Guardian of Night (38 page)

The dream that gave her the idea had actually been of a boat in the middle of an empty, lead-dark sea. The boat itself had been made of stone. And yet it floated.

“And so there’s a continual flow of information into the artifact,” Sam continued. “It’s retained one quality of the singularity it may once have been—it captures information. A current—or likely any significant application of energy—seems to reconfigure this matrix for a portion of time, about a minute, in the same manner as supercooling suddenly reconfigures regular conductors into essentially resistance-free superconductors. This thing becomes a ‘super-information-sump.’ A bottomless pit for any elementary information in its range.” Sam shook her head, smiled wryly. “But this, all of this, is conjecture on my part. What we know is what happens next—”

She clicked the slide. The beam swished back in the other direction, crossing the cat-eidolon. It dissolved.

“When the minute is over, the artifact turns itself off. The information in the affected material region reasserts itself. In, as best we can tell, a random manner.”

“The material is wiped away. It becomes formless energy. Starlight,” Ricimer said. “My people have done this to an entire species.”

“Genocide by information removal,” said the president. She shook her head. “And was this what was planned for us?”

“Only if your resistance could not be broken,” Ricimer replied. “A tenet of Regulation and the Administration is to retain enough of a conquered species to allow for a small measure of cultural innovation for further gleaning.”

“So we’d get to be slaves?”

“Doubtful. From what I know of humans, extinction would ultimately be your fate,” Ricimer continued. “You have the technological means to avoid submission and a will to fight. Such conditions will eventually trigger an all-out response from the Administration. They will fear that you might become a competitor instead of a parasite host.”

“So the species that can’t be broken to slavery become targets for elimination?” the president said, a frown of disgust on her face.

“This is the policy of the Administration,” said Ricimer.

“We’re not conquered,” said the president quietly. “Nor will we be.”

The sceeve captain made an odd head movement to his right, a slight shrug. “No one my species has invaded has reverse engineered our technology so quickly, or made innovations so rapidly. Within two cycles, your war vessels were on a par with ours. Now I am coming to believe that in some respects they are better.”

Ricimer moved to the nearby map table, put his hand down forcefully, its tapered point of a palm pointing toward Sol system.

Looks like we share at least one bodily gesture in common,
Sam thought.

“Human are the species that might possibly bring about the downfall of the Administration,” he said. “I became convinced of this while I was fighting you during the initial invasion. And now I’m sure of it.” He turned and faced the president, held out his hands in a cradling gesture.

“We are a political species, like yours,” he said. “For millennia, there existed competing philosophies among the hypha, different cultures and modes of living. These still are present, but they have been driven underground. My wife was a member of such a philosophical grouping. She had a deep and abiding belief in the symbiosis of all creatures, all life. This is the Mutualist way.”

“And are you a Mutualist as well?” the president asked.

“I am not. I am but a fellow traveler,” Ricimer answered. “And the implacable enemy of the Administration. What I am looking for is allies. Not companionship. Not true believers.”

“Then you’ve found us,” said the president. She nodded to Sam. “Continue, Dr. Guptha.”

Sam clicked her slide. A human eye.

“I assume you are all familiar with the principles behind the chroma,” she said. “Salt in the eye projects images on the retina that are the precise frequencies of light that the corneal salt filters out. It is a miniaturized version of the old green screen used in filmmaking special effects. This is, for instance, the way that servants are able to represent themselves as geists.”

A few baffled expressions. They’d have to stay confused about that, so long as her main point came across.

Click. The Escher print of the hands reaching out from a piece of drawing paper, drawing one another.

A few bullet points. Here it was. The central idea.

“What we project that we will be able to do is to modify the disentanglement weapon’s beam. We will modulate it in a manner similar to the projection methods used to create the chroma. We will, in effect, create a sort of chroma within the disentangled substrate, a virtual reality of virtual particles that
are
entangled within their frame of reference, that do retain their information. They will be, in fact, entangled with one another and not with any exterior event, process or substance.” Sam took a breath, continued. “We’ll be able to green-screen in a special effect.”

“And what will that effect be?” asked Coalbridge. “Godzilla?”

Sam smiled. “Not exactly,” she said. “We believe that we can encode a servant into the artifact’s region of effect.”

“A servant,” Ricimer said. “An artificially intelligent agent?”

“That’s correct,” said Sam. “A servant on either end—the artifact would, in a sense, be fired
through
the servant. On the receiving end, the duplicate servant would then be shielded by the information ‘shadow’ of the first. It would not become informationally disintegrated. This servant, now present in the newly unentangled material, would then be able to determine the reapplication of information to the affected substrate.”

“A Maxwell’s demon,” Leher said. “A little bugger that determines the state and properties of every particle there is.”

“Precisely,” said Sam. “But within a confined area. Otherwise such a servant would become—”

“God,” Leher said.

“Something like that.”

“But within this confined area, the servant could make whatever you shoot that thing at into whatever you want?” said Leher. “As in, turn lead to gold. Broccoli to pizza?”

“A lump of material into an antimatter annihilation event,” Sam said.

“A supernova,” said Ricimer. His muzzle was flaring widely, and the lemon scent was again in the air.

“Sure,” Sam said. “The complete conversion of say—”

She made a few rough calculations in her head.

“—a sphere about a quarter-kilometer in diameter into force-mediating particles. Energy, I mean. You’d get something equivalent to a smallish supernova. We make the beam smart, we can make stars. At least for a little while.”

“A quarter-kilometer?”

“Depending on the density.”

“Say . . . a spacecraft.”

“Yes, probably, although—”

Ricimer glanced over to Coalbridge. “We happen to have a spacecraft to spare, do we not, Captain?”

Coalbridge thought for a moment, then broke into a smile. “Indeed we do. The
Powers of Heaven.
We incorporated her Q and towed her back, of course.”

Again Ricimer slapped his hand down on the table beside him. This time his huge eyes were directly on Sam. “You’ve done it,” he said. “I knew you would, but I couldn’t possibly predict
how
.”

“Done what?” Sam asked. “We’ve merely played around with some of the implications of the information with which you provided us.”

“Yes,” said Ricimer. “My mother once told me an ancient tale of my kind. It is called ‘The Bright-Dust of Teshinaw.’ It was a moment when we Guardians still possessed the quality you humans term ‘play.’ Somehow we lost it. But now you have brought it back to us.”

Again the box was laughing.

TWENTY-ONE

20 January 2076

Sol System

Kuipers Outbound

USX
Powers of Heaven

Coalbridge was in command of the
Powers of Heaven.
She was his now.
His
sceeve vessel.

She was alive again. Well, a sort of hybrid-mutant life with a human servant and a sceeve computer program acting as the vessel’s nervous system. The computer aboard the
Powers of Heaven
at the moment—a Pocket Palace Plus, which contained a copy of the servant LOVE and the Lamella programming from the
Guardian
—was busy preparing for the
Powers
’s final chapter of existence. Neither LOVE nor Lamella could travel into the
Powers
’s computational matrix, because there no longer was such a thing on this vessel. The nuke next door had burned the last vestige of craft churn away. The computer system therefore didn’t have the data-crunching power to control Q, to navigate, and to helm. Coalbridge’s unaided human brain and intuition would have to serve for steering.

Maintaining course manually was nerve-wracking, but it was also kind of cool. He’d freed the emergency-control stick—it had been exactly where Ricimer had said it would be—from its stowed position in a tubelike structure on the side of the enclosure, and it had swung into place before him like a safety bar on a roller-coaster ride, horizontally at about shoulder height—which would be waist height to a sceeve, but there was no adjusting for that problem. He’d called up a large exterior-display screen for the wall directly in his sight line and was now piloting the
Powers
in manual-override mode. Ricimer had given him instructions on how to go about it, but, apart from training sessions, Ricimer himself had never used the manual pilot on any craft he’d captained, and he’d told Coalbridge that he doubted any of the currently serving Sporata officers had either.

“It’s a vestige of another time—a design era before we had gleaned trustworthy computer technology from a conquered species,” he said. “But Sporata vessel designs change extremely slowly, if at all. The normal course of action when constructing a new craft is to layer on new technology rather than make wholesale changes.”

Thank God for hidebound sceeve engineering,
Coalbridge thought. The old tech was now allowing a human to fly one of their spacecraft without computer assistance.

So far so good.

He was flying in a tight triad formation with the
Guardian of Night
and the
Joshua Humphreys
. Only a few meters separated the craft. The
Powers
was attached to the
Guardian
with a docking collar that must be retained intact if he and Leher—who was with him aboard the
Powers
—were to be able to return to safety once the
Powers
met her destiny. All three vessels were, at the moment, in N-space, ramped up to a significant percentage of
c
. Extry craft had no such built-in manual capability, at least not one that was wholly under the control of one individual. This may be the fastest speed a human unenhanced by wiied computer algorithms had ever piloted a vessel. He’d have to check when he got back home.

If he got back home.

The vessels were purposely tied close together so that only a careful scan of their beta signatures would reveal that their Q-drives had been kept separate on a quantum level. On the trip outward, back toward the Sporata armada’s lines, the two vessels were, in Q-terms, three craft concealed as one, with all the vessels employing separate, nonentangled drives. Of course, now that they were in N-space, there wasn’t a question of entanglement. Each employed separate reaction-mass engines to move along.

All part of Ricimer’s plan.

Coalbridge had worried that perhaps he’d gotten the situation all wrong, had failed to understand some duplicity on the sceeve captain’s part. That his current action might be a fantastically complicated setup to subjugate the Earth once and for all. In this nightmare scenario, Ricimer would hold back when they reached the Sirius armada, establish contact instead of attacking. He would jettison the
Powers
along the way and call for her destruction—and then use the distraction to be on his way to his sought-for Mutualist enclave—making his escape while the Sporata armada was kept busy taking on the United States Extry.

Coalbridge had confided his fears to Leher, who had shrugged and agreed it wasn’t a bad plan at all. “If Ricimer is merely intent on reaching the Mutualists, that is,” Leher said, “and assuming he doesn’t mind the mass betrayal and genocide that would follow. Not to mention the nine-hundred-plus hostages he’s left us with on Walt Whitman
.
”

“I’ve learned to never trust a sceeve,” Coalbridge replied. “But the thing that gives me comfort is that I think this guy is playing a deeper game. One you and I haven’t quite figured out yet. But I will. We will.”

Leher nodded. “Been thinking along the same lines,” he said. “But, like he said, I think he needs
allies
right now.”

Coalbridge smiled. He was beginning to feel that he and Leher weren’t merely fighting the same enemy—but that they shared a set of goals at a basic level. That they were becoming a team, a good one.

It had the makings for a goddamn friendship.

If they lived.

And then Coalbridge’s doubts were put aside. The moment for attack came—and Ricimer struck the Sporata armada with a stunning but intelligent ferociousness.

No betrayal. The fight was on.

Although Ricimer had readied his new weapon, he did not immediately use it. He elected to come in near the apogee of the armada sphere both because this would be unexpected and because, if they were lucky, they could threaten and maybe disrupt the command-and-control flag vessel which Ricimer assured Coalbridge would be precisely at the sphere’s center.

“It is by the book,” Ricimer had said. “There has never been a commanding admiral who sticks closer to the book than Blawfus,” he added. “We can trust him to do exactly as expected. I can’t answer for the other armada captains, however. I trained a good many of them, so some will not be tricked into a fatal mistake, no matter how well we set the trap. Expect any survivors to attempt to rally.”

The basic idea was to go into the center of the approaching hemisphere of Sporata vessels, hitting them at about an AU out of the solar system primary plane with guns blazing—this intended to prevent the armada from getting to the Kuipers and using those rocks and cometary fragments as a resupply point to arm up with more kinetics.