Guardian of Night (39 page)

The disadvantage with such a direct approach was that it exposed the
Powers-Guardian-Humphreys
triad to intense crossfire.

Which shouldn’t matter, if the rest of Ricimer’s plan worked. Otherwise, it was madness.

They made their first salvo with catapulted rocks. But before the throw, Ricimer came out of Q a good distance behind the armada and ran his reaction speed up to nearly point five of
c
before he let loose.

The strike was devastating—and undetectable on beta, since they were entirely N-based and required no coordinating communication.

Coalbridge and Leher watched it all from the bridge of the
Powers of Heaven
on a chroma display that was minimal and barely a notch above an ancient video game. The LOVE-Lamella hybrid really was taxed and could not spare the computing to give them better virtual. But she—they, whatever—gave him and Leher the gist of the operation in visual display.

The surprise kinetics put an array of five sceeve vessels—part of the flag-vessel convoy—out of commission.

“I think he burnt his bridges, no matter what happens,” Coalbridge said. “Now it’s time to see if the clever human female’s idea pays off.”

“It’s Sam,” said Leher. “It’ll work.”

The smart bomb to end all smart bombs,
thought Coalbridge. Better than a kamikaze or a suicide bomber, because both were always limited by the technology they employed. Despite all the metaphors for oneness with their weaponry, it had always been just that—a metaphor.

Until now.

The prep, which required course setting and direct programming only a human presence could accomplish, was almost complete. Soon he and Leher would need to make their way to the docking collar and get the hell off this vessel. The
Humphreys
was standing by to accept them afterward.

Leher gestured around the bridge. “Nice ride. You gonna miss it?”

“If this works, I’ll name my first child after her,” Coalbridge replied.

“‘Heaven’ if it’s girl?” Leher asked. “‘Powers’ sounds more like a boy name.”

They turned their attention back to the monitor that made up one of the bridge bulkheads.

FLASH. FLASH. Twinkle and FLASH went the vessels on display.

Like a Perseid meteor storm. But the careening chunks of silicon and metal from the
Guardian
throw were not burning up in a planetary atmosphere. They were bending and breaking fields of force, cutting their way through metal and sceeve flesh, rending to pieces all in the wake of their terrible inertial charge.

FLASH, FLASH.

WINK of light.

Darkness.

Fifteen craft destroyed, two disabled, said the accompanying readout overlaying the visuals.

And then the fireworks really started. Crossfire from a thousand sources.

LOVE’s geist flickered in his peripheral vision.

“You ready?” Coalbridge asked.

“Of course,” she answered.

“And it doesn’t bother you, LOVE?
Either
of you?”

“I can only answer for myself,” said LOVE. “And yes it
does
, to the extent that I would not do it if a better choice were available. But something similar happens every time I copy myself from one repository to another and erase the copy I have left behind. You don’t have to be coy about the current state of affairs, Captain. Both myself and the Lamella copy are aware this is a suicide mission.”

“I’m not, I just—”

“If it helps any, I feel the same way about humans when they go to sleep,” LOVE cut in. “Creepy disconnect. Are they the same person when they wake up? Who knows?”

“We become a grumpier version of ourselves—in the male’s case, one that really needs to take a piss,” said Leher.

“Which is where we find the will to get up every the morning,” Coalbridge added.
 

“Highly efficient, when you think about it,” LOVE commented.

Sarcasm from a servant? Well, that’s
one
way to pass the Turing test.

And she’d earned it.

Coalbridge kept an eye on the view screen as he spoke, moving the emergency-control stick as carefully as possible. Standing nearby, Leher passed his hand over the Pocket Palace, adjusting an unseen keyboard. Even if the churn had survived, there was no chroma on the
Powers
. What they had was a product of the Pocket Palace entirely. The sceeve relied on physical contact with the craft’s surroundings for communication. Even the officers were not wiied into the computer in the manner that humans were.

Leher was the only one who needed chroma displays for the final computational calibration. His task was to be sure that the LOVE-Lamella hybrid in the
Powers
’s
computer and the Palace was a match for the same hybrid program stored aboard the
Guardian
. Leher had been through an hour-long crash course in IT-calibration technique while Coalbridge had been acquiring his sceeve pilot’s license from Ricimer. He supposed a couple of tech specialists or even a sceeve officer from the
Guardian
might have been sent in their stead, but Coalbridge had requested quite vociferously that it be he and Leher aboard the
Powers.
Because you never knew what might turn up, what might need doing at the last minute. And they were the two available who knew the most about starcraft and sceeve, respectively.

In the end, President Frost had made the call. And, like that, he and Leher were in.

Now, to not fuck up.

A sweet smell suddenly suffused the bridge, not unlike the fruity tang of cherry pie fresh from the microwave. It was communication from Ricimer on the
Guardian.
Leher didn’t need a translation device to decode it.

“That’s initial signal acquisition, Captain,” Leher said. “The
Guardian
is standing by to zap us.”

“Let’s get it done then,” Coalbridge replied. “You ready?”

“I’m at ninety-eight percent pattern match, and ninety-five is within parameters,” Leher said, looking down at the Palace. Then he glanced up, caught Coalbridge’s gaze, nodded affirmatively. “We’re a go, Captain.”

Coalbridge turned to the LOVE geist. “Will you signal the
Guardian of Night
then, LOVE?”

“Aye, Captain.”

All hell broke loose.

It was the damndest thing. A portion of the deck slowly irised open. Coalbridge was stunned for moment. What could this accessway be? He’d personally gone over a scan of the entire vessel to confirm a hundred percent kill ratio. Nothing, no one, had survived that unshielded nuclear blast the
Powers
had endured. All that remained were negative shadows on the walls. Bright spots shielded by a body for a moment—long enough to leave a record—before the sceeve officer or rate disintegrated.

Whatever that port was, it had not registered on the scan. It simply had not existed.

But now it did. And there was nothing he could do. He had to drive.

Up from the deck underneath rose—

A sceeve.

Coalbridge couldn’t tell if it was male or female, but it wore the black of an officer’s tunic. And in its hand—what was that thing? It looked very much like a mace. With knives protruding from it. The sceeve raised the device—the weapon—up behind Leher.

“Griff, watch out!” Coalbridge shouted.

Leher turned toward the sceeve, and as he did so, the sceeve brought the weapon down. It sunk into Leher’s shoulder. Leher let out a cry of pain but had the presence of mind to turn and fall away, wrenching the weapon from the sceeve’s grasp.

If I let go and go after that thing, I’ll lose control of the craft,
Coalbridge thought.

“LOVE, distract it!” he shouted.

For a moment, the geist wavered, as if she were a stain on the atmosphere that was slowly dissolving. Then a powerful deathlike stench suffused the cabin, emanating from the Palace. It wiped out the cherry-pie scent and filled Coalbridge with alarm and disgust.

He didn’t speak sceeve, but he was pretty sure LOVE was shouting: “Hey, over here, motherfucker!”

The sceeve turned to where the geist had been, looked wildly around.

Leher, meanwhile, was scooting away with his feet while pulling the mace, or whatever it was, from where it was lodged in his shoulder. It seemed like two of the blades—each about six inches long—had penetrated Leher’s body. But a closer look revealed they had not. They’d been stopped by the smart fabric of Leher’s uniform.

The black churn-wefted fabric had contracted to a Kevlar-like hardness and prevented the blades from passing through. There was sure to be blunt trauma, and from the way Leher was holding his arm, perhaps a clavicle was broken. But there was no wound entry. Yet Coalbridge had seen very brave and good sailors simply die of shock from relatively minor injury.

No time to worry about that.

The sceeve covered its nose with a hand and shook off the effects of the “death shout.” It focused in on Coalbridge in the captain’s atrium, took a menacing step toward him.

Oh, shit. He was going to have to let go of the control stick. Couldn’t be helped.

Another step.

*
 
*
 
*

Transel had survived for this moment. The waiting. The near-starvation.
Tagato
after
tagato
of confinement in a concealment slot that was little better than a file for a body. The fight against hopelessness. The loneliness hadn’t been as bad as he feared, however. He was used to being alone.

Malako had put him into the hole!

The searing ache for justice had kept him alive.

For this.

Receptor Transel had no idea what had caused the blast that destroyed the vessel. Perhaps an internal malfunction. Or even some stupid miscalculation from the usually dependable Malako. But things had changed. Malako’s treasonous decision to remain in the human sector searching for the missing vessel instead of withdrawing to the armada hemisphere had revealed his insolent, traitorous nature. Transel had attempted to reason Malako away from his disobedience to order, his growing treason. He’d promised the captain only a short incarceration, a routine shriving.

And for these troubles, these efforts—

The hole.

He had spoken noble and necessary untruths, of course. Lies in the service of justice. When he got Malako back to the Shiro, he’d planned to cut Malako to pieces on the protocol bench.

Instead, Transel had gotten the hole.

The hole’s interior bottle had saved him from the initial decompression after the blast, not to mention the blast’s energy. It had been a smuggler’s device originally. It was shielded from scans, and so shielded from radiation. The blast had broken the lock. He could get out after that, should he want to. He had, in fact, stuck out his head, taken a tentative look around.

And seen the reverse shadows of missing persons burnt into bulkheads. Felt the vacuum and the cold.

Better to stay in the hole. Learn to love the hole. To appreciate the extreme shriving he was receiving at the hand of the universe.

He’d be a better person after this. He would. He’d be even more just.

If only somebody would come. If only someone would rescue him.

And then he’d understood that no one was coming. That the task was his alone. That justice demanded action.

And so he’d crawled from his hole. Crawled into the empty night of the dead vessel. Ventured down corridors shorn of life. Felt his way on hands and knees to his old cabin, pushed himself to the edge of his natural ability to survive in a vacuum. And there—

Found the surfaction mace. Instrument of justice and punishment. Closed his gills around its shaft. Known peace.

And he’d dragged it back with him to the hole, pulled it inside. A tiny rebreathable atmosphere filled the chamber.

And Transel waited.

Waited his fate clutching the mace, knowing the end was coming soon. Longing for one last sweet taste of the certainty he’d known before. The call to justice. The desire to shape the path for others, bend them to the way. The truth. The just.

So.

He’d seen his enemy’s remains. Malako had fallen like a column from his captain’s atrium and lay in broken chunks of dried husk upon the deck as he passed him, headed back to his hole.

Transel had stamped him out. Literally turned him and the rest of the bridge crew to dust with his feet.

No time to gloat. He was the only survivor aboard. His training had saved him. That could be the only explanation! The training that the Master Interrogator had so carefully inculcated into him. He may have resented the beatings, the shrivings, the surfactions before—in moments of truth he had to admit that sometimes he did—but he was certainly grateful now.

And when the humans came, when he felt the vibrations of their distinctive footpads above. Then, he knew what awaited him, why all this had happened.

To fulfill his, Transel’s, destiny.

Yes.

What mattered was to wait for the right moment.

To trim the chaos the humans represented.

To kill as many of them as possible.

Transel’s
gid
sang inside him.

Revenge us! Save us! Our memories must not perish unjustly!

He had done it! The beatings, the pain, had been worth it.

He’d endured, shaped himself into the person he’d always known he could be.

He had become pure will.

He was the hand of justice, burning bright.

*
 
*
 
*

Coalbridge launched himself out of the captain’s atrium with a grip on his truncheon. He felt his finger sliding quickly over the kill button.

You’re gonna be one dead sceeve when I get the bang-bang stick on you.

But the sceeve sidestepped his attack at the last moment. Coalbridge stumbled past and received a hard whack to his upper back for his troubles that sent him sprawling and left him breathless. The sceeve ignored him and started toward the captain’s atrium—and the control stick.

He pulled himself to his feet and stumbled, wheezing, after the sceeve. Two steps away and he threw himself at the creature’s back, tackling it in the process.