-forces equalized and he “bounced” away, slowly floating back across the enclosure in the opposite direction.

DAFNE’s geist visage, only her face, reappeared before him. First it was five times normal human size, like a big Oz head. Then it flickered and reappeared at normal size. “Think I’ve got it,” she said. Then another lurch. “Four-fifths churn radiation wiped. No room.”

“What are you talking about, DAFNE?” he heard himself say.

“Sorry, Captain,” said DAFNE. “It’s me or life support.”

“DAFNE!”

“No room, Jim. Was an honor.”

“Come back here, XO,” he screamed. “Come back!”

And then the pseudogravity clicked back in. Unfortunately, human crew and bridge nonvirtual contents were suspended in the air. All fell together with a crash—bodies, blood, and equipment.

Coalbridge blinked. Moved a hand. Alive, yes. He sat up, surveyed his surroundings.
Looks like somebody dropped us from a great height,
he thought.
Which is sort of what happened.

The bridge was a mess. Practically a disaster area.

He heard a low moan. Sakuda rose, clutching his shoulder. Then his eyes rolled up into his skull and he fainted away.

Coalbridge stood unsteadily. He unbuttoned his shirt, shucked it off, then stepped over broken plastic and metal to find Sakuda lying on the new floor—a former bulkhead. Didn’t matter. He knelt down, wadded his shirt, and pressed it against the bloody stump of Sakuda’s upper arm.

Jesus,
Coalbridge thought,
a goddamn
chair back
did this.

At his touch, Sakuda awakened and began to shiver as if he were freezing.

“Am I o-okay, Captain?” asked the weapons officer in a quavering voice. “I want to leave a v-voice mail. My father. Voice mail if I don’t make it.”

He attempted to swallow, coughed violently. He attempted to wipe the spittle from his mouth with his missing arm but only succeeded in shifting the position of his shoulder.

“Hold still,” Coalbridge said.

“Big chief, sir. Mau Mau in his heart, my father. Fucking sceeve did not get him, no.”

“Shut up, Sakuda, save your breath,” Coalbridge said.

“Tell him. Tell him the lion cub is . . . fight like a—”

“I’ll tell him.”

Sakuda’s eyes rolled back into his head. His trembling body began to shake as if it had live current coursing through it.

Then it stopped.

And Sakuda died.

*
 
*
 
*

DAFNE was gone. Wiped.

Dead.

She’d done it herself, to ensure life support.

It took the better part of an hour to get damage control underway and take the vessel out of a crisis state. In another half hour, he had a damage report and casualty list.

Multiple injuries. Four dead, crushed, in a cargo bay.

Position was not so bad. Despite being flung for thousands of kilometers, they were still relatively close to the scene of the battle. The other personas were fine and working in long-practiced concert with the human crew—this wasn’t the first time servants and crew had faced damaged Q in battle, even if it was probably the worst—

—it
was
the worst.

Coalbridge knew it was bad news when the geist of the Q-drive algorithm ENGINE popped up on the bridge. ENGINE
never
came to the bridge. Efficiency incarnate, he didn’t like to waste computing power on animating a geist. He didn’t like to speak at all. Language formulation took away valuable calculating capacity, he claimed.

“My lightstacks have been ruptured,” ENGINE said. “Entanglement is compromised.”

Coalbridge, still half stunned, asked the obvious. “Surely you can find a stray photon
somewhere,
ENGINE.”

“Not with unresolved spin. Not with any unresolved Q. Captain, we’ve lost the whole supply.”

“We’ve run out of . . . light?”

“That’s correct, sir,” ENGINE said.

“Which means we’re dead in the water,” Coalbridge said.

“We have Newtonian propulsion, sir,” ENGINE replied. “Small supply of reaction mass.”

Coalbridge rubbed his eyes. “Okay, then,” he said. “Let’s go see what we’ve got to work with back at the scene of the crime.” He turned to Katapodis, who was bruised but whole, at helm. “Take us to the battlezone, helmsman.”

“Aye, Captain.”

They weren’t so very far away, after all. Even at N speeds, the return didn’t take long. In an hour, they were there.

The
Guardian of Night
drifted nearby, silent.

Not a threat. Coalbridge was amazed at the realization. A possible ally.

She’s waiting for my signal.

Take care of the threat first.

No sign of
Powers of Heaven
was to be seen.

“Is she gone? SIGINT, report!” Coalbridge said. “Did we blow her to pieces?”

“There!” It was Katapodis, the helmsman. He was pointing to a shining fleck at three o’clock, halfway up the dome of the night.

Coalbridge ordered them toward her. He had no more weaponry. All systems were on emergency power and all resources diverted to life support.

He had no DAFNE.

His
DAFNE.

His friend of six years.

His sister in arms.

Gone.

As it turned out, no weapons or defenses were necessary.

The
Powers of Heaven
would not fight again.

Half of her had practically been turned inside out by the nukes. There was an enormous hole in her forward hull and an “exit wound” with metal flowering outward in a gaping eruption on the other side. Photonic flickers surrounded the damaged edges, delimiting a boundary that the vessel Q was attempting to regenerate, but having no luck. She’d poured her insides into space. One look told Coalbridge all he needed to know. Except for a few zombie systems, her computers were blown. Her crew was a puddle against the bulkheads. No one had been thrown clear. He knew, but ordered a cursory sensor sweep just in case.

There were no rescue beacons, no activated officer bottles on the beta sensors.

The
Powers of Heaven
was a dead craft.

“How do you like that, XO,” whispered Coalbridge. To himself. To the empty air. “We won.”

TWENTY

19 January 2076

Vara Nebula

USX
Joshua Humphreys

“Sir, we’re going to have a problem with the
Guardian
heliox environment. It’s a twelve-fifty-two mix, with a hundred-five p.s.i. atmosphere,” said Lieutenant Nguen, the marine from the craft contingent who handled physically equipping assault teams on sceeve vessels or, in this case, a contact team.

The double whammy of breathing at high atmospheric pressure,
thought Coalbridge.
You stay in that sceeve air, it sends you into nitrogen psychosis within a minute or so. You leave without hours of decompression, and the bends will kill you.

“We’ll stay with the rebreathers and pressurized uniforms, then work into a compression schedule to put key personnel on sceeve pressure,” said Coalbridge. “The
Humphreys
is leaking like a sieve, and we wouldn’t have the air to flush and replace the sceeve gas if we brought them over here.” He smiled. “Besides, what would be the fun of
that
?”

“I’ll work out the protocols, sir, and inform the affected crew. They’ll bitch about fairness, because the big ones will need to stay in the chamber longer. It will be based on body mass.”

Coalbridge nodded. “Set it up.” He’d always hated close-quarters fighting with a rebreather over his face and a ballooned and stiffened uniform suit—the churn in the Extry uniform fabric would make it into a pressure suit for a few hours at a time. During a few engagements, he’d had sufficient warning to ramp his special-force marines up in a hyperbaric chamber and inject them completely adapted to breathe sceeve air, which was, of course, breathable by humans if they were ready for the enormous pressures of sceeve enclosures. He’d never done it himself, however. Maybe he’d finally get his chance soon—but not yet. So rebreathers and balloon suits it was.

Time to float over through the converted assault tube the marines had set up as a docking corridor. He would take Leher with him. Four heavily armed marines. And that would be it.

With DAFNE gone, he’d moved his VISOR, the vessel internal-systems division officer-in-charge, Lieutenant Commander Matty Taras, to XO and given him a field promotion to commander. He’d leave Taras in command of the
Humphreys
while he was away.

While I’m away having tea and cookies with a fucking
sceeve
skipper,
Coalbridge thought.

Taras had standing orders to destroy the
Guardian of Night
at the slightest sign she was going belligerent.