Guardian of Night (37 page)

They
were
the sceeve, after all.

*
 
*
 
*

Sam Guptha stepped out of the puck following the Secret Service agents. The president would be the last to debark. It had been years since Sam had been into space. Of course, a couple of thousand miles above the Earth’s surface wasn’t really
space
-space, but it was a lot farther than her grandparents back in New Delhi, or even her rocket-scientist parents, had ever been. Without pseudogravity, the feeling was not that different from being in a hotel on Earth. Except for the curved walls—Walt Whitman was designed to spin if the pseudogravity suddenly cut out. There were too many supplies that needed constant gravitation (or its artificial centrifugal equivalent) to risk a Q breakdown—breakdowns which had tended to occur with some frequency during the early days of the station.

They passed some welcoming banners and even some banquet-style steamers—how the heck had they gotten those up here so fast?—and entered the conference room to await her presentation. After a great deal of thought and computer modeling, she and her team had managed to convince themselves that their idea would work. Now she had to convince, well,
everybody else
.

Of course, the alternative was most likely a quick death for them all.

So if logical argument and honey-throated appeal fails, at least I have that going for me,
Sam thought.

*
 
*
 
*

Leher followed Coalbridge and Ricimer through the docking collar and into the station proper. Ricimer had not had time to set foot on the
Humphreys,
and this was the first time he had boarded a human vessel. At least so Leher believed. Could be he’d been involved with the invasion five years ago. Could be he was Ivan the Terrible back then. There was much that remained unknown about who this sceeve really was, and why he was doing what he was doing. Leher figured that, provided he were to survive the next forty-eight hours, he was about to spend years working on the answer to that particular question.

Leher looked down as the sceeve walked across the airlock deck. Ricimer was the only sceeve who had debarked—mostly because Leher and his Xeno team had only been able to rig one sceeve-shaped pressure suit. The Mutualist refugees, if they were delivered here, would have to be put into a pressurized compartment of their own for the time being.

Ricimer’s head was helmetless and exposed, but the captain had assured him that, with the stress taken off his body, he should be safe from pressure effects for many hours. He did descend from a space-based species, after all, even though the sceeve had adapted to atmosphere hundreds of thousands of years ago.

A heliox feed would take care of any problems with exposure to the heavy nitrogen concentrations in the human breathing mix. Ricimer had a finger’s-breadth clear tube that snaked from a bottle of compressed heliox strapped to his back and into his muzzle so that he could breathe his native mix but still “speak” into the human atmosphere, and so into Leher’s translation box.

As they made their way down the corridor toward the meeting place, Leher noticed that Ricimer’s feet did, indeed, leave damp prints on the steel floor. The
Guardian
and, Leher figured, most other sceeve vessels, had special absorbers in the floor to handle such leavings. When Leher experimentally stepped in one of Ricimer’s footprints with a boot, he found it was sticky, with a small tug needed to free himself. Like a Post-it note, Leher thought. Or slug slime.

Can’t take a sceeve anywhere.

And then they were through the corridor and into the meeting room—a long office with a large, empty table in the middle. No chairs. From speakers somewhere, a faint version of “Hail to the Chief” played as the president rose up to stand before Ricimer. The station’s enormous old-fashioned tank-map of the sky as depicted in three dimensions was contained within a tabletop of holographic glass. Leher had heard the Walt Whitman
staff still used the old map as a backup to keep tabs on logistics. At the moment, all information was blank, with only the stars and planets shown in their pinprick positions. The map couldn’t possibly have been to scale, Leher thought, or it would have taken up the entire station to represent the actual analogous space between the pinpricks. But the distances between systems seemed to have been proportionally collapsed, at least.

For a moment, no one spoke. And then Ricimer went first. “Madame President, I wish to extend the same greeting as I did to your representative, Captain Coalbridge. I and my remaining officers wish to request diplomatic asylum in the United States of America. Furthermore, the persons in my hold, which include children of my species, are seeking political sanctuary from an oppressive regime. If you turn them away, they will surely be slaughtered, as they were about to be before they departed the Shiro and came aboard the
Guardian of Night
.”

The president nodded. “Very well,” she said. She held up an ampoule that was very similar to a sceeve nebulizer. On second glance, Leher saw it
was
somebody’s re-creation of a nebulizer. And a pretty good one. “Shall we have refreshment?”

Ricimer’s muzzle flared to a smile. “I would be delighted, Madame President.”

He took the ampoule from Frost’s hand. An aide immediately gave the president her own drink—her customary beverage, a can of Diet Coke. She raised it in salute.

“On behalf of the people of the United States of America, I accept your request and that of your crew, Arid Ricimer. We will also offer sanctuary to your passengers. We understand what it is to be cruelly oppressed by your Administration.”

The president stepped back, momentarily startled as Ricimer made a slight bow.

“Welcome to America,” she said.

Ricimer placed a palm on his chest directly over his
gid
. The traditional sceeve analog for a bow of respect. “Your servant,” he said.

“I don’t know about that,” said the president. “Maybe my
constituent
one of these days.” Frost sipped her Coke. Ricimer examined the ampoule, quickly seemed to get the hang of it, then whiffed it into his muzzle. After a moment, his smile widened.

“Is this Old Fifty-five?” he said. He took another sniff. “It is! Where did you find this?”

The president turned to an admiral standing off to the side. “You know anything about that, Murray?”

“Brewed it myself, ma’am,” the admiral replied.

“You
made
this?” Ricimer said. Leher recognized something like wonder in the undertone of his reply. “I have chosen wisely after all. Any species capable of creating Old Fifty-five . . .” His thought trailed away as Ricimer took another whiff. “Delicious.” Finally, he seemed to have had enough. “Pardon me, shall we now get down to the business of the turnover?”

“Not quite yet, Captain,” President Frost replied. “I plan to leave you in command a bit longer, if you don’t mind. We may have an idea.”

“As you wish, of course.”

“Now, Captain, what about the weapon your vessel carries? Is it operational?”

“Yes,” said Ricimer. “Although I have not fired it. I prefer stealth when possible, and in any case I do not believe its rate of fire is fast enough take on the entire armada.”

“Yes, our conclusions, as well,” said the president.

The president handed off the Diet Coke to the same aide who’d brought it. She glanced over to Sam.

“Captain Ricimer, now
we
have some news for
you
. And a proposal.”

*
 
*
 
*

“Ladies and gentlemen, this is the first meeting I’ve had in years that I was truly looking forward to and that I’m completely glad to be at,” said President Frost.

Sam noticed Leher’s box huffing and puffing in translation. She wondered how much of her own briefing would really come across to the sceeve. Knowing Griff, probably a lot, she decided. She hoped most of it.

A lemon scent. It took Sam a moment to realize it arose from—from within the nasal cavities of—Captain Ricimer. Griff’s box made a sound akin to a chuckle. Sceeve laughter smelled like lemon? Or maybe it was a polite laugh that was meant to express irritation? Would have to ask Griff when—

The president faced Sam. Everybody else did as well.

“So, without further ado—”

Okay,
Sam thought.
Please, dear Lord, let the damn slides be in order.

She clicked her first graphic. It was a diagram of the Kilcher artifact, the weapon upon the
Guardian of Night
.

It still looked like the corrupted horn of some enormous, probably evil, beast to Sam.

“Where did you get that image?” huffed Ricimer suddenly.

The box put a surprised tone to the words.

“From the Poet’s transmission, of course,” Sam replied, a bit nonplussed. “From you, presumably, Captain.”

“Ah, of course,” said Ricimer. “Of course. Excuse me, please. I had forgotten your computational mastery, your ability to model.”

Sam glanced to Frost, who nodded. Go ahead.

“We, that is my systems guy, Francois Remy, created the virtual display.”

“I see,” Ricimer said. Again the lemony puff, stronger this time. Griff’s box translated it again as laughter. “I take it that your computer ability has developed even further than it had when I last encountered your species during the unfortunate invasion.”

“By many orders of magnitude,” Sam said, feeling a bit uncomfortable. This thing was speaking so matter-of-factly, even blithely, about the worst thing that ever happened to the human race. Sam had seen plenty of pictures of the sceeve, but Ricimer was the first she’d ever met up close. She’d prepared herself and had barely missed a beat when he’d come in. But now that he was addressing her directly. . . .
 

It was spooky. His eyes occluded every few seconds but didn’t really blink. And, of course, he had no mouth. Just that enormous nasal-vomeronasal organ that looked like a cross between a mass of melted plastic and a three-dimensional model of the Grand Canyon. She found herself checking for snot. There was none, just a slight moistness to the crenellations, like that of a dog’s nose.

“I understand your feelings as to what I have done, and I do wish to take responsibility,” Ricimer continued. “But I must say you humans have met, and even surpassed, my expectation for your species.”

Sam nodded. “The exterior modeling was easy, since we had the specs. As was general behavior, since you provided us with the experimental data. The hard part was figuring out
why
it behaves the way it does, of course. And then what we could do with that information. Implementation.”

She clicked the slide.

An animated graphic. She waited a moment to set it into motion.

“The weapon does not create or destroy matter or energy, of course. Neither does it create or destroy information, which would be the same thing. The best way I can explain it is to say that it
threshes
information. The weapon creates a sieve effect on a level smaller than even that of gravitational interaction. In fact, we really don’t understand the physical principles involved. Yet. So we’ve worked backward from the effect, on which we have data. It’s a sort of reverse Schrödinger’s cat experiment.”

Leher looked puzzled.
You and me both,
she wanted to tell him.

She started the animation. The emission from the weapon—pictured as something like a spreading flashlight beam, although actually the diameter could be altered at will—swept across a three-d representation of a black cat.

The black cat became a white outline.

“Looks like it got turned into a ghost,” said Coalbridge.

“We call it an ‘eidolon,’” Sam replied. “But ghost will do just as well. The ‘ray,’ if you want to call it that, from the weapon serves as a kind of infinitesimally small sieve.”

“What does it remove, if it’s that small?” Coalbridge asked.

“It culls information,” Sam said. “That’s the best way I can say it. It removes from leptons, gluons, gauge bosons—from every wave-particle duality in its path—the information concerning the particle’s charge, its spin state. Its color. Everything we think of as the particle’s ‘properties.’ It doesn’t merely copy the information—it strips it away.”

“Leaving . . . what?”

“There’s not really a word for what remains. Inchoate matter, you might call it. But whatever you call it, it doesn’t stay in that state for longer than a single unit of Planck time.”

“Meaning?”

“It takes on new properties. Whatever properties are nearest at hand. Mostly, it just blows up.”

“And what is actually going on with the stripped information?”

“Like I said, we’re not sure. There is some thought that the information is dissipated elsewhere, perhaps in the creation of gravitational effects. I myself suspect that it’s somehow suspended in an undetermined fashion. Separated out and not in communication with its material substrate. The dead cat becomes alive and not alive. Real and unreal. It returns to indeterminacy.”

“Don’t suppose you know what the damn thing is, do you?”

Sam smiled. Leave it to Griff Leher to ask the one question she wasn’t prepared to answer and wanted desperately to know.

“We do not.”

“But you’ve dreamed up an idea, haven’t you, Sam?”

She hadn’t wanted to speculate, but he would call her out on that. Of course, Griff knew how the principle for scaling up the Q-bottles to house the first W22 FTL-deliverable nuke had come to her. A dream of parallel lines of swords flying through a cloud of suspended, fallen leaves, skewering only the red ones and leaving the others to fall. After that, it had only been a matter of getting the math right.

Sam sighed. “Most likely a wild guess,” she said. “It’s not even a hypothesis, because I haven’t begun to figure out how to test it.”

“Share your conjecture with us, Dr. Guptha,” said the president.

Sam rubbed her eyes, then ran her hand through her hair.
Needs a wash. Overslept after staying up all night. Almost missed the Skyhook.
“My idea is that the artifact is the remains of an evaporated black hole,” Sam said. “How the Kilcher came into possession of such an object, I could not begin to say. Its extreme density may be an indicator of this. The artifact seems to suck information into itself in a way that’s almost analogous to osmosis in a cell. I think it’s structured somehow to make its initial information content ‘less dense’ than the information in normal space.”